Top of the mornin' to you fucks.
I'm Demonic, your friendly neighbourhood retired forum admin. I'm unsure how many of you still recognize the name (besides jrgp, but he's practically a relic at this point... and to think he was a n00b once). So to sum it up, I played Soldat from 2003/4 until 2008. I
made a movie once and have a couple of default maps. I vaguely remember fucking up the weapon balance for one version.
Either way, I have a good hour and a half to waste before meeting a lovely lady who doubles as my therapist, and since I've already knocked down three-four beers after work, here's some shiznit for ya. With pictures. AND LOVE!
that's me, in my room, with my cat Marx, and my favourite vice.
so. to recap a long story short, I used to be this guy:
like the great many who are addicted to vidya, I was always 'mature for my age'. turns out that's just a fancy phrase for being socially retarded, sheltered and troubled.
I mean, when your mom dies, you take comfort with your friends.
I messaged a guy named 'knot' on MSN. He was a soldat-friend.
(And he disappeared sometime after alexoner photoshopped his sister's pictures with a dick in her mouth, which wasn't that funny considering the chick was making a living out of modelling... but I digress).
So the years pass, as they do. You do some laps, make yer mistakes (I became a nazi for example), and then shit sorts itself out. You get an ugly girlfriend or two, you fall in love, you have your heart broken.
You don't give up on trying to fish acclaim from strangers on the internet though.
And then you break some too. Not just yet, not so fast, and not because you're a malovelent bastard... it's just that you're trying to be so fucking perfect all the time, you fear failure, you fear owning up to your mistakes so much that you don't even dare make any.
So you bail early, and when things irrevocably turn for the worst, it dawns upon you that the issue might not be with a global conspiracy to make your life worse, and it's not that people are bad... it's you.
And nazism turns out to be a passing trend. Like emo.
But nobody really prepared us for dubstep, did they?
You seek community. The same feeling you once known amidst of anonymous strangers on the internet, with the flavour of genuine human interaction. And man, you're thirsty, it's not even thirst, it's straight up fucking 'lost in the sahara' dehydration, you'll take a drop of water from whoever. Some, you'll learn to regret. Some, like Soldat, in due time you will out grow. And some sticks in your mind like a splinter, forever unremovable.
So I started working for a hardcore webzine, and joined the local improv-everywhere. Look no further for social interaction without the actual chance of getting laid then these two.
Or so I thought.
There are two soldat players in this picture. Yours truly in the ugly hoodie on the far right.
And you shave your head. A few times.
You're going to be bald sooner or later anyway. Do yourself a favour, and don't shave it preemptively.
Ever wondered what would happen if everyone you've ever loved vanished? Ever wondered what happens when the distance between you and your friends becomes an interstellar space? Ever feel the frustration of having nobody to blame, just being left alone, at the mercy of circumstance? Ever want to break down and cry, only to have every shoulder so-far-ever present having a list of priorities which you will never make?
My ex-high school class. None of us finished college or university. Several of them don't live in the country anymore. The rest of us don't really talk either.
Depression is always portrayed in the media as if the curtain just suddenly drops, unexpected. The cruel reality of it is pararrel to a rowdy night: it all starts clear and okay, and the next thing you know you're lost somewhere dark with nobody to turn to.
Everyone tackles it differently. For those who want to drown in apathy, there's weed. For the people who forever fear being stranded and alone with their thoughts, there's a wide array of designer drugs and parties catering especially for them.
After a broken heart, a drop out of college and nothing but a small room at my dad's with a hateful stepmom and a shitty myspace, I turned to the bottle. In this country, if you're broke and sad, the dive-bar is your best friend.
You flatten as a person, and the feeling pans out, seemingly stretching into forever. The diseases of the mind are the same as of the body in the sense that everything is overshadowed by the dreaded feeling that this is here to stay, this is permanent.
But it turns out the more you pull your head out of your ass, the less distant other people become, and the sooner those chokepoints of the past become meaningless lights in the dark. Time is a highway, and the present is the car you're sitting in. You just need to step on the gas.
Living upside down has become quite the literal picture for me over time.
You find friends in the unexpected, while simultaneously re-evaluating your friendships so far. The anonymous quote of having kinship with some and history with others will ring true forever. Some speak without uttering a word in a language you find oh so familiar, while others speak in words that you know too well but could never relate to again.
Awkwardness begins to crystallize as what it really is, and it becomes less of an object of a false sense of superiority over the plebs... but rather the distant mile which you learn to walk. New doors and windows open wide as you walk down a corridor which is only darkened by your fears and ever-present feeling of inadequacy.
Now, at this point, Disney would have you believe that you fall in love again.
Unfortunately, I'm not a character conjured by fat execs in L.A. I'm a deeply damaged person, who first had the misfortune of becoming a PUA.
(Then I did fall in love, but that's a whole different story of abuse and psychological torture for all parties involved).
If you haven't heard of this wonderful sham, which serves to pander to the forever alone 'over analyzing every detail of every conversation' people,
here's a wikipedia link.To cut a long story short, even if you're sharper than the average tool, this is not the best available option to self-medicate. I'd personally recommend Taoism, starting with the Tao of Pooh.
In the meanwhile, let it be known that if you have a wonderful, loving, beautiful girlfriend, who you ditch and claim that your overwhelming jealousy issues will be fixed by PUA...
...you're gonna have a bad time.
Oh, you'll fuck three football team worth of women with the substitutes and misc. staff, but still, it's gonna hurt.
Her especially.
Getting drunk helps a fuckload though.
So the fucked up thing about PUA... is that for every toll it takes. It works. Rejection? Nigga, I've been rejected... I've gotten slapped, I've gotten threatened by guys, I've gotten told to fuck off, hell I had a girl throw up after talking to me.
But designate yourself to a task, and it will work. I've designated myself to Soldat and in two years I was running a good portion of the community... once I assigned myself to PUA, two years later I'm holding a seminar for the Hungarian acolytes.
Odd shit? Odd shit.
In the meanwhile you take up a personality. You grow to be an image you aspire. In ethics and aesthetics.
Or Skins. Man, it's much more fun on TV than living it...
...speaking of which:
Or remember when I mentioned meeting people in the weirdest places?
Sometimes the people you get close enough to give an arm and a leg come from the weirdest places... 's my current roommate. The mohawks. Checkem.
that's n00bface on the right... and a hungarian pop-star in the middle. besides this picture we only have slight recognition of this night.
This post is getting long enough, and it's only at 'what happened until 2011'... I'll cut it short, so here's the take away;
It gets better. You won't. But it ain't worth no sweat.
You can't catch me not smiling. Bittersweet is a good taste to have in your mouth. You'll learn love, friendship, you'll get enemies and you'll learn to fight to tooth and nail... and you'll get lost and the end is never the end, but a bigger punch you get to recover from with more ferocity than you have ever imagined previously.
some party in my apartment... I think I've screwed all the women present on the picture, but they're blurred so idk who was there.
so yeah, that's that. I'm thinking of reinstalling soldat for a few gathers, or to write the last couple of years in detail. Wherever hardcore takes me.
Where does it take you?
