HOW I GOT TO BE SO AWESOME

 

by Rick_Slick

As part of our Super 4th Anniversary Special Deluxe Edition, our frequently-disappearing blue-nosed reporter slips another article in just under the deadline.  This week, he provides a retrospective of his self-proclaimed awesomeness over the last four years.  Which appears to be inversely proportional to the frequency of articles he turns in... 

Today, the Voice of There celebrates it's 4th anniversary as There's premier fan site and in-game news source or a whole bunch of hoopla like that.  Okay, enough about that... now that I have satisfied the requirement to talk about this momentous occasion, lets talk about whatever I want to talk about now! 

You may have noticed that I haven't written anything since like that April Fools article... when was that again?  I can't remember, but it was like at least a few weeks ago.  This is because I have spent all that time buying RavenTresses presents for her birthday, which was yesterday.  According to her, she is turning 25, but I am pretty sure she was 25 the last couple of years, too, so maybe she's using some sort of magical anti-aging cream or youth ointment or whatnot.  Now that her birthday has passed, I have to start shopping around for Labor Day presents for her.  I never realized until I met her that there were so many holidays that required buying presents!  Anyway, Happy Birthday, RavenTresses!! 

Have you ever noticed -- just as in her case because she told me so -- everything gets way better over time?  Well, maybe except for the smell of old rotting bologna sitting out on the counter because I forgot to put it away for a few days.  But I digress... let's take the Voice of There, for example --  when it first started out, it was probably just a very basic web page with some icons of some sort, and it wasn't flashy and didn't catch your attention very well: 

 

In fact, when Geea first asked me to write for the Voice, I turned her down because I thought she was asking me to write batch files for a Windows 3.1 system folder.  But nowadays, there are all sorts of cool Photoshopped images (mine are all real screenshots with no trickery whatsoever) and words and so forth, which make it both interesting to read (for those of you who can read, anyway... for those of you who can't, HAHAHAH YOU CAN'T READ, NEENER NEENER NEENER!  Okay, no one read that part to them.) and look at.  I don't want to take credit or anything, but I humbly think this sudden increase in awesomeness happened right around the time I joined the team here at the Voice of There. 

Now, I wasn't always this awesome, trust me.  Many unawesome things have happened to me... for instance, the one time when RavenTresses barged through the door all excited, holding a steamy coil of dog poo cupped in her hands, proudly exclaiming, "Hey, look what I just nearly stepped in outside!!"  Other times, awesome things have happened like when she showed me the NutriSystem web site where she gets all her meals from, and I told her that instead of 30 days of meals I am going to order 30 days of nothing but dessert, and she said that it wouldn't let me do it, and I bet her I could, and she said nuh-uh, and now, long story short, I have three pallets of brownies, cookies, cake, and pie and she's all jealous.  A lot of people (like three over the last four years, including myself in the mirror once) always ask me how I got to be so awesome.  Well, you're in the luck, because now I am going to proceed to tell you!  Now, on to the telling you of how I got to be awesome!  Let's go!  One, two, three, GO! 

  My unawesome days were quite boring and non-descript.  I had just started in There in September 2003 because I got bored of staring at my Windows desktop waiting for the icons to do something interesting, and managed to get myself a buggy painted with a red, white, and blue American flag with the pattern all jacked up that seemed to excite British people when I drove past.  I also was able to find matching pants and a shirt, which is quite difficult for a guy with no female fashion influence, especially since the Voice of There didn't exist yet so no one knew what to wear.  My best friend was the gray labrador I had that was named "||||||||" because he had me on ignore because I was so unawesome.  My buddy list was sparse... I tried to add people to try to force them into being my buddies, but apparently that was not quite how the buddy list functioned.  I had voicechat from square one, as all beta members did, because in ancient Greek "beta" is short for "beta than everyone else".  But because I was not awesome, my voice was all prepubescent and squeaky and caused people to run away.  Also, I only knew like three emotes and I never got invited to any events, even the really fun ones where everyone just sits on a hoverboard AFK the entire time.  I had a There girlfriend once, but she ran off with my There best man right before our There wedding.  My life in There was just plain miserable.  Most people escaped their real lives to vicariously live a more exciting life through their Therian avatars, but my virtual life was more boring than my real life somehow.  I actually couldn't wait to log off and go to work in real life each morning. 

At my wit's end, I had decided to dramatically end it all by climbing atop one of the pyramids in Egypt and plunging to my death.  Unfortunately, if you know anything about geometry (or as RavenTresses likes to call it... "geography" or sometimes "geology"), you know that it is extremely difficult to plunge to your death from atop a pyramid.  This no doubt frustrated a lot of depressed Egyptians back in the olden days, which is why their bodies are always wrapped in bandages when people like Indiana Jones find them because of all the scrapes and scratches they got from sliding and tumbling down the sides of their stupid pyramids.  I did this and slid quite a bit along the ouchy hot sand until I came to a stop right in the middle of a group of people, which I quickly learned was a casting call for a brand new movie that this dude Francis_7 was filming in There.  Right as I stood up, he said it was my turn to audition for the movie, and I said "LOL whut?" and because I was one of the few people that he could understand clearly in voice chat, I suddenly found myself with a role in "Killboat". 

