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Dressed up in awful cheap goth clothes and LARPed. On a college campus. With other college-age adults. Who were mostly NOT freshmen. On Friday and Saturday nights when other students would walk by.  Dressed up to nerdy film midnight showings far, far past the socially acceptable age of doing so. My World of Warcraft character - the only one I ever leveled - has about 300 days played. I've been on/off again since late 2006. Early on I skipped many social events to play, now I'm far better about balancing raid time and social time. Mostly. Once spent literally 24 hours playing Super Mario 64, only pausing for the bathroom; food was brought back to the television. That was an interesting drive back to the rental store, let me tell you.
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In the school cafeteria, while everyone else was eating their lunch or playing dominoes or poker, my friends and I could be found tucked away in a corner playing Dungeons & Dragons.
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Nov 13, 2012 20:51
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Solus posted:I have over 1000 hours in TF2.  
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Nov 13, 2012 20:54
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:I can only imagine there were some Cyrano de Bergerac-esque scenes where you had to coach your roommate on the finer points of the MUD in case she asked questions about it. I don't think they knew each other beforehand, but he introduced me to the game and was an ace at it though he hadn't played in a while. He was an insanely shy dude who was also an amateur pilot and stunt jeep driver, while she was an insanely outgoing person who would jump in the car late at night for a road trip to visit internet strangers. So of course they hit it off right away.
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Nov 13, 2012 20:56
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Necron Vs. World posted:Me and a girl got really drunk at her apartment and she wanted me to put some music on so I set my zune to random and the remastered Conan The Barbarian theme came on (Anvil of Crom??). And I spent about 10 minutes explaining why the movie is so sweet and why Conan is great. Did gently caress and later watch Conan with her on blu-ray so not that bad imo. Good choice, Conan is actually a really romantic movie. My nerd story is pretty simple. I was once the moderator of one of the larger Diablo forums on the internet, and my life pretty much revolved around it when I should have been doing any one of various other things instead. When I was deprived of my moderator powers over forum drama, I wept. Thulsa Doom fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Nov 13, 2012 |
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Nov 13, 2012 21:04
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I hope this is as painful to read as it was to write. Until about fourth grade, I was too consumed with Pokemon and Harry Potter and Nintendo 64 to be much of a problem. Aside from Cub Scouts, where I was one of those "needs attention so bad he will take the bad kind" type of kids. In my defense, I didn't want to be there, but it took four years too long to get kicked out. Looking back, I wish I had held out a bit longer so I could get kicked out for something entertaining, but I'm convinced that I could have been a gay Muslim crossdressing atheist, and my dad would have pulled strings to keep me in there. From fourth to eighth grade, I was aggressively useless in gym class because I assumed that if I was bad enough, I'd just get quietly pulled out and no one would notice that my fine motor skills haven't improved since I stopped making GBS threads myself. Then I went to high school and opted for the weight room every semester, and no one called me out on not being able to move more than fifty pounds of anything. In eighth grade, I turned down dates (or the middle school equivalent) with two very nice and actually well-liked girls because I assumed they were making fun of me. After this, I severely creeped out another girl in the kind of way that is seemingly only done by people with developmental disabilities because I didn't know it wasn't okay to bring up whether or not you'd have sex with a girl to her face when you're all thirteen. In ninth grade, I did the school play. There were about twenty of us between the cast and crew, and I was definitively the youngest. When the play finished, I got invited to the cast party, where I said all of three sentences, two of which were awkward non-jokes, and played my DS while all the socialized kids hosed in the other room. Even when I got invited to the other room. Twice. (Drama geeks are a notoriously depraved and incestuous bunch.) In tenth grade, I decided I wanted to smoke some weed. A friend offered to practically deliver it to my house, along with an improvised smoking device. This was practically a rite of passage; I was going to break a heavily ingrained rule, rebelling against the law, the educational establishment that lied to me, and my parents who trusted me, as well as bond with people my own age over something other than "no one likes us". He was a block away when I called him, chickening out because my folks got home early because my cousin's grandfather died. Kept me off weed until this year. In eleventh grade, I went out for my last school play ever, an incidentally all-white production of The Wiz. Because of my unfamiliarity with the source material and how the director planned on interpreting it, I