EPTI know I haven't posted here in a while. It's crazy to think how much time has passed since I started doing this - and all the things I didn't end up doing with this blog that I meant to
- in fact it's been 8 years now almost. I don't know if my blogging was ever a big deal on here. I certainly had some minor infamy (especially the [girl blogs]), and I remember playing League of Legends with the people on the TL League Teamspeak and getting trash talked over my blog. Still, I doubt I made that big of a splash. But I think I might have made some people happy, and that's what matters. Time passes, and there's less and less time just to write like I used to do. Still, this blog has been my lingering tie with this website, and even if it was only ever a minor part of the TL experience for the probably everyone but me, I'm glad I started it.I don't come on here as much anymore. To be honest it's kind of sad for me. This website has so many of my fondest high school memories, and even some of my favorite college memories. Time really flies, doesn't it. So this is a retrospective in a way, and I'll try to keep it short.
For backstory, I got SCII when I was a sophomore in high school. I begged my parents for it after a pretty big accomplishment of mine had gone very south. I won't go into detail, but suffice it to say I thought that maybe a new video game would get me out of my funk: oh my god did it. Starcraft II was life-changing. I remember playing it in the car to high school debate tournaments, watching it during my most boring classes at school when the year was about to end, and talking about the Korean meta non-stop to my friends (even to this day my friends will joke about me talking about the Korean meta). It didn't change my life, but it made me so happy even though I was absolute hot garbage as a player. So I found my way here to become a better player. I was mostly here for the build orders and replay packs, but I stayed here because of the feeling of community. I had no friends to play the game with, so this website filled that rift really nicely. In short, I was one of the noobs who was too young to grow up with SC:BW and had migrated over with SCII.
About a year into being on this website (perhaps too soon to be honest) I started writing blogs. At first I didn't actually do it to contribute anything meaningful to the website. I just knew that I needed to practice my writing and my typing, and this website was a convenient place to drop some word puke. Honestly, it worked. Between school and forcing myself to write a blog almost weekly for a couple years, my writing became more effective, bit-by-bit.
Eventually, though, I found that I kind of loved adding something quasi-valuable to the content on the website (though nothing on the level of many of the contributors here). I started out with [girl blog]s and mostly meme blogs. After about a year I began to open up more on here, and I began writing about my struggles with college denials, the miscellaneous experiences of my life, and eventually blogs about what I really hoped to make of myself. In the process of writing these blogs I opened up about so much of my life that I find myself returning to TL not only to browse through what's happening in the Starcraft world, but to remind myself of how a younger me saw the world.
Over the years I have to say that this blog was one of the very few things that stayed constant in my life (even if I don't get to post nearly as much as I want). Girlfriends came and went, friends moved away, etc. But whenever I want to remind myself of who a younger me was and a have a little chuckle about whatever I thought was life changing at that point in my life, I know I can come here. It's a totally biased view of me, through my own eyes, but maybe that's the best part of it all.
Before I end this: I'd like to thank both JWD and Micronesia. I don't have much of a relationship with either, but they both unknowingly influenced the person I've become. JWD's blogs (if you read this and you haven't seen his blogs, do yourself a favor and look through them), heavily influenced how I began to think about aesthetic presentation in writing form. They combined ideas, music, and anything else in an orderly and satisfying manner. I had never really experienced something like that before, and even though I have many more influences now, I still remember the first time I read his blog and the effect it had on me. Also, thanks to Micronesia for not banning my teenage self for posting blogs that were nearly 1/2 memes. Cheers to 8 years.
:r 
