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A long overdue introduction


Nayleen

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Subtitled: How Fuwanovel/Aaeru saved my life.

 


 

Hello dear Fuwanovel community,

 

Many people around the forums and IRC already know me under nicknames like "the Fuwanovel coder", various variations of my alias like "Naynay", "Naylicious", or simply "the German" (because I'm the only active German person on IRC as far as I know). In real life I'm called Timo by coworkers and family and "Dieter" by very close friends who know the origin of that nickname.

 

I'm working as a professional web developer for a few years now, but have been creating web sites for various purposes for more than 10 years already, mostly for private servers for Ragnarok Online and Lineage 2 back in the day and later guild homepages and forums when I was actively playing World of Warcraft.

 

Not too surprising that I signed up here and immediately PMed Aaeru back when she was asking for PHP help for the site as I have just been waiting for this opportunity. Many people ask what keeps me going for me to invest quite a lot of time, even going as far as reworking the entire backend and quite a lot of the frontend AND introducing many new features to a site I have absolutely no relations with.

 

There are two reasons for that, one is very simple while the other is quite complex, the first and easy one being that I was looking for a project like I did 10 years ago for quite a lot of time; Now that I'm professional and not just a random script kid I really wanted to start making a name for myself, so I loved the idea on working Fuwanovel because it's a site about something I hold very dear, Visual Novels.

 


 

Now the other one is quite complex and reaches back about as long as I can remember. I've got crippling depressions and anxiety issues, bad enough for me to feel too powerless to even leave my bed save for basics like eating, drinking and sanitary needs. Most people don't even notice it except when I vanish for weeks at a time - because I may be shy and pretty reserved, but I love getting to know people and am fairly talkative once I warm up to someone, so they can't even imagine me being depressed. I'm introverted (meaning social interaction expends energy for me) but generally love being around people I know and feel I need social interaction to function properly.

 

This is also why staying at home also depresses me even further, until I either snap out of it or it spirals completely out of control like it did last winter, where I stayed at home for a whole five months. Which, as most people can imagine, is long enough for my medical attests not being enough for me to keep my job.

 


 

So I was depressed, missed social contact - my best friend who used to force me to go out with him when I was feeling down was working in the US, so he wasn't around to save me from the downward spiral I was in - and about to lose my job (which wasn't perfect, but had its fun days and at least paid the bills), spiraling everything even further out of control.

 

All I did during that time was sleep, eat, drink, shower and read. I read the Visual Novels I torrented earlier that year but never came around to read because of work and other stuff leaving me too tired to even read in the evenings. It didn't take me too long to either finish or tire of them, I simply didn't have enough; Going through the hassle of searching VNDB for new translated Visual Novels that interested me and then having to torrent them, find and apply the TL patch was too much of a hassle at the time.

 

I was seriously considering just ending my life right there, because reading Visual Novels made me tear up and feel for the characters, it's the most touching medium for me because of the combination of graphics, music and writing - especially the songs in some of them and acted as kind of a substitute for all the social interaction I was missing out on because of my depressions.

 

That was when I found Fuwanovel and its easy-to-use interface, most VNs were prepatched so everything was pretty easy for me to work out. I started and finished HoshiMemo, G-Senjou no Maou and the MajiKoi partial patch and began reading Rewrite. They kept me going long enough for the worst to tide over, for me to finally pick up the broken pieces of myself again and start getting back into life again, get back on medication and search for a therapist to work this out once and for all, as I was having these downtimes annually.

 


 

Fuwanovel literally saved my life; It was my main motivation for wanting to help out when Aaeru was asking for help on the site and it still keeps me going today, 3 months and thousands of lines of code later; I owe this site so much, and I love the community and working on new features with everyone involved.

 

A special shout-out here to: Naomi, Aaeru, Tay, solidbatman, shcboomer, Kendjin, Rakushun, DrKleiner, Lewycool, Zakamutt, ThatPlayer and Mephisto - and everyone else I'm forgetting to name explicitly. Please stick around so I may never lose interest in the site.

 

I hope everyone who reads this enjoys this small, very personal write-up. I'm looking forward to continue working with everyone to keep this site running and become even more awesome, complete and more widely known with each passing day. I love you guys.

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Thank you for sharing that, Nayleen. You must have been apprehensive about getting that personal and going into all that, but it was a very touching and I enjoyed reading it. It’s awesome to see how a small online community for a niche hobby can mean so much to someone. It’s no doubt a testament to all the great people here.

 

I wish you all the best and I thank you for all the hard work you’ve put in.

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well i am glad to have you here and you locks as well and it's a good story but we all have been in a situation like this and i was going in to the downward spiral when i found fuwa my self so i could escape out from it quite early i have been very down about 6-8 month before by a horrible break up and moving to a new town that i knew nothing about so i should say my thanks to this community aswell

 

may as well say i got my first sister when i was feeling down about 6-8 ago and that made mot recognise her before she was about 7 months

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That's a fascinating story which really struck a chord with me, I can see it probably took a while to write.

