i've been on the net since i was like, 9. which would be since 2015. which feels crazy to say, because it doesn't feel like it's been that long.

for a long time, i mostly just watched youtube and didn't really engage with others. i watched a lot of minecraft videos back then - stampylonghead, iballlisticsquid, sqaishey quack, dantdm, aphmau, skydoesminecraft... been a real pain seeing the fall from grace of that last one.

anyway, my first ever experience with actually talking to people on the net was, of course, through minecraft. i convinced my dad to get MCPE for me for christmas in 2015 and i would play it non-stop for every waking hour of every day on my ipad. (yea, i'm ashamed to admit it, but i was a shitty ipad kid.) and one day, in february of 2016, i found this little server called BrokenLens. weird name, right? well, i didn't really think about that back then. no, as a little 9 yr old kid, i was more concerned with how fucking Awesome the maps looked and how fun this weird gamemode i'd never seen on any other server before, called OitC, was.

i became infatuated.

and soon, i found out about this thing that BL had, called a "forum". in the game, there were these signs in the lobby, and one of them had a link to this forum. i had no clue what a forum was, but i clicked it just out of curiousity. (or rather, i punched the sign, because you know. minecraft.)

i'm so glad i did.

i spent 4 years on those forums, making a plethora of amazing and wonderful friends who were so, so kind to me. back then, i did not understand internet safety at all and i used to just, like. Say i was 9. and somehow, i got extremely lucky, because nothing bad came of this. no, instead, i became the baby sister of the BL forums. everyone was so kind and funny and sweet and amazing to me. and of course, occasionally there were shitty people, but the mods and admins always dealt with them appropriately in a timely manner. and i was able to have such amazing, safe, fun time on this forum.

but because i was a shitty kid going through a lot irl who didn't understand how to manage my own emotions, i eventually started some drama. because of course i did. to be completely honest, i don't actually remember anything that i said or did - i only remember, vaguely, the feelings of anger and frustration that i let absorb me so fully, and the feelings of regret, guilt, shame, sadness which overtook me once the anger subsided and i realised what i'd actually done and how wrong i'd been.

as much as i made friends, i lost a few, too.

there's still a lingering feeling of... well, i don't know, really. something that taints the nostalgic feeling i get whenever i think back to the first and only forum i was ever active on. there was good and there was bad, and i will be the first to admit i was the cause of much of that badness. but to me, the good of all the friends i made and the fun i had will always outweigh the bad.

sometimes, for no reason at all, i'll remember BL. and i'll hope that all the friends i made are okay, wherever they are now.

out of curiosity, i looked BL up again while writing this post, and it seems the owner took the forum down. it makes sense, really - i remember visiting the forums during a nostalgia trip down memory lane one day, and seeing that he was closing the minecraft servers in april of 2022 i believe it was. so of course the closure of the forum would follow soon after. yet, seeing the fact that the forum was offline made my heart ache, just a bit. the illusion of the chance for reconnection with old friends doesn't exist anymore.

it's gone, fully and completely.

to my great dismay, i am unfortunately a discord moderator. i do not wear this title with much pride.

if you read the forum section first - which you should've - then you'd know about my history with BrokenLens. well, my discord beginnings follow on from this.

my earliest discord memories are playing minecraft while calling my BL friends. sometimes, we'd play on the server. other times, we'd play on our own little world. it was a lot of fun! admittedly, though, i did not contribute as much as my friends lol. one of them was exceptionally good at redstone, and he'd make these crazy contraptions to make our life infinitely more convenient. i would learn, later on, that he was just copying shit from youtube lmfao. but at the time, i thought he was a genius.

another one was amazing at pvp and pve. actually, a lot of my friends were good at pvp. if you remember the gamemode i mentioned earlier, OitC, it was a free-for-all pvp gamemode where the person with the most kills at the end of the game wins. it was my first favourite mode, and also where most of my friends came from. however, i was fucking awful at it. like, worse than the average player. yet somehow, i ended up being friends with a lot of the people at the top of the leaderboard anyway hahaha. one of my friends, an older one, would later admit that she found me endearing and became my friend in the same way a wise wizard takes in an apprentice. except she didn't teach me shit and i continued to suck, lol. another friend did actually try to give me tips to improve, but i was a hopeless cause lmao. but still, i loved all my friends, and i also looked up to most of them too, especially since basically everyone was older than me.

anyway. the point is, as i got older, i started using discord more and more to call friends while playing. eventually, i decided i wanted to make my very own server. why? i have no idea. if i had to guess, though, the answer that my younger self would give is probably why not?

so anyway, that server failed. it was called Orange Server. i don't remember the reason i chose this name, but just put a pin in it because it's important for later. i invited a couple friends to this server, but like, it was dead as hell lol. it had nothing in it and there was no reason for my friends and i to use it over the private group chats we'd been using already. i didn't know much about discord bots back then, either, so it had like, one. i think it was mee6? i dunno, just some random bot i saw in another server lol.

however, somehow i lucked out, because one of my friends also wanted to make his own server. taking inspiration from my server, he named his Fruit Bowl. and holy hell, he went to fucking town advertising this thing. like, he was one of those annoying self-advertisers who join servers just to DM every single member there an invite to Fruit Bowl. and if he was banned from one server, he'd just join another. it was crazy, but it worked. eventually, the server reached 1k members, which was fucking insane to me. because i was there since day one, since there was just the two of us and a couple other friends, and now there were a thousand different people in there. it blew my mind.

