- First sim league Cup win, EA NHL Sims, Season 2 with the Ducks (had Ovechkin, Sakic, Lecavalier, Niedermayer, Johnson, Johnson, Stastny, Svatos, Wolski, Rask - loved that team).
- Being inducted into EA NHL Sims Hall of Fame.
Huge honour. Especially since I was not Quinn's favourite person at the time.
- A member I won't name, of a hockey site I won't mention, offering me a nude of a girl he was seeing if I agreed to trade him a certain player. (Coincidentally, I was going to trade him said player, I did trade him said player, and he did send me the nude).
- ManMMA reaching its 8th birthday. Never thought I would see 3 months. (HUGE thank you to anyone here who is or was a member of that site)
- Some random league in my early days (around 2006? 2007?) that an unnamed (former?) member of this site deleted on us all because he was mad about fuck knows what (HE KNOWS WHO HE IS, AND FUCK YOU STILL, GUY!). That was the first successful league I was apart of. It was full, active, and things were going great. Great staff, good, consistent simming and everything. I have no idea how said member ended up with delete-powers, but I was very disappointed in that shit for a long time. Still am.
(If you are reading this, go piss on your own mother, ass-clown!
)
Then there's the real life stuff.
- First few voice calls with people I only ever knew as user names.
- Becoming outside-of-sim-site acquaintances, or even friends, with people met on sim sites, and experiencing the positive impact we could have on each others lives.
- This spot is reserved for when I meet my first sim leaguer in real life. Almost was able to pull this off in March, but Covid fucked everything up, and I was unable to make it to Toronto. It was literally the day before the NHL season was postponed. Was heavily considering going to Toronto to meet up with therealbk, since he was visiting, but yeah. Covid ruined everything. I don't know if he is here, but he's a rock star that I will meet IRL one day.
- And very lastly, this. This right here. This whole thread. The fact that pretty much all of us have been a part of this strange cult community for 10-15 years, and are still dabbling in it. And sometimes we are even still able to hook new members into this thing of ours. We all know each other from our previous usernames. We remember those of us who have come and gone. And those of us that are still here, lifetimes later. Even though we are on separate sites, and sometimes were competitors, or whatever else, we are still in this. We have maintained this unique little world for a lifetime. When I started joining and learning about these wacky "sim sites", I was a kid in University. Now I have a kid of my own who is not that far from high school. It's been a really great time getting to know you people, on and off site, and checking in to catch up here and there. Hearing about your life events. Being a part of each others communities, and lives. We have survived, what, 3 generations of gaming consoles? We survived GM Connected! Our strange cult that is the sim site community is this magic world that I absolutely love being a part of. Thank you all for being in this strange little rollercoaster sim world with me.
-como/stynn/manmma/Justin/Justine