and how does this disappointment make you feel?

I always wondered if he was just some kind of superior human being, to pass off those kind of experiences like they were nothing, or if his exterior held a truly broken human being.

ACDC (you heard me)

My most beloved thing in the whole world is money, and thanks to the ancient Jewish magic of my predecessors there is a solid quantity for me to while away my time with.

guys i had a really long post ready but i accidentally closed the tab and don't feel like rewriting it so i'll just say that it was a nice long speil about my life and how i was picked on in high school and had a violent angry father yet i turned out to be a well-adjusted friendly human being with a bit of an off-kilter sense of humor.

guys i had a really long post ready but i accidentally closed the tab and don't feel like rewriting it so i'll just say that it was a nice long speil about my life and how i was picked on in high school and had a violent angry father yet i turned out to be a well-adjusted friendly human being with a bit of an off-kilter sense of humor.

guys i had a really long post ready but i accidentally closed the tab and don't feel like rewriting it so i'll just say that it was a nice long speil about my life and how i was picked on in high school and had a violent angry father yet i turned out to be a well-adjusted friendly human being with a bit of an off-kilter sense of humor.

i'm pretty sure i'll hate deci forever though

DJ hangs with two nearly-deaf WoW'ers? I bet Jyot holds her liquor better, though!

DASSIT! Who actually read all that?

pika! pika pika pika ^___^

The concept of social anxiety I see so much on these boards stikes me as completely inscrutable. I've never understood the whole anxiety thing, and people's long meandering posts about the minute details of social interaction and all the little foibles therein strike me as either just excusemaking or pure navel-gazing -- which is fine (this is the internets!) but call it what it is, yeah? Deep, meaningful relationships with other humans are intricate, complicated things. Talking to the guy manning the register at Blockbuster is not. If you can't get that down, see a specialist about it! Because that shouldn't be hard! Unless it's a legitimate brain chemical thing? If so, eh, sorry. I know that can't be helped. I'm just unclear on how that stuff works.

We don't understand it either. That's sorta the nature of it.

this is definitely an axe topic

then how do you know not to trust yourself?



this is far less difficult to get over than being a blitering retard about money. in his own shitty way, he did you a tremendous favor.

Better than me? No.

ANYWAY here you go, kids! (for intended semi-ironic effect, kindly have this song playing at full volume as you read this. ^o^)

Hi, I'm DJ. Full name is Matthew Raymond Warner. 24, live in an apartment in Providence with my longtime girlfriend and our new cat. I take writing jobs where I can, work construction, and play many videogames.

I had a weird childhood.

Like pretty much everyone else on here, I was a pretty smart kid. Straight-A student (at first), oversensitive, just wanted everyone to be happy.

Needless to say, I got the shit kicked out of me on a regular basis. This wasn't helped much by the fact that I started gaining a pretty good amount of weight once I hit the 6th grade, as well as a general lack of hygene (which arguably persists to this day but I'll get to that). So, by about 7th-grade-ish, I was your stereotypical pasty chubby oversensitive loser geek.

By around this point, the situation at my house had turned reasonably violent. Physical confrontations between my parents and I were pretty common, which wasn't quite as lopsided as it might seem since I was pushing about 240 lbs. by that point. One particularly memorable one involving catching a clothes iron to the face. My mother and father both deny this happened, and both my brothers avow to have "not seen it happen". I've got a neat scar just above my hairline on the left side of my head that says different! And they had to drive me to the hospital for it which involved the lovely movie-magic moment of saying I "fell down some stairs" to the doctor with them looking on, arms crossed, making me guffaw a bit when a near-identical line showed up in Fight Club that same year. Also, my dad blew out an eardrum once with a swift backhand that I didn't get out of the way of in time. Pop! Ow. Doesn't sound possible, but I assure you it is! Also hurts like the dickens, and you get a weird underwater/faraway effect in the ear in question. Luckily, it healed and my hearing is fine now. Curiously, my dad will own up to this to other people, even though only he and I were there for it.

Of course, I also spent much of this time attacking my brothers as well (who invariably sided with my parents), at one point knocking my brother's face completely through a wooden closet door. He fled the house for 48 hours, and when he got back, he refused to enter the house unless I wasn't in it. I would up walking 27 miles over the course of an entire night and well into the next morning and sleeping at a friend's house for almost 3 weeks. When I finally got home, nobody asked where I'd been.

