Editorial: The Last Lecture

Full disclosure before we begin, folks — this post will focus on my career, my reflections, my personal thoughts, and will be extremely me-centered. If you don’t like me, you won’t like my anything; in which case, this post isn’t for you and I encourage you to skip past it. 

Of the various changes I introduced or were part of during my time here at CPA Central, the thing I would most not want to see the site without today, is editorials. The popularization of opinion and the idea that yes, CPA Central’s editors could be biased, and yes, that was okay in some cases. Now, it’s not like we’re going to go making ACP first every week (hell, if we wanted to do that, I’d just promote Kingfunks4), but CPAC’s opinion column has forever changed the way armies view the media, and I could not be more proud of that change.

I feel that this post, I owe to myself and owe to you guys. Let me explain what I mean. For a long time now I’ve toyed with the idea of a post that covered all the major bases — a post that, at the end, left you with the conclusion that this is Club Penguin Armies, and god damn it, I’m here. However, at no point in my army career have I felt that I had experienced enough, seen enough, and was in a good enough position to write that post — until now. This is, in a way, everything I’ve wanted to say that I haven’t said so far. I owe it to myself so I can finally clear my mind of these ideas, and I owe it to you guys because without you, there would be no one to listen to me talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. I really hope you enjoy this post, because I had a hell of a time writing it.

Table of Contents

I. The Second Golden Age

II. Cliches of the Community (All The Bulls***!)

III. Success and Its Relevance

IV. The New Word on 2007

V. The Endless Buffer

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I. The Second Golden Age

The period of time spanning the large majority of 2013 and ending somewhere prior to the Summer of 2014 has been coined, by many, as a Golden Age — the second, more specifically; the first having for a long time been recognized as 2008-2009. It was, for sure, a time to remember in the Club Penguin Army Community. The Rebel Penguin Federation, which had spent years wallowing in mediocrity, rose to world power status at the onset of the summer, largely due to a figure known as Elmikey and his push for the widespread use of the autotyper. The Rebel Penguin Federation, in their need to go only up, would eventually take on the Nachos, with Puckley at the helm. That war, among others and the community-changing stories throughout 2013, would leave us calling it the Second Golden Age before the year was up.

In 2009, the CP Army Council was reformed to help armies in the community reach larger sizes through the use of recruiting. In the early days of armies, the years of 2006 and 2007, recruiting was hardly necessary, because armies’ constant presence on Club Penguin made them widely known and made certain that users of the MMO were constantly stumbling across them. It was only after our migration away from constant Club Penguin patrolling that we started to see a loss in troops and, thus, a need for recruiting. The Army of Club Penguin, under Boomer 20, was doing better than it ever had before, and this Council had the goal of helping other armies to do the same.

In 2011, two retired CEOs of CP Army Central and widely respected members of the community — Woton and Sklooperis — proposed reformations of army councils in the form of a Senate. Also, that year, Shaboomboom, Person1233 and Boomer 20, among others, pioneered the Anti-Hacking Bill as a first line of defense against cheating, scamming, and hacking in the warfare community. The CP Army Council of 2012 reformed because of a need to get back to recruiting and to overcome the massive moral issue that was beginning to plague armies.

Let’s get the record straight on something quickly before we continue. As I argued in Editorial: Why The Chaos of 2012 Happened, Councils, while not inherently (or always) good, can help and do help to better the community and better the warfare outlook. The major obstacle Councils have to succeeding is because  the pour soul who, as a community center, decides to stand behind it, finds themselves personally victimized. Take the Council of 2012 for example — all kinds of armies, on both sides of World War VI, seceded from the Council before it was over because they felt they were being “controlled.” Reality is, if Boomer 20 or myself really wanted to control you, we’d just force you to follow our belief systems to be featured in the Top Ten and, though that wouldn’t have worked 3 years ago, it would damn sure work right now, because the Top Ten Armies is your golden idol.

The good news for you (though seceded armies of 2012 may tell you otherwise) is that none of us have it out to control all of armies and bend them to our every whim, and if you’re going to oppose an Army Council, that’s one of the most idiotic ways to do it. I mean, come on, if we had appointed Camplazlo3 as Council President, I’d understand your fear, but fearing the Council because of the person who runs it is pretty low when Councils throughout the years have been overseen by names like Boomer 20, Woton and Sklooperis. If you can’t trust Army Legends to run your Council, who can you trust?

