My Life So Far

I could call this my life story but that sounds a bit too dramatic, considering the most exciting thing I’ve ever done is sip a Jägerbomb. This is really just the story of how I came to be in the community today. Y’know… in case any of you were wondering.

I was born on 19th February 1998 (which means I’m 4 months away from being an adult, which is a bit worrying). My brother Daniel was born 22nd November 1999 and our early childhoods were very much shared, but by the time we both reached junior school (i.e. the Key Stage 2 element of primary school), we started to drift apart. I have another brother, Jake, born 30th November 2004, but our age gap has always been too wide for us to have much common ground. I get on with him well nowadays though.

Although I’m not autistic like my brother, I’ve always been extremely socially awkward. Up until I was around 8 years old I didn’t really talk to anybody at school unless I had to. That didn’t really bother me back then, I was content to simply learn about the things which made me the nerd I am today, starting with history and geography. I wasn’t really interested in watching TV or films, and never had any games consoles besides an original PlayStation – I’ve been a PC gamer for life, starting with games like Lemmings for Windows and Lego Island. As a result I was never into Pokémon, Disney films or anything else kids my age liked. I had no interest in music either until much later. This is why I’m still playing cultural catch-up to this day.

The first franchise I really got into was Star Wars, around the time I started Year 3. That’s how I made my first friends at school. However, although I played with them at school, nothing ever came of it. I’ve not spoken to any of those people for probably 8 years now. When the FIFA World Cup came around in 2006 I briefly became interested in football and I started playing football with the other boys in my class. This got me on much friendlier terms with them, but I soon lost interest when I realised how terrible at football I was.

During Years 5 and 6 I started to fit into my class more and more. I had a couple of good friends, Joe and Greg. Me and Joe used to visit each other’s houses and with him was the only time I actually went to “hang out” in the village with another one of our friends, Jimmy. However, doing that stuff didn’t really interest me too much, so I made no effort to keep it going when we started High School. All the progress I had made in junior school ended up disappearing and I went back to being an outcast – but that still didn’t bother me. In 2009, my parents split up and my mum moved out. With newfound freedom, my dad got our house an Internet connection for the first time.

Over the next few years I slowly started making friends at High School. In Year 9 I became good friends with someone called Sam, who shared my enthusiasm for the Elder Scrolls games (I got TES IV: Oblivion in 2011). I also joined a proper friendship group for the first time – there were quite a few of us but my main friends there were Tom and Pace. At home, I now had my own bedroom instead of sharing with Daniel, and I had my own PC for the first time instead of using a family one. I started using the Internet more, becoming familiar with sites such as YouTube and the Elder Scrolls wiki. I had seen a few episodes of Doctor Who over the years, but when I was young it scared me too much to really get into it; that changed in 2010 towards the end of Matt Smith’s first season. Me and my brothers also had a ton of Lego, so naturally I wondered if Lego Doctor Who could be a thing. I ended up finding Lego stop-motion animated Doctor Who adventures on YouTube, made by an ordinary fan. This inspired me to try my hand at animating my own Lego videos. In January 2012, just a month after I first registered my email address, I created my YouTube channel for my Lego animations, and this is of course the origin of the username I have used ever since, ABanimationLtd.

By this point Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim had come out and I was watching Skyrim videos on YouTube when I stumbled across a Minecraft video. I was soon fascinated and I bought the game just before my 14th birthday in February 2012. This single event changed everything. I subscribed to a YouTube channel, PaulSoaresJr, for the first time and because of him I was soon inspired to start making my own Minecraft videos, buying my first headset for this purpose in March 2012. My first videos were terrible (I apologise to anyone who has seen them) and I didn’t get noticed much, but just by sheer chance a channel named ThatNoJKid2 left a comment on my third let’s play video. NoJ (or Jon) put up an advertisement for a multiplayer server he was the co-owner of in April 2012. I had never played multiplayer ever before and after seeing what people could do on multiplayer servers I was keen to try it out, and so with much trepidation I logged in to my first server, Crusader-Craft.

