Arch0wl AMA

[Arch0wl]

yolo

[Reach]

What do you bench

[DossarLX ODI]

How did you get to your username?

[HalfStep]

Who are you?

[Reincarnate]

Favorite memories from the DWI/SM/DDR/rhythm gaming eras since 2001~ ish?

[Zapmeister]

You're playing poker with a tiger, a chicken, another chicken, a gorilla, a caterpillar, another chicken, an antelope, a catfish, and another chicken. You're holding Ad 5d and the flop is 4h 5s 4s. The tiger plays with its chips contemplatively and bets the minimum. The two chickens flap their wings in a panic and both fold. The gorilla starts laughing to itself really loudly and calls. The caterpillar immediately raises to 2.5x. The third chicken folds. The antelope seems disconcerted and starts backing away but eventually calls. The catfish confidently raises to 6.5x while staring at you. The fourth chicken folds. Do you fold, call, raise, or run screaming?

What was ffr like back in 2002? (the game, not the site)

What do you think of the image in my signature?

Suppose that Saturnian aliens have taken over ffr (the site) and are keeping it hostage. They are demanding 10% of all active ffr players. What test would you recommend to determine which 10% get the cut?

[CypherToorima]

dawn of a new age.

[PaperclipGames]

How does it feel to be a super oldfag?

[Arkuski]

jp007.wmv?

[igotrhythm]

You still trying to do the quest?

[Nullifidian]

Are cucumbers your favorite food?

[FFRGreen]

hows life

[Arch0wl]

bench - last bulk I peaked at 135x9 so that's a 1RM of 174. have no idea what it is now though. lost 40lbs for this cut so I've lost a lot of muscle in the process. that's the consequence of dirty bulking

username - originally I went by "NightOwl" when I was 11 because I stay up late. I loved the name "Archmage" from breath of fire III so I combined the names. a guy already had "ArchOwl" so we agreed that we'd distinguish ourselves with O for him and the 0 for me

who am I - stepmania player known for AAAing Quasar on 1.5x music speed, index, way back before anyone did anything like that

favorite memories - the environment right around when ITG was starting, O2Jam worked and FFR was taking off. it was a brave new world.

poker - saute the catfish in oil and as he's almost done cooking, add some butter, basil, and heavy whipping cream in that order for a sauce

ffr back in 2002 - primitive, no one had any hard songs to play, playing styles hadn't been developed yet

image in sig - I don't have sigs enabled

test - random stepmania trivia, designed by Kommisar, the Kommissar of trivia tests

super old - weird, feels like time hasn't passed

jp007 - definitely in the top 3 most traumatic things to ever happen to me, can't say I enjoyed it

quest - nope

cucumbers - no but they're good on sandwiches and also with sriracha sauce and vinegar

hows life - swag and yolo

[Reincarnate]

What exactly was jp007? (genuinely curious)

[stargroup100]

vid of underage arch jackin it iirc

[Snapps]

how many times did you lie and said you had sex with carly but really you didnt

[Arch0wl]

Originally Posted by Snapps

how many times did you lie and said you had sex with carly but really you didnt

Probably none. Most people who know me on a very personal level know I take lying really seriously. Which isn't to say I've never lied about anything, just that if I do it's an extremely rare thing and I try to avoid doing it as much as possible.

[Reincarnate]

How did something like that go public?

[A2P]

citrischild (or w/e) happened to be a very vengeful girl, thats how it happened

[Arch0wl]

This is my version of what happened and hopefully it will put the nail in the coffin for most questions. I will try to phrase things as neutrally as possible but the order in which I present the facts will still be biased -- I can't completely eliminate that.

Toward the end of our relationship (I was 16), we became distanced from each other and had more disagreements. This is typical for couples in relationships that long (we were together for a year and three months, in total) but as a couple we were narcissistic and believed that we were exempt from everything that normal couples experience. I feel like we got into the relationship because we agreed on so many things, but we never learned how to disagree. So when we had major disagreements, it was catastrophic.

