Vengeance

 I'll admit that what I'm about to write about is most certainly petty and it's full of vengeance. But here we are anyways.

At some point in the last 2 weeks or so, I had left a discord server due to various reasons which I'm not going to get into at this moment. And that server was somewhere I had a lot of fun, connected with quite a few people and made friends with them, so my sudden and unannounced departure could have come as a shock to them. Was it right for me to leave, maybe? But there were definitely better ways to go about it that weren't so rash or dramatic. I simply could've just logged out, close discord for awhile, etc. Or I could've just said somewhere that I need to take a break and would be temporarily leaving the community to rejoin when I was ready. That would've been optimal if I had decided I wanted to leave.

Whatever the case may be, this is the path we're on now where I left unannounced and didn't say anything to anyone for a few days at best (I broke silence with the server owner after a few days since I was friends with them and wanted them to know that my leaving was on me and not because of them).

At some point I vaguely recall purging my discord friends list. That's nothing I did intentionally to hurt anyone, I just clean up friends lists every now and then, I've done it on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Otherwise my Facebook would be at probably 300+ compared to the 140-ish friends I have. Does it harm anyone or cost me anything to not purge the lists? Nope. So why do I purge them? I don't know? I guess I like having lower numbers to accurately represent the people I actually count as friends. It's hard to explain and I'm not sure what to say much more beyond whatever just scratches an itch in my head to have a lower and so-called more "true" count of friends.

Anyways, upon cleaning up my discord list, it was good. It allowed me to realize I still technically was friends with a probably old account that had belonged to my ex. Not that there are any hard feelings against her, but I just think it's best for me to have absolutely 0 connections or methods or potential contact. Sure that sometimes I ask how she's doing to one friend, but I don't always ask because I figured while sometimes I may be curious, it's not really my business and at least since I've asked once and that it sounds like she's doing well, that's all I need to know.

The other aspect of why I bring up the discord purge was because I had apparently purged some of the connections and people I've friended from the discord server I had left. However I don't recall knowing why I purged those friends. Not to say that to justify anything but I just think it was something that was caught on the wrong end of things or maybe I did have a reason during the purge.

Fast forward to Friday, March 18th. I reached out to the server owner and expressed that I understood that I haven't been stellar and that I had my faults when I had decided to leave the server. That sometimes I had missed being a part of it all. The owner mentioned it was fine for me to comeback whenever I was ready, but suggested I should apologize to a couple of people who have been directly affected by my less than stellar moments. I took that and reached out to some people.

Only one of them returned some messages, and expressed that there was hurt in my departure and my apparently unfriending. I tried to explain it but also understood that no amount of explanation could've truly changed or healed any damage that was done. I didn't try to justify my actions, but the least I could do was try to explain how I did things. Nonetheless the damage was done and it didn't turn out as well.

So it seems that there was a lot of hurt and it is totally understandable.

When I read these messages, I saw the hurt and without going into too much detail, there were points that this former friend of mine had expressed internal darkness that led to darker thoughts and potential thoughts on suicide. I had done whatever I could to talk him out of it, but I'm no therapist, I'm not licensed in psychology nor psychiatry so all I could do was try to explain and help from my own life experiences in hopes that maybe it helps. I had previously suggested seeking out therapy, but for whatever personal reasons he had decided, he did not want and says he could not go to therapy. I suppose as the saying goes, "you can lead a horse to water but you cannot force it to drink."

Upon reading those final messages saying that friendship was no longer an option, I was unsure what to think. I knew I didn't really have grounds to contest it or to try to bargain for a new chance. All I knew was that I had to simply accept it and respect the decision to end the friendship. Not everyone you make friends with will be a companion for life. While it may be sad sometimes to see someone go, it's just the nature of life and there will be some who stay for long, some who don't, and the beauty is that you get to just learn and make experiences with people that you can carry for your lifetime if you want to.

Originally, I was just going to leave it at that. However, seeing the title of this post, there's more to the story that actually becomes the vengeful plot.

I had decided that eventually I would rejoin the discord server and just be more laid back and if someone bothers me I'll just log off instead of taking to arms about it like I had in the past. I need to stop letting people get under my skin so quickly anyways. Although this time was an instance where I didn't stop myself.

