Alexanderr
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Are you still doing well old geezer?
@FrothySolutions
@FrothySolutions
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A
I dont understand, is this some copypasta bs or are you actually writing this for whatever reason?
Also got the notification twice.
I dont understand, is this some copypasta bs or are you actually writing this for whatever reason?
FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
- Joined
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- #153
I'm still here.
No, I'm actually writing this.
"Mom's Basement" or "Wholesome Family Fun"
TL;DR: Twitter trends tell me it's E3 right now. I used to love E3 and love games, I was gonna found a career and life on it. But somewhere around 2014 I fell out of love with the video game industry. And without video games to distract me from my loneliness, I began my true descent into identifying as an incel. But if I don't like video games, what do I like? I need to figure out what my interests are. Because I'm gonna try following Reddit's advice for being happy and not alone: Pick up hobbies, be friendly with the people you meet pursuing those hobbies, and build a network of associates. Because they say I'm too old to go back to college and hang out with teenagers. Even though I'm pretty sure if I looked like Pharrell Williams, I would have no problem blending into a college campus. But still, people tell me no. Don't try to be like Pharrell. So I'll give their way a shot. I'll give their way until 2020 to make something happen for me. And if it doesn't? Well, I'm pretty sure the only advice they'd have for me is "Just try to cope with your regrets." And that's no kind of advice. To just live in sadness for the rest of your life. But the alternative? Well, that's unthinkable.
E3 is on! Ooh, I used to love the community at E3. I was in all the conference threads on GameFAQs. I think the Smash Bros. boards was where the most popular Nintendo E3 Conference thread was. I made a GameTrailers account just so I could be a part of the talkback chat stream. I made a NeoGAF account too, back when you had to do that the hard way with your own personal e-mail. Why? Because I wanted to reach out and touch the actual industry people. And sometimes I got to.
The last E3 I ever watched I... think... was in 2015. That's when Iwata died. But my love for games was waning as early as E3 2014. I guess the industry had become something I didn't recognize or enjoy. But games used to be my everything. I once dreamt of building a whole life on games. And so for me to say "All my life I've been struggling with inceldom, trying to get out" isn't accurate. I tried to get out when I was in college, I tried shortly after I graduated, but somewhere between there and recently I had found a very powerful "cope" in gaming and gaming-adjacent hobbies. I didn't need a girlfriend, didn't think it responsible to even have a girlfriend, because as an industry notable what I planned on doing was being like that Japanese guy from "Summer of Love." I didn't need a flesh and blood girlfriend because I was gonna be rubbing elbows with the finest names in 2D who were gonna draw me personalized pictures a la art trade, because we're friends and collaborators. I would be married to the job. But without this, who am I? What hobbies do I have?
Why is this relevant? Because I want help in being happy and ascending. Ideally with a harem of lowborn beauties to be passed around amongst. But I don't believe that's possible unless I belong to a social environment like college. And my research continues, to find the trashiest, slootiest, buckwild campuses in the country. But every day I'm reminded: I'm a 46 year old man. And it's rare that 46 year old men can blend into a college campus. Y'know I try and convince myself that 46 isn't that bad? For someone my height? I could easily spec into boymaxxing and not look like some old hobbit, right? I convince myself of this my looking up celebrities that are my age. Know what the problem with that is? Most of those pictures aren't current. Take this guy, Pharrell from the band Pharrell.
He's 46. He looks like he could fit in on a college campus, right? If he wasn't known as musician Pharrell? But he's not 46 in this picture. However, he IS 44 in this picture. That's pretty close. And so the cope continues.
How does he do it, by the way?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/style/pharrell-williams-reveals-secret-behind-age-defying-looks/
Hydrating. And exfoliating. Specifically with products like Glytone Self-Foaming Cleanser and Clearing Toner and Moisturizer. Not the stuff you can get at Rite-Aid. It has to come from a dermatologist. But it's all skincare.
