Hi gang, The holiday season, for me, is a time to be together with family and close friends. But it's also a time to reflect a little on the past year. Mistakes which were made and maybe could have been avoided, good fortune which found your way; maybe you can make it happen again, and so on. And then there's the Empire. So my question to you: has playing on the Empire changed you? Now, I don't necessarily mean drastic changes, but even small changes matter. For example: maybe you learned new things (I'm not talking Minecraft! ), maybe you met people and also caught up outside the game, etc, etc. Poll closes next year
Well to be honest, EMC has improved my writing. How? Well that comes from the criticism I've seen for other pieces of writing and actually working on my writing, by sharing it with all of you. I never really had much incentive to write, until I came to EMC. It's really motivated me to do better.
For me, the change wasn't primarily from EMC. It was from other things, like the Minecraft Community online as a whole and YouTube. EMC has influenced my thinking and perspectives in life. There's significant growth long-term players can/could see from me. Back in 2012/13, I don't build the same as I do now. Yes. The EMC forums have given me a HUGE boost in writing skills and motivation to write and communicate. -
EMC made me act way different on the internet in general than I would ever have if I didn't come across this server. Swearing, trolling and other stuff is just not a part of my day. It's truly a gift
Changed me in the way I think about others. While I like to think I'm an all around nice guy it's still easier to be good towards the people here rather than others yelling in all caps on other games. It's kind of made me more calm in the way I approach people and has translated over to talking to people in real life more or the same way I do here. EMC's certainly been a huge part of my life for almost a quarter of it and I'm grateful every day I'm on it. It's also a bit of a curse because of how addicting it's become that my studies has certainly suffered because of it and now I'm sort of playing catch-up.
For me it has helped how I act on the internet kind of like faith said. But instead of swearing, trolling, and what it is using slang words instead of normal words. If I look at my first conversation it's filled with slang and it's pretty cringeworthy too.
This is going to be a long one. Hold on to your butts. It's a two parter, too - I've never done that before. 2016 is a first time for everything. I've been playing, browsing the forums - whatever I do - here since I was eleven years old. I'm now sixteen (seventeenth birthday is now closer than my sixteenth). I have changed a ton. An important thing that happened in May 2012: I joined the EMC Wiki Team (I guess now you'd call them contributors) in this month. That is all. I'm going to go right back to August 2012, when I started being active on the forums and involved with the community (I became a highest posting member a month later with around 1,500 posts ). I was twelve. My youngest brother had just turned one. I was probably around 4'9-5'0 feet in height, I had big puffy cheeks, all-around baby-face, and a weird bowl haircut. From what I can remember I had just two friends, one of which I thought I was totally in love with. She made me feel like absolute crap and I came to EMC for help with the feelings I experienced. I liked music such as Breaking Benjamin, Three Days Grace, and Hollywood Undead - just part of your average 'edgy pre-teen' starter kit. I thought gay, bisexual, whatever people were 'gross'. I lived in a different house, I had a different laptop, I had a different phone (a Nokia). I thought the human race being wiped out was an entertaining idea. I... don't know what was wrong with me. I mentioned earlier that I came to EMC for emotional help - I did it for attention. I only realised a few months ago when 607 brought it back up to me, but it was definitely for attention. I made myself sound borderline insane and stressed people out for me for the sake of attention I felt I was lacking in real life. I was a horrible person, as far as evil twelve year olds go. I shot down advice and responded to people with reasons why their advice was useless, the thread would get locked, I'd start another one. I got more friends in school when I came back to it in September (2012). By February 2013, I was temporarily banned from the forums after I hurled some really horrible words at someone who was just trying to help me and got fed up with me responding with 'you might as well not even bother helping me; here's why'. I had mba2012, Jake_Bagby and nfell2009 as friends by that point (and still are my friends *in the loosest sense of the word *jk** :s). That girl who I thought I was in love with? She recognised how disgusting I was. She began ignoring me, and I finally confronted her about it - she told me she thought I was lying to her, that I was manipulating her, and that she no longer cared about my