EPTUpon entering username and email, the app told me that the username was taken, which to be honest never happened to me before. Resetting my password revealed the past: back in 2015, when I had the clash with TotalBiscuit that resulted in him banning himself from tl.net, I had created an account to have some sort of control over the reddit part of the ensued discussion.
I read through that old reddit thread, went back to my own blog that I did, re-read the discussion I had with John back then, and I felt sad. He was already fighting cancer in 2015, if I recall correctly, he had been diagnosed but it wasn't a terminal diagnosis yet.
When I heard he passed away, I was filled with sadness. I realized that his death actually affected me a lot and made me re-think my approach to our conflict, re-think my approach to people in general. Things suddenly feel unimportant, they lose all gravity when you realize that the person you've fought with is dead. We had no personal relationship, nothing at all, but my words affected him and his words affected me.
I played around with the idea of writing this, I hesistated a lot, because who'd care really? It wouldn't bring back John nor would it help any of his loved ones to cope with their losses. It would only help me, thus being somewhat selfish. I never realized how much my time on here actually formed me as a person. I grew a lot ever since 2012, when I became father, and now I'm almost 30 years old, working a normal life as a half technical, half business consultant, everything has normalized a lot and things are going, well, one would even say, boring.
So, what I basically want to do here is to express my feelings towards teamliquid.net and the people running the site, running the team, running this sort of community, and of course towards the people I spent so much time with back then, be it my abysmal mafia performances, my not-as-funny-as-I-thought LR comments, or all the warnings and bans I caught. Visiting ESL One Cologne with Gumba still counts as one of the best memories of my life, meeting Apollo, HerO, seeing Jaedong cry, and that awesome final. There's no way this would've been possible without all the amazing people on here.
Including John. When I realized my blog had hit 15k views, people were talking (bashing) me on reddit, adrenaline rushed my veins. It is a super weird feeling to get insulted by a lot of people you don't even know (and getting positive feedback, as well). Being a person of the public, which I was for roughly 2 days, was an experience I'd never want to miss, and although it was super negative in the beginning, I wouldn't want to miss it now. It helped me so much to grow as a person in reality as well as growing as a person on the internet. It sounds weird to differentiate this, but I'm sure that people on the internet behave way differently than they'd do in real life. I regret, I so regret calling John out when he already had cancer. I mean, just because someone is ill, you shouldn't treat them differently if they don't want it, I know. However, being a genuinely friendly person doesn't cost one too much, and although John played his part in escalating the situation, there's always two people involved and I am the one to blame here. It was my deliberate choice to get in that fight, to not let go, when I probably should've let go.
So - well. Long story short. I miss John. I hope he's in a better place now, I hope his family is alright, and I hope all his friends can find a way to cope with their losses. And I miss teamliquid. My life is not at all boring, my priorities however have changed, so ... I'm only visiting this site for nostalgic reasons. Everyone on here, please take a big thank you for supporting this amazing community, and godspeed to y'all.
Shoutouts to all the amazing people I've grown to admire, such as Olli, Rude_FFW, KadaverBB, Zealously, of course ninazerg, and all the other ones I probably forgot. Oh, and Gumba.