I could try to be like Pharrell, And I will try to be like Pharrell. But people, mostly on Reddit, are saying it won't work and I'll stand out like a goblin on a college campus. Frankly I think they just don't like the idea of a 46 year old man fucking an 18 year old. It's not "normal." And they're right, it's not. But I'm not normal. What is normal? The advice they give me. You've probably heard it all. "Go to bar trivia, go to a pick up basketball game in the park. Build a network of associates like that. You don't wanna go to college, you just want friends." And ordinarily I'd sneeze at this advice. I know what I want. But here's the thing: I want help finding the trashy colleges. But every time I go to ask they tell me "No, you're too old." Actually, what they tell me is "No, you need to go to college for your career." So then I have to tell them "I already did that. NOW can I go to college for the sex and parties?" Then they tell me "No, you're too old." I tell them "But I'm deeply unhappy with life!" And they tell me "Then take our advice." So I'm like, alright. Fine. I'm gonna do what they tell me. I'm gonna ask people how their day went. Even if I don't care how their day went. I'll make friends with bloated, soggy old men my age. I'll chat up the store clerks who fuck with me. I'll give a smile and "How's it hangin'" to everyone on the street I should chance to meet. I'll go to bar trivias, cafe poetry slams, I'll play sports, I'll take classes, I'll do all that shit. And maybe I'll make friends. But if I'm not happy with these bloated, soggy friends, I'm going back to r/relationship_advice and saying "Alright, I did like you said, why am I not happy, you're so smart?"
Now, I am not an advocate for suicide. I'm against it! But what I think's gonna happen after I follow this advice is, I'm gonna go back to Reddit and say "I'm not happy. They told me to go play basketball in the park and I've made friends, but I hate them all and I wish I was back at college." And they're probably gonna say something retarded at first like "You don't wanna go back to college, those young people would've annoyed you." And then I'll say "No, it's the opposite. Old people annoy me. I want my youth back because I didn't get a fair crack at it the first time around." And then they'll say "Yeah, that's just one of the hardships of life." And that'll be the end of it. But what kind of advice is that? "This thing that you're deeply upset about? There's no cure for it. You're just gonna have to live with your sadness." But I'm sad! I don't wanna live with my sadness? So should I just... not "live?" Reddit says no. And I'm inclined to agree. But the basis for that is "Suicide is bad." And it is bad. But "Suicide is bad" is not the same thing as "Life is good." Keep me from suicide because it's an abhorrent thing. But say I don't die. It doesn't solve the problem of my unhappiness. I hate to put people on the spot like this, but if you REALLY don't want me to die by my own hand, are you saying you'd rather me be unhappy until I eventually do die of nature's hand? People give the suicidal grief for "wanting attention" when they post that they're gonna make it official. Yeah, of course they want attention. They're threatening suicide in the hopes that someone will save them somehow. Nobody "wants" to commit suicide, they're compelled to that end. So they draw attention to themselves with threads and livestreams in the hopes that someone can show them that life can be good.
We've got a little more than half the year left. I suppose I owe Reddit at least 6 months of trying it their way. Of course I'm gonna keep the college scouting and the gymceling and everything else going. But let's just see what regular ol' 40+ life has to offer me.
The last E3 I ever watched I... think... was in 2015. That's when Iwata died. But my love for games was waning as early as E3 2014. I guess the industry had become something I didn't recognize or enjoy. But games used to be my everything. I once dreamt of building a whole life on games. And so for me to say "All my life I've been struggling with inceldom, trying to get out" isn't accurate. I tried to get out when I was in college, I tried shortly after I graduated, but somewhere between there and recently I had found a very powerful "cope" in gaming and gaming-adjacent hobbies. I didn't need a girlfriend, didn't think it responsible to even have a girlfriend, because as an industry notable what I planned on doing was being like that Japanese guy from "Summer of Love." I didn't need a flesh and blood girlfriend because I was gonna be rubbing elbows with the finest names in 2D who were gonna draw me personalized pictures a la art trade, because we're friends and collaborators. I would be married to the job. But without this, who am I? What hobbies do I have?
Why is this relevant? Because I want help in being happy and ascending. Ideally with a harem of lowborn beauties to be passed around amongst. But I don't believe that's possible unless I belong to a social environment like college. And my research continues, to find the trashiest, slootiest, buckwild campuses in the country. But every day I'm reminded: I'm a 46 year old man. And it's rare that 46 year old men can blend into a college campus. Y'know I try and convince myself that 46 isn't that bad? For someone my height? I could easily spec into boymaxxing and not look like some old hobbit, right? I convince myself of this my looking up celebrities that are my age. Know what the problem with that is? Most of those pictures aren't current. Take this guy, Pharrell from the band Pharrell.
He's 46. He looks like he could fit in on a college campus, right? If he wasn't known as musician Pharrell? But he's not 46 in this picture. However, he IS 44 in this picture. That's pretty close. And so the cope continues.
How does he do it, by the way?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/style/pharrell-williams-reveals-secret-behind-age-defying-looks/
Hydrating. And exfoliating. Specifically with products like Glytone Self-Foaming Cleanser and Clearing Toner and Moisturizer. Not the stuff you can get at Rite-Aid. It has to come from a dermatologist. But it's all skincare.
