Hi! I’m May. You can learn my real name by looking at my username on here and thinking about it really hard. And then looking at the username again. It’s May.
May lore… Most of you know lots of things about me already, because I use the cookie thread as my diary. Facts about me. I’m chronically ill and autistic. I’m a student in university in New York, when it is not the summertime, at least. I love achieving tasks, and much of my online life is me trying to find tasks to achieve when I’m not in class.
I’ve been on the computer basically as long as I’ve been alive, because I learned to read at around 2 or 3. My dad’s a software engineer, so he had me on Scratch shortly after that, and I also played a lot of online pet sims and such as a kid. I made my first online friends when I was eight years old, by walking into their forums on Howrse and deciding I was their friend now. I once accidentally deleted my own personal forum and I cried for hours. My mom tried to get me to tell my therapist, but I refused, because I didn’t think it was a big enough deal.
I liked Warrior Cats a lot as a kid. I read the entire series to impress a girl I had a crush on when I was eight (and who later went on to move schools and then show up in every dream I had for years). I met a lot of friends through an author of the series’s blog, which I frequented, and I still talk to them to this day.
I’ve been playing the browser petsite Flight Rising for six years. I like to draw custom skin items - I learned to draw basically exclusively to do this - and I’m an organiser for my flight’s dominance team, something I find difficult to explain. It involves a lot of spreadsheets and organising like a hundred people. I had to fill out a job application for it. I have significantly more money’s worth of virtual items there than my entire bank account could buy. It was my life for a while.
I also play low-level competitive Splatoon with some friends I met through Blaseball (a browser baseball sim), and riichi mahjong, because during a Blaseball Among Us game night, @pandora was playing solitaire mahjong in the background, leading us to joke about starting “Mahjong Mondays” where we all sat and played solitaire mahjong in silence. I decided to start them for real, but several people heard of them and thought it was multiplayer mahjong, so I rapidly taught myself how to play so I could run a game night for it.
I play forum mafia because it also serves as a task to achieve, and because I hate being bored more than I hate any other feeling in the world, and because I love understanding my reactions to things better. I like unpleasant, stressful games of mafia most of all, at least in hindsight, because difficult tasks are more satisfying to achieve, stronger feelings help me not get bored, and it helps me learn to deal with such stress in a controlled environment.
Offline… I don’t do so much. I am quite sick. During the school year, I spend all the energy I have getting to classes and coming back. I had/have friends, as in people I talked to in classes and went to prom with and such, in high school and college, but I’ve never been really able to hang out with them outside of contexts where I’d already see them, and I’m a terrible texter. I’m kind of a non-person in this sense. Hence why I am online so much.
As for facts you maybe didn’t already know… false impressions you may have gotten from my posts… I don’t actually follow the Mets that closely, my fandom is more hypothetical than anything. I’ve never really been drunk, it just happens that nights where I have like one or two drinks are also nights where I’m incredibly fatigued, so I’m incoherent online for different reasons. I’m not extremely good at mahjong, but I’m not bad like I make myself out to be, either. I’m the best of my friends, including the ones who have been playing longer than I have. It’s just that, like any long-existing game, some people have been playing for decades, and so there will always be many people better than me. I try to be as sincere as possible these days, because irony feels like a poison, but I am still often too weak to admit how much I do actually like you guys.
I’m also a cat.