#my colonel hears me and calls me a greasy freebooter

[nevesmose]

So the last time I posted anything was way back in 2016 when I had just moved to England and was working in a shitty hotel. Finally after ten thousand years I'm back, and in the intervening time I, in vaguely chronological order:

Had various celebrity encounters (details available on request)

Got married

Moved to a new city

Worked in a different shitty hotel

Worked in a shitty call centre

Joined one of the Big 4, iykyk

Had a kid

Moved back to Scotland

Got diagnosed with autism

Had another kid

And now after all that character development I've come back to a Tumblr account untouched for almost a decade and a screen name I first came up with almost two decades ago. Christ I'm old.

Why?

Let's slam on the auld accelerator all the way back to summer 2006. I was a complete antisocial nerd and not in the cutely engaging likeable way but in the cold, creepy hate-filled way. The undiagnosed autism probably had a lot to do with it tbh.

My only social contact was as a cringy hanger-on to my friends' band, and when I say friends I mean people who we had no choice but to be around each other in class. It's like going to sea in olden times, or having a cellmate with a pretty enough mouth. You make do, but it doesn't have any deeper meaning or connection.

One weekend they promised everyone that they'd be getting played on the radio. A small local station that no longer exists, practically hand-cranked. So me and various others tuned in and waited for hours to hear them. Did they rock the rural Scottish airwaves all the way from Lochaber to Fochabers, Invergordon to Inverbervie, Pitlochry to Pitmedden?

No, no they didn't. The mid-2000s were sadly denied their ten millionth landfill indie band and life went on. I never found out why and I didn't really care because my thought at that moment was just - fuck this, I want to do something for myself.

Another thing about me at that time was that I was a huge Metal Gear Solid fan - still am in a lot of ways. I played the heck out of MGS3 and liked The Sorrow so much that I habitually wore a commando sweater because I thought they were cool.

Reading that back it sounds like the start of a particularly gross Shrek is Love, Shrek is Life parody but I swear it's true. In any case, I had found a bunch of MGS3 fanart and such on Deviantart but was too paranoid and anxious to actually create an account.

Up until that day, anyway. I wanted to do something for myself so I took the plunge and did it. Met a lot of really great people and had some wonderful times over the following 10ish years. It was nice, in the most meaningful way, to make my own little identity for myself when I didn't have anything else going on that really mattered to me as a person. Also I wrote a lot of edgy Dark Eldar fanfiction.

Of course, life went on and I ended up drifting away on the tide of gradually building up other things in my life, even in my own slow way. Which brings us to now.

It's pretty pleasant, in a nostalgic way, to revisit the online footprint of the person I was then and to look at his antics with a little more, dare I say it, maturity and self-awareness than I had at the time. But I'd be lying if I didn't say it's also pleasant to recapture a little of how it felt to be that person whose responsibilities extended only as far as creating OCs and adding the right amount of XD, x3 and ^_^ emotes to every comment.

What a dork. But it was fun to be that dork.

#nostalgia #england #scotland #autism #aspergers #landfill indie #metal gear solid #mgs3 #deviantart #sorrow is love #sorrow is life #my colonel hears me and calls me a greasy freebooter #it's all 144.75 now