Welcome to The Hive, Once Again.

ATTENTION - NO CHARACTER OR SITUATION IN THIS STORY IS BASED ON REAL PERSONS OR EVENTS. This work is meant to satirize broad topics rather than specifics. Thank you for reading.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

For whatever reason, every day I find myself so fed up with the many problems of the world that I get a distinct urge to add my name to that list in a big way.

Still, so far into the many many months of my conscious life, I’ve managed to avoid committing any violation of the Geneva Conventions, and that clean criminal history extends to most other internationally recognized treaties. By the way, just in case you were wondering, I did get a one-week suspension in high school because of my alleged tendency to scroll through Twitter and scream every time someone said something egregiously wrong and it happened to appear on my timeline.

To this day I am still not out of rehab for that one.

And so ever since then, I have decided that a lifestyle based on parasocial relationships through the Internet is something I must grow out of if I want to earn my own self respect, and so today’s the 451st day in a row of me not coming into contact with Twitter.

But of course.

It’s not like I could simply move away completely from the online world, that’s just not how society in the year of our lord 2023 works. Some time after abandoning Twitter for good, I was already at the absolute limit of what I could stand without relapsing, and giving up was looking very alluring, so I did what all those old stop smoking commercials recommended: I committed to only using a slightly less noxious replacement until I was fully and irreversibly cured from Twitter.

That’s how I came across the wonderful application known as Discord–ranked third on the App Store’s Social tab, just below Instagram and my worst nightmare, it promised to give me what Twitter could not: real human beings to talk to.

After joining dozens of servers full of people who cared too much, or too little, about the one schtick their community happened to have, I finally found one that was perfect for me.

Its name, The Hive.

Its uniquely copy-pasted central topics: anime, anime videogames, anime writing, and tons of other similarly related content.

Everything about it felt like it spoke to me personally, ever since the moment I laid my eyes on the welcome page. And I guess I must have been right because it’s been two and a half years and now I’m in college like an alleged almost-adult and I’m still consistently spending hours of my life in that place. But hey, I haven’t had to go to any more psych wards in that time, so I guess it was a net improvement.

So what goes on at The Hive that’s so interesting I made a whole book to profit off of it?

Well, two things. First off, what’s interesting or not lies in the eyes of the beholder, so stop judging me. Second, funny that you assume I’m ever recovering my investment on this.

Regardless.

This is a collection of stories from The Hive, some of which are funny, some sad, some depressingly lacking substance, and all of which are definitely real and actually happened.

So, I guess this is enough for an introduction. Username Flurble (what did I say about not judging me), real name redacted, welcomes you to The Hive, once again.