showed up to the audition doing the most hideous minstrel show accent the world has ever known. I got Uncle Henry, who has all of three lines. This would be my last foray into theater. That's not even the most shameful part to me though, I'm most ashamed of myself for thinking that I was entitled to a bigger part just because I was in it for longer (although I definitely could have gotten a lead if I applied myself, there were some dire kids in there). In twelfth grade, at the annual pep rally, I sang the National Anthem wearing the rival high school's colors just to be an anticonformist dick. It's the first time I've heard people boo the National Anthem. When prom came around, I decided I wasn't going because I had no friends, until the last minute when someone offered me a free ticket that their date wasn't going to use because she got cold feet. Since I still wasn't about to take it seriously, I opted out of a traditional tuxedo and went with a white cravat and purple everything else. I looked like white Prince, but it was technically formalwear so I couldn't get kicked out. Unsurprisingly, I didn't do any dancing, nor was I invited to any afterparties. The summer after twelfth grade, I went to an anime convention not because I enjoy the fine art of Japanese cartoons, but because a friend told me that they were practically handing out free sex there. It was painfully awkward, but I had a "there but for the grace of God go I" moment which set me on the path to actually being able to function in groups without interjecting with violence or sex. I still went back the next year though. I even got my free sex, which makes for a great "worst thing you've ever done" story. Also, I wore a not-fedora (trilby?) on-and-off for the last two years of high school, but I don't count that because I never wore it with cargo shorts and band shirts, but with stuff that you're supposed to wear a nice hat with. Besides, after all that, a fedora would practically make me cooler.
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Nov 13, 2012 21:11
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I won a thousand euros on a game show by being able to tell what book and chapter any random line in the Harry Potter corpus is from. Also I call it "The Harry Potter corpus". Earlier today I attended a symposium with literally the biggest name in my field (Daniel Dennett) and told a room full of people I sometimes have dreams about playing text adventure video games (to make a point about the phenomenology of dreams). Last week I started preparations to construct a taxonomy of imaginary beings. All of them.
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Nov 13, 2012 21:11
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My parents met at a D&D game, and I was concieved on a D&D table. For the first 10 years of my life, every weekend I would camp on the stairs after bedtime, listening to them play with a dozen friends. Of course, this meant I had no choice but to build my own pen-and-paper game system and fantasy world as I grew up, and I was the leader of a 30-strong Magic playing group through high school. My second nerdiest moment was when I built a character rolling program for my system... in Garry's Mod. For my most...  I had a big crush on a girl in HS, but was a fat awkward nerd. I told a mutual friend I liked her and wanted to ask her to the prom. Later that week, I needed a bag of cheetos and so went to the store where she worked. Upon seeing me, she ran over and made small talk and flirted.I just wanted my chips. I went to the prom alone, and she stayed home.
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Nov 13, 2012 21:27
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Techno Remix posted:In high school, I was part of an "e-Fed" and was semi-serious about it. For those who don't know what that is, it's basically a forum where you role play as a professional wrestler (either a famous one or one you created yourself) and the guy running it chooses the winner based on how well you RPed. I won matches, I won championships, I won entire events. I mean, I played D&D in college and still try to do things in Fallout/TES "like my character would" but I only feel shame over pretending to be a professional wrestler online. My wrestler, Jake 'The Joyride's special was the New York Lobster... Not only was I a sperg, but I was unoriginal as poo poo.
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Nov 13, 2012 21:29
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Any Goon who remembers Cybernations might recognize this. I managed the internal affairs of an alliance on a text-based MMO. (LUEnited Nations) The alliance had more than 600 people. I implemented a banking system, created a layer of middle management to reduce bottlenecking between the people on top and everyone else as the alliance continued to grow, and turned the internal workings of the alliance into a well-oiled machine. In hindsight it still boggles my mind that I was managing the affairs of 600 IRL people. Too bad I can't put something like that on my resume.
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Nov 13, 2012 21:30
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reflir posted:Last week I started preparations to construct a taxonomy of imaginary beings. All of them. I would be extraordinarily interested in reading this if you felt like sharing. I'm curious to know how in-depth you plan to take it, as in whether it would simply be a listing of potential dream constructs or whether you would associate them with mental states, disorders, and other factors.
