Arch0wl AMA

[Snapps]

Re: Arch0wl AMA

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

[Arch0wl]

Re: Arch0wl AMA

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]

Re: Arch0wl AMA

How did something like that go public?

[A2P]

Re: Arch0wl AMA

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

[Arch0wl]

Re: Arch0wl AMA

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.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Arch0wl AMA

How did you get expelled in fifth grade?

And that all sounds like it must have been really difficult, Arch -- I'm sorry to hear all that. I don't think anyone really "deserves" that even if out of some sense of moral payback -- trauma has some very serious long-term consequences.

[Arch0wl]

Re: Arch0wl AMA

How did you get expelled in fifth grade?

I was isolated socially from 3rd grade to 5th grade. When I was in 1st grade, this girl I was friends with (her name was Samantha, iirc) skipped a grade, and I honestly should have too -- the coursework was ludicrously easy, and both of us thought so. When I was in 3rd grade my teacher actually suggested I skip a grade or two, but the school gave my mom a huge guilt-trip when she tried and gave her a lot of doomsday hypotheticals. So they didn't, and I was typed as "the smart one" by teachers and other students, which led me to think that I was different on some fundamental level.

I spent pretty much all of my free time playing video games. I would have read, but I didn't know that advanced books existed. The only books we were able to read were encyclopedias and books calibrated to what our reading level was supposed to be. This was a school that was in a bad neighborhood, so it was relentlessly one-size-fits-all.

By the time I had gotten to 5th grade I was very overweight (here's a picture: http://i.imgur.com/RDNIHOv.jpg) and I had just moved into a new neighborhood. There was this kid who lived several houses across from me -- we'll call him X for the purposes of anonymity.

I don't know if he just had a really bad upbringing or if he's actually that way, but X was psychopathic. He lied and stole chronically. Before we met him, a kid in our neighborhood pointed to him and said "that kid's the devil." And on the first day I met him, he asked if I could see a Pokemon card. I showed it to him, and he grabbed it from my hands and ran off with it. I was raised primarily by my mom so where most kids would get violent over things like this, that course of action really didn't enter my head. I thought violence was unethical at that age, in part because I was raised to believe that.

I think X hated me because his father was absent from his life and my dad is 6'3" and ex-military. X was a bully, but I was roughly around the same size as him and probably taller than him by an inch or two, so he couldn't do anything physically. He'd do things like suck up to the teacher and then get a bunch of his friends to say that I did something or other. Or, he'd spread rumors about me. He made fun of my weight constantly, multiple times on a daily basis. One day in particular I remember -- we had a substitute teacher, so X got everyone in the class to throw shit at me, saying "hey everyone, hit the retard." I looked at the substitute like "what the hell are you doing?" but she just laughed it off in a way that if someone else was there, she'd point and say "haha, those kids being kids! No roughhousing now, children!"

It's important to note how X was able to win the favor of teachers. He was dumb, but he pretended to be even dumber than he was to teachers, so that when he did well on a test or whatever, the teacher would think "I'm a great teacher! Look at how good this kid is doing!"

He had stolen stuff from my house several times already and tried to pawn it off at a garage sale, so my mom hated him. In response, he accused my mother of molesting him. (edit: apparently this is not correct. see below.)

Toward the end of the year I started getting suicidal and X took that as an opportunity to spread more rumors about me. There was a Vietnamese kid a few years older than us who was the neighborhood boogeyman at the time; X's clique would fabricate ridiculous stories about him. One time during lunch they said he intended to break into my house with a gun of some kind, so in retaliation I said "if he does, my dad has a rifle."

Two of the girls at the lunch table misheard this as "I have a rifle and will shoot you" and reported it to the principal the next day, but I have reason to believe that they were egged on by X, because that very same day he was in the office writing some kind of statement. This was right after Columbine, so the school believed the two girls on their word for reasons similar to why they believed X. In addition, I fit the profile: white, smart, isolated, plays video games a lot.

The school expelled me due to an alleged "terroristic threat" and allowed me to come back only under the condition that I sign a form saying I had made said threat, and do three days of alternative school following the signing of that form. My parents refused to let me do this, so the school sued them on truancy charges. We eventually settled out of court, because the school's case was ridiculous and their testimonies didn't match up at all. (edit: apparently, this is wrong. see below. the school did mention truancy, but we were sued by the parents of the two girls, not the school.)

The consequence though is that I was homeschooled by my mother for three years and partially homeschooled for another two. My mother knows how to read and write well, but she doesn't know math beyond basic arithmetic. She's extremely loving and tried her best, but she could only teach as much as she knew.

The effects of that expulsion hit me even now. When I went back into public school, I didn't have adequate math knowledge for my grade level so I went to a ridiculously ghetto transition school for a period of time. When I say "ridiculously ghetto," I mean someone there killed a cop and no one was surprised. I had to learn Algebra out of a textbook in a self-paced classroom where 2/3 of my Algebra class was pregnant. The very first time I took the SAT, my score on the math section was 450/800. I self-studied, retook it and got 570/800. But for comparison, I was able to get 770/800 on the writing section without much study. If I had been in public school math from the beginning, I could have maxed out that section and my choices of colleges would have been very different.

Edit: some corrections to this, since I dug up some information:

- I wasn't sued by the school. The school was involved in the suit, but I was sued by the two parents of the girls who accused me. Apparently, we didn't settle out of court either; according to my mom's account, they had to issue an apology.

- X didn't accuse my mother of molesting him; he said she "threatened him" and he was purposefully late to school due to being "scared." She wasn't allowed on school grounds because I was expelled and she didn't have a student attending the school, not because of the accusation.

Why are you opening up all of the sudden?

I am no longer insecure about the things that have happened to me and feel like I can talk about them with the benefit of hindsight.

[robertsona]

Re: Arch0wl AMA

this is weirdly gripping

[Omegix]

Re: Arch0wl AMA

Do you post on reddit? I've seen multiple arch0wl posts and was wondering if it was you. Also, I have irc logs of #a0 from Feb. 2005- Feb 2006 if you want them.

[Arch0wl]

Re: Arch0wl AMA

I don't want them. I'd probably be embarrassed knowing how I wrote back then.

I do post on reddit, but not under 'Arch0wl'. (edit: This is me, but it's not my main name.) I don't want to reveal my username because I have a group of people who stalk me on reddit and this would make my name googleable. But if you are a regular of /r/SubredditDrama you probably have seen my posts. If you want it, I can PM it to you. Just PM me on here and I'll send you a link.

[Omegix]

Re: Arch0wl AMA

Na, I don't need it. Funny thing is I can't look at the irc logs either cause after like 1 min of looking over them I see something so dumb that I wrote I just have to close it.

[CypherToorima]

Re: Arch0wl AMA

Wow holy shit. I would have never thought you had such a childhood. God damn that shit's fucked up.

[Charu]

Re: Arch0wl AMA

Sorry to hear your past was like that.

Hope this "X" fella no longer haunts you. Seems like the ultimate type of bully that knows no bounds.

[Zon Fire]

Re: Arch0wl AMA

favorite simfile?

[Netjet!]

Re: Arch0wl AMA

favorite simfile?

im sorry but after reading all of the other really serious questions/responses this post made me crack up.