User blog:Garr9988/A Special Occasion, and Looking Back

Happy birthday to myself the Angst Magnet himself! Now we're he's 19, around Claudia's age when she came to the Warehouse (if not just a year older)! Wish I had something cool to say about him, but all I have are feels I can't properly put into words.

To think, he used to just be a silent self-insert that was so awkward and didn't know what to do around here (much like myself). But after the darkest period of my life so far, being without you guys for several months, we both came out a little banged up (that's an understatement, but much better in the long run. It was because of that depressing episode that I changed what was supposed to be a short one-off meant to bring Garrett and Felix together (bc I had a crush on him/Draco back then) became an emo-esque, somewhat poorly written trilogy, the Double Danger Arc, that itself spawned the Oto arc, culminating in my two Magnum Opuses, Beginding and Retritaliation  (the latter of which has a page here as well).

It's been (almost) six whole years since I first came across the Warehouse back in October of 2012, when the 4th season was still airing. I vividly remember the first time I saw the show, the very beginning of "An Evil Within" (the Lovecraft Key episode) while my father was just flipping through channels one morning (well, I feel like it was in the morning anyway). I saw the monster, then saw the twist that it was just a normal person, and I was just... hooked from the get go! I can't remember if I saw it closer to October or not, considering the episode aired in July (meaning, if it was closer to October, that it was a rerun).

I was only 13 at the time, and so so so green - I didn't even start out with a face, I was an Anon on the Canon Wiki that suggested a few things to the various artifact challenges. This seems to have been the very first suggestion, if not the first comment, I made on that site! And then this one. And then this one. I didn't even know how proper commenting worked, and I thought it was "normal"/the norm for the site to try and come up with a real life story to it (it sounds so cringey and like something someone that would annoy me nowadays would say to make me actively ignore them).

I made an official account November 24th, 2012, just one month after finding the site. After that, this seems to have been my first comment on this wiki, and Black Canary's Fishnet Leggings looks like the first page I ever made! And while I was looking back at my history, I found this comment on one of Affectos' artifacts - yeesh, even though I clarified myself, I sounded so nasty (it sorta reminds me of Draco and Per, to be honest)! Hard to believe we're dating now, huh?

I was just a wee baby back then, but I apparently spoke so grammatically-proper, so professionally, and did such decent research for my artifacts that, at least in Draco's case, you guys thought I was an adult too!

My artifacts have improved sooooo much from when I was younger. Back then, I did make sure to do research on my ideas, but not as much, and the effects were so much simpler (or even just plain bad). I still have the nautical-themed notebook I had since middle school (when I joined) that I wrote most, if not all, of my artifact ideas in (the first few were Christmas artifacts from an attempted challenge I made, they're actually other people's suggestions, but the rest are mine). Most of these were never made into artifacts, and some might never be, but I still keep it around because I hoarde notebooks because it's a snapshot of what I was like back then, how eager I was to create and the way my thought process worked. I'm all about record-keeping now, recording as much as I can to remember later, so this notebook will (hopefully) be with me for quite some time. Hell, if I ever get that Revival/Spin-Off idea off the ground, or just make a YouTube miniseries, I'll probably use it as a prop as a personal nod.

What's funny is, until next October or so, I've been part of this wiki for about as long as Pete, Myka, and Claudia have been part of the Warehouse. How time flies, and how appropriate, huh? I'd pop some champagne, but that's two years away. Oh well!

I love you guys! Here's to another year of Snagging, Bagging, and Tagging!