Also, this is about the age (16) that I began drinking heavily, flunked out of school, and started to get in regular fistfights -- I've got 2 expulsions from two differnet schools to my name and have my bottom two teeth chipped and knocked out of alignment thanks to a close encounter with a concrete wall (tooth on my left) and someone's boots (tooth on my right). To this day I technically do not have a high school diploma, though I got into college anyway, curiously. The last highschool attempt got me thrown out for attacking the headmaster's mother with a telephone reciever.

Suffice to say that, from about 14-18 or so, I was a violent, nasty, antisocial fucker. I would lie chronically, stole, and was ugly as sin to boot. I was continually drunk, was routinely using my parent's house to hold giant drunken parties for my drug-dealer friend and his hangers on, and was well on my way to either a suicide or a life of petty crime and/or homelessness. My dad actually took me for a drive to a flophouse once to try to show me where I was headed. Fun times.

Through all of this, I still loved videogames! My parents refused to let me have anything (my mom smashed my Sega genesis on the floor in a rage a week after I bought it. I still have the motherboard!) Games were basically my one big solace. None of the crap I had to deal with elsewhere, I had to deal with while playing videogames. It didn't do much for my appearance, but I also genuinely didn't care.

Then, about age 19, something happened I'm still kind of at a loss to explain. My folks now call this "maturity". I'm more inclined towards some John Travolta in Phenomenon type shit (if less dramatic), but here you go:

Pretty much out of the blue one day, I stopped talking. Completely. Even when directly questioned, I'd just shake my head and tap my throat if questions persisted. I was genuinely too depressed to speak. This wasn't the woe-emo-MySpace-look-I'm-a-goth type depressed, this is the crippling, not-eating, barely moving, not-living type depressed. The dangerous kind you go to a psyche ward for. I put a lock on my bedroom door and only used the house to sleep. I actually slept on the side of the road one of those days, though I'm entirely usure now why I did that.

It took my family about three weeks to figure out something was wrong.

I'm getting this kinda out of order: I still had a year left before I'd get kicked out of high school while this was going on. I think it was the summer of '99? Not entirely sure if it was the summer or right before the summer. So, the depression happened while I still had a fair chunk of school left.

Anyway, about 2 months of not speaking. Five words a day, if even that. Sentences incredibly uncommon, mostly just nods at best. I kept waking up in the morning hoping I'd feel better, but it kept not happening.

Then, a day before school got out for some kind of vacation, one of the kids in my class turned to me and said "You lose some weight, man?"

Didn't think much of it at the time, but when I got home I stepped on the scale out of curiosity and it turns out I had! About 10 lbs, just from not eating. I'd gone from 265 to 255, though most of it was in my face.

I'm not sure what happened right there. But clearly, something did.

You've seen Office Space, right? Where the guy goes to a hypnotist to not worry about his job, and then immediately stops even pretending to give a fuck, adopts a policy of brutal honesty, and suddenly everything clicks for him?

Basically, that happened. Only, true to form, much more agressively. As opposed to simply letting things slide, I suddenly came to the realization that I'd been a whiny jackass my entire life, needlessly antagonistic and self-centered, and man, what the fuck was I doing? Why the hell was I loafing around so much? Christ, if I died like this, I'd really hope the end result would be oblivion and nothing more because God Damn, I'd never be able to look myself in th eye!

All this while standing naked on a scale in my parent's bathroom.

Six months later, I'd been going to the gym every day for two hours. I lost about 100 lbs and was in great shape. My attitude had changed completely. I was chatty, pleasant to be around, and much less prone to picking at people. The lying had stopped entirely, replaced by a fairly brutal sense of honesty. I got completely new friends, was going out every single night, and landed a series of girlfriends. I'd gone from being at the bottom of the totem pole at my high school to very near the top of it.

I still had (and still do have) some pretty serious agression issues. Most people are hesitant to just grab the nearest blunt object and attempt to brain someone with it, but that kind of reluctance just never factored into my thinking after a certain point. Beaning Ms. Young with the phone was probably that part of me's last big hurrah, but it was pretty costly (probably worth pointing out she was an 85 year old woman). I'm lucky I didn't go to jail for that, in retrospect; they didn't even press charges, just kicked me out of the school, which subsequently got me kicked out of my parent's house. It was 19.

