2003
On January 13th, in the economically declining town of Dayton, Ohio, a few hundred children are born. I happened to be one of them. Six months later, my family moved to Farmington Hills, a quiet suburb in the metro-Detroit area. Our family consisted of Mom, Dad, Allison, and me. (Plus our black lab, Laika).
Early years on the Internet, 2004-2009
I don't remember a life before the internet. There's always been, at minimum, two family computers in the house. Both of my parents were early-career engineers, who filled the home with old math textbooks, computer manuals, and National Geographic magazines. It was a quiet home, save for the occasional spat with my sister.
School, on the other hand? Not quiet.
I was a shy kid who got by without much notice by generally being nice to everyone. Externally: well behaved kid. Internally: overwhelmed, angry, confused. I floundered in anything related to athletics (which dictated social status more than any other factor), but I wasn't particularly academically gifted, either. Rudimentary art skills set me apart, though I was often unwilling to show others what I was drawing. I had friends, but rarely saw them outside of school--such was suburban life.
In hindsight, it's no wonder I turned to computers for companionship.
In these early years, I used the family computer to play computer games for kids, my favorite one(s) being the Fritz and Chesster games, which taught me how to play chess.
(Chesster is the rat. Fritz is the main character. His cousin Bianca does not receive the honor of having the game named after her, I guess.)
Video games were my primary hobby as a kid. One Christmas morning, my sister and I opened our gifts from Santa and marveled at the little devices we held. Both of us were gifted a Nintendo DS, and mine was cooler because it was red and had the Mario 'M' on the front.
Perhaps the most important development: my sister showed me animated shorts on a website called 'YouTube'.
YouTube was born not long after me, in February of 2005. Which should make YouTube my younger sibling, but by the time I could form cogent thoughts, videos were already driving the digital culture. By the time my sister and I started watching YouTube videos, brothers and future authors Hank and John Green had begun their empire.
(As an aside: Researching the early history of internet platforms is ridiculous. CollegeHumor (now Dropout, an independent comedy platform), created Vimeo in 2004, beating YouTube to the user-uploaded video platform game by a year.)
According to a lecture from Jawed Karim (one of the YT founders), Hot or Not was a major source of inspiration, since users uploaded their own content (specifically, photos). This is a feature of the internet that we now take for granted, but was apparently novel at the time. The platform, originally intended to be a dating site where users would, essentially, upload a video version of a personal ad. They ditched the dating site idea and switched to video content more generally because, after struggling to find footage online of the Janet Jackson Nip-Slip Debacle, they realized there was an untapped demand for video sharing sites. The internet is built on the whims of guys like this.
This had little bearing on my experience of the internet--for now.
2011 - 2013
It's obvious. I was a Warrior Cats kid.
Warrior Cats is one of the many interests I shared with my older sister.
Warrior Cats is a book series about cats who live in four clans out in the woods. For the purposes of this netizen's autobigraphy, that is all you need to know about Warrior Cats.
Notably, there used to be a website called warriorcatsrpg.com. It became feralfront.com before shutting down entirely.
My first fights I could remember with my sister were over the computer (aside from ones centered around who was stupider). I honestly can't remember why we were fighting over any computers--maybe the one of two we were supposed to access were also, incidentally, too old to load webpages, forcing us to fight over the one that could.
Or maybe I wanted my older sister to get off of that nefarious device? I couldn't say.
Anyways.
Roleplaying was my first experience in taking up space online. After making an account, I hopped onto some thread, interrupting an already-existing romantic plot happening between two other users. They threatened to call the admins on me if I didn't stop bothering them. I'm sure neither of them knew I was 8 years old.
I loved roleplaying online, but I was also vaguely aware that I shouldn't be doing it.
YouTube was also good for educational stuff.
ooooo to be continued ooooooooooooooooooooo