For the last two years, I've done an AMA at summer. Why should 2018 be any different - especially when this year seems to be a repeat of 2016, the year I started doing this in? Plus, it's been a while, I've gone through a lot since last year, so any questions you think you may have asked me before will likely have different answers. These are always fun anyway so I might as well give it a try. Obviously, as the title says, you can ask me anything. I prefer serious questions but joke questions are perfectly fine too.
In the February of 1968, the French Communist Party and Socialist Party (the party of François Hollande, who was the President of France and a Co-Prince of Andorra from 2012 to 2017) formed an electoral alliance in an attempt to take down President Charles de Gaulle, who had lead the French Resistance against Nazi Germany and founded the Fifth French Republic in 1958. Prominent poets and musicians then protested at the University of Paris, with their message being very anti-Gaullist, anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-consumerist. Eventually, in May 1968, the police closed the university until further notice. The Student Union organised a march to the University, and 20,000 took to the streets to protest outside of it. The police began to beat them with batons, and when the civilians fought back with rocks and stones and made barricades, they introduced tear gas to their assault. Over the next few days, the police began to overturn cars and throw Molotov cocktails at the protesters, attempting to frame the civilians. French and American artists began voicing their support for the students. The French workers joined in. 11 million workers occupied over fifty factories, grinding the entire economy of France to a screeching halt. Over 20% of the population was now part of this uprising. The police continued to engage in street battles with the protesters and strikers. Charles De Gaulle dissolved the National Assembly and fled to West Germany, calling an election and ordering everyone to go back to work and enacting a State of Emergency. He feared that yet another French revolution would erupt, which would have happened had the head of the Paris police not stopped violence against the strikers. Gaulle returned to France and won the election with increased support. However, it was clear the French people viewed him with intense distaste - they liked his party but hated him as he was too old, too authoritarian, and out of touch with French society. After failing to win a referendum some months after the protests, he was forced to resign in 1969. Throughout all of this, the Atelier Populair, an organisation of students, occupied their university's printing press and began to make posters. They were digestible and simple pieces of pop art. While violence raged in the streets, art blossomed - the posters went up all over Paris, graffiti was painted on the walls, and songs were written. Nowadays, they are objects of aesthetic interest, uncovered and released to the public in 2011's 'Beauty is in the Street' book. I discovered this book through The 1975. It had always been on my radar, but the single they released the other week, 'Love It If We Made It', is a song about the state of the modern world and makes reference to this event in the lyrics - the book is specifically mentioned. It's too expensive for me to buy myself but many of the posters are available on the internet. I took a particular liking to the one I'm using as my profile picture - I'm not sure why. I like pop art anyway -I've usually had a piece as my profile picture - and the message is nice. The writing is French for 'Be young and be quiet'. Obviously, it's a reference to how the students were silenced by the establishment and how, in general, young people are told they're too stupid to understand issues and to respect their elders. But I think the message of 'don't be quiet' applies to the wider context of everything in life. Probably to hold off on those thoughts of despair and to stop giving up on everything. In just a few months he's gonna meet someone who means the world to him, he's gonna mean the world to her, and there's going to be a bump in the road but you're both going to come out stronger for it. Those exams he's worrying about are going to be perfectly fine and he's going to have some of the best grades in his year, even if he didn't try. 2016, 2017, and 2018 are going to be the best years of your life so far. Hang on. Get a personality. You're bland and you're boring and that's why you think people don't like you. Just open up a bit and go discover some new things. And also, get your hair cut earlier. Don't wait until the turn of the year. People like seeing your face when they talk to you, dude - not whatever mop you've thought looks nice on your head for the last five years. And you can do so much fun stuff with shorter hair! (I mean, my hair was the longest I've ever had it this year, but it was grown out from something shorter and actually looked nice, so...) I did. Breakfast. Although, from what it looks like, brexit is going to take my breakfast. Java, probably.
Do you like waffles? More serious question: What do you consider the most important thing you've learned from playing on EMC?
