1,000 Days with EMC

Byeforever's 1,000 Day Special

Sixteen years of existence, 1,000 of the days of my life as part of Empire Minecraft; with both of these milestones, how about we honor them.

Hello once again, Empire Minecraft. For the time I've been with EMC, players celebrate their achievements, in years, days, or even for birthdays like I am, right here, on the servers' forums. I find much of them doing similar deals for these milestones, like drop parties and other events. I want to try to stand out from those people, but I have no idea what to do that’s really different from them.

Q & A (Question and Answer)

You can ask whatever you want to me, Byeforever. Please ask your questions in this thread.

http://empireminecraft.com/threads/1-000-day-special-q-a.44671/

Philosophies

After inspiration from Mitch Albom's novel, Tuesdays with Morrie, my view of life has changed in good ways, like social impact, and in bad ways, like depression and loss of self-worth or value. I have also engaged in the words of people throughout history and have been able to make my own memorable quotes. However, some of the quotes I have created have been too difficult for the most people I know to understand on their own.

Hers' an explanation of one of my quotes.

“My new era is approaching; there's hype, but they're spikes of happiness following sorrow.”

-Byeforeverthe2nd, 10/26/2014

I was trying to address about what’s coming in the near future fitting my interests that will likely be a new era in my life and the fact there’s a majority of people already hyped for the future. I've been looking far forward to mainly these three things:

Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire

http://www.pokemonrubysapphire.com/en-us/

Super Smash Bros. for Wii U

http://www.smashbros.com/us/

Empire Minecraft 1.8

Release Date: Unknown

The “spikes of happiness” refers to the instant happiness when hype first generates. “Sorrow” comes from the sadness after hype fades away, at least for me.

I have been making preparations for when EMC updates to Minecraft 1.8 since last summer for me. The update was finally released in early September after months of development, but then other problems occurred for Mojang, such as their sell-out to Microsoft and the death of EMC’s main plugin source, CraftBukkit. Now, no time frame for 1.8’s release for EMC can be made because other server plugins have to be updated to the new Minecraft version first. I do know we aren't alone; there are many other servers experiencing the same uncertainty as we have been over the past few months.

The uncertainties for 1.8 have gotten to the point of me thinking the update will never happen for us EMC members, causing me to think all of my work I have put into preparations for it are useless. This furthermore led to the negative side of my view of life: depression and reduction of self-esteem.

I am able sometimes to leave my thoughts on Minecraft 1.8 aside and I do feel better when it happens, but only temporarily.

From how this situation stands, I feel like abandoning this EMC’s chain of servers and its community until it has been confirmed that Empire Minecraft 1.8 is in the works by its staff.

At the time I’m writing this post, I’m not in any notable happiness towards the two milestones I have reached, but I do see it as a time for great change.

Hopefully, everything I have covered to this point is understandable to you.

Anyway, the last topic I have for you is one I kept private to Forever Company. Shortly after the understanding Tuesdays with Morrie to its full potential, I was introduced to retired basketball coach Dean Smith. Dean wasn't an ordinary sports coach; he had a philosophy for his team that make it successful. The three main ideas he had was "play together, play hard, play smart." These phrases, although sounding simple, can mean much more.

Coach Smith described these ideas in-depth in his novel The Carolina Way.

Under the tag below was what I first wrote about Dean Smith's philosophy.

Play Hard

The first part, play hard, is about 'doing your best' and maximizing effort. But, we won't be always in the conditions to achieve this, like if we're tired or exhausted.

Play Together

Usually, a group of people can get something done faster than if it was done by one person. But through some acceptations, like too much confusion, it can actually take longer. Ideally, I don't want to have selfish workers, or have one person do all work.

These consequences have happened to me too much in my life, and I know that we're likely to be working with others in our lifetime careers someday.

Play Smart

I've been told many times in my life that I'm a smart person which I can tell is true. I understand work ethic; the effort you put into something is highly likely to come back to you. What I hadn't realized until now is that not everybody understands this. For example: they might not care what they're being taught in school. Behaviors like this can result with frequent failing. We can all chose to ignore, be lazy, etc., but it's a matter of breaking the bad habits.

Hopefully, you have gotten or will get something out of this special.

Honestly, I don't know if I'll be obtaining something like some of you EMC members will.

You can appreciate as much as you want for me achieving 1,000 days as an Empire Minecraft member or 16 years for me real life age, but I think it ultimately comes down to getting rid of my obsessions on Minecraft 1.8. I don't have to dedicate everything I do in or for Minecraft to EMC, but I spend most of my time in the game for it or under other understandable purposes according to myself.

You can ask a typical gamer why they play video games and their response back is usually "for fun", but for me that's not always enough. All of the deep thoughts I have could be actually unnecessary and me thinking too far. Asking the same question "why do you play video games (or any game in particular)" to me, the answer will be unlikely to be made in an instant. That sign of not answering a simple question is me thinking too much. The deal is I want to provide the most accurate answer as possible to the person, even if they didn't need a high-quality response.

Bump.

I had obsessions with games too, in fact if my parents hadn't taken them away a couple years ago my life could be in the hole right now. When I turned 12, my parents got me a few Call of Duty games, I had been intriguingly interested in them by watching Youtubers and my friends playing them, I wanted to be cool like they were and hold big parties where everyone could have fun playing. At first, I thought that if I got them I would in no way become obsessed with them since i was the last of my friends to get them and that they had already been sucked in enough by them. What I didn't realize is that how much self-control you have is not determined by the length of time you been around that object, but by your maturity level, and mine wasn't very high XD. Within a year I was completely immersed by them and they had taken over my life, I've always had good grades in my life but in the end of one year they were on the verge of falling to B's. Not to mention the year that this was taking place was a very hard year for me personally, I was living at my grandma's and didn't have too many friends at the new school I was going to. Biggest problem was I knew I had an addiction, and it led me to feel very depressed, I cried myself to sleep sometimes but I wore a mask over me whenever I was in public, but I felt like the amount of time I had with that mask was constantly decreasing, and I was on the verge of becoming an emotionless person on the outside with an emotional mess on the inside.

Then one day my parents drew the line and took them away from me after owning the games for about 15 months. Initially I was like "No big deal, I'll get them back soon" but then I realized I wasn't going to get them back. The only interesting game I was still allowed to play, strangely enough, was Minecraft, and of course I had to get obsessed with this once I had to fall back to plan B. My parents saw this and took it away from me too. Then I was really screwed and actually started doing productive things in life and helped to get my family out of my grandma's house and into our own place. My social life got a lot better when I realized that actually listening to what people have to say is a lot better than simply not believing them to be true. My grades picked back up. For an entire 18 months, I went without most of these games. Then around 5 months ago, they gave them back to me, said I had one chance to prove myself worthy of controlling myself. And I did it. In fact, I'm on top of it now, everything seems fairly small and dismal to me now that I know what 18 months can do to you. So basically, never give up. Take a break if it means you'll come back with a renewed focus someday, because your time with something never has to end, it just has to be controlled, and only you can do that. Hopefully that shows you how much you're capable of doing for yourself.

Bump.