suicide threats to her because I was 'too much of a pussy to do it anyway'. She was right, I knew it, and her leaving my life stung. Everything hurt for a little bit as I came to realise 'wow, I really hate me'. She told people in my year group at school I followed her home one time and would take pictures of her and that I was obsessive and controlling in our time together. The obsessiveness and controlling part wasn't a lie - the following her home, pictures crap? Yeah, that was a big load of BS. Over time, people realised I would never do that, or just stopped caring. But hey! I turned thirteen in May 2013. I knew what was wrong with my personality, I was on the way to fixing it, I started spending more time here and with my friends, and... then I got permanently banned in June 2013 for slandering the staff (the stuff that gets given to them today is way worse than what I gave them back then). The end. Not really. I appealed my ban in late July. Some staff didn't want me back - I used to kick up drama (not much has changed there lmao), I'd voiced my discontent with the staff a lot (again, not much change), I was quite rude to people. I wasn't unbanned until September, and I had many people welcome me back. Jump to December 2013; me, mba2012, and JackBiggin had been working on the EMC Wiki and a small little project called MinecraftIt! for a long time. A few months earlier, Jack had begun working on an official EMC Wiki and didn't tell us, and upon its sudden accidental reveal, he told he was jumping ship on our projects (no bad blood here; we were making slow progress with just us and an official EMC Wiki works much better). I was annoyed. I got mba to 'confront' Jack with me. He understood my ('our') anger and gave us access to the stuff 'we'd' been working on for a year and a half. That wasn't enough for me. It was this hunger for recognition on my work on the Wiki that I joined an EMC protest group - something I haven't quite seen since - in February (2014) and joined in with the complaint writing. In my list of requests, I demanded mba and I get 'recognition' in the form of a contributor title. We launched the complaints earlier than expected since the staff had somehow (we suspected some kind of 'rat' in the group) caught us, and IcecreamCow told me 'no' to the Contributor thing. I was, again, angry with this. I decided that since he'd shot all of our complaints down, I would 'take a break' from EMC. Then I decided 'no, I can do better than that' - and started a petition on Change.org to get him demoted. I shared it in the group before I went to bed. Cue me waking up to being permanently banned when I woke up. I didn't seek an appeal until... whenever it was IcC got demoted (apparently I was unbanned on the forums sometime shortly after it happened and didn't know until I sent the appeal in weeks later). I returned in May, and my in-game appeal lasted until July. I joined the contribution team after sending in an application in August 2014, which after all I'd been through that year with the staff, I wasn't expecting at all. I was happy. And, finally, the following September was when my interest in politics started - thanks due in part to EMC, with 72Volt's rants and his community-building projects. Oh, I moved house in March 2015 too. And then I got upset with the May 2015 UK General Election (the first sign of the incoming wave of political populism this year vomited up). My opinion on the European Union became different that month. I mention this because it all connects with this year in many ways. This year's been a wild one. I don't remember what it was like before February 26th - because, let me tell you, that day changed me. I got my National Insurance number which allows me to register to vote and do other adult things, and I met a girl on Omegle. I know that sounds silly - Omegle is for desperate Indian boys! I was bored. I just went there to mess with some 'desperate Indian boys' - maybe I might even get some weirdo from the USA who asks for your kik as a conversation starter! So I wrote '18 F UK' into a chat. I got a '16 F Germany, but I'm Serbian' back. 'Oh crap.' I thought to myself, and I abruptly disconnected and cycled through multiple people to find this girl again (at this point, I had turned into a desperate British boy). I did. And thank God I did. She doesn't know I met her for the first time twice, and I hope she never does, because that's kinda embarrassing I was pretending to be a girl to mess with some random people with no brain cells. The Omegle chat we had was awesome. She had a great sense of humour, she laughed at my jokes - something I've never really had from many people before, and holy shit, she's amazing. I posted about her here straight after she gave me her contact details, we showed our faces after getting tired of trying to guess what eachother looked like (I guessed 'black hair, green eyes, biggish lips' correctly - I was just going off what my 'type' looks like, like what the Hell lol) told me goodnight, and disconnected.