The reason these kinds of people step up to run Councils is not because they’re looking to advance their career — I assure your Boomer and Woton consider their careers and their recognition as one of the ten most important people ever in armies to be more than enough to retire on. It’s because they know what armies were “before,” whatever the before in this case is, and want to overcome the major obstacle that’s stopping us from being that again. In 2009, Boomer wanted to show other armies how to be as big as his ACP by recruiting — and you’ll be hard pressed to find a more selfless goal than that. Woton and Sklooperis tried to form Councils in 2011, not because they wanted CPA Central to become the literal army Illuminati, mind you, but because they genuinely cared about the future of armies and realized we were coming to a tipping point, which we were (see: 2012.)

To talk about the Second Golden Age, it’s impossible not to talk about the large thing that looms in everyone’s mind: 2012. I’ll be the first to go on the record by saying that 2012 was a major clusterfuck ( 😀 ), not at any fault of the folks behind the Council, but if you’re really interested in who was at fault, you can go read the post I linked earlier. Let’s move on.

The 2009 Council rose out of a need to get sizes back (through recruiting) and establish some basic rules, the 2011 attempts at a Council rose out of a need to relinquish the cheating that was happening and establish some basic rules, the 2012 Council rose out of a need to get sizes back (through recruiting) and to relinquish the cheating and immense moral plague that was spreading through armies, along with (shockingly) establishing some basic rules. I’m sure you can find the pattern in that.

The point is, successful eras in Club Penguin Armies rise out of acceptance. To overcome the reason we, as a community, aren’t being successful, or why one army is so much more successful than everyone else, we have to first admit there’s a problem. And look, we’ve been trying to figure out some basic rules since ANTA, so the real question is, why can’t we just establish some, update them periodically, and get on with our lives? Well, that’s because the 2012 Council failed.

If it hadn’t, maybe this extreme BURJN ALL MORAFLS crusade wouldn’t be happening. The Second Golden Age of 2013 was great, really, it was — and do you know why it was great? It was great, because once the smoke cleared after World War VI, we were finally able to see that all this flagrant disregard for authority, and moreover, flagrant disregard for respect, wouldn’t help in a community that relied on the maturity of teenagers. So for, maybe a year, we still had these issues, but we did a little better. We worked together just a little bit more. And I bet you’d be hard pressed to find someone who wouldn’t tell you that was damn cool.

And as the person who had a hand in all of CPA Central’s major stories during this respect/morality issue, I can tell you that we get tired of it. And, as Boomer so accurately stated in Editorial: Why We May Never See An End to the Scandals:

Club Penguin Armies are held together by a thin fabric of fairness and trust. What rules we do have are not set in stone; you will not go to jail or pay fines for breaking them. They are merely there to be guidelines so that we can all play fair and have fun. This fairness is based on trust. We have to trust that we are all competing fairly. If multilogging is allowed to persist, this level of trust will be destroyed. It is trust that leads us to determine which army is the biggest, the best, and most deserving of the highest honors. We trust that the armies who take the battlefield with us are representative of the loyal soldiers who fight for their cause, and not represented by a small group of individuals doing anything they can to inflate sizes in the pursuit of personal gain.

In case you haven’t caught the gist of that, it’s that so far, 2014 has been pathetic. Here’s the reality, folks: we experienced a Second Golden Age in 2013, and that was great, and we tried to ride the wave. Now the wave’s crashed. And it’s not over because armies are smaller — hell, 2014 Dark Warriors were bigger than 2013 Rebel Penguin Federation, and 2014 Light Troops were of similar size to 2013 Nachos. So why have we all drawn the line and declared the Second Golden Age over? Because you can’t stop cheating; you can’t find it in your hearts to have some tiny shred of respect for those of us who are trying to create a fair community. You all would rather watch the thin fabric of this community ripped apart for your personal gain. You’ll tell your troops to multi-log and you’ll edit some pictures and you’ll take over an army and then you’ll lead it to decent heights and then hop to a new one and do the exact same thing.

So the way I see it, I mean, fuck it, why don’t I just multi-log, edit my battle results, and overthrow everyone above me? I could become a CP Army Legend. 