I could try to be like Pharrell, And I will try to be like Pharrell. But people, mostly on Reddit, are saying it won't work and I'll stand out like a goblin on a college campus. Frankly I think they just don't like the idea of a 46 year old man fucking an 18 year old. It's not "normal." And they're right, it's not. But I'm not normal. What is normal? The advice they give me. You've probably heard it all. "Go to bar trivia, go to a pick up basketball game in the park. Build a network of associates like that. You don't wanna go to college, you just want friends." And ordinarily I'd sneeze at this advice. I know what I want. But here's the thing: I want help finding the trashy colleges. But every time I go to ask they tell me "No, you're too old." Actually, what they tell me is "No, you need to go to college for your career." So then I have to tell them "I already did that. NOW can I go to college for the sex and parties?" Then they tell me "No, you're too old." I tell them "But I'm deeply unhappy with life!
" And they tell me "Then take our advice." So I'm like, alright. Fine. I'm gonna do what they tell me. I'm gonna ask people how their day went. Even if I don't care how their day went. I'll make friends with bloated, soggy old men my age. I'll chat up the store clerks who fuck with me. I'll give a smile and "How's it hangin'" to everyone on the street I should chance to meet. I'll go to bar trivias, cafe poetry slams, I'll play sports, I'll take classes, I'll do all that shit. And maybe I'll make friends. But if I'm not happy with these bloated, soggy friends, I'm going back to r/relationship_advice and saying "Alright, I did like you said, why am I not happy, you're so smart?"Now, I am not an advocate for suicide. I'm against it! But what I think's gonna happen after I follow this advice is, I'm gonna go back to Reddit and say "I'm not happy. They told me to go play basketball in the park and I've made friends, but I hate them all and I wish I was back at college." And they're probably gonna say something retarded at first like "You don't wanna go back to college, those young people would've annoyed you." And then I'll say "No, it's the opposite. Old people annoy me. I want my youth back because I didn't get a fair crack at it the first time around." And then they'll say "Yeah, that's just one of the hardships of life." And that'll be the end of it. But what kind of advice is that? "This thing that you're deeply upset about? There's no cure for it. You're just gonna have to live with your sadness." But I'm sad! I don't wanna live with my sadness? So should I just... not "live?" Reddit says no. And I'm inclined to agree. But the basis for that is "Suicide is bad." And it is bad. But "Suicide is bad" is not the same thing as "Life is good." Keep me from suicide because it's an abhorrent thing. But say I don't die. It doesn't solve the problem of my unhappiness. I hate to put people on the spot like this, but if you REALLY don't want me to die by my own hand, are you saying you'd rather me be unhappy until I eventually do die of nature's hand? People give the suicidal grief for "wanting attention" when they post that they're gonna make it official. Yeah, of course they want attention. They're threatening suicide in the hopes that someone will save them somehow. Nobody "wants" to commit suicide, they're compelled to that end. So they draw attention to themselves with threads and livestreams in the hopes that someone can show them that life can be good.
We've got a little more than half the year left. I suppose I owe Reddit at least 6 months of trying it their way. Of course I'm gonna keep the college scouting and the gymceling and everything else going. But let's just see what regular ol' 40+ life has to offer me.
Tony
Head of Doctors
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FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
- Joined
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- #155
"A Life of Substance" or "Incel-Next-Door"
TL;DR: It's pretty much official, these ZMAs aren't doing anything for me. They say it must be because my body was already sufficiently zincked. Which I don't believe because I eat too much junk to be anything close to properly nutrified. But also, if I am maxed out on zinc, it's not fair that I'm doing everything right but still feel like shit. That there's nothing I can do because I'm just getting old. Speaking of getting old... I might be in some kind of online article about incels because I was contacted by a journalist a couple weeks ago and she and I talked about a bunch of stuff like my regrets about not getting to live like a frat asshole and now the best I can hope for is to be a boring, average grownup and she says that I didn't miss out on anything and that frat assholery isn't fun and being a boring, average grownup is actually better and more fulfilling but I look at other people my age and I don't see how they can enjoy the lives they do or how they don't just feel depressed every day and then I realized... My disinterest in women my age, my general malaise, these are the natural reactions to the rigors of old age. And what do you do about the rigors of old age? You treat them with drugs. That's why old people must be happy. Because they encountered the problems that I face now, but went in and got the usual "old people problems" treatment like ED/low-t treatments and stuff. And various other substances to carry the spirit. So if these ZMAs won't work, I need to look into harder stuff that'll make me feel alive again. Because if I can feel alive again, maybe I won't mind having floppy dolphin sex with decidedly un-ratchet old ladies next door. Settling for being a regular schnook without the regular schnook college experience to make being an old schnook fulfilling. Maybe I'll find fulfillment if I take a class somewhere. That's kinda like college, right? I just need an environment that's "kinda like college."
