To my fellow Hypesters,
Five years ago today, I came running to my computer to post (what I believed to be) breaking news about X-Men: The Last Stand on these forums - forums which I had been reading since Spider-Man Hype - and my excitement was instantly bashed down by fanboys who ate and breathed anything X-Men. I was utterly embarrassed and I tried so hard to gain an appreciation from these boards which I hadn't found in my new middle school. I looked up to TNC and LS! in order to model myself off of respectable posters, and I kept trying to push myself into new circles of the forums including the Batman forums.
The worst reaction I found to my arrival at these boards was in the Batman threads when I created a fanart thread -for what we now know as The Dark Knight- which I posted the worst manips you will ever see and also a plot outline in which I referred to Harvey Dent as "The Cabulerez Heir to the Mob". (Again, sorry about that... I didn't start reading the Batman comics until about three years ago.)
Highschool came around, and again as I struggled to find my place there, I still came to the hype for some sort of support, only to clash with a poster named farmerfran. Me and fran clashed on almost every topic, and because of fran's widespread acceptance on the boards, I became infamous and ridiculed. Funny enough, it was this ridicule that made me feel accepted on the boards when a poster said "Hey back off, he's one of us! A-Man may be ******ed, but he's our ****** dammit!!!" and God, did it feel good to read that.
In five years, I went from middle school, to high school and now college. I went through MULTIPLE name changes (including astroid-man, asteroid-man, Asteroid-Man, A-Nus and A-Man). I butted heads with mods, just barely brushing by being banned NUMEROUS times. I clashed with the great jag, I envied fran, I looked up to LS! and TNC, and I fought long and hard to be recognized.
I went from making ****** posters to making actual movie and theater posters. I went from posting terribly cut fan-trailers posted on YouTube (back before Google owned it... til Google bought it and closed my account because of the fan trailers... ****ing Google...) to getting accepted into a prestigious school in Canada for the Media Arts and Film.
In these five years went from having a dirty teen-stache to a full grown beard, I went from using a ****** Windows 98 Desktop to now having an amazing Windows 7 HP Desktop and a MacBook Pro. I've gone from being un-employed, to employed, to un-employed, to employed again to only freelance (not by choice... dammit).
My two grandmothers passed away, I finally met my Grandfather (who passed away just last week), I saw my two sisters meet their husbands and get married, and finally, I left home to live on my own, alone in a different city, making my father proud and breaking my mother's heart.
From September 29th, 2010 at 10:30 am to nearly 14,000 posts later, I am finally comfortable with who I am on the boards and in real life and I give an immense amount of that credit to these boards.
These boards have had tremendous influence on the five most eventful years of my life and I thank every single one of you for this; I thank the vets who've been here longer, my fellow '05s and anyone who has popped up along the way. And to the noobs, you are definitely in for a treat.
Superhero Hype! Boards, I tip my hat to you.
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