I know what a lot of you may think.

You may think that I am a try-hard or otherwise. But hear me out first.

But there are a lot of things that I have on my mind.

The Beginning

When I first started out on PMC, six months ago, I never really thought that I would be successful, well-known, or otherwise. All I did was create mediocre FNAF skins that got views, but not necessarily attention. I was my own secluded corner of the site that nobody knew. I was just there, lurking, in the shadows. I didn't have a lot of subscribers for my level. At level 13, in fact, I had twenty-two. Twenty-two people could view my content the minute it was uploaded. I had next to no comments. I was lucky if I got more than five diamonds on one submission alone. I didn't start out with instant fame.

And these statistics only dropped after I stopped making FNAF skins.

I ran out of ideas to do, and I wanted to start something else. My shading improved, and I expected to get the same amount of views as I did before. Unfortunately, I was dead wrong. The skins I uploaded during this time are the least popular submissions of mine to this day. It was horrible for me. Realizing that people only cared about my FNAF content and nothing else really hurt. I was stuck no matter what I did. Leveling up was no easy feat for me, either. I was a simple Journeyman slowly gaining experience over the days, even though it takes so little to level up in those times.

I've never been a good skinner, despite what a few people have told me. I'm not Oblivion or Kefka. I don't know how to shade or hue-shift. I've had some popular stuff in the skinning category, but you'll notice it's all FNAF and Yandere Simulator, two very popular games. Original ideas don't even come to me. Skinning is too tedious; too time-consuming; it gave me nothing to be proud of on this site. I didn't know what to do.

Starting Blogging

I only meant to upload a single blog in the beginning and move on with my life. I didn't expect to gain attention; I hadn't for a long time. It was so simple to make, really. It's probably my shortest blog to this day.

I was beyond shocked when it got over 700 views and 17 diamonds, plus a load of comments and suggestions. Attention was being given to me by popular users who never knew my name before. And that's when it hit.

I realized that I could blog and make quality content. And...I realized that I was having more fun blogging than i ever had with skinning. Not just the popularity and enormous attention that came with it, but the actual process of making a blog didn't bore me at all. My sub count and levels flew off the roof. Back in the Expert stages, I gained a new level almost every other day. It was way more than I ever expected, so I basically quit skinning and put that part of my PMC past behind me. Blogging was a part of me now. I had made lots of new friends and experienced more than I ever thought I would have in my time on PMC. Most people knew me as the blogging queen, a title I was understandably overjoyed to have obtained.

The awing thing is...if I never started blogging, chances are I would have still been a Jouneyman now, and I may have even quit the site. The times still haunt me inside, just a little. It's not easy to think about times when you weren't successful, believe me, even if this is just a Minecraft fansite.

Other Users

I didn't start out with instant success. I didn't have talent, at first. I didn't have much of anything to show off. I was just trying to make PMC a hobby of mine. I never expected to get where I am now.

But other users, newer than I am, do have more talent than I did. They never knew what it was like to be unrecognized, because they have had attention from day one of joining the site. And that's what slightly bothers me.

Skinning by default just seems to be more popular on PMC. It's harder to please people through skinning, sure, but if you do it correctly, you'll overpower most people from other categories. I'm learning this the hard way.

I never was a popular skinner. I just simply cannot do it, no matter how hard I try. I don't get it, and I barely even want to anymore. I'd take blogging over skinning any day.

But people want skins, and most people do make skins. It overshadows basically all the other categories on PMC. And somehow new users seem to know this. They know how to play the "instant popularity" game better than I do. It's more than just talent to get yourself out there. You have to make yourself be known to everybody.

Sometimes I wonder if it's intentional, whether it be putting a pretty face as your profile picture to make people like you to doing nothing but advertising your submissions every 15 minutes on chat and never talking to anybody else. They know how to become famous, and they know how to keep themselves up there. I didn't catch on that quickly. And I don't hate people that do these things. It's only PMC, after all. But I'll admit that PMC is basically the thing in my life right now, and I'm planning on staying here for a few years. I want to be the best person I can be, and other people sometimes don't understand that popularity isn't everything about being a good person, neither is power. I'm not claiming that all new users who have talent at a small level are trying to become popular at any cost. There are lots of users on this site more talented than I am in different fields. It just so happens that some of these other fields get you more attention than blogging.