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Nov 13, 2012 21:31
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Once in college chemistry or physics, I met a really cute girl who desperately needed help with the class. I normally would have been super shy and unable to get out of my own way, but because I was interested in the class it was really fun and easy to explain everything to her. This was back in the day when we still had a "directory" with everyone's landline numbers. She called me up and told me she had a crush on me  but I was such a loving idiot that I ended up embarrassing her and nothing ever came of it 
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Nov 13, 2012 21:33
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More recently, about two years ago I taught myself symbolic logic in order to create a mathematically-sound theory of comics and sequential art. 
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Nov 13, 2012 21:35
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My junior prom was incredibly boring and I had no date, so I ended up skipping out after 15 minutes to go to a Magic: the Gathering tournament. In the dress, heels, makeup, and everything. I was prom queen the next year, at least  ...but the party still sucked.
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Nov 13, 2012 21:38
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Sometime in middleschool I was obsessed with Morrowind. I put more hours into that game than any other with WoW being the only exception. I stopped playing towards the end of a run where I wanted to collect every item in the game. The worst part is that for a period of time instead of saying "oh my god" or "Holy poo poo" I said, "By the nine" 
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Nov 13, 2012 21:39
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I had a WoW girlfriend.
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Nov 13, 2012 21:46
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PierreTheMime posted:I would be extraordinarily interested in reading this if you felt like sharing. I'm curious to know how in-depth you plan to take it, as in whether it would simply be a listing of potential dream constructs or whether you would associate them with mental states, disorders, and other factors. It is going to be a while before it's done, not in the least because I have no formal training in systematic biology. Basically I had the idea that it would be really cool to have a book on my shelf that looked like a biology textbook if you weren't really paying attention to it but that's actually just about imaginary beings. With that in mind, I mean to make it as in-depth as possible (within the bounds of sense; there are going to be more and more detailed entries for different kinds of vampires than for different kinds of pokemon, despite there probably being more pokemon). Rather than sorting them chronologically I've been thinking about creating higher-order "idea groups" that share a family resemblance (in the Wittgenstein sense), but not in the D&D sense. I think it would be too easy to just go "undead, shapechangers, magical beasts," etc.; instead, I want to sort them by what sort of societal factors gave rise to stories about them. Skinwalkers and wendigos for example are very obviously cautionary tales against the evils of cannibalism (vampires might be as well); pokemon on the other hand just exist to make money. What I intend to do first is take 2 or 3 paradigmatic cases, trace their histories, and see what kind of groupings suggest themselves. Once that framework is established it'll be much easier to place everything else. But as I said, it's going to be a while, and the project came into being to make procrastination easier, so I'm not making any promises about how far it'll go. edit: of course, within a single idea, the different versions of a certain creature would be ordered chronologically. Again, what would be interesting is to see how ideas change over time. reflir fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Nov 13, 2012 |
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Nov 13, 2012 21:55
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klosterdev posted:Any Goon who remembers Cybernations might recognize this. I managed the internal affairs of an alliance on a text-based MMO. (LUEnited Nations) The alliance had more than 600 people. I implemented a banking system, created a layer of middle management to reduce bottlenecking between the people on top and everyone else as the alliance continued to grow, and turned the internal workings of the alliance into a well-oiled machine. I was one of the best WCIII players at age 13 . I stopped but I'm incredibly nostalgic for the old days.
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Nov 13, 2012 22:04
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Worst of the worst. My girlfriend was giving me a handjob and I was playing WoW and ignoring her. She was my first girlfriend, in my first apartment.... I had to get some items from Stormwind to Orgrimmar for my brother. Her hand was on my cock, and I was more concerned about the wolf that was chasing me than I was about throwing her on the bed.
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Nov 13, 2012 22:05
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reflir posted:it's going to be a while, and the project came into being to make procrastination easier, so I'm not making any promises about how far it'll go. Oh, okay. I misunderstood and read the sentence as a taxonomy of dream-bound entities and concepts, which would be a much much smaller list. Yeah, all fantasy creatures is a pretty herculean task.
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Nov 13, 2012 22:06
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waste of internet posted:I had a WoW girlfriend. Oh poo poo, I apparently blanked that out of my mind. I totally did too, gently caress that was awful.
