User:Gnosis is knowledge/Farewell essay

Context
I wrote this several years ago upon returning to this site for the first time in years. It accurately reflects my mindset then, not so much now although most everything in this is true in a sense. I can still stand behind most everything here, and I feel it still needs to be here on Star Wars Fanon, even if not the first thing you see on my userpage.

Basically just realise this is several years old. -- 2016 edit

Essay itself
Not many people still here would recognise me, and I'm sure I don't recognise you. No harm in that, but I just feel like talking to myself on my userpage about myself, my stay here, and the reason why I left. I know, it's a pretty lame thing to do, but it's been on my mind for over a year.

What follows is extensive TL;DR.

And it is 2012, the year the world ends, so why not make my first edits in almost three years. This account is almost six years old, which is pretty cool. I thought about how best to officially leave, from banning an admin, to vandalising the site, but I'll do better and just leave this here. Maybe I'll come back eventually, but I've done a pretty good job spending three years away from here, so let's go for another decade or so.

So where do we begin?
It was a dark and stormy night (hurr) when I discovered this website. It was the year 2006, and I was...12 years old. But nobody would have guessed I was only 12 on this site, but I wouldn't have guessed our founding admin was 13 when he made this site, so, hey. Twelve year old me didn't do too much, so he had read lots of cool stuff on Wookieepedia back in the day, and found out about this site through there. Star Wars Fanon back then got about maybe 150 edits a week, half of which were vandals and the reverting (or often not) of said vandals. Most articles were just assorted trash or jokes. I made this account as a joke account as well (meant to laugh at my friend with the article "Darth Trask;" we were both KOTOR fans), but I got drawn into creating serious articles after all of that. All articles that I ever typed on this website were done on Internet Explorer 6, believe it or not.

The community (the other three guys back then) were fairly welcoming, and we reverted lots of vandals and welcomed hundreds of notable users to this site back in the summer of 2006, a summer that I'll always remember because of the time that I spent on here, plugging away at silly articles, reverting the vandals, feeding the ED trolls who would come here by memorialising vandalism in various articles, laughing at Darth Vacatour and his stupid sockpuppet crap and eventually vandalising his stupid troll-feeding wiki. Speaking of memorialising vandals, I will finally admit that yes, I vandalised Star Wars Fanon in summer of 2006 to get my name in the "War with ISV" article. I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only serious contributer who vandalised here. For that, I got IP banned for six months, but I managed to convince the Wikia staff (the only admins back in those days) to unban me after two or three days.

That summer will always spawn nostalgia from me. It was wake up, play some Battlefront II, write some Star Wars Fanon, and be lazy all day, or, alternatively, go over my grandparents house, eat a good lunch, and edit more Star Wars Fanon, and revert the occasional vandal. Nothing productive all that time, but it was so fun.

A few months after summer ended, school was back, and writers block combined with homework made me lose interest in this site around September 2006. I left the site until early 2007.

First return
When I came back, lots of new faces in the crowd (names in the Recent Changes page is a more apt description) were here, and the site was still pretty fun. Towards that summer, I began noticing the site shifting towards a more serious attitude. I paid no heed to it, and kept doing what I was doing. That was the year with the whole "Clan drama," which was pretty hilarious how heated it got. It was showing that the laidbackness of the site was going away, but the clans really were dumb. I had lots of fun that year too, and left again for probably similar reason. I left in August, but popped back in before New Years.

Discontentment and departure
Year three was when I started to become detatched from the community. Users began to really become too serious, and we saw Star Wars Fanon trying to copy Wookieepedia in a sense with its new policies. In 2008, I don't remember much besides that. I popped in and out of the site every few months, got really pissed at how high people were setting the bar for "good articles" and removed my only claim on one (and promptly lowered the standards a few weeks later), and just noticed that the site had lost what had made it fun. We deleted several featured articles that year for various reasons, which I thought was just really dumb. I mean, it leaves a huge blank as to what we featured that week, but the rules had to be rules, regardless of their effect on our site. I persisted, because my imagination could never cool down back then, and people generally let me and my articles alone be, probably because I had one of the oldest still active accounts. I constantly thought to myself that had I been a new user, I would have been mercilessly harassed, like I feel our older users (myself included, I'm sad to admit) sometimes did to brand new users.

End of that year, I got what I had always wanted and was finally appointed admin. I fooled around with it, cleaning up our site a bit, popping in and out for most of the rest of that year and in 2009.