I rejoined the server earlier than expected because I caught wind of messages in a support channel that seemed to be directed at me without saying my name. When I had sent my apology message on Friday, March 18th, the timestamp was 1:48 p.m., and I come to find that in the support channel the same day at 1:51 p.m. there was a message expressing something about feeling about to cry and lose their mind at the same time. I suppose that one could be coincidental and not much more beyond it, but the timing seems oddly close. Then later on that same day, after the messages of saying that he wanted to end the friendship, that chain of messages were sent beginning at 4:41 p.m., to which the following was said at 5:52 p.m.

The messages that bother me was because he was asking why does ending friendships hurt, and what I don't understand is it's because he chose to end it. Now maybe it's different and maybe some attachments affect other people more than others, but in most instances when I end a friendship, I never felt hurt. I'd end it and just think to myself that I couldn't care what happens to that person. Maybe that's just me and my natural vengeful side speaking but I just don't care if I think someone has wronged me enough to say I'd not want to be friends with them anymore. Maybe that's me being overly aggressive, who knows.

Whatever the case may be, I saw it as a self-victimization that "oh woe is me a friendship I had cared about ended, it hurts" but he never tells anyone else that he chose to end the friendship. He doesn't say that he chose to not want communication anymore. He doesn't show that he was saying that my abandonment was apparently the cause to try attempting suicide twice in the last two weeks. No one sees that.

After all this long-winded story-telling and background building, here's the vengeance. I wrote within the support channel a seemingly philosophical piece that was basically saying to not believe everything you see for there is never the entire story present. And I know I'm guilty of that too, but I felt vengeful (obviously). I felt there was a need to speak since there was no context and the self-victimization was pushing me towards anger. If there was even just a "I had to end something I didn't feel comfortable with" or even just personal differences instead of just claiming that a friendship ended and what seems to me that he had no part in ending it, then maybe I would've let it be.

So I wrote this piece, speaking of the duality of man. How things aren't always as they seem, how there's two sides to everything. And of course like I said, I've been guilty of hiding some details for the sake of whatever purpose I saw it as.

Then earlier this morning at around 7 a.m., this same person who spoke of not talking to me anymore, decides to write in the general channel of the server, and I simply was not going to let him play both sides of in the direct messages saying he doesn't want to talk to me anymore, but then try to greet me and play this façade of being friends within the server.

I saw the welcome message and yes I could've chosen to be better and just ignore it, but then we wouldn't be here in this super long blog post, would we? As you can see, I "reacted" to the message with an emote displaying toxicity, because I think the truth of the matter is that it is toxic to say you don't want to be friends and to cut communication, but then pretend as if none of the communication or messaging happened.

When I checked the server again a couple hours later after I reacted with the "toxic" emote, I found the message was deleted. One explanation could be the moderators/server owner deleted the message, but the other (and more likely) explanation is that this former friend deleted his own message (since the ability to delete your messages is active). Then for fun, I checked the support channel, and found that this same person also reacted to my semi-philosophical piece.

He puts the "thinking" emote on it. So at least he knows it's about him. The whole vengeance plot is because I'm striking back in the same capacity he struck at me. Claims to be hurt by the ending of a friendship, without telling he ended it and without sharing his own darkness. I called him out with the lengthy bit on how some things are seen and some things aren't seen.

Now is it mature to have been seeking vengeance? Absolutely not. It never is mature. Vengeance is typically a luxury most people cannot afford not because it is expensive, but because it can be costly in other ways and it consumes one's life and disallows the enjoyment of many other things if all you want in life is vengeance against someone or something.

So there you have it. A whole research paper's worth of information and talks on how vengeful I have been. Is it my proudest moment? No. But did it make me feel balanced/justified? Maybe. All I want is that if you want to end friendship with me, that's fine. But just don't play the victim and say you're hurt because you're not telling everyone else everything. You're not telling them you tried to use me as your entire support system and when I left you're blaming me for your suicide attempts. Now maybe it's not all on me the blame, but it sure sounded like that my absence led to the push towards attempting suicide. So no, I will not be entertaining anyone who thinks they can just omit the majority of the conversations and truth and claim the end of something hurt. Maybe it does hurt, but then explain it. Don't make it seem like I was the only evil here. Am I evil, yes absolutely in some degree I am, but it's not all on me.

Riddle Me This

Before I begin, the following post is more for my entertainment and contains spoilers for The Batman (2022), so this is your warning to not continue reading on after this point. You have been warned.

Now, moving on, I'm not reviewing the movie in this post (not like how I did a couple years back when I saw the movie The Joker (2019) but I will be discussing some points about it as it is pertinent to my little bit of fun.

