I have seen a few other users do threads like these in the past, so I figured there wouldn't be much harm in making one myself.
Most of you may not know me, at least under this nation, or maybe you've seen this nation posting in NSG but never knew much about the man behind it. I have been a member of NationStates under various nations since 2012, which seems like just 2-3 years ago until you actually do the math and realise it was seven, and it's been quite an experience in many ways; I've made lots of friends and enemies here, and I hope to continue at least making friends over the coming years.
Let's start at the very beginning: Tuesday 24 April 2012. I had the afternoon off and so had a bit of free time on my hands, and I, being a young idealist, wanted to start my own country in real life, ideally a small chunk of land in southeastern Asia (though, as I now understand, being a white-as-the-queen's-buttocks Christian with no knowledge of any southeastern Asian language, this would be pretty much the definition of "implausible"). I was Googling around for information when I stumbled upon a link entitled "NationStates | Create your own country". Intrigued, I clicked on the link, read the FAQ, and twelve minutes later, my first nation was founded in The Pacific.
My first nation was originally a Father Knows Best State, though it soon became an Inoffensive Centrist Democracy, or, as the Conservative theme renamed it, "Communists". I jumped around between regions quite a bit in my earliest days, though by 16 May 2012 I had created my own region for my nation, the now-defunct Yo is that your new ride. I was somewhat active in the forums and made a few friends early on, though after a few run-ins with moderation I decided to become merely a lurker, though I would still spend about two hours on the average day just surfing through the NS forums, especially old Moderation threads, and I answered lots of issues during this time too, enough to take my nation from its initial inoffensive classification down to Democratic Socialists, Corrupt Dictatorship, and finally Psychotic Dictatorship.
Quite a few people close to me at the time thought NS was a bad influence on me, as I would often talk about some of the less savory characters of the past and present on here (Karinzistan, Objectiveland, Phaloxian, and others coming to mind) and frequently used NS terminology in my daily speech, though I do credit NS for expanding my worldview and making me realise just how messed up people and governments around the world are, in addition to changing my early-life idealist view of everybody being given the same amount of money and resources without having to work, which was very naive and mostly impractical. Ultimately, due to my lack of rebelliousness and cattle-like obedience to close family and authority figures of the time, in February 2013 I stopped being active on the forums altogether and merely logged into my nation once each month to keep it active, though it lapsed for a couple of days on two occasions. I'd had a few puppets early on, my first one being created after about a month after learning that was perfectly legal, though by this time I had only one remaining, and it had been given to a family member for the time being anyway.
This 2012-2013 period is what I consider "back in my day" relative to my time on NS, and I often become nostalgic for the characters and setting of the NS of this period. I remember the introduction of Factbooks, Nation Challenge, and the NS Store, and I remember when Melkor, Sedge, Kryo, Ard, Tsar, and Flib were all still mods. I remember laughing at the Hall of Ex-Nations on the original NSwiki and reading pages of flame wars and troll threads created by short-lived users, and I remember when several of today's most notable users were raw n00bs. I remember exchanging a few telegrams each with Unibot and Spartzerium, and using quite a few of the UDL's nifty calculators, though I was never involved in R&D and never really knew how it worked. I also remember when the population cutoff for name reuse was just 250 million and the program itself was rather fresh; good times!
Ultimately, a site as rad as NationStates can't keep my interest away for too long; in September 2013 I moved back up to semi-retired status, creating a few more holiday-themed puppets in the early months of 2014, this nation being one of them. My activity level wasn't quite what it had been "back in my day", though I would still hang around sometimes and catch up on all the juicy gossip (Verbluffen, Maldo, and the end of the original run of TET). In September 2014 I snagged a name from the name release program for the first time, namely Bathmatia (now defunct), whose name had come from a book I'd read in 2012. In August 2015, I created one of my other favourite nations that I've used: The United Grammar Police, which is also sadly defunct, though it was based on my own politics as opposed to being a complete craphole psychotic dictatorship and had a nifty flag.
In summer 2016, my activity levels increased again, although I had decided to let go of my first nation, having been embarrassed by more than a few of my early comments, in addition to all of my holiday-themed puppets. I began posting on the forums more actively again in June of that year, though this was rather short-lived, and this time it was under my only surviving 2012 puppet, which I'd had back for a while at this point. I began playing the Nation Challenge in earnest for a while, especially after having my win rate destroyed by current #1 Asshai under the Shadow, who had only 148 million people at the time, though ultimately my interest in NS waned again after a while. That nation ceased to exist in June 2017 with almost 11 billion people and over 23,000 challenge points, enough to give it a respectable ranking around #800 at the time but now not enough even to remain in the top thousand.
I rejoined on 6 August 2018, the day before the site's sixteenth anniversary, creating 60s Music and founding my current home region, Groovy. I revived this nation as my forum puppet in September, with forum activity levels not seen since my original 2012-2013 heyday, and nine days later I got back December Land, a foetus holiday-themed puppet whose password I'd forgotten only weeks after its founding. (Its population is now similar to that of 60s Music, despite having been founded four and a half years earlier.) Ghost Land is now the nation with my highest challenge score thus far, currently at level 57 and a world ranking of #50 with over 400,000 points, though 60s Music itself is also in the top 300 and all of my current puppets have at least a couple thousand points each. Groovy now has a population of eight nations, though we're always open to new arrivals.
To summarize, it's been a great and quite interesting seven years since I discovered this site by accident, and I am really thankful to Max Barry for creating such an awesome and addicting website, let alone one that is still going strong after almost 17 years. I've had a lot of fun and made a lot of friends here, and I intend to stick around for at least another five more.
Cheers from the Evil Republic of Ghost Land, and the Hippie Commune of 60s Music!
It's a bit sneaky how NS stealthily eats up the time, isn't it?
, and while I haven't seen you around before (or at least not much), you seem cool. Cheers!