TL;DR: It's pretty much official, these ZMAs aren't doing anything for me. They say it must be because my body was already sufficiently zincked. Which I don't believe because I eat too much junk to be anything close to properly nutrified. But also, if I am maxed out on zinc, it's not fair that I'm doing everything right but still feel like shit. That there's nothing I can do because I'm just getting old. Speaking of getting old... I might be in some kind of online article about incels because I was contacted by a journalist a couple weeks ago and she and I talked about a bunch of stuff like my regrets about not getting to live like a frat asshole and now the best I can hope for is to be a boring, average grownup and she says that I didn't miss out on anything and that frat assholery isn't fun and being a boring, average grownup is actually better and more fulfilling but I look at other people my age and I don't see how they can enjoy the lives they do or how they don't just feel depressed every day and then I realized... My disinterest in women my age, my general malaise, these are the natural reactions to the rigors of old age. And what do you do about the rigors of old age? You treat them with drugs. That's why old people must be happy. Because they encountered the problems that I face now, but went in and got the usual "old people problems" treatment like ED/low-t treatments and stuff. And various other substances to carry the spirit. So if these ZMAs won't work, I need to look into harder stuff that'll make me feel alive again. Because if I can feel alive again, maybe I won't mind having floppy dolphin sex with decidedly un-ratchet old ladies next door. Settling for being a regular schnook without the regular schnook college experience to make being an old schnook fulfilling. Maybe I'll find fulfillment if I take a class somewhere. That's kinda like college, right? I just need an environment that's "kinda like college."
I've been on these damn ZMAs for... 12 nights. It's been 12 doses. And I feel nothing. I've been asking around, and the advice I'm given is "Well if they're not working, there's nothing you can do with those capsules and you should stop taking them. You wouldn't even feel anything really unless you were severely deficient in those minerals so it must be that you get enough of those minerals from your food." That sounds like bullshit to me. Because how is everyone else turning into Superman on these pills? No way in hell everyone is "deficient" in zinc but me. Their diets would have to be lower than garbage because I eat some garbage. But let's say I'm actually not zinc deficient. That's doubly bullshit because how is it that I'm doing everything right but still feel like shit? If all these ZMAs and zinc supplements can do is max out my "genetic potential" for testosterone. does this mean I'm screwed and I'm gonna have to seek harder stuff?
Which brings me to a topic I've been wanting to bring up. I don't wanna jinx anything, but I might be in some kind of journalism piece about incels soon. I've been doing a little bitching today about how I wanna be in pictures...
https://incels.is/threads/can-you-b...about-it-on-incels-co-or-lie-about-it.126341/
...asserting the belief that the only way I'm gonna be heard is if a journalist reaches out to me. And the only way a journalist is gonna reach out to me is if they find me on incels.is. And if I were some hypothetical incel who ascended, but wanted to be reached by journalists looking to talk to people in the incel community, they wouldn't be able to find me there. Because according to RageAgainstTDL, you cannot let the community know you've ascended. Because it would complicate things. So if I had ascended, WHICH I HAVE NOT, but wanted to be contacted by a journalist, I would be outta luck. Why am I so sure I'd be outta luck? Why am I so sure that if I wanted to be approached by a journalist I would have to be on incels.is? Because that's where the journalist who is talking to me now found me. She's doing some sorta true crime piece, I think she said? We've mostly been talking on the phone and my phone is shitty to flat-out broken. We talked about a lot of stuff. And I insisted that I not be anonymous. So if/when this thing gets published, a lot will come out about me... But we talked about a lot of stuff and one of the things we talked about was my regret over not making good use of my youth. How I didn't get to hang with campus sluts. And whatever potential ascension I find in the future, I don't think it'll be good enough unless I can somehow capture whatever it is I missed out on. And what does she tell me? "You didn't miss out on much. It's a nice experience, but it isn't that great. There are much better things out there."