I am one of the few users that has actually become successful through blogging. A couple others are GrayRemnant, Chron, and -TT-. I've been here the least longest, yet I am close to catching up to their levels. I am so grateful for everything blogging has given me on PMC. I have more subscribers, diamonds, and views than I've ever dreamed of. Almost all people never have and never will be a good blogger. But the group of us aren't necessarily entitled to our positions, of course; it could change any day. But it's hard to see that just because I am a blogger, it means any day a glorious level 1 skinner could come around and be noticed in a far shorter amount of time than us. I consider myself lucky to be at this stage at this time. Blogging is what gave me the success I have, but that same amount of success could be possibly be reached by anyone else in a shorter amount of time no matter what category they delve into.

It's not something I can control and I'm not complaining about it. I'm not begging for more attention; I want to earn that legitimately. I am simply explaining some of my problems as a blogger.

Attention-seeking?

Lately, more of my blogs have been about stories of my time on PMC or advice on PMC's rules. This confuses some people, and makes them think that I am trying hard to get lots of attention for myself.

My first example of some criticism I have received is in my "Let's talk about 'haters'" blog that I made a little while back. People, even some of the nicer users, simply don't seem to get that I didn't really think of the user as an actual hater. Some even dared to say that I was overreacting or trying to get more views, which I wasn't. I put in quotations around the word "hater" for a reason. It was to show that I didn't really take the term "hater" seriously for my issue. I just didn't know what else to say.

Another thing I certainly didn't get in the comments of that blog was that people were saying that I was too harsh in reporting the message straight away. I know I already explained it in the disclaimer there, so I'm not going to say too much about this. But might I remind you that these were normal users, not moderators. They, nor do I, understand what exactly to infract and how much for. It's not our jobs; we're just meant to report the messages and the moderators - skilled professionals - can make a final decision. It confused me on why these people, with no experience in moderating themselves, were telling me that I made a wrong decision. It got so bad that a site moderator had to go in and notify a bunch of the commenters that they didn't know what it was like to be in that situation.

In another one of my blogs, "Minimodding: What it is, and why it isn't allowed", some people didn't really bother to read the blog, supposedly, despite the fact that I used the whole blog to explain what minimodding was and why it wasn't allowed (:P). Was I trying to make the moderators see how much of a rule-abiding citizen I was? No. Was I being a massive hypocrite and minimodding myself? No. Did it embarrass anybody that a member was explaining such things? ...No. Then what was I actually doing?

Nothing in that blog was meant for attention for myself; it was attention for that issue. During my time on chat, I have seen an increasing amount of people telling off other people for breaking the rules even though it's not their place to. What I wanted to do was make those people read my blog and prevent them from doing it again. It even helped to prevent other people from making the mistake for a first time. If you notice, I wrote that blog not as if I was a moderator, but a normal user who has witnessed and even nearly performed such mistakes. Nobody had tried to correct the issue in such a way before; it was my chance to, and I knew people would listen because I am a very well-known PMC blogger. There was nothing I wanted to gain for myself.

Why did I write this?

I'm not trying to gain any extra attention for myself or trying to get people to sympathize with me because I have such a "sad" backstory. It's really not even that upsetting, especially since it's just Planet Minecraft, after all. The worst I've ever gone through on here was just a lack of friends or people to talk to. This isn't meant to attack any newer users or people that have commented things I disagree with on my blogs. There's not much of a lesson to learn from this; I just felt that it was time to share my experiences over the six months that I have been around for. I've been proclaimed "the new user who does well" by other people, and they have been around for far longer than I have been. All of us are only going to be around on here for so long, but I want us to enjoy it while we still can.

What I wanted people to realize more in-depth was that there are indeed hardships no matter who you are on PMC, in the past, present, and likely future. Not everything is rosy for me and I'm not trying to paint myself in a positive light. People just seem to think that I have less things that I need to do as a blogger to become successful, and that's definitely not the case. Being a member of the chat, forums, and the site, I've seen a lot of things that I needed to deal with that other users don't. We all have our own problems on PMC; we're all different from one another. These are just some of mine that I've come across over the past six months, and this isn't even it. The future of us on PMC is bound to hold more troubles for all of us, no matter what fate is sealed for us. For now, though, I am  a level 35 blogger that rules the blogging section and chat at the same time...so I've been told. That could change, either in a good or bad way. We'll just have to see for ourselves, for all of us.