Farewell thread?

With Cheat confirming that this place will be set to read-only and subsequently archived, I thought it would be appropriate to have a farewell thread.
Info about how to move to the new site is here

Some stats
Total post count now: 9110
Days on the site: 3,809
First post: "Wasn't this the 'private' flood party where everyone got banned from?" thread

10 year highlights
The good: I moved 6 times, had 4 partners, got my license, bought 2 cars, bought a house, got married, got 2 cats, traveled to 12 countries, read 50+ books, got credited in a couple AAA games.
The bad: Stretched the tendons in my left elbow, oldest and closest childhood friend took his own life, witnessed how the russian invasion ruined the life of my friend in Ukraine

I don't remember who invited me here when b.net was getting gutted but I thank you.
These ten years were full of peaks and valleys. Starting with the uncertain days of college, I didn't know if I would ever be financially stable. This place could take my mind off those things, I could forget about the loneliness and constant stress.
Eventually after graduating and finding a stable job, things got better. Much better, for the most part.

Have a look at your early posts, see how much you've changed (or not).
Thank you Cheat for creating sep7agon and thank you all for keeping it going for so long!

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.

What up niggas

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.

To be honest, I don't think of myself as a great moderator and it took being in power here to see that. I'm good at being an admin / builder and creating tools FOR competent moderators, but man did I have some fumbles in the past with not banning people when I should have and also moderating people that maybe I shouldn't have.

I don't think of you as someone who should have been removed for your behavior. I remember you had some heated comments in the past, but who doesn't?

I really just appreciate all of you people playing in this sandbox I made (and Isara made better tbh). I got super lucky that Bungie made people unhappy with their design about the same place this forum was off the ground.

You're welcome over there if you want. No obligations. I'll tell you that I've learned my lesson about holding people's data / accounts hostage here. I'm building the new site so you always have the option to remove your content or account, even if you're banned or if things are locked. Account deletion isn't quite figured out yet since I'm still building critical features, but eventually it will be.

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.

I've interacted with this community for nearly 16 years now, wild to think that some users have 20 years worth.

You guys are some of the coolest people I ever met on the internet. When I was a kid and had a tough time at school or any other issue I would log onto old Bnet (hell even B.next) and have a great time talking about Halo or random stuff with all of you. This was a community where I felt comfortable in and can be myself. Through all the discussions, constructive or heated, I wouldn't trade this for anything else.

If I ever pissed you off, annoyed you, or just was an asshole at any point, I apologize. Getting older is making me realize its not worth dealing with all that. Almost dying in a car wreck in 2023 is making me appreciate life a little bit more and I've been trying to be a better person since that event.

As for the users from Sep7 that disappeared without a trace I genuinely hope that they're all doing okay and have found happiness in life.

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