It was in 2009 that my committment to this site finally broke. Sometime early in May, I visited the site and noticed some junk about "Mass-deletion purge" of articles. I thought to myself, "Cool, clearing out the trash," until I scanned through the colossal category (thousands of articles) and noticed that a ton of my stuff was in there. I had never been so infuriated in my life that what I had spent summers on would just be deleted like that. I tried to clean up some of my stuff, but I realised that it was utterly pointless, and my interest faded into whatever I did that summer, I think mostly listen to music while browsing god knows what and fail at playing guitar and writing bedroom black metal. My departure was quiet, and I'm sure that people realised I was gone, but I didn't really care.

Final thoughts, and the ultimate reason why
I could say that I left because of the elitism of this website. We have no room to be elitist, considering the inherent silliness of fan-fiction, even greater the silliness of writing in-universe Wikipedia-styled articles about it. But people were. Quality control is always vital for a wiki, but there is no inherent mission for this site, like Wookieepedia, so why should we just delete articles out of the blue? I know, this is a terrible argument, but I'm not here to argue about the past.

I admit that I was a bit miffed to find a lot of my articles (including the only featured article I ever made, and our second ever featured article) had been deleted when I came back to post this, even though I could have cared less for them at this point. It always hurts to see something you worked for hours on deleted out of the blue for failing some arbitrary rule when people praised the thing enough to put it on the front page six years ago.

At the time of my final departure, I had been conceiving some extensive article "saga" about some Human-alien emperor probably Mary Sue dude and his family owning everyone and then getting owned. But nothing ever came of it, and all of it has died in my head, as had a ton of other good stuff (but mostly bad) that I've devised over the years.

Thinking of my articles, I feel that writing Star Wars fanfiction was holding myself back. Nothing much related to Star Wars ever appeared in them, besides a few canon locations and common terms like "Jedi" and "the Force." It was basically a self-contained universe within the Galaxy Far Far Away. None of it would be particularly good as original science fiction/space opera, as the first novel of original content that I ever wrote showed. The whole deal with the Exlusites and the Exlus Federation goes to show the birth of my original content creation.

Speaking of original content, that's the reason why--original content. Sometime in summer 2009, I was told that for a course in my school, I could just write a novel and be done with it. And that I did. I devised an original concept that I described as "Star Wars, but worse," never a good sign. It was my first time dealing with a less fantasy-grounded universe, and one that had to be pulled entirely out of my head. The naming conventions, stayed the same (jam letters on keyboard and insert vowels, abuse the letters "k" and "v") for the aliens, and it really played like a lost article series. I had to write a convincing character-driven dialogue, and that turned out pretty awful. Come to think of it, a lot of the elements of it were lifted straight out of an aborted Star Wars Fanon article series that I had in mind. Extferenti appears to have been the article, and the story was that they would invade the galaxy from a dwarf galaxy and kill everyone, but just manage to lose. Not much is stored on this site, as most of it died in my head years ago, but lots of elements were the same, down to them both prowling the galaxy in a gigantic 200km wing-shaped ship. You'll never read this, by the way, as I am very embarrassed by how it turned out.

My likes these days range from finding obscure music, to anime, various strategy games and RPGs, to taking part in the mockery of internet morons, among other things. I still write, and I have organised databases for concepts of all of my universes in a style similar to my Star Wars Fanon style.

Nowadays, I deal exclusively in original content, and have several well-fleshed out universes to base short stories and full-length novels in. They range from apocalyptic to space opera to odd alternate history. Naturally, none of my works are published, and no, they are not available online. I feel that I am not a particularly skilled writer yet, though I find that I have improved since my first attempt at writing a novel. One day, though, you may find me in a book store, or more probably on your Kindle/Nook/whatever, or maybe I'll have written a Star Wars book and something I wrote here will be, *gasp*, canon! I can dream, eh?

If you really need to contact/beg me of something, I can be found mainly on the following websites:
 * RateYourMusic - My profile on RateYourMusic, good for music lovers and collectors such as myself.
 * MyAnimeList - My profile on MyAnimeList, constantly growing whenever I have free time and am not engrossed in something else.
 * 4chan's board M - I am found under the name "Anon." Rules 1 and 2, hurr derp.

My final words are that I have to say Thank You to everyone who I have met on this website, whether I liked you or not. I'm sorry that I've wasted your time reading this, but I needed to get this off my chest sometime or another. You can comment back all you want, but I won't be there to see it. De-sysop me (I was pleasantly surprised you guys hadn't), do whatever, I don't care. See ya!

--Mike (Gnosis is knowledge, Knowledge, whatever)

TL;DR - That's all, folks!