There and Back Again: A Pilot's Tale

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Pheqes
Posts: 18
Joined: Tue Mar 08, 2011 3:50 pm

There and Back Again: A Pilot's Tale

Post by Pheqes »

Upon entering the Discord server for TVS, I realized I had been playing this game for over a decade and a half. Probably around 16 or 17 years. I think I started when I was 15. I'm 32 now, and a lot has changed. I also realized that the same may be said for a lot of the people I reconnected with in the chat. Some of the folks I had been playing with from Beta 3 when I first started however many years ago. And many more throughout the years.

Hero, Faulcon, Guderian, Anakin, Chilidog, ecvej, Zyper, SpiderWolve, and many others.

Some had already started their adult lives when TVS started. Some of us are now in our adult lives. I thought this would be a lovely way of seeing where we all ended up. To one's own discretion, of course!

Also, I'm rather long winded and have trouble condensing, so this will be rather long.

I started in Beta 3 on the Tibs. We won that one. I came in around tick 300, and I'm just sure I'm the reason we won.

At that time in my life, I was living in my birth state of Missouri. The Ozark Mountains to be specific. For anyone who doesn't know where that's at, it's almost in the center of the United States. One state to the left and that's about to the center. Midwest is what people like to call it, because it's not west to, say, Nevada or California, but its significantly more west than the original beginnings of the United States. Hence - Midwest.

The Ozark Mountains saw me dodging all sorts of unsavory backwoods influence. I often ponder how I didn't become an entirely different person than I am today, as most people made fun of me for playing video games or staying in doors or not partaking in whatever woodsman stuff they wanted to do. I've often went against the surrounding environment; and I saw no appeal in the backwoods folk that I grew up around. So I escaped to the PC and found TVS.

My mom was married to a rather sub-like human. One day, while sub-like human was out trying to look for work, my mom approached me and asked how I'd feel about moving 10~ hours east and growing up somewhere else. I was 15, but was 100% about it. I had nothing to look forward to growing up in the forest and mountains and all my friends were online anyway. Besides that, I really could care less for my step dad. And I wasn't about to abandon my mom. So we moved to a state called Kentucky.

Kentucky and Missouri are alike in a lot of ways. The culture and scenery wasn't that different from where I grew up, so I didn't take much time acclimating to it. I eventually graduated high school, moved next to Cincinnati (a city on the river dividing Northern Kentucky from Southern Ohio), went to college, met a girl, dropped out of school with girl, went back to school with girl, dropped out of school with girl again, got married to girl, went back to school again, and finally decided school wasn't for me and dropped out for the 3rd and final time with the deal to myself that I wouldn't let my unwillingness to finish my education define my success in life. Sprinkles of that as the story goes on.

We got married in 2011 after dating for 2 years and being engaged for 1 year. We were 21 and had no idea what we were doing, but we got it after a while. Come 24 or 25, we decided to take a bit of a leap and move in with my mom down south - who had recently moved to the Gulf coast of the U.S. in a state called Mississippi. It was a small tourist town with casinos, so I got a job there and gained experience that I'd carry with me in life to this day. I started doing grunt work and worked my way through 2 promotions until I was doing some technical watch dog stuff for something called Title 31. Essentially just making sure people are spending high amounts of money responsibly and not washing it or funding terrorism. It was monotonous, but kind of cool at the same time.

After a few months, Arielle (wife) and I got our own place and started to sort of rebuild our standing for the first out of two times in our lives together. We were 1 hour from New Orleans, which if you haven't been to the U.S., chances are you've heard of New Orleans. There's no place on earth like it, which is both a blessing and a curse. I couldn't imagine two places like New Orleans. It's one of those cities where there can only be one.

Anyway, long story short, we got bored. We lived in Mississippi for two-ish years and it was... simple. People were simple. The city was simple. Living there was simple. Time seemed to slow down when living there. It's like a bubble where everything outside of that area didn't matter and the world passed you by. It was rather uneasy for two young people who hadn't quite experienced life they way they wanted to, so we decided to move to a big city called Atlanta.

Atlanta SUUUUCKED.

We got motivated to move there because we thought we could handle the city and thrive in it. Esports (Competitive gaming) was starting to become a thing and I, in my hubris and naivety, thought I could waltz in and take a handle on it. Up to this point, I had been commentating competitive games for a few years now. Little did I know how valuable reinforcing all that time on the mic with behind the scenes production would be. I was NOT accepted by the esports scene in Atlanta and that's my fault. They were light years ahead of me and it was a huge wake up call to how I should branch out and do more. More on that later, though.

Atlanta was stupid expensive and we were dirt poor living there. There were no casinos to leverage my experience with, so I got a job managing a suit shop in the most "We like the smell of our own farts" part of the city, and Arielle was struggling with her work too. We lived in a roach infested shoe box and hated our lives. I'm not going to get too deep into depression talk, but we're both prone to depressive spirals and the state of our lives in Atlanta made us both contemplate suicide. It was the first time I had ever been on meds for that sort of thing and I hated it, as they made me feel like a robotic shell of a human with no emotion. But it did help me focus on things I need to do in order to get out of the situation. So we saved every thing we could over a year and planned to leave.

Around this time, Arielle took a flight to Las Vegas, Nevada to visit a friend and she ended up falling in love with the city. Me, with absolutely no love left for Atlanta and ready for any sort of change short of homelessness, was keen on accepting any venture. We made a 29 hour, 3 day trip across the United States to move to Las Vegas where we currently live. I could leverage my casino experience here and she could do what she does (which I won't mention). I got a job at a casino as an accountant, because that promise I made to myself keeps me from accepting less than what I feel like I should.

And then I got an email from TVS saying a game was back on and there was a discord. I stopped in and it felt like the high school reunion I never had.

There is a lot more in between the points, of course. Commentating video games took me to so many cool places in the U.S.: Hawaii (twice - once I told the company I wasn't going to go again unless my wife went, so they brought her too and it was AWESOME), Pennsylvania, Texas (the decent part of it), California. I almost got to go to Canada, but I was too poor in Atlanta to afford a passport. I've since retired from commentating, but keep up with it quite a bit and create content for fun. Made a lot of cool friends in the business and learned/honed a ton of practical skills.

Wife and I are approaching our 10 year anniversary next year. We've agreed to not have children, so we have a dog. Wouldn't trade that for the world.

Still huge into video games even as a recreation.

I write a lot too - as you can tell. But other things as well for fun.

Experiment with psychedelics, which is hit or miss for some people, but I don't care. It was for my depression and helped way more than the meds I had in Atlanta.

Las Vegas is a really cool city. It's not the cheapest, but not Atlanta or California levels of stupid expensive. There's always something to do here and there's a nice esports scene, which I'm all for. And it's driving distances to a ton of camping sites and only 4 hours from California, which is where a lot of my other friends and interests live.

So at the moment, life is pretty good.

Tl;dr: I moved to 4 different cities, got married, dropped out of school 3 times, and traveled across the U.S. to commentate on video games since starting TVS 17ish years ago.
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