About 2013 is when it all started. the week before my 21st birthday was the worst week of my life. At the start, I more or less lost my job. In the middle my mp3 player died. At this point, I figured it couldn't get much worse than that...

And that's when the week was capped off with my grandmother dying.

Needless to say, when I turned 21, I needed a drink.

Still, the situation on RT was more or less normal. I was keeping up with the RP and forum replies, as well as new episodes of Red vs Blue, and there was no indication of anything different.

It was around the middle of 2013 when it started. Most of the forums I followed, the Freelancer RP being the most noticeable, the replies just... dried up. They ground to a halt. And sure, it was likely due to me having a small list of forums I followed, but it still felt bad to see. 2014 was nowhere near as good to me as the end of 2012, but it wasn't near as bad as what was to come. I had a decent amount of spending money coming in from mowing the neighbor's lawn, and to top it off, my niece was born in June of that year. I was still feeling pretty good.

That would change when 2015 rolled around.

Time I would've spent hanging out here and engaging in my Green Lantern RP was quickly overtaken by job application after job application as I searched desperately for a job. I had no money in my account and the neighbor moved away, so while I wasn't homeless thanks to living with my folks, I was more or less broke. It was around either this point or the very end of 2014 that my sponsorship was no longer renewed, and ran out. Not that I noticed, being so focused on looking for work. As if that weren't bad enough, my laptop had died, forcing me to use a then 6 or 7 year old laptop I was using to experiment with a Windows/Linux dual-boot (For those curious, this system was named  Eta and Iota. I would refer to the whole laptop as "The Twins"). This laptop, while far more functional than I anticipated, didn't have the hardware to browse RT regularly, forcing me to begin my 4 year absence. And during that time, things changed...

I'll cover that next time. Until then, some music...