I had an amazing two months talking to her. She quickly became my best friend. She realised how serious we both ended up taking stuff, she didn't want me to be important to her, and she put me through a few days of not talking to me before telling me 'I don't want to talk anymore'. Krysyy advised me on pretty much everything through this time on how to get her to talk to me again. I hated myself again for a little bit. My sixteenth birthday was spent in 8 hours of school, panicking over incoming exams the next week, a detention, and walking home in the rain, reflecting on stupid crap. There was a day I stopped caring about stuff - and I did my English exam! I did so well, as I discovered in August, I did the near-impossible and dragged my grade up from a D to a C from just the written exam (usually you'd have to resit the speaking exam and redo the written crap)! The girl - screw it, we're going to call her K from now on - K messaged me a few days later when I was giving up hope of her ever talking to me again (I was lying in bed, listening to a song she introduced me to, told myself 'she's not going to message me again', and she messaged me). We had two little conversations that weekend. It wasn't much, but it was something. Krysyy told me to not message her with this one thing about 2 weeks later - messaging her 3 months after meeting eachother with a throwback to the Omegle chat. I came up with the idea after 2 hours of sleep during 9AM PE on a Monday. I fantasised about it from Monday until Thursday. I figured 'what the Hell, I haven't got anything else to message her with if I don't use this, and I have nothing to lose'. I sent the messages at 10PM on May 26th. She didn't log in for a while - not until 4PM on May 27th. I was happy, I was excited. We talked for the rest of the day - and we laughed when her best friend took her phone when they were hanging out at like 10PM and told me she hated me. We haven't stopped talking since. We're close. She's probably my best friend. She feels something similar. I'm grateful for her. Oh, and I got my GCSE results in August. I have four - resitting one at the moment. I left the Contribution team in August, too. I started college in September. My res went derelict in, I guess, October and I lost everything I've built since I was unbanned in July 2014. In many ways, I'm back where I started all those years ago. Those things that have been building up since May 2012 - they all kind of collapsed this year. Dissipated. I'm almost back at square one. I'm happy for the new start, though. So, here I am. I'm sixteen years old. I'm an active member of the forums, I'm the fourth highest-posting member with over 9,000 posts. My youngest brother is now five years old. I'm 6'0 in height, I have a much less fatty face, I have some kind of style to my hair nowadays. I have loads of friends in real life, I have four close internet friends (three of which I can thank EMC for) and I love y'all, I have EMC - and I love you too even if you wind me up a lot. One of these friends I'm probably totally in love with, and she doesn't make me feel like crap (besides when my anxiety BS is making me overthink, but that's my fault, not her's), in fact she makes me happy and I can be myself with her. I come to EMC to post about how happy I am, or sometimes come to vent about my negative feelings. I like music such as The 1975 (favourites by far), Arctic Monkeys, Catfish and the Bottlemen, The Wombats, Lana Del Rey, Halsey, The Weeknd, Zayn, Melanie Martinez, and so many more I'd be wasting your time listing them - It's a huge difference to what I liked when I joined here. I don't think gay, bisexual, whatever people are gross - I support them and sometimes, I even think I'm somewhat bisexual myself. I live in a different house to when I started here (and I miss it so much), I'll be using a new computer in a few days, and I've had, like, what, three phones? I don't think the human race should be wiped out. I think we're destined to do great things if we play our cards right - which we didn't this year, but we can turn stuff around in 2017 if we want to. I, for one, am looking forward to 2017. And to 2016: for all the crap things you gave and took from us, I have to thank you - I realised who I am, who I need in my life, and somewhat what I'm doing. Thanks. So... has EMC changed me? I don't know. But I've spent a lot of time here over the past almost five years, I've learned things from it, it's a major part of my life... so, I'd guess it's a big fat 'yes'. This took me an hour to write, oops.
Aye. That is British College, though, which is different to the American definition. College in the UK would loosely be Grade 11 until you're 18 (I don't know if you have a grade for that - I'd guess it'd be Grade 13?). Your College is our University (which I'm very likely not going to).
I'm he I'm heading to college in September unless I find an apprenticeship because British government wants us in education til 18
