This is a tradition that I started back when I was 11 years old, so shoot me if I stop now. I don't spend all my waking hours on the WCC chatbox like I did back then, but it's hard for me to break out of certain habits. Some of my old posts were angsty, some were cheesy; some were short, some were long, some were way too long. This is going to be a jumble of everything and I still don't know how long it'll be when I finish, so I won't try to guess.
I'm not proud of everything I've posted here. In fact, I'm probably embarrassed to death by most of it. There's a lot of cringe to be dug up. And I wasn't always a nice person to be around, or nearly as smart as I thought I was, or cool or well put together, and I'm still not. Whatever the raging, pretentious prick I was or am though, it was this place and the people I found here that raised me, produced me, put up with my crap. This place and these friends were and are the most consistent things in my life, my rock, my anchor.
It's
twelve years ago today since I joined this forum. I remember this date better than my family's birthdays. Twelve years means I've been regularly logging into this same URL for over half my life. That means, if you're a new person reading this, there's a chance I registered my account before you were born. If my WCC lifespan was a dog, that dog would most likely be dead. Twelve years.
Over those twelve years, I've met friends that have stuck by and grown up alongside me ever since. I met my fiancée, a girl from two states away who I never ever would've encountered except that I yelled at her for spamming on WCC. When I was 13, she was visiting family and we arranged a really awkward date at the mall. My mom dropped me off and hung around to make sure she wasn't an old man there to traffic my kidneys. We didn't meet again in real life until I was 16. By the time I was 18, she had moved here and we lived together. This is just a bit unorthodox, but I couldn't have imagined a better storybook result for us.
People ask us how we met. More than once, we've glanced at each other and just answered, 'cats.' If we say we met on the internet, people think dating apps, Facebook. If we say we met through online roleplay, they start running for the door. There's usually not time to introduce all these concepts to someone not familiar to them already, and even if there is, explanations never do it justice. Unless you were one of the privileged few to briefly live on that jank Warriors forum in the 2010s, you couldn't know how deep it goes.
Twelve years. When I was around twelve years old myself, we used to fantasize on the chatbox about 'WCC House' and 'WCC Con.' One day, we were going to meet, and hang out, and probably awkwardly sit on our phones rather than talk to each other. It was just a meme. When we were twelve, it seemed impossible, I just knew it seemed better to be with these people I'd never met face to face.
We all stopped being twelve, eventually, and most of us didn't like Warriors roleplay anymore, but WCC Con was no longer impossible. Last June, my degenerate internet cat friends flew and drove from all parts of the country to live in a cabin for a week. We stayed for 7 days and 6 nights near Skykomish, Washington State, with a bonus day sweating to death in my apartment. We walked around Seattle and Leavenworth, hiked, fished, painted, smoked our brains out, played a Smash Bros. Tournament, watched Twilight, briefly kidnapped a dog, played Dungeons and Dragons, learned about Mormonism, and got tattoos. And then it was all over. We went back to our normal lives, and those weirdos I had spent a week with became disembodied voices and text on Discord again, like none of it had even happened.
The first day at that cabin, I was a nervous wreck and wandering all over the property like a crackhead. But that night, I asked this weeb to marry me, and we walked back out into a room full of all our friends who had been there with us through all the ups and downs. I think it was meant to be.
- click me:
I didn't really want to dox anybody and put their face up on the internet if they weren't comfortable with that... so I just blotted everyone else's faces out with creepy gray circles like they disappeared in a Stalinist purge. I swear they're cute and it's a good picture.
So, hey. If you haven't got the gist by now, I have a special spot in my heart for this site. If we've met but haven't talked in awhile, hi, you cross my mind from time to time. Even the old forgotten geezers from twelve years ago. And if we never talk again, I'm grateful you were in my life, and found this place with me. Here's to another year, and to more WCC Cons.
