About Me

So, I'm not quite new here, but it certainly has been a while.

Perhaps 3 years ago, Joshua Holder played a police officer back when the force was still called CDPD and a cool cat named Ben Stonesomething(I think, maybe? Who knows.) ran the Department. Though I left SL and the Den as suddenly as I joined, I enjoyed my brief time here and look forward to making a return. I doubt I'll recall anyone from back then and I'm positive no one will have cause to remember me, but new beginnings are exciting in their own right.

With that, here's a provisional introduction; it's conditional on the fact that I submitted a Columtreal U RP Application only yesterday and corrections may be necessary if it doesn't meet with approval.

About Joshua Holder

PART I: LIKE IT USED TO BE

“Madam, it never was ‘like it used to be.’” - Former NYC Mayor Ed Koch to constituent who asked him to make New York "like it used to be."

Born to that ambigious stratum known as the working-class, Holder grew up in a section of Hathian that still remembered its better days: not exactly a thriving community, stubbornly blue-collar to be sure, but a community nonetheless. A place where, at the very least, there were no victims who didn't matter.

The "privilege" a front row seat to Hathian's decline - the ravages of Seclimine and other drugs, the gang wars, endemic corruption - fed an honest desire to serve his community. He graduated from the Police Academy, parlayed the college credits into a Bachelor's degree, and began walking his beat - hoping to remake the Den "like it used to be."

PART II: PREDATOR WITH A BADGE

"Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power." - Bertrand Russell

Soon enough, the distance between the loftiness of his stated ideals and the hard realities of policing the Den grew into a gaping chasm. Eventually, Holder adapted.

Truth be told, the darkness was always there. The lust for women, for money, for influence. CD/HPD just proved to be a particular fecund environment in which the evils of Holder's mind could grow.

In describing the undertrained, underequiped, and underpaid police forces of a century ago, Luc Sante wrote that the patrolman's lot was "a choice between starvation and extortion." Such an aphorism applies just as well to the Hathian of today...and Joshua Holder did not go hungry. He took from gangs, from civilians, from businesses in need of protection.

On the street, and in the holding cells, he was a predator with a badge, taking license and liberty with the most defenseless of Hathian residents.

PART III: EXILE AND RETURN

"Conscience do cost." - Butchie, The Wire (Season 3, Episode 7)

The transformation from bright-eyed fool to callow predator did not come without a price, and Holder found solace as many officers do: in the bottle. It's cliche to say it, but there were always sparks of hope followed by rages of despair, and always there was the constant pain that could only be a salved by drink.

Finally broken, he resigned (or maybe was resigned) from the police force and - perhaps in a sign that not all cops are intellectual dullards - sought solace in books and academics. He enrolled in Graduate Study, working at the nexus of biology, political science, and behavioral psychology. Soon enough, however, his ..uh..more mature...passions found an outlet even in staid academic settings. Recruiting unsuspecting undergraduates in his research studies, he performed experimentations on sexual response and forced behavior modification that were sometimes elaborate and sometimes simple rape.

With such studies severally frowned upon by the Institutional Review Boards of any respectable university, Holder has returned to Hathian to apply for a faculty position at Columtreal University.

Willing to carry a heavy teaching load in a number of subjects (not like the Accrediting agencies have visited Columtreal recently), he hopes CU will give him the space to perform his rather unpromising research.

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Josh - and the player behind him - thinks he has it in him to teach a couple different subjects without relying on boring Wikipedia copy-paste-fests. What kind of course would you be most interested in taking?