 The movie's main antagonist was Edward Nashton, a.k.a. The Riddler, and there were some solid riddles/puzzles to be solved by Batman as the movie progressed through the roughly 1 week time span as the crimes were committed and Batman tries to solve and apprehend part of his Rogues Gallery in his now second year of fighting crime.

This Riddler made usage of substitution ciphers and left coded words that can be used to give Batman a clue of what's to come or what the next step has to be. Some of the puzzles when solved don't make as much sense to him initially, but then as the words are said and thought out, it reads as something that is rather ambiguous to what the initial decoding meant.

As the film ends, some viewers (like myself) are wondering, "what happens if you try going to rataalada.com (something within the movie)?" If you do, you will eventually get a prompt to "CLICK FOR A REWARD" (don't worry this is official Warner Bros site, it's not harmful, or if it is, whoops).

This is the "reward":

It is a coded message utilizing the same substitution cipher used in the film.

Now I looked at it and figured that it must be solvable, otherwise why have an interactive website that leads to an image of random letters and symbols, or just symbols since there aren't any actual letters within the English alphabet present at first glance. I'm not a professional puzzle solver so if left to my own devices, I wouldn't know how to start taking a crack at it. All I would know is that if it is trying to say something that you got to try to count any repeating symbols and treat them as (most likely) vowels. From there, slowly break through it as the letters are assembled and see what repeats throughout and what doesn't. I guess that means a trial and error method and it could be time consuming.

However, I had an edge because all I had to do was do 2 Google searches and I solved it on my own (with the assistance of the Google searches. No I did not ask Google what the answer was, I just needed to look at some of the previous riddles shown in the movie as I figured that it would have to correlate otherwise we'd be dead in the water and have to start from scratch). Luckily my searches proved to be fruitful. Using the answer for the first riddle in the movie for "What does a liar do when he's dead?" as well as the second puzzle's solution, there was enough in each of those two (of which everything used the same cipher) to crack it.

It made me feel good because it was a fun little way to keep me, as the consumer, engaged and thinking about the movie. And considering that I once claimed the mantle of the Batman (I mean have you seen the title of this here blog?), I figured this was a good way to test my mental strength. It's not a super hard test considering I had resources and was able to crack through it using it, but still a fun little brain exercise.

Okay so all of this rambling for what? Well, I solved the above puzzle. It took me about 40 minutes. The initial minutes were spent just staring at it to see if I can recognize where certain symbols repeated to try to formulate what letter it might be. After about 10 minutes, I decided to do some digging. I searched for the image of the first riddle, and then used that as a reference to start assembling letters out of the mess of the symbols. From there I began to get a little stumped as the letters within "HE LIES STILL" have several repeating letters and it doesn't get you very far. Eventually I thought about the next puzzle which spelled out "YOU ARE EL RATA ALADA" which can be found on some of the promotional imagery to get a good look at the symbols used there. From that second solution, I was able to pull enough different letters to have the majority of words within my grasp and then it was a simple process of filling in the remaining blanks and seeing if those newly guessed blanks were also in any other words.

And the result?

"YOU THINK IM FINISHED BUT PERHAPS YOU DONT KNOW THE FULL TRUTH EVERY ENDING IS A NEW BEGINNING SOMETHING IS COMING"

Don't mind the chicken scratch of handwriting, I did this on my phone and used my finger to write it out

After seeing this final puzzle solved, it leads to one thinking, "well yeah we could've figured that much since there's no way that the Riddler getting locked up next to the Joker (who wasn't officially established yet, but context clues confirm it) would be the end of them. Especially considering Batman was only in his second year of crusading to clean up Gotham's streets." But it still was quite a lot of fun as I slowly pieced it together.

Like I said, while I do like to tote this as I solved it, I had help from the already solved riddles from the movie. I definitely wouldn't be sharp enough to be like Batman just yet, but what's a little fun and imagination going to do?