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Nov 13, 2012 22:09
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MattD1zzl3 posted:When I was 15 I managed to get this attractive girl into my room, sitting on my bed, without once thinking I had a chance to bed her. (Hope that doesn't sound creepy, I defiantly had a shot) I spent a few minutes showing off my computer and gundam model collection, than left. I was at a party. and this really good looking girl was talking to me and it was all cool, she was nice to talk to and we danced a bit, hindsight she was really into me, which was awesome. Later that night she came over and said that she didn't have a place to sleep that night, so we agreed she could sleep at my place. We came home and I didn't really thought what might could happen, so I got out my fold out bed, so she could sleep on that. gently caress post teenage me.
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Nov 13, 2012 22:09
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Die Elf posted:Sometime in middleschool I was obsessed with Morrowind. I put more hours into that game than any other with WoW being the only exception. I stopped playing towards the end of a run where I wanted to collect every item in the game. The worst part is that for a period of time instead of saying "oh my god" or "Holy poo poo" I said, "By the nine" Oh wow. That reminds me of the time I came back to school from break the summer that StarCraft: Brood Wars came out and I greeted my fellow nerdy classmate with "En Taro Tassadar". 
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Nov 13, 2012 22:18
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Solus posted:I have over 1000 hours in TF2. I hear you, 1000 in less than 12 months.
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Nov 13, 2012 22:18
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As a senior in high school, I lied to myself and said I would rather stay at home and play Age of Kings with my equally nerdy buddy than go to prom (really I was terrified of rejection, was fat, and had an awful anxiety problem). Looking back, and in reminiscing with friends who actually went to prom, I made the right decision. My friend and I also used the high school CAD lab's giant plotter to print out a diagram of an orbital ion cannon. But that doesn't count because that's totally rad, and I wish I still had it.
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Nov 13, 2012 22:30
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One time I was driving down the freeway with my roommate in the car, and I passed a sedan with a vanity licence plate that said "REVVAN". I said "Holy poo poo, what a dumb nerd. He can't even get the name of the character right." (Referring, of course, to the player-character of the Star Wars videogame KOTOR). My roommate looked at me and then went "Or he could just be revving his engine." So loving embarrassed.
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Nov 13, 2012 22:35
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reflir posted:I won a thousand euros on a game show by being able to tell what book and chapter any random line in the Harry Potter corpus is from. If you ever get started on that taxonomy, please make a thread. I shall assist in this worthwhile endeavor. I sperg about Saint Seiya a lot. One long term project is to commission a sculptor/metalworker for a full suit of the Sagittarius armor to my measurements. I can tell you every attack of the 200+ characters and will gladly engage any Saint Seiya discussion. I'm a knowledge snob and constantly scour wikipedia for any new bits on my favorite topics: black holes, nuclear weapons, the cold war, bunkers, cuisine, underwater speleology and other topics. I won a university trivia contesting nearly answering every question. Everyone was so proud, even me.  I've managed to survive without being outed as a nerd since I have some un-nerdy pastimes like swimming, hunting, camping, cooking, rollerblading and powerbocking, that and people generally don't give a crap about nerdosity in my country.
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Nov 13, 2012 22:36
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Wellsir... Between the ages of 15 and 19 I immersed myself deeply into the game of EverQuest, logging over a full year of time /played. I 'married' in-game a character who was played by a woman twice my age. We tried unsuccessfully to move the relationship into real-life. I talked to her kids on the phone and she did some of my homework for me. Eventually I broke it off by writing her a massive pages-long email explaining how I could never be the hero she and her kids needed. I decided it was time to dust myself off and step into the real world as a new man with a new identity. So I bought myself a kilt. A very expensive, custom-made wool kilt from Scotland. Along with the tall socks and ornate sporran on a chain. And I wore it. Everywhere. I was... KILT GUY! Yeah that's right, World. Kilt Guy comin' through. Deal with it  Kilt Guy lasted for about 4 months, until one day I had a sudden moment of profound self-awareness during Public Speaking class. Also this: Paint-Drinking Pete posted:I've turned down every girl who has shown interest in me because I assumed they were all plotting to make fun of me. I still feel like I inherently creep out women just due to my natural sperginess and ugly.
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Nov 13, 2012 22:40
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 Good times. 
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Nov 13, 2012 22:45
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I regularly corner people and spend 30 minutes to an hour telling them about modular synthesizers.
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Nov 13, 2012 22:53
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A cute girl asked me out one time but I turned her down to raid Molten Core.
