Subtitled: How Fuwanovel/Aaeru saved my life.
Hello dear Fuwanovel community,
Many people around the forums and IRC already know me under nicknames like "the Fuwanovel coder", various variations of my alias like "Naynay", "Naylicious", or simply "the German" (because I'm the only active German person on IRC as far as I know). In real life I'm called Timo by coworkers and family and "Dieter" by very close friends who know the origin of that nickname.
I'm working as a professional web developer for a few years now, but have been creating web sites for various purposes for more than 10 years already, mostly for private servers for Ragnarok Online and Lineage 2 back in the day and later guild homepages and forums when I was actively playing World of Warcraft.
Not too surprising that I signed up here and immediately PMed Aaeru back when she was asking for PHP help for the site as I have just been waiting for this opportunity. Many people ask what keeps me going for me to invest quite a lot of time, even going as far as reworking the entire backend and quite a lot of the frontend AND introducing many new features to a site I have absolutely no relations with.
There are two reasons for that, one is very simple while the other is quite complex, the first and easy one being that I was looking for a project like I did 10 years ago for quite a lot of time; Now that I'm professional and not just a random script kid I really wanted to start making a name for myself, so I loved the idea on working Fuwanovel because it's a site about something I hold very dear, Visual Novels.
Now the other one is quite complex and reaches back about as long as I can remember. I've got crippling depressions and anxiety issues, bad enough for me to feel too powerless to even leave my bed save for basics like eating, drinking and sanitary needs. Most people don't even notice it except when I vanish for weeks at a time - because I may be shy and pretty reserved, but I love getting to know people and am fairly talkative once I warm up to someone, so they can't even imagine me being depressed. I'm introverted (meaning social interaction expends energy for me) but generally love being around people I know and feel I need social interaction to function properly.
This is also why staying at home also depresses me even further, until I either snap out of it or it spirals completely out of control like it did last winter, where I stayed at home for a whole five months. Which, as most people can imagine, is long enough for my medical attests not being enough for me to keep my job.
So I was depressed, missed social contact - my best friend who used to force me to go out with him when I was feeling down was working in the US, so he wasn't around to save me from the downward spiral I was in - and about to lose my job (which wasn't perfect, but had its fun days and at least paid the bills), spiraling everything even further out of control.
All I did during that time was sleep, eat, drink, shower and read. I read the Visual Novels I torrented earlier that year but never came around to read because of work and other stuff leaving me too tired to even read in the evenings. It didn't take me too long to either finish or tire of them, I simply didn't have enough; Going through the hassle of searching VNDB for new translated Visual Novels that interested me and then having to torrent them, find and apply the TL patch was too much of a hassle at the time.
I was seriously considering just ending my life right there, because reading Visual Novels made me tear up and feel for the characters, it's the most touching medium for me because of the combination of graphics, music and writing - especially the songs in some of them and acted as kind of a substitute for all the social interaction I was missing out on because of my depressions.
That was when I found Fuwanovel and its easy-to-use interface, most VNs were prepatched so everything was pretty easy for me to work out. I started and finished HoshiMemo, G-Senjou no Maou and the MajiKoi partial patch and began reading Rewrite. They kept me going long enough for the worst to tide over, for me to finally pick up the broken pieces of myself again and start getting back into life again, get back on medication and search for a therapist to work this out once and for all, as I was having these downtimes annually.
Fuwanovel literally saved my life; It was my main motivation for wanting to help out when Aaeru was asking for help on the site and it still keeps me going today, 3 months and thousands of lines of code later; I owe this site so much, and I love the community and working on new features with everyone involved.
A special shout-out here to: Naomi, Aaeru, Tay, solidbatman, shcboomer, Kendjin, Rakushun, DrKleiner, Lewycool, Zakamutt, ThatPlayer and Mephisto - and everyone else I'm forgetting to name explicitly. Please stick around so I may never lose interest in the site.
I hope everyone who reads this enjoys this small, very personal write-up. I'm looking forward to continue working with everyone to keep this site running and become even more awesome, complete and more widely known with each passing day. I love you guys.