i should mention that, despite being like, 14, i was an admin on this server. the owner felt i deserved it since i inspired him and helped him set up the server, and also because i was a close friend of his. this was a terrible decision which we will come back to later.

anyway, that server eventually grew to, like, 5k members. and then it got raided. god, that was a whole thing. for reference, the owner was only 2 yrs older than me so he wasn't much smarter than i was. and he gave admin to this guy who basically smoothtalked his way to the top, only for the guy to turn out to be a troll who then abused his admin power to essentially ban everyone and delete the server while the owner was offline. i was online, but i couldn't really do anything because we were of the same rank, so i couldn't demote him. it was terrible.

yet, somehow, the owner persevered. and i gotta give it to him, the guy's motivation was insane - i would've just ended the discord server dream right then and there, but the owner decided he would start anew. after cutting ties with the troll, he made a new server and re-invited all the active members of the old server before, once again, going to town on DM promos. and somehow, this server ended up getting even bigger than the last one.

however, i want to return to my admin status. yea, about that. the owner gave me admin in the new server, too - he basically kept the same mod team as before, just without the troll. but you know how i said that me being admin was a terrible decision? yea, well, i eventually got demoted because while going through moderator applications, i found a funny comment from someone and wanted to share it, but i didn't understand the idea of cropping a screenshot and ended up posting some members' sensitive information (i think it was their ages?)

yea, uh, i was a really stupid kid.

of course, i definitely deserved this demotion. but i think i got salty over it? because i'm pretty sure after i got demoted, i started visiting the server less and less. to be completely honest, i really don't remember much from that time. but, eventually, i was so inactive that i just left the server altogether because i didn't talk to anyone there anymore, and if i did, it was in DMs.

when i came back to the server, it was completely foreign to me. not just because the active members had changed to a new group of people, but also because the server had undergone a complete rebranding. it was no longer called Fruit Bowl; the owner had sold the server off to some other guy and it was now called Nova or something like that. the only way i even found it was because the owner messaged me out of nowhere asking if i wanted to catch up, to which i said sure, because it'd been a long ass time since we last spoke. and somehow, he ended up sending me an invite and explaining the rebrand. he was still an admin in the server, but he was no longer in charge, and he told me he was considering stepping down too because he didn't have the time for it anymore.

by this point, it'd been years since we started that first server together. i held no more ties to this new, rebranded server where nobody even knew who i was. and so that chapter of my life came to a close, and i later ended up leaving the server while clearing out a bunch of my servers.

that was my first and only time moderating a large server. i would say it was fun or that i learnt a lot from it, but the truth is i barely remember any of it. the few vague fragmented memories of that server i have are all of talking to friends and playing games with them, not any real moderating. so, uh. yea.

however, you might've noticed that when i called myself a discord moderator at the very beginning, it was in present tense. that's right! i am still, unfortunately, a discord moderator. except now, it's for a much different server.

if you're familiar with Cookie Run: Kingdom, you might also be familiar with the name Losersquad. i am not only the creator of the now discontinued Losersquad Guides Sheet, but i am also the guild officer and thus, by extension, part of the discord mod team.

this server is, thankfully, a lot less populated. to be completely honest, i don't do much moderating here either since the only active members are our guildmates and most of them don't cause much trouble.

that was a "brief" history of my presence on discord as a moderator. i have an even more expansive history as just a simple member, but i'm too lazy to go into it, and i doubt anyone is interested either anyway lol.

for a while back in 2021, i had a very brief stint as a youtube creator. in fact, my old videos are still up. if you're curious, here in a link to my channel.

all my videos were short CRK videos of me using the CRK starters to beat a bunch of stages which, at the time, were considered extremely hard. i say at the time, because the devs have since nerfed those stages right into the ground.

i don't really like those videos anymore though. not because they're bad - some of them are, but not all - but because the intention was, essentially, mock people who found those stages hard. i used to tell people that they shouldn't complain about things being hard when i could do it with the starters, a team considered by many to be complete garbage (with basis, too - the devs intentionally gave the starters very low skill values). but now that i'm older, i think it's okay for people to complain sometimes about things being harder than necessary. sometimes they are, especially if you consider where the average player would be in terms of progress when they come to that stage. even if i can beat certain stages, that doesn't mean everyone else can, because i'm a late-game player who's been playing since release day with many more resources than the average player does.

aside from youtube though, my one other notable creation was something mentioned in the discord section: the Losersquad Guides & Data Spreadsheet. oh man. this spreadsheet blew up more than i ever expected it to. it was covered by popular CRK creators and was pinned in the main CRK discord as the go-to place for guides on pretty much everything. it started as a small project by me and a friend, and expanded to having 14 editors, some of whom handled specific sections because they were so detailed. we were all volunteers, and also all teens, which is the reason i eventually had to shut it down - we just didn't have the time anymore.

but, man. it was really something. i'm still proud of that sheet, of my friends on the editing team, and of what i started. nowadays, there are many other CRK creators who make guides, some even in spreadsheets just like we did. i really do love the CRK community - it's what's made me stick around for so long. sometimes, there are moments were i start to lose interest in CRK, or moments where i want to stop supporting the devs because of their god awful decisions. but the friends i've made are what keep me coming back to it.