I'm honestly not too sure. Shyguy's music taste seems more diverse, while yours seems more concentrated on metal and rock. I think it'd depend on the context. Yes! There was a school trip 3 years ago for history students to Ypres, Belgium. I love history and the Great War, which is what the trip was for, but what really made me consider it was that my friends had a plan to buy genuine Belgian waffles. I couldn't go due to the financial situation of my parents, but I really wish I had - my friends actually went through with the plan; and the teacher who organised the trip was my A Level history teacher for the past 2 years (he taught us the English Civil War section of the course and American Civil Rights) was showing us an English Civil War musket ball he found, and revealed that on the Belgium trip he managed to find some bullets and artillery shells in the fields and... well, managed to bring them home on the plane with a disturbing lack of issue from the airport security. I'm... not too sure what that last part has to do with waffles. That community is important. I've betrayed that finding on many occasions, being banned on my main account for trolling and some of the last posts on my profile being about how little I care for it and outright insulting the staff. Meanwhile, there's players here who give up their free time to help others - I like to think I was one at some point, especially while on the contribution team - and players who radiate positivity even when their real life situations aren't at the standard they should be at for such people. Now I recognise what this community is to me, why it works, and why what I did was wrong. I don't know if this makes sense, but that's definitely what I take away from this place.
I was about six months into Year 7, the first year of secondary school, and finally found a proper friend who had the same interests as me - I added him on Facebook and saw that he'd shared a post that day that was made by the Yogscast. I approached him in school about it and we talked about Skyrim and Minecraft for weeks on end and eventually he referred me here. We played together and Skyped pretty much every day. He eventually left and as the years went on we separated into different friend groups (they were still interlinked though). I recently saw him at two parties where we caught up and talked about football and had a few drinks. Germany. For starters, the United Kingdom is a country with intense division rippling through its society right now, I vehemently oppose Brexit, and throughout my teenage years I've seen this country get poorer and poorer because of the ruling Conservative Party. Now it looks like I'm going to have to queue up for food and medicine that will be served to me by the army in the near future, that I'm going to witness food rioting, that I'll likely lose/be unable to get a job, and that this country will break apart in my lifetime and the politicians are content with letting all of this happen. It angers me. On top of that, I'm Welsh - Wales was conquered by England in the 1200s and was oppressed right up until the 1900s, and even today English people harbour some degree of racism towards them. Now, the government is removing their say on important issues like Brexit and are content with letting poverty spike and for the Welsh economy to suffer at a level equal to Eastern European economies. I've also been told, even by the government, that if I'm a remainer I should leave the UK if I hate my country that much. I just... don't like it. The solution to this is to move to Germany. Why? Because they seem to be the country that lines up best with how I want the United Kingdom to look and I find the culture (it also has Celtic roots, which is the race that the Welsh people are a part of) and history and language interesting. And it's still part of the European Union. On top of that, the girl I love lives there. Even if the UK wasn't the mess it is right now, I'd still go there for her. If she lived in Serbia, with the majority of her family and where her parents come from, I'd go there for her rather than Germany. As cheesy as it sounds, she's my home - not England, not Wales, not Germany; the person who I can look at or talk to and feel calm, laugh at's silly grammar mistakes, and fall asleep on the phone to at 6AM after calling for seven hours is where I belong. For a holiday? Probably Greece or Serbia. Greece looks beautiful and Serbia has a very interesting culture.
Yeah. It's more important than all the political background - after all, I don't care about that on a 'personal' level, if that makes sense? And it just works anyway to put that stuff in a hierarchy, with the most important thing being last, and it's a much lighter note than the pessimistic stuff before it.
I'm really happy to see you're still around, and I'm also really happy to read this: And, yes, that does make sense (at least to me). Questions... I always suck at coming up with questions when there's a good opportunity for it, and have plenty when there's not. Anyways: 1 - How are your plans of moving to Germany going? 2 - How is "she" doing? 3 - Have you quit smoking yet? 4 - Do you think you'll ever find something to pull you back to Minecraft, even if it's only for a few days? 5 - How are you doing today?