NoJ soon became my first internet friend and we got to know each other very well over the summer of 2012. There was also Nate, the owner of the server who we occasionally fell out with, and Sarah and her brother. Crusader-Craft ended up shutting down, leaving me without a platform to record my rather more successful YouTube series, Lore of Minecraft. However, by this point people at school were starting to notice my videos. Some people teased me because of them, but others got on board with the idea, in particular Guy, better known to most of you in this community as LittleLooter. Back in Year 7 I didn’t like Guy much because he used to pick on me, but 2 and a half years later that was put far behind us when Guy, on the journey home from a school trip to Malham, offered to host for me a private Minecraft server so that I could record the Lore series. As a side effect, me, NoJ and Guy formed the Tekkit Trio, using a secondary Tekkit server on Guy’s laptop.

NoJ was much more popular than me on YouTube and he made a few well-connected friends as a result. Amongst these were Eepblah, MunchingBrotato (who of course went on to become very famous on YouTube) and Wondersie. They all played on the server of YouTuber GameplayerHD, and me and Sarah moved there after Crusader-Craft shut down. However, that server was overcrowded and a much better chance for a fresh start presented itself in August 2012 when Sie, along with his YouTube partner Nate (not to be confused with Crusader-Craft owner Nate), opened the Nateandsie server. It was there that the community formed of which the remnants are one of the components of our modern community. On the NS server, I started a faction called Adamsville, which became home to most of my online friends at the time. Guy introduced his IRL friend Lewis, whilst I ended up becoming friends with the server’s moderator Aidan (Hetch). I also started to branch out to another community: being a fan of PaulSoaresJr, I joined his fan forum website Punchwood.com where I joined the Forum Wars roleplaying community, which remains resilient to this day. Some of the friends I made there include Al, XanatosReaver and Vladek. Through Punchwood I also ended up finding Minecraft modding tutorials, but I had problems with them and I found myself with a blank copy of Eclipse and no idea what to do next, so I used YouTube tutorials to teach myself Java programming.

Not everything was smooth sailing. Even back then there were issues with drama, the worst of which came in September 2012 when NoJ seemingly left, bringing an abrupt end to the Tekkit Trio. Although he came back, the temporary loss of my best friend left me with a constant fear of driving away my friends in the future. Meanwhile, me and Nate got on speaking terms again. By this point, I was familiar with the Mindcrack server and I wanted to try something similar. Me and Nate opened The Crafters in October 2012, and it included me and him, NoJ, Guy, Lewis, Aidan, Sarah and her brother. The early days of this group were plagued with issues. Technical issues – including one instance where hackers got onto the server – forced us to switch hosts and start a second season. At the start of 2013, we kicked Lewis and his friends from the group for causing trouble.

Back on the Nateandsie server, Adamsville had been all but abandoned thanks to The Crafters. However, 2013, the Minecraft golden age, was only just beginning. A new faction, Tuxville, quickly rose to dominate the Nateandsie sever. Sie himself and many of his admins and moderators, in addition to a sizeable portion of the community (known as the NS Army), were members of it. It was led by Tux and his girlfriend MissTux, who were soon invited The Crafters. A complaint by Tux inspired a coup d’état against Nate which saw me becoming the new owner of The Crafters, renaming it to Craftanium.

Nateandsie had a fairly large community which was growing all the time and it was that server that brought many of us together. It continued to act as a recruiting ground for Craftanium, with Becky following the Tuxes into my group in May 2013. I personally never had much influence within that community – never became a moderator or anything – but I was fine with that. In the meantime, I was keeping myself busy by founding the Empire of Adammia in April 2013, a project which I would become notorious for in the coming months. When Adammia joined the Grand Unified Micronational a few months later, I met a wide range of fellow micronationalists from around the world, but unlike the Minecraft players they were a lot less friendly and none of them have ever really become a proper friend of mine.

The community took a dramatic turn in June 2013 with the advent of what I call the Great Schism. Sie and Tux fell out and me and most of my friends migrated to Tux’s new World of Tux server. Since I was already a friend of Tux, I soon became a moderator, then an admin and eventually the Head Admin of WoT. In the early days, this server was much more closely-knit and I ended up becoming friends with a number of people from Nateandsie who I’d never talked to up to this point. These included Ryan, Jordan, Flinny and Sydney. By now, the community had become aware of the Insomnia Gaming Festival and the first WoT meetup was planned at i49 in August 2013. That was where Becky, Tux, Jordan and Ryan became the first Internet friends I ever met in real life.