 

I can't (or won't) write anything that detailed, but suffice it to say that the world of anime, manga and galgames is definitely part of my coping mechanism for my introverted nature.

 

I'd go to a therapist but I'm actually afraid of psychotropic medicines...

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Man, I've got to said first of all I'm happy that you feel comfortable to share this with us, it takes a lot of courage to express something like this.

 

So, when I first met you on the IRC I thought you were some shy guy just talking a few then hiding again but you started to open up a lot when we started the idea of playing civ 5, and that's where are friendship started ( internet friendship, friendship whatever you want to call it ). After that Civ5 game when starting talking more and more joking around with each other and so on. Then fuwanovel comes into play, you being the coder even throwing ideas for you and bug to fix ( not to mention the fullstops you need to fix ;) ).

And now we come to the present were we play osu, we laugh, we joke and also talk or discuss about things.

 

Ok, I'll stop rambling on about useless crap I just want to say if you ever feel in a sad/bad situation you can count on us to help you out ..... well... that differs but whatever !!  just saying that you arn't and will never be a stranger here you are apart of the Fuwanovel family.

 

Oh what was your favourite Vn and do you need a recommendation?  

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I'd go to a therapist but I'm actually afraid of psychotropic medicines...

As a person who has personally tried them SSRIs, I'd at least consider giving them a try. At least in my experience, the whole emotion-deadening or pesonality-changing thing doesn't happen. It's also fully possible, at least here in sweden, to refuse medication and still get help through other means.

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very touching for me as ive been "almost the same" for a very long time now. 

recently started going to the therapist 2 times a week. (refused medicine's tho)

dont really what more i wanted said but.. 

 

even if we havent talked , im glad your here 

That's a fascinating story which really struck a chord with me, I can see it probably took a while to write.

 

I can't (or won't) write anything that detailed, but suffice it to say that the world of anime, manga and galgames is definitely part of my coping mechanism for my introverted nature.

 

I'd go to a therapist but I'm actually afraid of psychotropic medicines...

I'm currently on SSRIs (about my fourth week now) and the first few weeks were terrible for me, constant nausea (the hard way, constantly feeling like having to throw up, but it never actually happens) and I was feeling tired all the time even though they're supposed to push and motivate me. You kind of feel your brain rewire though, which was a good and promising thing for me.

 

I also took Bupropion/Wellbutrin, which is a NDRI, for a while - helped quite a bit as well, but wasn't enough.

 

The only real hard thing about this type of medication is finding the right one for you, but finding it can help you improve a lot quicker; There's basically no risk of addiction and most side effects only happen during the first weeks, after that it's smooth sailing. 

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Thank you for sharing something like this. As someone who is very introverted as well, I know how hard it can be to open up like that. As far as I can remember, I have never opened up like that to anyone. I'm so glad that Fuwanovel was able to help you in a time of need, and we are all glad that you found this place and decided to stick around here. You have been a great help to many people. I know we don't know each other very well, but everyone here is friends, maybe even family,

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That was amazing of you to share with us thank you so much Nayleen! I can honestly say im alot like you and i hope someday i won't be so scared to talk to you or other people in IRC chat  :unsure:

 

I truly hope you keep this good motivation going through your hole life and wish you the best! 

 

Must have been torture too find the right words for this... 

 

I really appreciate this and would love to read other people's toughts on how they feel about Visual Novels.

 

Thanks again Nayleen!  ^_^

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One of my friends went through something very similar, to this day she jokes that the forum we met on saved her life, and it's not even far from the truth. She's actually fairly extroverted these days, haha.

 

Glad you took the time to write this, even though we never actually talked I'm very happy for you.

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So this was the long post you said nobody would read? Fortunately for you, this is a visual novel forum so we'll read everything you want to share.

 

That was a very well written post, in fact, you may even want to consider writing a book(or even a VN) about your experiences, because it's a story only you and nobody else can write.

 

I'm glad that you are here with us, and that you choose to stay longer, because I need help on my programming homework I'd miss you if you were gone.

 

Actually, your story wasn't touching at all and elicited no emotional reaction. Nope. Not at all. Definitely didn't happen. These tissues are here because I had a runny nose.

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Hey Nay.. Glad to see you are doing well.

 

We'll need to get back into some games when I get my internet back :D

Looking forward to it, I'm on a temporary slow connection as well but that's not that big of a deal actually.

 

We really need to get everyone together for another round of Civ5.

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How should i start....? Like i said before, it always makes me smile when someone have the trust to share that kind of thing, because it's not an easy thing to do (at least not for most people). I'm glad that you took some of your time to write it Nay, just noticed that you decided to post it where the introduction topics are, a bit unnecessary i think, seeing how you're one of the people that helps run this place, and when a lot of people on the IRC channel knows you, but it just adds to the way you opened to others. It'a also good to see how this community supports others in so wonderful ways. This doesn't sounds too much how i expected, so i'll leave it at that... ^_^"
Keep up the good work Nay~!!!

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