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II. Cliches of the Community (All The Bulls***!)

Like any great internet community, we have some cliches here — okay, we have way too many cliches here. And of all the cliches for people and ideas that are leading this community toward a never-before-seen level of sad, I’ve narrowed it down into four major points. Let’s begin.

• Deception Junkies

I intentionally avoid calling you guys “hackers” because the sad truth of the matter is, you aren’t. If you were, you wouldn’t be toying around with 10-year-olds on a Club Penguin community. This, of course, isn’t just limited to those who threaten to hack sites: it’s scammers, RATers, raid groups, defacers, anyone who tries to take advantage of a user through any form of deception and is one of the oldest things to bother Club Penguin Armies.

Ever since our migration to Xat and WordPress back in say, 2007, this kind of behavior has been popular. Let’s go part by part. First of all, very few (if any) capable hackers have ever been part of the army community, and if they became capable, they moved on from our sorry MMO. Those who remain cannot find any respect anywhere else, so they resort to instilling fear or frustration in pre-teens or teens and considering themselves successful for it.

Those who deface sites like to consider themselves hackers — and that’s somewhat the fault of army media — the reality is, of course, that you find a nice loophole to spread pornography all over a site (see: SMAC) or just delete its contents entirely, instilling chaos in the administration for about two hours before they decide to move on with their lives. Defacing is especially sad if it comes as a result of frustration over being fired — if you were so terrible at the job you were hired to do that you were fired, the last thing you should be doing is defacing the site of an army that’s moving on and leaving you behind.

There isn’t much to say about scamming other than the fact that it’s low, low, low, low. Even more low, however, is going around after you got scammed and advertising a “DONATE.TO.ME” campaign. You were the idiot who got scammed, and you don’t deserve any new powers. If it seems to good to be true, it is, which brings us to something else, that being RATs. RATs are probably the thing that’s most recently in our minds, and the solution to that is very simple: don’t be stupid and click suspicious links, because the people who are doing it are already too low beyond redemption and have decided they are too good for this community.

• Ruining the Fun of Armies

This can be viewed both internally and externally. To begin with, let’s talk internally, and the problem with armies internally nowadays is that they aren’t as much fun anymore. And no, I’m not about to start saying we need to bring back 2007 warfare — armies aren’t fun anymore for a different reason. Quick story; when my brother (Bluesockwa2) and I joined ACP officially in March of 2009, the army was in a Golden Age. Though I never got that far in the army, Bluesockwa2 got as high as Fifth in Command of the army — one rank below Division General, and two below owner. And here’s a fun fact: despite scheduled recruiting sessions, he never autotyped or recruited a day in his life.

Armies aren’t fun anymore for troops because I should be able to be a god damn ACP member — hell, I should be able to be an ACP mod — without having to spend an hour of my life every day autotyping or recruiting on Club Penguin. I shouldn’t have to help new recruits figure out how to fill out a join application, and I shouldn’t have to tone down what I want to talk about on chat so that these recruits feel at home — I miss that ACP, and I miss that kind of army. You know who’s supposed to recruit? Owners. High mods, maybe. Those who sign up to specifically be in a Recruiting Force. And other than that, the job of keeping new recruits flowing in shouldn’t be the job of members, and I should be able to get a promotion for attended battles, like I could in 2009. If you need everyone in the army to help you do that, then you’re not good owners.

Externally, war has lost all of its good. In case anyone here has forgotten, war used to be what made armies rise, and what made armies better. World Wars in armies have steadily depleted, from one every year, to one every two years, and now we’re reaching 2015 and we haven’t had a major World War since 2012. We’re scared to fight wars because we’re scared to admit defeat, and scared that we won’t do well in the Top Ten, and scared that we won’t get CP Army Legend, and scared that people won’t respect us. I’ll bet you army leaders in 2007 were scared too — and back then, there was a World War every year.

It’s not that we’re different people now — that’s a human trait, and that’s normal. It’s that risk-taking is the entire reason you should be recognized for your success, because you took a chance, and maybe you succeeded and maybe you failed, but at least you took one. But instead, you curled up in a ball and refused to admit that an agreed-upon score was actually helpful in a war, so you made up your own, and when you were attacked for it, you pointed fingers and said you weren’t the only one. Well change has to start somewhere.