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Nov 13, 2012 22:54
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I pretty much opted out on parties and all that essential poo poo back in high school because I was a huge chicken and couldn't stop playing Starcraft and Half Life mods.
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Nov 13, 2012 22:55
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I am quoted in the BYOB edition of Weekend Web. It's pretty hard to get lower than that.
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Nov 13, 2012 23:16
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reflir posted:I won a thousand euros on a game show by being able to tell what book and chapter any random line in the Harry Potter corpus is from. What was the line?
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Nov 13, 2012 23:17
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I was super into anime in the late 90s-early 2000s and watched a ton of Sailor Moon, Evangelion, Fushigi Yuugi, etc. All subtitled of course because the English dubs were for lame people! A fair amount of it was downloaded through my parents 56k connection. And then I would drone on and on about it to my school friends and classmates none of whom gave any fucks, except one girl and her boyfriend who were really, reallllly into Inu Yasha and were also big time furries. In 8th-9th grade, 3 of my friends and I kept a notebook where tried to team-write a fantasy novel. Like one girl would write a few pages, pass it on to the next girl, etc. It was awful and we were super lucky it didn't get confiscated by our teachers because that kind of thing was really frowned upon, and another group of girls did have their notebook taken, the principals read their notes, parents were called, detentions were given, etc. I guess the difference was that they were popular kids so their notebook was about ~*~boys~*~ and ~*dating~*~*~ and we were unpopular so our notebook was about ordinary people who gain entrance to a magical world by finding pieces of a lost magical crystal. And then, to make matters worse, in 10th grade when we decided that was super lame, two of the girls founded a "writers club" at school with some older kids, and I was not invited to join because my writing was too bad.My one friend got AOL in 7th grade, before the rest of us had it (or we had Internet but not AOL) and we would all cluster around her family's computer and watch and give input as she chatted in the role-playing chat rooms. I was really into Pokemon cards when they first came out and that TCG was the source of all kinds of disagreements and drama amongst my friends group. I babysat my friend's much younger brother by teaching him Pokemon cards and playing Pokemon monopoly with him while my friend and his friends most of whom I didn't know played D&D in the living room. Meanwhile I was all, I'd rather play Pokemon cards with an 8-year-old. I have played through an entire year of Harvest Moon 64 and Harvest Moon Magical Melody in one sitting on multiple occasions. Later on in college I was co-founder of our school's DDR club. quote:I've turned down every girl who has shown interest in me because I assumed they were all plotting to make fun of me. I still feel like I inherently creep out women just due to my natural sperginess and ugly. I'm a girl and this was me from the age of, oh, pre-puberty until about age 25 when I got married. I was convinced any guy who was into me or being nice to me at all was making fun of me because of how badly I was bullied in elementary/high school. And I was straight-up rude to a lot of guys because of it. Sorry, probably nice guy I completely blew off in college freshman econ class who just wanted to talk about the Rolling Stones! My friend at church when I was about 12 got me into the Dragonlance novels (which I still read occasionally if I notice a new one at the library.) I had the giant big bound volume of the original trilogy that I took out from the library and brought with me to school, and a kind of nerdy guy in my grade tried to chat me up about it and I straight up shot him down. Looking back on it, it was painfully obvious that he was kind of into me in that weird middle school way.
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Nov 13, 2012 23:19
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I played cybernations actively for 6 years. I play magic the gathering with my roommates again after swearing it off in 08. We have 3-8 man drafts in our apartment once a week. I turned down sex to finish watching the last season of doctor who last night. Worth it. I still read naruto and bleach. I've read most of the Star Wars series. I bought Pokemon black and white so I could own every Pokemon ever. I'm a member of SA.
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Nov 13, 2012 23:23
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I spent all of 5th grade making extremely complicated paper airplanes. My airplanes were so distracting to class that my science teacher gave me a whole period to teach the class about paper airplanes. However, my designs were too complicated for anyone else to make, so the hour ended up being me making paper airplanes for the whole class.
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Nov 13, 2012 23:27
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I also attended a LAN party with my friends in place of senior prom.
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Nov 13, 2012 23:31
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I once turned down sex for free pancakes.
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Nov 13, 2012 23:33
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I burned CDs of the Katamari Damacy soundtrack when I was in middle school and listened to them. I almost cried when The Sims Online was shut down. I was into that poo poo.
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Nov 13, 2012 23:36
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