The sudden fame and fortune was nearly too much for a poor, helpless, unawesome sod like myself to handle.  It became clear that if I were to maintain a presence as a popular There movie star, I would have to quickly learn how to become more awesome.  So shortly after release of "Killboat", I travelled abroad and enrolled myself in an ancient Chinese Shaolin Awesomeness Academy.  Here, Shaolin monks trained their students in the art of awesomeness... such skills as how to verbally defend against people making fun of me by saying clever and witty things, how to write funny articles and movie scripts, how to dress, how to be all smooth with the ladies, how to pee standing up, and the most important lesson of all, how to repeatedly proclaim yourself awesome to as large an audience as possible so that everyone starts to actually believe it.  At the end of my training, the Master gave me the final test and asked "Do you not hear the grasshoppa at your feet?" while some pan flutes and sitars were playing, and an eagle cried out in the background just like in the beginning of some old Kung Fu movie.  I answered yes, and he was like "Well, there you go, then." and then I graduated.  I am pretty sure they need some work on their standardized testing process, but I am not going to stare a My Little Pony in the butt, or whatever the expression is where you get something for very minimal effort and you should just shut up about it and be happy.

 

 It was then that I caught the attention of RavenTresses, as surely a famous movie star would be able to buy her lots of presents!  She helped me become more awesome by spending all my money, or so she tells me.  Then, Geea talked me into writing for the Voice of There, which provided me with access to a large audience so that I could make sure everyone knew how awesome I kept declaring that I was.  The Miracle Pictures movie deals kept coming, and in between productions, I started designing clothing in There to help other people become awesome, too.  Because if you are awesome you should always try to help other people find their own inner awesomeness, ideally by bilking them out of their hard-earned cash with your shoddy products.  Which brings me to the important life lesson that I would like to pass on to all of my younger readers:  It's not about the friends you make or the peoples' lives you impact in a positive way, it's about how much more money and stuff you end up with than everyone else you know.  That's right... that's the kind of lesson you don't learn in elementary school while you're busy eating paste and having nap time or whatever, kids.  Remember, you heard it right here from me.

Other things besides just me have became more awesome over the last 4 years, too.  Miracle Pictures recently celebrated their 5th anniversary making movies in There.  From our first feature-length film "Killboat", to more complex movies like "Noob Hunter", "Broc Lee", "There Wild Wild West", "Tiki Trek", to movies with awesome special effects like "Mission Slightly Difficult", "Killboat 2: A View to a Killboat", and most recently, the long awaited epic "Wizard of Lag", we have certainly come a long way from ad-libbing lines in Killboat.  I'm sure Francis_7 and Disky wish that over the last 4 years, the number of times they had to film a particular scene with me in it before I got my lines right or didn't mess up what I was supposed to do would decrease, but sometimes being awesome means making sure everyone sees you do a scene over and over again 20 or 30 times because practice makes perfect.  At first, they just worked it into the movie, like that scene in Killboat where I completely forgot my lines and just stood there looking all goofy for about 30 seconds... they just added some cricket noises and suddenly, thanks to movie magic, I was the cold-hearted jerk who just stood there watching one of his friends get massacred by a killboat while doing nothing to save them whatsoever.  You know, movie magic sometimes does not work in my favor.  Needless to say, that was the last time I was without a script in hand. 

You know what else got to be more awesome?  All the developers and designers in There that make us super cool stuff to drive, wear, and decorate with, and the There staff that fixes all the bugs and adds new features and tools for us all the time!  And all of the people who post on the forums are more awesome now, too -- they have learned how to flame each other with more tact and finesse instead of like four years ago when we used to all call each other names and cuss at each other and we had a Rant & Raves forum where we could whine and complain and create drama.  Also, even simple things like water became more awesome... from some strange blue-colored concrete to actual transparent water that you can stand in.  Additionally, back in the day, all we had to do for fun was sit around and stare at each other and stream Backstreet Boys songs through voicechat... but then we eventually got awesome games like Spades, Dice, and now Gin! 

Most people get sick of me going around humbly saying that I'm awesome all the time, but the truth is, I'm really not.  I make tons of mistakes and do stupid stuff every day.  In fact, before I ran spell-check on this article, there were 1,238 spelling errors in it, including my own name.  I accidentally hurt peoples' feelings when I don't mean to, like when I totally forgot to buy RavenTresses a Martin Luther King Jr. Day present.  I fudge a few facts in my articles every now and then because I am too lazy to Google it.  I have a hole in my sock right now, even though it is the only article of clothing I am wearing while I sit here typing this.  However, in spite of all that, the key to being awesome is to truly believe within yourself that you are awesome, and then telling everyone around you that you are awesome because people are pretty gullible and will believe anything you say if you say it with conviction or repeat yourself enough times.  And that is all it takes.  So... go forth and be awesome and whatnot! 

Because imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.

 

[Disclaimer:  The Voice does not endorse scooping up dog poo in your hands to show everyone what you nearly stepped in, trying to commit avie suicide by leaping off the top of a pyramid, letting your children learn life lessons from Rick_Slick, or streaming Backstreet Boys tunes through voicechat.]