Hi.

You don’t know me... Well, you might, but not under this moniker. I used to hang out here. I used to hang out here a lot really. When I found Everything, I felt like a kid in a candy store. It was... Everything! But then, like Anakin Skywalker, I was lured to the Dark Side. I feel for the trap, I became hooked on the level system, obsessed with karma.

Everything was just a game.

At first I wanted to move up quickly. I wrote and wrote. I noded short nodes and I noded some long ones. Some were good, some were great; most were mediocre, if factual. I noded a lot, I started moving up in the levels. I wasn’t getting much Karma at first though. Then I started cheating. I created some secondary accounts and leveled them up a bit. The extra votes not only eliminated my negatively reputed nodes, but I got some karma out of it everyday. And I voted, oh how I voted! I burned all my votes on all my accounts everyday. It wasn’t easy as I got higher up; try burning hundreds of votes everyday. In the end, it was hard to find things I hadn’t voted on. But I digress. I kept moving up. One of my second accounts achieved ching!’ing power. I started to C! myself. Not everyday, I couldn’t be that obvious.

I was playing a game, and it was one that required not only effort and perseverance, but also stealth.

So I worked and worked. I toiled away day in and day out. Some of my nodes were really quite good. I wrote terrific day logs. And I made it pretty high. I won’t tell you how high, because I don’t want to give away who I am, though I doubt it would matter anyway. Then I got busted. Someone killed a whole slew of my nodes that were cut&paste. I wasn’t annoyed, I wasn’t mad at the editor. In fact I felt almost relieved. She did me a favor. Sometimes I was annoyed at some of the people whom I received messages from, critiquing my nodes for example. I felt indignant since I’d been there longer than some of the editors. But I realized that it wasn’t about that. I was just playing a role that I’d created for myself. I was an everything gamer; no more or less. I never managed to fit into the community that I visited religiously and I realized that that made me sad. I read nodes all the time when not noding myself. I came to feel as if I knew a lot of you. I read about the gatherings, and how you’d get together and have a lot of fun. I saw friendships build up and followed the growth through homenodes. I’d have given anything to “teach” at Yossarian's School of Badassary.

I was jealous.

I was jealous that no one even knew who I was, that I was never invited to the get-togethers. Sad that no one would be my friend, that no one cared that I wrote a pile of nodes. No one cared that I was working up the level system. That didn’t matter. I wasn’t part of the community; a great community filled with incredible and interesting people, a community I’d watch grow from its beginnings years before. I was just an outsider trying to fit in the only way he could think of and generally doing a bad job of it. Anyway, even though I seem to have rambled on a bit, there’s just one thing I wanted to say to everyone

I’m so sorry.
I miss you all, though I’m sure you don’t miss me.