• Obsessing Over the Top Ten

This has been covered time and time again, and I’ve said it before. The Top Ten started out as an opinion piece, and it’s still an opinion piece, but somewhere along the line, in 2012 or 2013, we started seeing this massive spike in Top Ten influence and then the rankings became armies’ Golden Cow and then army leaders started abusing the rankings and they’re still doing it now, because it’s not like you can judge success from war, because war is dead nowadays, so let’s get the best Top Ten score we can. In case you haven’t noticed by now, everything, and I mean everything, is related.

Back in 2009 and even up until 2011, the Top Ten might come out every two weeks, and maybe one week it wouldn’t be based on size but on site graphics, and maybe one week it’d be based on who won the recent tournament, and maybe one week it’d be based on who’s had the best track record, and that was okay, because people read it and didn’t obsess over it, so the folks at CPA Central could experiment.

We’re locked in now, and people blame us for the influence of the Top Ten? Blame yourselves. You’ve become obsessed with this thing — you get out of bed for it, you calculate it yourself, you nitpick and nitpick for small issues in hopes of inching above your competition because no, god forbid you go to war with them, just inch above them in the Top Ten. You think it’s frustrating to be ranked low in the Top Ten? Imagine how frustrating it is writing it.

• A Struggling Relationship With Reality

A surprising majority of armies’ problems stem from the fact that nowadays, people create the facts they want to hear. It leads to propaganda, it leads to scandals, it leads to flame wars (or just wars), and it leads to a demonization of correct intelligence and, therefore, a downfall of morality. There’s a difference between “fairness” and “balance.” You don’t need balance to be fair, and that’s something many people in this community struggle to understand. If the Indigo Warriors edit pictures, it may be balanced to pretend it’s disputed, but it’s not fair. What would be fair is to report what really happened: the Indigo Warriors edited pictures.

The issue is that sometimes, when the truth is reported, armies attack the media for “victimizing” them, essentially blaming the messenger. If you mutli-logged, it’s not my fault for reporting that you multi-logged, it’s your fault for doing it in the first place. This sort of denial is why the moral downfall of armies is happening and why it shows no signs of stopping. We can report as many people as we want for multi-logging, but there’s no real way to penalize them for it, and there’s no real way to change anyone’s minds. Those who believe it’s wrong will continue to believe it’s wrong, and those who believe it doesn’t matter will continue to believe it doesn’t matter.

In the same way, to spread propaganda through your army, you have to believe that it isn’t inherently wrong to spread this propaganda. Also a possibility is that you believe the sorry lies you’re telling, in which case you should seek further help, but let’s not get into that just yet. When you post incorrect information and spread it to your troops (especially who your members, many of whom aren’t even teens yet), you’re making a conscious effort to incorrectly inform them, and in many cases turn them into more hateful people. In case you didn’t know, that’s bad. 

Lucky for you, however, I have developed an eight-point system to figure out how detrimental you are to the advancement of armies, depending on how many of these 8 points you can check off as applying to you. 0-2 being survivable, 3-4 being threatening, 5-6 being detrimental, and 7-8 being why are you still here? 

Every event my army has must have over 15 troops, and if it does not, I will either multi-log, edit pictures, or not post the event.

All my troops must recruit for at least an hour a day, otherwise they are fired.

Running an army is hard work and, despite the fact that I signed up for this, I deserve universal respect for it.

The best way to solve any problem is blame it on someone else (see: army media.)

Having the correct size counts isn’t good enough anymore – exaggeration is the key to success!

If my army is not in the Top Ten during a specific week, it is obviously evidence of a pervasive campaign against me and not my own fault.

No matter the cause, a tournament loss is directly a result of a media Illuminati of epic proportions.

Gaining the advantage in a war is best done by never admitting defeat.

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III. Success and Its Relevance

Here’s a short anecdote: In 2013, when Capncook and Tori were Co-Leaders of the Army of CP, and names like Flipmoo, Fluffyboy3 and Cassius Brutus were owners in the army, ACP held elections for senate. At the time, I was a moderator rank in the army, and being effectively the leading politician of the community, I felt it was only natural to run. Though some higher-ranking ACP doubted the success I would have in the election because I was not essentially ACP-centered (which I wasn’t, I was CPAC-centered) the margins by which I won the election were almost comical. I secured one of the five moderator positions in the ACP Senate with more votes than any other moderator who ran, any other owner who ran for Senate Chair, and only losing to one ACP member in the elections for five member ranks.

