Project Megan: Forward
Originally I started posting to the target newsgroup just as myself in early 1998, under the name "Neptune Salad," just a few short, exciting months after my brother and I got our own cheap little computer and internet connection. I found alt.games.final-fantasy quickly, and being a fan of the Final Fantasy series I started reading some of the posts. Within a few days, I was already posting, my first post actually being a legitimate question about Final Fantasy. In the newsgroup I was amazed at this large group of people sort of acting out a weird friendly fantasy life, writing short stories (later I learned called "fanfics"--my first taste of them on the internet), and people generally getting along and having fun with each other. I was swept up immediately and within a month or two I began to get known. I was soon accepted as a "cool new reg" in the newsgroup (sadly, an exact quote which I was once proud of but not anymore). I got AIM along with a group of the other regs so we could all really chat with each other. This was even before AIM had a feature where multiple AIM users could all chat in the same window. I befriended quite a few people who I talked to on a daily basis, considered writing fanfics of my own, started putting more thought and effort into my posts to make them more entertaining, and had a good time in general.
This was all in my internet infancy, when I considered that basically everyone was good, and on the entire planet there were only a few people who were just mean. After a few years, that world view would reverse completely, perhaps to change again in the future, I can't tell.
Trouble started when my brother started posting to AGFF also. He would generally try to be nice, since we were both sharing the same name, and I was already established on AGFF before him. We worked out a little identification deal where he'd sign his posts as "Nep" and I'd sign mine as "N.S." (which I found out later made no difference because people still couldn't tell the difference between our posts anyway, no matter how wildly the writing style or typing ability differed). Soon though, Josh, being himself, had people mad at him, first from joking about a 13 year old sex-addicted girl's hilariously endless flurry of typing mistakes (the actual joke being this picture file) to not being overly-sensitive enough about someone posting a nude Playboy centerfold on the newsgroup saying that it's one of the female regs (which a post regarding that can be found somewhere in the "old news" pages on our actual site). Josh then was really being pretty tame, and just having a sense of humor about his surroundings. But already he had people furious at him. People would complain to me that he was actually ruining my good name--some people saying that he was doing this by posting binaries to the newsgroup (which we were BOTH doing at the time--and certainly didn't interfere with the newsgroup or bandwidth any more than most of the regs' 50K/1000 line signature files). Already the hypocrisy was stark, but back then I was friends with all of these people, and unfortunately saw the problem in Josh instead of them, since it was the easiest thing to do. I had no excuse for being mad at Josh, aside from the fact that he was getting my friends, who were all idiots consequentially, mad at him and me.
I can imagine that it would've been hard on Josh, since not only was his life on the internet, where I was gaily prancing around in fantasy land, gone to shit in a pot full of morons, but his actual life was being reduced to having our mom send him off to a retard school because he wouldn't do his homework (I had a similar fate--and yes that was the real reason). After about a year, I was still clinging to my ideals and friends, but slowly they would melt away as the realization came to me that they were all completely worthless whining self-righteous depressive people. This realization came after the 500th post with some faceless reject of a reg posting about how they were either so depressed or they wanted to commit suicide (and AGFF has actually had a large number of people threatening suicide on the newsgroup, and even a couple lame attempts, all failed naturally). Seeing the tidal wave of sympathy that came in, I realized what the game is. However, I myself was also in a depressive tailspin, but for a real reason. I did not threaten suicide or emote a hundred *sigh*s for sympathy after this (I did before, back when I was actually one of those people). I did however do my fair share of whining about how much I hated a specific so and so, which was part of the transition period from one of those FFAG regs to a full-fledged human being of understanding, reason, and clarity.
The single most pitiful moment I had as one of those FFAGs was actually falling in love with one of the females who posted there. She shared most of the sentimate at first, but then soon I was scorned by her for basically no reason. One of those pathetic emotional sob stories where I was wrenched and depressed for quite a few months, either having to be away from her due to sudden loss of the internet connection, or just having her being a fucking dumb cunt and not then knowing how to deal with it. At first I was so smitten with her that I figured she was much much smarter than I was. Eventually I realized that she was only for the reason that I was 17 or 18 at the time. That didn't last too long, but after I finally gave up on her I still spent that good while whining about her to some friends. But it was a venting that I needed to let out. Eventually I ended up scaring her so much that I got my now infamous (infamous with me and my friends, at least) "net.stalking" title. It's basically a joke, just like her, except, unlike her, it's actually funny. And it means that I'm the greatest "net.stalker" on the entire internet. She was the final chapter of my involvement in FFAG. And today, the one thing I really know about her is that she went from a fairly cute 14 year old to a fucking laughably hidious 23 year old tori amos fan.
Today, I have gathered my forces with Josh, to basically pluck the emotions of these fragile people. And that is what spawned this project. Earlier this year (or some time like that) I went back to AGFF under a secret identity, as Andrew Goebel, a typical loser, with mostly correct grammar and punctuation, but not very interesting and a bad habit of ending every sentence with a :) smilie. Which was really more of a self-parody from back in my FFAG days. It didn't last as long and never went as far as the Megan project, but I did get a friend to play as a female love interest, where we both just started posting, meet, and fall in love on FFAG. Eventually we both disappeared until I came back under the Andrew Goebel name as part of a giant troll spree by a couple friends, Josh, and I.
My latest project was much more ambitious. The goal was to be a normal reg on AGFF until I was either satisfied or completely tired of the character.
