Grayed out

[MarcZaf]

Hey guys,

    I am leaving Zero Virus. I've given it alot of thought, alot of time, and my mind's made up. There's nothing wrong with you guys, in fact, I think you guys are really cool. It's just that every time I visit the forum, chat, or discord, and seeing your conversations, the more I think that "I don't belong here." I feel that my ideas/interests barely coincide with you guys, you guys seem to hate things I may like, while I may not like as much what you guys are really into. I'm just alien to everything about ZV.

    It's just really making it hard for me to talk to you guys. The time I played CAH with you guys, I just felt awkward, because I wasn't getting the references, and I didn't know if I was even picking the right cards. I can't get into the RP because other than I've never done an RP or the story's way far ahead for me to just jump into, my inputs just don't match with the criteria. I guess that's why I've been making crap; to try and stay relevant, but it'll never equal to being able to dis on each other and still be friends afterwards.

    And so, I'll be leaving Zero Virus. I really had a great time here, a lot to be thankful for, and I'm done pestering you guys. Thanks for teaching me about sprites, sprite comics, bob, and tolerating all my dumbassery for the past x years. I'll never forget about ZV, it's been  a part of my life, and may have been one of the reasons I am where I am today and I'm grateful for that. Don't see this as "I can't relate to you guys, so I quit" but rather "I respect you guys too much to let my ignorance get the best of me."

It's been fun,
MarcZaf

[Vile]

I don't fit in either, and hardly know what they're talking about, but I'm learning i suppose. The thing for me is my local friends all suck so this community is the closest I have to a group of friends.

Sad to see yoy go man, I may not have posted often but I enjoyed seeing your gsme progress in the discord general thread. I'll miss ya.

[Nightmare]

Holy crap, Zafer found out how to indent his paragraphs on ZV. Not to detract from the gravity of the post but that legit caught me off guard and impressed me and I wanna know how you did it.

Anyway, Zafer I know you're going through some stuff lately but you're acting silly. I guarantee you're the only one who feels like you're an outcast who doesn't fit in. We all like you and respect you and value you as a part of our community. I never once thought that you were unworthy or annoying or that your interests were dumb. And your works that you did to "stay relevant" were more than that to a lot of us. They were not only cool additions to our expansive ZV Lore, but also inspirations for us all in our own creative endeavors. You've done a lot to motivate me on my own projects, and I'd appreciate it if you stayed around to motivate me some more going forward.

I understand in regard to say not getting all our references or something that it might be difficult or confusing, or that you think that because you don't get it that you're the odd man out, but I once again guarantee you're overreacting there too. Let me let you in on a secret: Nobody on ZV gets every single reference except for me. Because I make it my business to be a part of everything ZV and understand it all. I take notes on all the goings on on ZV (always have and always will.) I read everyone's comics, look at everyone's art, watch everyone's streams, play or at least brush up on all the games and other interests people around here hold. I practically run one of ZV's RPs and follow the other despite not being involved with it at all. I religiously attended the story times, and I poke and prod people for whatever information I don't already have after all that crap. I do that partially because I'm super interested and partially because I have a really good memory when it comes to this kind of stuff and I feel comfortable knowing that if nothing else people can turn to me to help refresh their memory on this kind of stuff. Because of that I am the only one who gets all of the references. You may feel lost sometimes but hell, talk to anyone else and they'll tell you they're lost sometimes too. You can either shrug it off and not care, ask questions and start learning, or mope about it. It's clear what choice you made but I think you should reconsider picking one of the other two instead.

The point is, you don't need to know everything about ZV to be a valuable member of the community. And as for us not sharing the same interests? Hell, man, you think most of us all share the same interests? First of all, who cares if we share the same interests or not? I've had lots of friends I was close with for many many years and neither of us gave a crap about anything the other was passionate about. But aside from that, people on ZV have some pretty diverse interests... Sure, there are some things a majority of us can agree on, but just using myself as an example I've got my laundry list of interests and I maybe share a few with nobody around here, a few with 2 or 3 people each tops, and maybe have a couple mainstream interests. And that's probably everyone else's experiences too.

As another example: I really like talking politics--pretty much nobody on ZV does and they tune me out when I get started on it. Then Fusion starts talking Star Trek and I don't care about any of that so I tune him out, but Ztrl and him can bond over that. Then Tony talks about Miku or something and nobody cares, I turn things to DDR and Ztrl joins in and Xero shoots us both in the leg. If we all just liked all the same things and talked about all the same things, it'd be boring. I don't see how you can think that nobody here cares about things you're interested in, I'm willing to bet you have some sort of interest that one of us is super into. Hell you draw, sprite, make comics, and program games, I think you and I got a lot in common actually.

ANYWAY. I don't know what you're going through in your personal life that's got you so bent out of shape lately. I'm sure I can relate, there have been times in my life were I was depressed and it made me feel bad about myself and I had a lot of trouble having fun doing anything. Maybe that's something you're going through right now and that silliness is what's making you think this way. Let me just say though that leaving ZV because you feel bad is only unnecessarily taking your bad mood out on us, but not only us, yourself too. If you need some time to yourself to straighten things out in your head then fine, but it doesn't have to be a goodbye. You've got no reason to cut us out of your life; doing so would be a detriment to both sides, I think.


So this is what you're gonna do: You're gonna read all this stuff, you're gonna think "damn, Nightmare's a pretty cool guy" then sit down and take some time to think. You're gonna realize that you are in fact an alien here, but that it's cool cause we're all just a bunch of aliens who showed up on ZV to conquer it at the same time and ended up chilling together. You're going to do whatever you gotta do to shake off this mood that's got you beating yourself up and thinking that we don't want or need you. Then you're going to come back to ZV, apologize, promise to never leave us again, and tell me how the hell you indented your paragraphs.