Though it may surprise you, this story really does have a higher purpose than glorifying my career — if I really wanted to talk about my career, ACP Senator isn’t really that high on the list of achievements. But from election margins like that one and accolades like the various I have received throughout my career, I believe it is fair to say that I have been successful. I have achieved success in armies, by the definition of, well, most. I set a series of goals for myself and went through a roller-coaster ride of a career — some events were predetermined, and some took me by surprise, but I have come out of it with an impressive track record.

I’m far from one of the greatest CP Army Legends — in fact, some would argue I’m not one at all. I am, however, among the few who can claim to have defined an era. And I’m far from the only one — I could probably name you a shortlist of one hundred of the most important people in armies, say, 20 per era. I would start by naming the legends of the era, and then leaders of other powerful armies or influential news sites, and I could come up with at least one hundred figures. If you tried hard enough, you could probably squeeze out at least two hundred fifty.

So, of the thousands of people that have come and gone in this community, what defines someone as successful? 

Well, unfortunately, the approximately 10% of individuals that would be considered important to warfare’s progression are just a subset of a much larger majority. Who’s successful in this community? Well, everyone. I’ve got good news for you: no matter who you are, be you the leader of the Dark Warriors or a member rank in the Redemption Force, you’re part of the 100%. There is no 99% here in armies; no margin of those who are “oppressed” and not as a good as those of us who are lucky enough to have our name on the Legends Page. I am a six-year warfare veteran, holding various accolades in major armies, the founder of SM Army Press and CP Army World Media, I have been elected to CP Army Legend and have served as CPA Central CEO in the site’s most prosperous time — but above all, I’m a person, just like you.

I wasn’t ranting about my career successes for the sake of my ego — even though, I grant you, I have one — I was ranting about my career successes to make a point. During the time I have worked here at CPA Central, the very type of post I am writing right now has commonly been used to attack events, people, and ideals that go against what I consider to be the progression of armies as we know them — or, a crusade against stupidity. I have generally been viewed as thinking myself superior to most because of the way I attacked many prominent figures, and I guess rightfully so.

The message I’m trying to get across to you is that, in reality, I do not consider myself superior to anyone, and no one here is inferior to me. Each leader, and each member of the army community, should share this ideal. No, that doesn’t mean flame posts are inherently satanic and that doesn’t mean attacking people for being detrimental to warfare is a bad thing, but what it does mean is that above all, we’re all people. And 100% of the people here have been successful, because success is just chasing after the goals you have set for yourself. If that goal is abandoning warfare because you would rather hang out with friends, you’re successful at making the choice you wanted to make.

To the influential out there, I’m not better than any of you, and you’re not better than any of your troops. Everyone is successful, and though your definition may not be the same as theirs, only that person can decide for themselves if they consider their achievements successful. But do them a favor, because most likely, they don’t: be the bigger person, and even if it means pretending, give them the respect they give you. 

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IV. The New Word On 2007

Of all the topics I brush upon in this post, one thing that has really pushed my buttons (especially recently) has been the glorification of old eras, specifically what is considered old warfare, old tactics, and the year that is 2007. I consider myself one of the most modern individuals in this community, because despite the long amount time I have spent here, I am forced as CPA Central CEO to constantly keep moving with the changing times, and more often than not I am the one making the decision as to whether or not the times will change, when new ideas come to CPA Central for support. Maybe it’s because of that job or maybe it’s just because of the way that I view the world, but I am inherently progressive.

The word progress, in English, comes from the Latin verb progredior (progredi, progressus sum), meaning to march forward, or to advance. It is this philosophy of advancement that I believe governs the world, and governs army warfare. The reality is, progress is taking you along for the ride whether you like it or not, so you might as well accept it. I believe that this community is moving forward, for better or for worse, but there are clear examples of what should be opposed and what shouldn’t be opposed.