Now, five years later, I really can't complain. Elisa's moved in, I'm doing okay money-wise, and my interest in videogames has taken me to some interesting places! My past has also granted me an interesting perspective on stuff, which is nice because I also seem to have left it behind and it isn't dogging me down. I sure wouldn't want to be the same person I was, but in a way I'm glad I went through it for the perspective.

Of course, this gives me a strong and occasionally violent no-bullshit streak. I will readily tell people to their face exactly what I think of them and why I think it, whether good or bad. If I like you, I tell you! If I think you're being a whiny priss, I tell you that too (takes one to know one!) Backhanded, passive-agressive anything doesn't fly with me. I hate that shit with a passion.

Of course, by extension, I'm extremely pragmatic. If I've got a problem with someone and they fix it (or can point out to me why I'm mistaken), then we no longer have a problem and I'll let the whole thing drop immediately. Grudges aren't my thing. I own up to my mistakes readily, but I expect other people to do the same.

That said, if I think you're being a jackass purely for the sake of being a jackass and are only apologising/capitulating/whatever to get the heat off while you plan for a renewed assault, I'm not about to get played. I've got no problem just writing people off as permanent assholes, and once I do that, I will gleefully, unapologetically, and (if applicable) completely unfairly rip into them at every opportunity possible until I am no longer in contact. And this applies in real life just as much as anywhere else, and I find it works! The last kid who was attack-on-sight got the message after the first time, and now we're actually reasonably friendly with each other. All it took was a faceplant on the sidewalk! Go figure.

You always know exactly where you stand with me, and I like it that way.

Like I mentioned to Psiga, I'm sort of an accidental Libertarian (though I'll never be caught dead identifying myself with the Libertarian party). Pretty much nothing weirds me out or phases me, and what you do in your own time is none of my fucking buisness. I'm a card-carrying ACLU member. You do what you like as often as you like, just keep it under wraps or don't wine if people look at you funny when you make it public.

The concept of social anxiety I see so much on these boards stikes me as completely inscrutable. I've never understood the whole anxiety thing, and people's long meandering posts about the minute details of social interaction and all the little foibles therein strike me as either just excusemaking or pure navel-gazing -- which is fine (this is the internets!) but call it what it is, yeah? Deep, meaningful relationships with other humans are intricate, complicated things. Talking to the guy manning the register at Blockbuster is not. If you can't get that down, see a specialist about it! Because that shouldn't be hard! Unless it's a legitimate brain chemical thing? If so, eh, sorry. I know that can't be helped. I'm just unclear on how that stuff works.

Now, GAMING!

Note that I didn't even get into these things full force until about 2001, but whether it's some weird pangs of escapism from childhood or just some miswiring somewhere, I still love 'em and it'll still be a lifelong thing for me, I'm willing to bet.

I own pretty much everything and don't discriminate. Old, new, underground, mainstream, whatever. If it's good, I'll play it. I love this medium, love to see where it's going, like talking about it (possibly too much) and find the entire thing completely agreeable and wonderful.

It's also treated me pretty well, so I can't complain.

DASSIT! Who actually read all that?

Better than me? No.

I can relate: some absolute maniac piece of shit just admitted to bulking up at the gym then beating the shit out out of an elderly woman with a telephone and now I'm trying to work out how to use the voodoo power of chaos theory to have a seemingly unrelated object hit him in the nuts with sufficient upswing to render him sterile. He'll never see it coming.

Psiga and DJ in 2008 on the having drunken orgies with handicapped MMORPGers, detailing on the internet ticket.

By the way Joestar, it doesn't sound like you're asexual, just that you're so depressed it's leaning on your sex drive. I can relate at times.

omg laxxxgrrrl we can trade pictures of our parrotlets! And then have them fight! (Rocco is a total badass though)

Also, I can't tell if it's fake or not as it might be a response to my last joke bio post.

DJ hangs with two nearly-deaf WoW'ers? I bet Jyot holds her liquor better, though!

I blame WoW.

It's possible. I mean, I'm attratcted to women aesthetically, and I have had the occasional attraction to a specific one, but I basically have no desire to explore the finer points of the Horizontal Arts with either women or men.

Answer 2: Watch "Welcome to the NHK"