The behavior I should have noticed earlier on -- that we were both guilty of -- was avoiding actions because they resemble a person we disliked, and not because of the action itself. So say there's some person named X and X happens to drink a lot. We would sat "you're being like X" as opposed to "drinking a lot is bad, don't do that." Each time we did this, that person became less of a person to us. But I didn't notice faults like this because admitting a fault in the relationship, I felt, was implicitly admitting a fault in myself, so I held on to the relationship for longer than I should have.

I don't think Carly changed the "you're being like [person]" mentality. She probably held me as a person to be avoided -- "you're being like Arch0wl." I think that over time, she rehearsed all of the bad things about me and this made it easy to think of me as a non-person. Spreading a person's masturbation video becomes easy when you see them as an enemy without feelings or autonomy.

What surprises me most, though, is that she didn't delete jp007 immediately after we broke up. I can understand how her thinking habits would lead her to spreading that video, but we both agreed to delete any of the sexual content we had of each other post-breakup. We were also quite honest with each other during the relationship (or at least I was on my end) so that means she lied to my face about deleting it.

For the purposes of being transparent, though, I've always felt like I deserved it. There was another girl Carly despised -- I think her name was 'Brit' -- and when we were new to our relationship (I was 15 then) Carly used this girl's email password to get this girl's boyfriend's naked photos and we posted that on her deviantart page. This was almost a decade ago, but I still feel extremely guilty about it and having gone through something very similar now, I recognize how terrible it was to spread such private content. Definitely not a high point in my life, morally or emotionally. It's probably the worst thing I've ever done or been involved with.

After jp007 was released I went nearly celibate for about a year and a half. Anything involving my physical traits made me very uncomfortable to think about, so I focused entirely on the intellectual aspects of almost everything I did and placed a ridiculous amount of importance on intellectual things. I wore stuffier clothes (dress shirts) a lot because more revealing clothing made me feel more physical and I was attracted to ways of thinking about the world in abstract, intellectualized terms. This in conjunction with a few other traumatizing events helped me develop megalomania (you do not want to go down this rabbit hole, just take my word for it) -- I had built a kind of utopianism from the ground up. Any kind of formality was comforting then and I talked according to extremely rigid linguistic rules I had created. I probably would have tested off the charts for both OCPD and narcissistic personality disorder at the time. I idealized the ivory tower-style hermit who spends all day holed up reading something, and tried as much as possible to achieve this even though I am naturally extroverted and it was really difficult to shut myself off from so many people. I would stress myself out over the fact that I had socialized with people and berate myself for wasting too much time. Anyone who knew me during that period (should be 2006-late 2007) could tell you that I was weird, mostly because I completely reinvented who I was and how I thought people should behave from scratch.

Part of the reason I was able to sustain the personality I had created after experiencing the blowback from Carly circulating jp007 was because I went to a very underperforming high school. Which is to say: Texas scores something like 45th percentile on average on the SAT. My high school's average was 40th. So 90th percentile on the reading section for example was around 98th at my high school. In this environment, if you're a 90+ percentile scorer, you feel like a genius, and your intellect is what distinguishes you. It doesn't help that everyone around you will comment on how 'smart' you are. If you end up going to an average college, this mentality doesn't really change.

So I finally broke out of that when I transferred into a 'smart' college (average SAT was around 90th percentile, as opposed to 40th percentile like my high school) my sophomore year. For a period though I was still pretty narcissistic because I had trained myself to think in an all-or-nothing way. But despite those quirks, it helped a lot; being around a lot of smart people makes you think about yourself in non-intellectual ways. If you're around a lot of dumb people in high school, your defining trait is your intelligence because that's what everyone will comment on. If you're in a school where everyone is intelligent, how are you different? What makes you who you are?

I'm largely over it, and I don't hold ill-will toward Carly or anyone involved. There are traumatic events from childhood I'm still angry about, sure; a kid got me expelled in 5th grade and I still, even now, regard him as trash due to how it caused me to miss out on ~3-5 years of formal math education and ultimately influenced what colleges I could go to. The Carly video incident isn't one of them, though.

Anyway, that's my version. I'm sure if Carly told you her version it would differ drastically. Take this knowing it's coming from my perspective, and not from an objective observer's.