Haris Qamar mused about committing violence on behalf of the Islamic State, drinking slurpees of blood and chopping off heads. On Twitter, he celebrated terrorist attacks.

"The stuff I said was horrible, I know that," the 26-year-old told a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia on Friday before being sentenced to 8 ½ years in federal prison.

"Those words have come back to haunt you," Judge Leonie M. Brinkema told the Northern Virginia man. "You've just destroyed your mother and your father, and they came to this country to make a better life for you and your siblings."

The case illustrates both how the Islamic State lures in adrift young Muslims and how judges who set punishments often must square awful ideas with meager deeds.

What Qamar did was take photographs of Washington, D.C. landmarks for what he thought would be a propaganda video and buy $20 in phone cards he thought would be used for terrorist communications. In fact, he was working with a federal informant. He tried to fly to Turkey and join the Islamic State in 2014, but his parents stopped him by taking away his passport. When the informant encouraged him to try again, he demurred.

"Instead, he goes and plays video games," defense attorney Alan H. Yamamoto said in court Friday.

At the time of his arrest, Qamar lived with his parents in Burke, Virginia, worked at a storage facility and attended Northern Virginia Community College. He had hoped to transfer to Virginia Commonwealth University and eventually become a civil engineer. In the fall, he pleaded guilty to seeking to support a terrorist group.

It was Qamar's vicious tweets, on hundreds of accounts that were quickly shut down, that brought him onto the FBI's radar.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg acknowledged in court that "there's something childish" in the way Qamar fantasized about violent acts. "But there's something deeply disturbing about it as well," he said. "I don't think there's an antidote to the unfathomable bloodlust and attraction to depravity that this defendant has."

Brinkema disagreed, saying that by the time he was arrested last summer, Qamar "perhaps was finally outgrowing this fascination with blood and gore."

In a letter to the court, Qamar said he became enamored of the Islamic State while trying to escape a dysfunctional family dynamic. Qamar's parents, immigrants from Pakistan, lost all their savings in the 2007 financial crash, according to court documents. Qamar was helping support his family, but he also struggled in school in part because he spent too much time playing video games.

"I said many foolish things and did foolish things, trying to bring some excitement to my life," he wrote. "Even when I was thinking or talked about going overseas, I thought how much easier life would be not having to deal with the massive dysfunction of my family, tired of being a mediator between my father and brother or telling my parents about my failing college career or the financial stresses of the household."

Qamar also said he was inspired not by a desire to kill but by civilian atrocities he mistakenly believed the Islamic State was helping to prevent. His savage words were taken out of context, he said, because he was responding to reports of awful brutality.

"The repulsive violent statements I made were out of sheer anger and sadness for the innocent people I watched get tortured and killed," he wrote.

Friends wrote to the court to say Qamar was kind and helpful, even taking in a severely mentally ill friend and convincing him to return to his parents.

Brinkema asked why Qamar had celebrated the November 2015 terrorist attack in Paris. Qamar told her he had thought at the time it was"an eye for an eye . . . payback" for French military operations in the Muslim world.

"I've made a lot of mistakes in my life," he said. "This one especially has stained my soul."