Ever since I got paralytic blackout drunk on my 21st, I haven't worried about it.

It was stupid to get that drunk, naturally, but with the accompanying memory loss and total lack of feeling, you've metaphorically died. Between that time of stumbling around slurring your words and being passed out unconscious/asleep on the floor, you're already gone.

It's just black (or rather the absence of anything perceptual). In a sudden death you won't get the time to process or know it's happening, you'll just stop.

The first thought that woke me from that event was 'Hang on, I need to get my coat'. That was 13 hours later at home on a couch, 2 miles away from where I previously was (I didn't get home under my own power). The only difference between that, and death perceptually, is that you won't have that revival.

(For the record I don't believe 'we' go anywhere afterwards either)

Started on Bnet around 2008, on and off.
Kind of crazy we're moving onward to yet another offsite.

What I think is insane is that the Forum will actually 'retire' instead of dying a slow death or being host-banned a week from inception. I don't think anyone could have anticipated that happening when it started out, since most of us were wondering how the last 2 offsites had imploded days apart from each other.

This is the longest surviving forum I have been on. I was about and around a fair few game company's forums back around 2008, and a significant amount of them had already been forcefully closed by the time Sep7 started. For 5 years there was even another 'offsite' from an entirely different group of people, it had less infighting and drama, had more people to pool discussions from, and even then it died a faster death.

There must be something about the starting point, clearly - the other offsites are still ticking away with their own little cliques, their own rules about behaviour, their own odd characters and 'lore'. It's insane how many Bungie inadvertently created, and how there's still at least 4-5 of them in varying states.

Across 11 years of time here, there's been music rooms (rip Plug.DJ), movie shares, fucking MSN/Skype groups, and a lot of people and events which for better or worse has escaped my memory. It's mad to see the changes on the internet and internet culture whilst this place has remained unchanged. Against my own personal history, also.

This place has existed before I moved home, 5 times. Before all my original pets died. Before I moved country, before I had 2 fucking degrees, before I found my long term partner (who's aksed what I'm typing about 'on some old ass website'), before my parent's terminal diagnosis. When I was closer to 15 than I was to 30 (and that's terrifying). I can't say Sep7 has been a part of all those events, but it's weird when I come to post and get memories of those different pasts every so often whilst I browse.

I'm not really going anywhere with this, but I never really did that with things I posted here anyway. I should probably move the armchair.

Better find Jesus before you kick that bucket. People who don't have faith always fear death....

my relationship with this website has been extremely unhealthy. if you check the stats page, you'll find that i am the most active user here by a significant margin. on top of being the #1 most frequent poster, with almost 50K posts since 2014, my overall time spent on this website is 787 days—over two full years, which is nearly DOUBLE that of the second most online user, and almost 7% of my total lifespan.

all that time spent, and what did i do? i posted a lot of negative shit. had lots of arguments. made a lot of people dislike or even hate me because of my lack of respect for them, or because of my capacity to "shit up threads" with my negativity.

i don't completely regret my behavior—if i were to think of myself as a character, i think i added a lot of good to the narrative of this forum, the way any dislikable asshole character in your favorite show might add a lot of entertainment value to that story. but i think i did go over the line rather frequently—particularly in 2016, which is where a lot of my most regrettable posts can be found.

almost 10 years later, i wish i could tell you that i'm an entirely different person now, but in many ways, i'm still the Verbatim you knew—i am still a bitter and resentful person with a chip on his shoulder for everything—but i have certainly mellowed out in a lot of ways. i do not spend nearly as much time arguing with people on the internet anymore, for a few reasons, but certainly not because i've lost the energy to do so. rather, i've lost the passion. i haven't become a full-on nihilist, but i've certainly become more nihilistic. i just don't really see much of a point to internet debates anymore, whereas before, in my post-adolescent naivete, i could still halfway convince myself that i really was contributing positively to the world by incessantly arguing about the morality of childbirth on a backwater internet forum to a group of disinterested center right gamers who just want to talk about how bad the new star wars movie is, or whatever the fuck.

this is one of the few online communities that never banned me permanently for being an asshole—which is really saying something—and honestly, i do need to thank Cheat for that. i have to imagine i've been on thin ice on a number of occasions, but you've always erred on the side of allowing me to express myself without any limits, often to my own detriment, and that is VERY MUCH appreciated. it was having this forum as an outlet that prevented me from posting in horrible places like 4chan or what have you. sep7agon really was all i had for a long time.

that being said, i'm almost 30 years of age at this point—i have more than sep7agon now. i don't know if i really need to join the new website. if i do, i have no interest in starting arguments or "shitting up threads" with my unwanted contrarian opinions, so you won't have to expect that from me. i'll likely just pop in here and there to throw in my two cents on whatever interesting topics happen to come up. or maybe i'll forget to join and you'll never see me again and this'll be the last post you read of mine.

if you appreciated my presence here, i hope to still see you around.
if you hated my guts this whole time, i'm sorry. i get it now—not that i entirely didn't before, but yeah.