So enjoy my few moments of detective work or what have you, and let me enjoy my moment.

maybe i am the problem

sometimes i think to myself that i want to do x thing differently, i want to be beyond what i saw in myself as bad and improve myself. even in the new things i had feared that i would get in too deep with something and then be cast out because of my decisions. and in the end i ultimately did the same thing i had done the last time. i thought it was going to be different, and it is in the sense it wasn't the same actions but similar enough.

i cannot be trusted with power. i cannot be given a position of authority without the chance of me intentionally using the power in a wrong way. it corrupts me

the last time this happened it was because i couldn't deal with the person who was being rude to me and so what i did impede their ability to interact online within a community. this time it was a false sense of something that i would be able to do something and not have it affect me in the end.

i never hold myself accountable and given the chance to run or to escape, i do and just hope the problem disappears on its own and doesn't come back to burn me later on. when i am questioned i try to deflect or move on, however i am not as subtle or secretive as i may think i am

i have a problem with being honest sometimes. i get this seed of an idea from viewing what is fine or acceptable and then if something matches enough conditions, i think that maybe i can do the same and not have to worry about it.

what do i do with myself? i am too prideful to accept the results of my actions and my inactions from running away from what i had perceived to be a problem. people are a lot more understanding than i realize and give credit for, is this because i have no real way to express my feelings or thoughts or emotions? i mean i have this space here but who cares about any of the things i write here, i mean no one ever mentions it, so i don't even know if anyone reads it aside from a little view counter on the back end of having creator control or whatever when i view this blog from my desktop.

all i had to do was explain myself. or better yet just stop thinking about yourself and think about other people. to realize actions have consequences which i should've realized back in 2020, and i claim that i do recognize it, yet here i am again. just to realize that no one cares or is responsible for the way i feel about any damn thing, that if i get offended or feel tilted, toxic, angered, discomforted, you name it, all because of the presence of someone, i don't get to remove them and not explain myself.

the real course of action should've just been to block the account on my end and just deal with not necessarily catching on to the context of a conversation if there are noticeable gaps in between what is said from what is still viewable. i even had a third party app on my desktop to hide the display of "blocked messages" in discord, and it worked for awhile until i got fed up with seeing supposed unreads because discord itself just sees it as normal and the extension i downloaded was simply to fix aesthetics and not a real be all end all.

so what happens now? well nothing. it's been set as a perceived thing that i am offline from discord supposedly to focus on schooling, and partially it is true because i did spend a lot of time on discord and wasted many a hour just trying to post memes, send tiktoks, etc because my subconscious was driven by the leveling up system and that i had to make my way to some imaginary number that ultimately meant nothing more beyond how active or how much one spams the server in reality. the other piece is just running from accountability and responsibility, and as i occasionally open discord anyways on my desktop (seeing as i have deleted the app from my phone) that i have been removed from positions of digital power as a result from my lack of explaining anything. even if i did try to explain it, how do i even approach it beyond i get irritated or feel like i am in a worse state of mind if i see someone active in chats that i didn't get along with.

i mean if i don't get along with someone but it's only me, then i don't get to just ban them because i can't handle it. or even if i was able to or allowed to do that, i should be ready to explain it if someone asks instead of running away when i had a chance to ask for forgiveness for my action. the saying goes it's easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission, but if i'm not going to ask for either then what is the point and maybe i was on some self-righteous power trip and should never be allowed to control or have power ever.

maybe this is the lesson i needed to learn all these years, to just be a follower rather than a leader. people always tell me i should lead that i need to be a leader, and if need be i'll step up to the plate. but sometimes it's unnecessary for me to be there and if i get complacent or if i think i become untouchable, i corrupt insanely easily. i am a weak man and don't deserve a damn thing in life

the corruption existed in two different discord servers now, granted the first one there was other corruption too, but this one was fine until i walked through the damn door

maybe i should leave the server and just walk away with my tail between my legs so to speak. but if i do that now, considering i was just demoted today, it will appear as if i left because of the demotion, and that makes me the manipulative one. and here i was telling some random person who inquired about a former roommate if they are a good person or not to meet up with for a first time and i lit the ground on fire all around my former roommate deeming them as the manipulative one. oh how the turntables, am i right

i don't really know what else to say because i didn't even intend for this to be as long as it is. the thoughts might not even be coherent, but i'm not in a good spot and it's because i am realizing i didn't grow, i didn't change, i didn't become more than i was before, in fact i became less. i became a monster, i am not vengeance, i am not the night, i am not batman. batman although he is fictional, would not be as crass or rash as i am or have been over these last few years.

damn it all to hell, and screw everything i've ever cared about. now i know why i am never in a relationship because i am so fucking childish. some things that people have said about me in the past are now finally visible to myself, i cannot get myself to grow up because i always live in a fucking fantasyland. i don't deserve to have friends, i don't deserve to have anything that i do have today. i don't deserve to ever find joy or happiness because i am too full of myself that i think i can do what i want with zero consequence and i only want to chase things that raise my status, yet i am not doing anything that truly makes me good

i am the problem