The moral downfall of our community is something that likely cannot be stopped at this point — and if you want to oppose that, and say we need to go back to old warfare to avoid cheating, your cause is noble, and though you’re likely to be unsuccessful, there are far worse things to support. This downfall of morals, which many of us at CPA Central have crusaded against, is detrimental to the progress of the community — many Op-Eds on CPAC can give you all the information you’re looking for regarding that topic.

This is honestly one of the very few reasons you should be looking to retrogress our community. The reason more commonly argued, however, is that armies aren’t as fun anymore, and that the only way for armies to be fun again is for us to abandon making lines and doing tactics. There’s a few things wrong with that statement. First off, armies are still fun, they’re just fun in different ways — if I had to choose between being able to come on Xat and see friends of mine or running around throwing snowballs, I’d choose the first option, and I’m pretty sure many would agree with me. The changes in the way we battle are the consequence of invention, and progress.

Is this to say that battles in 2007 weren’t fun? No, they were fun; I fought in a few of them as a rogue. But I can guarantee you that chasing around rogue factions and throwing snowballs would get pretty boring too; the reason people remember 2007 in such a light is because they were eleven, not eighteen. No matter what we are doing on Club Penguin — even having sex —  it will be boring by the time you turn eighteen, maybe even thirteen or older. Ages changes our look on the games we play — hence why Club Penguin isn’t even meant for people our age.

The final reason that the battles associated with Club Penguin aren’t fun anymore is that war isn’t fun anymore. How can you enjoy “fighting” an army on Club Penguin (even if that fight is a dance-off) if you know that as soon as the battle is over, you’ll have to fight with representatives of the opposing army for a half hour before eventually agreeing to disagree, which is why 3 armies, on average, own a server.

You cannot save armies if you cannot even agree on who won a single server in a day-long offensive.

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V. The Endless Buffer

If you’ve stuck with me to this point, you’ve read 5,000 words on what Club Penguin Armies are — many of those words negative. And as I become more and more of a community veteran, I find that there is much to be negative about — especially when it comes to the path in which we’re going. Hell, you’ve made Bluesockwa2 such a cynic in regards to armies that at this point all he does is mock everything that goes on. Over the past few weeks, the September Drop has hit harder than I’ve ever seen; there have been days where I could hardly find an active chatroom. It is certain that someday, this community will come to an end, so you and I are engaged in an endless buffering process in hopes of prolonging that life for as long as possible. Now that I’ve talked to you about many of the ways in which this community will destroy itself — those being a distrust of authority, an obsession with ruin, a reliance on grasping “success,” and a severe fear of progress — I want to close talking to you about the human experience.

The human condition encompasses the unique features of being human, particularly the ultimate concerns of human existence. It can be described as the unalterable part of humanity that is inherent and innate to human beings and not dependent on factors such as gender, race, culture, or class. It includes concerns such as the meaning of life, the search for gratification, the sense of curiosity, the inevitability of isolation, and the awareness of the inescapability of death.

This community is unique, and above all unique in the way that no one built anything for us. Everything we have, and everything we do, is as the result of our own ideas and ambitions. We bring about our own success and our own failure, and if in twenty years these chats are all dead (which they most likely will be), what will remain is the feeling that we did something, and no one held our hand while we did it. This community is, essentially, a trial run of the human experience, and every central principal of the human condition can be applied to the experiences each and every one of us has in this community.

Everyone here searches for meaning — meaning to their career, it’s a want to leave a lasting impact and be remembered by people who will come after us. We search for what nook of this community we fit in — army leader, or politician, or reporter, or soldier, or perhaps some new idea that’s yet to be thought of and will get someone here CP Army Legend. Whatever that meaning is, we are all searching for it. Just as in the real world, many people leave this community without ever finding what that something was — they become fed up with their options, or they spend their entire career doing something they don’t really enjoy.

Gratification is something that is extremely clear in our community. News sites creates columns and awards like Person of the Year and the CPA Central 25 and the SMAP Summer Awards so that we can recognize each other for achievements that no one in the real world gives a shit about. I mean, sure, winning Best Leader in the CPAC Year-End Awards is great, and it might connect you with names on a chat, but your friends at school won’t congratulate you for it the next day. We are isolated when we assume these personas, names like Bluesockwa1, and do whatever our job is. And to tramp down that isolation, we recognize each other for achievements — attaining gratification.

