Good morning everyone!

[Arekiz]

Good morning everyone! As this seems to be an important post for me to make for the sake of keeping my existence, I will give a long and detailed story of my journey from the beginning to how I got here for no reason.  I hope my random midnight ramblings find you at the weirdest time of your life and confuse you as to why I'm sharing such pointless things.  Here we go.

After signing up for this forum, I spent a bit over a week waiting for an activation email and never got one. I was very sad thinking I was rejected for some unknown reason and wasn't going to be able to join this community.  I've been visiting for years and at one point many years ago even made an account, although apparently it was deleted at some point (I must not have seen the inactivity rules back then). 

I love this place but was always dissuaded from making an account because of the message saying you don't need an account to lurk and that lurker accounts would probably be deleted.  Realistically, while I did find myself wanting to leave a reply on a post or start a post myself every so often, I must admit those times were far and few in between.  I came to terms with the fact that I do usually just lurk and therefore decided if it was just going to be an inconvenience to the forum I should simply refrain from making an account.

Fast forward to me trying to find a certain novel on this forum.  I couldn't find it anywhere on this site despite searching for a while nor could I find it anywhere else.  That is until I randomly stumbled upon a link to what seemed to be a post on this forum for that novel.  But then when I clicked it, I was hit with the login page.  That was when I realized some things were behind the member wall. I briefly considered making an account, but then remembered the lurker thing, and after weighing my options I decided I would give up on the novel and continue my lurking ways. 

This happened several times after that, and every time my day would be ruined.  However, I would always convince myself that it was for the greater good that I give up on creating an account and so time passed in this manner with the list of novels I gave up on growing bigger and bigger.

Finally we get back to the most recent development.  I had once again discovered a novel I was interested in and once again I couldn't seem to find it anywhere except on this forum but the link that I believed contained what I desired was also once again blocked by the login page.  Something must've snapped inside me at that point, and in what I can only imagine was a fit of insanity, I proceeded to create an account.  I ignored all the warnings about being a lurker.  I was determined to not let anyone stop me from finally reaching my desired novels!  That's when I met the final boss.  The notice that I would be receiving an email for verification and would have to wait for that before I could activate my account.

At the time I thought nothing of it.  Activation emails have been around for a long time.  It is nothing new.  Nothing to be feared.  Or so I thought.  The first few days I hardly gave it a thought.  I just went about my day and occasionally checked my email.  Not a worry in my mind.  Then when the fourth day passed I started growing impatient.  I checked my email more and more often.  Refreshing, checking spam, checking different inboxes, making sure I was on the right email.  Nothing.  A couple more days passed like this and yet no activation email was to be found.

When it got to about a week, I started wondering if something was wrong.  Maybe I had put in the wrong email.  Maybe the email sender was broken.  Maybe account creation wasn't functional.  Maybe... I was rejected.  I decided I would forget about it for a few days and check back in after some time because fretting over it was clearly not helping anyone. 

More days passed after that.  I had stopped checking.  I had almost even forgotten about it.  That is until, I once again came across the novel I had started this whole journey for to begin with.  Once again I tried searching everywhere I could for it.  And once again the only place that hinted at its existence was the link to this forum, blocked by the login page.

It all came back to me in that moment.  The insanity that led to me creating the account.  The determination to not be stopped from creating the account for the sake of the novel.  The nightmarish wait for the accursed activation email.  The ever creeping dread of potentially having been rejected without any notice.

For some unknown reason I decided I would try logging in at that moment.  I had no reason to believe it would work.  And yet I tried anyway.  And then the website stopped responding for about 30 seconds and I had no idea what was happening.  I even feared for a moment that I was getting locked out.  That's when the page finished loading and there, sitting majestically above a black line at the top left of the page, was my username.  I was logged in.

Confused and dazed, I stared as the page that once held nothing but the login page had transformed into the novel that had eluded me for over a week.  My journey was complete.  I had arrived at my desired destination.

I am still not sure if there's an activation email I'm supposed to be waiting for.  There is a post somewhere that says un-activated accounts are deleted after 24 hours so I have no idea what happened there.  Maybe my account will spontaneously be deleted for not being activated.  I really hope not.  But if it is, hopefully my story will remain for all those that are not at all interested in reading it but will read it anyway out of pure curiosity.  And with that, I will now sleep.  As I must wake up and go to work very soon and will probably be incredibly sleep deprived due to spending time writing this for absolutely no reason.

Until we meet again. (hopefully I can beat this captcha code to even get this posted since I'm really bad at them...)