(Now this is going to be a lot of words [I put it in MS Word and it says 1500 words, counting the quote - what the actual fcuk], but since the server is down and the thread is pretty much laying dormant, I hope nobody minds if we just exchange stories for a while. I lost touch with the server long ago, even before we went offline, so this is mostly old times of the Days of The Banhammer. Feel free to skip if you can't be bothered. [That includes you, Doctor. Though I think there is one detail left unclarified that I put some effort to explain to you from my point of view in as comprehensible a fashion as possible for me. But seeing that I'm the reject AND you asked me once to stop pestering you, the least I could do is honor that request. On the upside: it's all the past, so it doesn't really matter.])
Hundreds, if not thousands. I am not actively looking for a Minecraft server to play on, though. I originally came here to discuss some Touhou-related topics and found your wonderful server by chance. I am not a member of many communities, but even during the brief time of having an alternative founded by another community I follow (I was playing on the Mindcrack Public Server), I did not cease to hope that I could get back here one day. I did find my fun elsewhere, otherwise the rejection would have surely gotten to me and I would have ended up broken and bitter, like J.O.B. (May his soul find calm somewhere.)
But I was once banned from a certain forum for a reason that I could not understand (it was long ago, I was but a wee tyke by then. I had no idea how, but I managed to make an admin angry at me and he banned me). The ban was set to last six years.
So I waited.Shame the forum was all but gone by the time my ban expired. To be honest, I thought it would still be around. Little did I know, six years practically meant an eternity back then, especially when compared to how young public internet in Poland was at that time (about 12 years).
Cool story, innit. Relax, never during those six years did I make any efforts at all to get back on the forum before the expiration date, because I thought I could wait things out. And that I deserved to be banned. Today it seems to me that the guy just had a bad day and abused his power, but who remembers the times past. I never gave it much thought, and so had little problems getting over it and almost managed to forget about the whole affair... Almost.
Anyway, I digress.
{Oh, but I had made an exception to this particular rule. Twice. And both times, it backfired.
That is not correct, I think. Only once, not twice, Doctor.
Unless I miss something, you must surely mean ArteMio (Tomhoffman) and me. Tomhoffman got banned, was let back in, and then got banned again. I got banned once.
In all fairness, I think I did recall you saying something along the lines of "you have been given a chance, but you kept on griefing" sometime after the EP Tower incident. I never felt like there was any exception in my case because the two acts of vandalism that I commited were separated by no more than 48 hours and maybe one post from you in between. As far as I can remember, it wasn't even a warning, just words of bewilderment.
Far be it from me to blame you for failing to give me a proper warning. I just want to make it clear that you started treating the two as separate cases before saying anything of relevance about the first one. You said nothing after it had happened, therefore I heard nothing, and whatever you had to say about the TNT incident alone after I had already painted EP's tower was for naught, because time could not be turned back, and law is not supposed to work retroactively for that precise reason, among others. Do you see now the futility of trying to figure out what to do about the first case after second crime had been commited?
In layman's terms: you probably "gave me a second chance" post factum, based on only one incident, after I had assaulted the Tower, but I never got a chance to use it, because you thought I did the graffiti after finding out about your decision. Except I didn't. Now if that's how you look at things, that does kind of come off as unfair. Because you treated the verdict as if it was posted in the past, where the EP Tower incident was still in the future. And since nothing could have been realistically done by me, I declare that this didn't count as a second chance at all.
Q.E.D. Once, not twice. Please stop saying that I ever had a chance to redeem myself if I never actually received it before painting the Tower, let alone never actually got banned and then let back in to begin with. The plan was to not ask for unban for at least two weeks in, because back then I really felt like I needed a break from the game (also got some Tenshi vibes, but that's irrelevant - sadly, there was no tea and pastry with the antagonist). And to give people actual time to cool down.
So many words... bottom line is: some stuff happened that got me banned, but unlike Tomhoffman, I couldn't get a single unban even though you said something along the lines of "you already had a chance". I never seen the chance in question. I felt misunderstood. But past is past and we shouldn't ruminate on that.
((I learned about the whole "Ex post facto law" in primary school, that's why I remember it. I also thought it was pretty neat. It's real! Look, it even has
a Wikipedia article.)
)[...But
just in case I do miss something and you actually meant something else, allow me to craft a list of lost souls:
- Tomhoffman (dropped lava on Peasant_Miner's house without extinguishing it)
- Cadrin (that's me) (upgraded Dorakyura's little sunflower meadow with self-destruct mechanism and put huge, ugly graffiti on EP Tower) (also hacked my inventory for moar minecarts, though that was EP's accusation, and so hilariously divorced from reality, I think even he finds that funny in hindsight - because when you hack inventories, you do that because you must obtain additional minecarts and record discs - that was the single best thing ever to come out of my ban and still makes me laugh
) (oh, and by the way, there were only two record discs available back then)
- Tomhoffman (stole something, as far as I remember)
- J.O.B. (I don't know, I wasn't paying attention, I just posted something to straighten him out because I was tired of the drama in huge font size that he was generating here, and when I thought it worked because this thread got calmer... nope, LJ drama.)
So do I miss something? Because that's all that comes to mind.
](There's just one thing that I feel extra bad about: I'm not sure if you know - you probably don't, many would write it off as irrelevant - but Tomhoffman saw me while I was in the process of putting graffiti on EP Tower. And he commited theft soon afterwards, right? To this day I still think that I might have given him the wrong idea. And that's terrible. He was the only one in my mind to have ever gotten the real second chance out of us three. And he squandered it. Perhaps it was my own fault as well, in a sense. Wasn't he a young, impressionable guy?
)Anyway, I was hoping you would realize the mistake you made about granting second chances that worked retroactively. Apparently you haven't, but now I spoke my mind, presented my point of view, and believe everything is clear. There is not much to add anymore, I don't think. Unless you want to hear a cool story about the hax minecarts for my failed minecart-based cargo hold for the third time.
}I used the word "forgiveness" in the previous post. I looked up its definition on Urban Dictionary and got some powerful stuff, man. "The greatest thing you can ever do for another person (and yourself)", "The ultimate test of love that drives a heart wild by lovingly surpassing all the wrong one has made and making it right", "Giving up all hope for a better past"... Well since it's so great and elusive, I understand that it should be next to impossible to obtain. So be it. As you now know, I can wait till this is over.