Towards the end of 2013, my best friends were Guy and Tux. Guy and Becky started dating which led to her becoming a good friend of mine also. NoJ had disappeared that summer, returning for a couple of months in 2014 before vanishing for good. Unfortunately, ████████████████████ acted as a catalyst for constant drama during the autumn of 2013, forcing me (as the only person unwilling to pick sides) to act as a diplomat to resolve the disputes. She eventually left Tux in November, providing the community with short respite which is reflected in the speech I gave at i50.

Back at school, where I was now in Year 11, I spent much time hanging around with Guy; me and him hung around with a small gang of misfits which Guy was the de-facto leader of. Around this time, I fancied a girl at school called ███, and the Skype chat for Craftanium ended up convincing me that it was a good idea to ask her out. It wasn’t. I’ve not asked anybody out since. At the start of 2014, a number of people in my friendship group at school, particularly in my science class, got involved in the Empire of Adammia, which led to a small amount of fame on my part, though I do feel that the lasting impression I gave to many of my classmates when we finished high school that year is “the weirdo who made his own country”.

Craftanium’s ranks continued to grow as we sourced players from WoT and elsewhere. Along with Ryan, Jordan and Flinny joining, a third season was begun in November 2013 which introduced Alice to the server. Our Minecraft community went into 2014 hopeful for the future, but the golden age was over. WoT was rapidly becoming invaded with little kids (or “squeekers”), some of whom took up high-ranking staff positions, causing tension between Tux and the rest of my friends. It all came to a head on 2nd March 2014, which I have hence dubbed WoTgate. This was the day World of Tux fractured. Pretty much all of my friends besides Tux left, and the server entered terminal decline. Ryan and a bunch of the others made a group called ARN to try and fill the gap, but it didn’t last long. Fewer and fewer people were bothering with Minecraft servers at all and without the game to keep us together, the old community drifted apart. The majority went to CS:GO with a few going to League of Legends instead. I never fell out with Tux, but I had no reason to remain on his server any more so I resigned as Head Admin in September 2014. Due to the drama, Tux also suspended his hosting of Craftanium, bringing the server to an end after one and a half years and three seasons. The Craftanium Skype chat remained, but conversations became rare.

A few months after WoTgate, I finished high school. I found myself losing contact with both my online and IRL friends. Sydney was my main friend that summer. There was still a community out there, but I didn’t feel like I fit in there. These were Guy and Becky’s friends from a community which had existed alongside WoT: Skeppy, Sam, Callum and Chloe, and various other people linked from there. Amongst them was Sie, and for a few months after WoTgate I refused to do have anything to do with him thanks to the drama between him and Tux. This was a dreadful mistake which set me back months in fitting in to the new community. i51 came and went, my least favourite Insomnia. i52 was better – by the end of that festival I was more comfortable around Sie and the other members of the new group, and came to regard Becky as one of my best friends. However, i53 proved that I was still very much an outsider, only being capable of tagging along and not saying much. Social awkwardness was holding me back yet again. I started college and made a couple of acquaintances there, but it did little to make up for my online social life which was now at an all-time low.

However, everything changed at i54. I started drinking alcohol for the first time which made me much more sociable, and also our group at the festival was the biggest yet and I met a bunch of people for the first time, such as Alice’s friend Nat and Chloe’s boyfriend Ciaran. Since then I’ve felt much more at home in the community we have today. I invited Nat to Craftanium which brought the old chatroom back to life and led to Aidan becoming a good friend of mine again after a rather distant two years thanks to the Great Schism of the NS Army. i55 saw Ryan return to the community after a hiatus of his own, Ciaran going from an acquaintance to a friend, and meeting Amy amongst even more new people.

The community we have right now isn’t perfect and I’m still working on it – which is why I bought a TeamSpeak server – but I’m very hopeful for the future; i56 looks a bit meh but i57 is set to be amazing. In less than a year I’ll be starting university. Everything is in flux these days. But, for the meantime, things seem to be going alright.