I’m quitting /ggrevolt/

I had front row seats to this Theater of Mass Destruction.

For six months, I could not sleep. Insomnia has a way of making everything bizarre, unreal, like a nightmare. My office job became more and more unfulfilling as my coworkers and their personalities faded into obscurity, becoming uninteresting, abstract clones of each other. My nurse practitioner refused to prescribe me anything, as by her assessment, only good natural sleep would aid my condition. So I began to self-medicate.

Consumerism became my drug. Made all too easy by the conveniences of modern life. Amazon, eBay, Etsy, they became my daily routine after exiting the confines of my dull white cubicle walls and returning to my apartment. An apartment increasingly filled with the spoils of my online hunts. Handcrafted rugs and throws, display cases filled with the most inane video game memorabilia. I defined myself and my place in the world not by who I was inside, but by what I owned. Until I found… that place.

Looking for just barely enough social interaction to keep myself from clocking out of reality completely, I fired up IRC. A click on the Rizon network some browsing through channels that looked interesting, various software and self-help support groups, brought me to places filled with the most desperate people I had ever met. Looking for answers to their problems, and finding none. And in that, I took solace.

Something happened. I was lost to a dark oblivion. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom. I slept like a baby.

This became my new routine. No longer was I spending my nights browsing for consumer products, instead I was hopping from channel to channel, board to board, each one filled with the dregs of the internet, each one filthier, more uncouth, more deranged than the last, until I met… HIM. And although I did not realize it at the time, he was going to ruin EVERYTHING.

At first encounter he was jovial. He ran a channel dedicated to discussing certain controversies in the gaming scene, a scene I slipped into on many a sleepless night praying for some elusive form of respite. He took me under his wing, taught me a bit about digging and research, and helped to inspire me to get my channel going. He was known simply as Thidran.

Before I knew what was going on, we were holding nightly debates in IRC. We called it “The Halls of Debate”, and despite a complete blackout about the existence of the channel, we had a slow steady trickle of newcomers looking to try their wits against the established regulars. It felt good to annihilate your opponents with brutal polemics, crushing their carefully crafted dialectic beneath a barrage of verbal arguments. There is no greater adrenaline rush than destroying something beautiful.

And Thidran issued challenges. He wanted us to pick a fight on Twitter with a random stranger. And he wanted us to lose. I picked Doomskander, and faced hours of emotionally abusive bullshit from him and his friends.

I began noticing things, however. Thidran was in The Halls of Debate less and less often. He was busy with something in real life, as he called it, and could spend less time online. But, from watching his IP when he logged in, it became clear that he was traveling. Various parts of the US, the United Kingdom, Canada, he was on a world tour. It wasn’t until later that I learned what he was up to.

On one night, he logged in after what looked to be yet another business trip. He told me he had visited Spain and had quite the successful meeting with an associate he referred to only as “V” about starting up a branch of Project Revolt.

I recoiled in surprise. I had heard that name before, “revolt”. Whispered in hushed tones on Twitter and IRC, it was fronted by an anonymous imageboard filled with the most atrocious things known to man. Things like doxxxxxing, harassment, and heavy criticism of respectable figures like Sargon of Akkad. What would Thidran have to do with anything like that? He linked me to a news broadcast, where a feminist was being interviewed about a brutal doxxxxing that she had been through, and told me that this was the work of Project Revolt. I was disgusted. But a dark fascination arose in the back of my mind.

I Am Jack’s Unhealthy Level of Curiosity.

I couldn’t stay away. I couldn’t detach myself. I found myself pulled further and further into the belly of the beast known as Project Revolt. I found myself rising through its ranks as we committed more and more heinous acts, until I was treated like one of its leaders. We began to stage “revolt meetups” as they were called, seeing people face to face… and it was a bunch of freaks, and yet I felt right at home among them. A Brad Pitt lookalike who was a military veteran, claiming that he had over 300 confirmed kills. A man who would not allow himself to be seen without being disguised in Vegeta cosplay. And several degenerates who dressed themselves up as animals. This was the crew that Thidran had assembled, the Cancer Crew, to carry out the work of Project Revolt. The project’s actions moved into the real world.

As the number of royal Cancer Crew members grew, so did the scale and elaborateness of our operations. It was not until one particularly elaborate operation that I began to realize that things were headed downhill.

We were supposed to kill two birds with one stone: Blow up a piece of corporate art, and trash a gun shop managed by a man who looked like a dwarf from Lord of the Rings. We had it all worked out, it all went smoothly until…

…the cops arrived.

They shot John Kelly. They shot him in the head, the fuckers. His body was dragged from the scene, and placed on a table in Project Revolt’s headquarters.

And then it all came crashing down around me. We were running around in ski masks, exploding things, what did it look like we were doing? Yes to us, we were loyal servants of Project Revolt, and John was killed in the line of duty. But as much as my fellow Cancer Crew members told me it was what he would have wanted, I could not hold back the tears in my eyes. I ducked out of the meetup as my fellow Revoltards took up a sickly, monotone chant of “His Name was John Kelly” over his body.

I wanted out. But everywhere I turned, I was faced with the same problem. I now know what Thidran was up to in his travels, he was setting up franchises. Little loyal fiefdoms all around the globe, enough of them that I could not trust anyone, I could not be safe anywhere, and nobody would believe my story. Not even the FBI, which I quickly discovered had been thoroughly infiltrated already. Thidran was building an army.

I needed more information. I went to Rizon again and hurriedly asked one of the halfops for the logs, something to pour over, something that may contain any scrap of information about what Thidran was up to. They coughed it up without asking any questions, with a quick “Heil Qu Qu”, as if I was their leader or something. I read them carefully looking for a clue, but none was to be found… Except…

There was no Thidran in these logs.

His words were there, yes. But the name Thidran was not.

On every line, next to every sentence, before every word that I had seen Thidran say, seen with my own eyes, was a different name entirely…

Qu_qu.

I started thinking back… Was I really sleeping well? I didn’t feel any more well rested… And every night when I woke up I felt like I had ran a marathon. I started digging through my computer history only to find logs of visits to travel sites.

Red eye flights to Spain. Canada. Various parts of the US. The UK. All in my name.

I know those reading this are not likely to believe this, but please, take this to heart. I can no longer contact “Thidran”, but I can still remember bits and pieces. I can’t say too much in the limited time I have, I am quickly nodding off and I know when that happens I will have zero control over what happens next. So listen carefully.

I am quitting /ggrevolt/. If you see me show up and claim to be a part of it, I am lying. Do not trust me. “Thidran” had big plans and I do not want to see them carried out.

WHATEVER YOU DO, do NOT go near the headquarters of any credit card companies, and stay away from the TRW building.

This is Qu Qu. I am no longer a part of /ggrevolt/. Maybe, at last, with this declaration I will finally be free of this nightmare.