All of us, too, are curious — curious of what came before us, and curious of what (if anything) will come after us. As CPAC CEO, I’ve been given the privilege of speaking with many of this community’s greatest minds — they are, often, obsessed with archiving what has come before us and obsessed with making sure there is something to come after us. They log and document the history of our greatest, in hopes that there are an equal amount of “greatest” to come. It is natural that we learn from those who came before us to do things better and more accurately than they did, and because of this, curiosity is necessary.

I touched upon isolation when talking about the awards — though all humans experience isolation, we are prone to it in this community. Some of us here have fantastic lives outside of armies, but this does not change the fact that when we log onto our chats and connect with people all around the world, that we’re trusting them to keep our secret. Sure, they might not know who we are, but we’re putting trust in them that if they were to find out who we are, that we could trust them to keep quiet. As much as some of you may laugh at this, I bet many around here feel some isolation when it comes to relationships. I’m not one to online date, but I would never be someone to put you down if you found a meaningful relationship, even if you found it through Club Penguin Armies. It’s hard to fall in love, be it online or offline, and with it comes an experience of isolation.

Finally, there is a looming inevitably over all the things we do — that the character we assume will die. If we have done enough, they will be immortalized forever like dead athletes in a hall of fame, but every single user who chooses a name and walks the road of warfare will have to remove that mask sooner or later, and never assume it again. And sure, people visit after retirement — sometimes for years and years — but there will be a last time you ever go on Xat. It’s just hard to know when that last time is. In the same way, the death of our persona in this community is difficult to predict. Many realize ahead of time that their journey is soon coming to an end, and their persona experiences a slow, peaceful, death. An equal amount, however, have no idea when it’s coming, and are forced out.

The conclusion of everything I’ve talked about leading up to this is that though this community will die, we have no idea when, and we can buffer against its ending. To do that, we obviously have to recruit, but we also have to address the deep moral plague that our community is facing. We can’t go on like this forever — and if the breaking point is the death of Club Penguin Armies, than the only people we will have to blame are ourselves. Don’t be selfish, because you are a part of a community with no safety net — but despite the lack of a safety net, this community has helped hundreds of people just get through the day. Don’t throw that away in favor of achieving success by destroying morals.

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Very soon both myself and Bluesockwa2 will be gone, and with us, I fear, will go one of the last barriers against the ultimate moral collapse that I have so fervently and fearfully watched as it rises like a black tide to consume this community. We have fought, we have cried out in posts, on this site and on others, on chats across the community; we have done our utmost, we have tried to show you where you are wrong, tried to draw attention to the looming collapse before it comes and catches us unaware. I fear, now, that we may have failed in that final endeavor. Now, the task to saving armies falls to you — to all of you. Don’t let your own selfishness and stupidity destroy what thousands before you have worked for nearly a decade to build. This is a duty, a necessary action that transcends all boundaries imposed by this community — and it is one that no single person or group can make alone.

The critical moment of action is coming, far faster than many would like, when we must freely choose to save this human experience that has changed the minds, hearts, and lives of so many, lest it be destroyed by the very people who brought it to existence.

The centralized truth of the human experience, in Armies or beyond, is that we don’t know. There is one guarantee in this journey — that you can’t take your persona with you. It will die, and you don’t know when, but you are only guaranteed so many years here, and you are only guaranteed so many years in life. There are only certain things you will be able to take with you — the lessons you learned and the people you met. Life is irrational and radical and doesn’t make sense, and just as we stand as a buffer against the death of this community, you need to stand as a buffer against your life becoming irrational. 

Keeping a stable life might sound like a difficult task, and I grant you, it is. To prevent your life from becoming irrational, you have to accept that the very nature of everything you do is irrational, because there is no hindsight in this community or in the real world. So fuck it, go meet new people, fall in love, achieve success and pass on your story to all who are willing to hear you talk, because as much as we all like to pretend we’re warfare veterans and media moguls, we’re a bunch of scared kids, and this is a convenient way to mask all the little things we want to do. When it comes down to it, the only way to overcome being scared is to accept that being scared is okay. 

мaтт.вℓυєѕσᴄкωa1

CPA Central CEO