I mentioned in "Mom's Basement" how if I was to follow the normie platitudes of being more friendly and finding a hobby and so on, and then maybe find a woman, but still not feel fulfilled due to the emptiness left in me by not living the college life, and then go on Reddit to ask for guidance, the response would probably be "Yeah, life kinda sucks, but you have to live it." But I forgot, there's another response I might get: The "You don't like your new life? Something's wrong with your brain and you need to fix it" response. The thinking that slaying in college and being a Toys "R" Us Kid is somehow inferior to being a dull-ass dry-ass senior fucking citizen. My interviewer has suggested this, my father has suggested this, my mother has suggested this, that there's "age appropriate fun" out there for me that will definitely satisfy me. And if it doesn't satisfy me? Something's wrong with me. Because I should be mature enough that young jackasses annoy me and intelligent, mature people entice me. I should want meaningful pursuits, not trashy rowdiness. But I just don't see it right now. I've talked about this before, those "20s vs. 30s" jokes people tell. The very thought of which infuriates me. How fucking obtuse can you be? I don't give a fuck how mature you think you are. Fuck your "I don't play games" mentality. I wanna play games. And they say "Well you shouldn't wanna play games. You should wanna be like the 30s couple." Or they'll tell me "People in their 30s still have fun! Don't listen to those jokes!" Forgot to mention, my therapist, a therapist I had once upon a time, said this to me. That being old was no reason to feel like the fun had to end. They suggested I join Hash House Harriers. And I gave them a try.
This is Hash House Harriers.
https://looksmax.org/threads/do-these-people-look-like-they-fuck.22207/
I don't know exactly how much fucking these guys are doing, but when I was there I was disgusted to even look at these people. Don't get me wrong, I love drunken debauchery, but this was not that. It was actually the opposite, if you can believe it. Masquerading as drunken debauchery, desperately propped up by the copingest old people who ever drank their feelings. See, they do a bunch of crass sexual stuff like give new members sexually offensive nicknames. But it's all pretend. It's fake debauchery. Like those sorority banners might be. And so you've got all these old people sitting around on a porch with a new recruit like "Teehee your new name is Cunt Lips, welcome aboard, Harriette!" And I'm looking around at this like "It's not the same. It's not the same." Wanna know how I know it's not the same? Because so fake is this pretend frat environment, every now and then the Harriers will hold a thing that you can bring the whole family to. Usually some chintzy Pumpkin Patch campfire shit or something. God, I hate the Harriers. So much did I hate the Harriers that it manifested as something weird in my brain. The Harriers didn't solve my problem, but I didn't wanna put that headache in my therapist's lap. They seemed to be excited about how it was gonna work for me. But it just absolutely did not. And I didn't wanna take my anger out on them like "That was the absolute shittiest time ever. You were WAY off mark there. You could not have been more incorrect." Because they did try and I can understand, based on what we talked about, why they would think I would wanna be a Harrier. On top of that? If the Harriers were my therapist's big guns? I don't think they've got much else and I don't wanna put pressure on a pump that's just about empty. So what I did was kinda convince my therapist that I was "cured" and didn't need our talks anymore. Even though I was still very unhappy. And that's how I bailed on both my therapy and Hash House Harriers. Maybe if I had stuck with therapy we would've found something. But based solely on what Hash House Harriers taught me, I find this to be true: Old people are boring. Normal, mentally stable old people. They aren't "college kid" fun. By simple virtue of growing into a soggy, cottage cheese person. Prove me wrong, if you can. Show me an old person you think is like a college kid and I'll point out how they aren't. And I don't just mean by looking like an old person, I mean in the way they talk, act, and think. The kind of talking, acting, and thinking I can't stand to be around. The kind that makes me wanna shoot myself. The kind that maybe, MAYBE, keeps me from looksmaxing? Because why do it, if I can't turn that into going back to college?
But this is the "age appropriate fun" people want me to have. I don't understand how men my age and older can be happy with it. I always thought they settled. @MadMong seems to disagree. Seems to believe they're actually very happy with women their age. Having the fun that's appropriate for their age.
"Settling won't make your dick hard, so it has to be something else." I can believe that. But what is it? I opened this post talking about substances that would get me to "feel" again, and that's what I wanted to talk about: These old people are happy together because one or more people in the arrangement are under the influence/augmentation of the kinds of substances that make you "feel." I want ratchet college sluts to like me and want to fuck me. I would be unhappy if I didn't get that. I don't get excited for things that aren't that. But if there was some pill or some drink that would MAKE me excited for that? Make me forget about college girls and instead want whatever I can get my hands on? I dunno, there's people on Looksmax who have chalked up tranny sex to being jacked up on substances. If enough gear can make you fuck a dude? I just need enough that I can settle for a mediocre roll-around with somebody's lonely grandmother. If there is a pill out there that can make me want that. That really is my whole problem summarized. I don't "feel." I'm trying to get my boners back, but I can't find them. I feel like shit. I don't get turned on like I used to. Not like I did when I was in my 20s. In fact, a lot of me was better in my 20s. I had more hope, more imagination, more inspiration, more motivation, that all went away when I got old. Now it's like, on the off chance I do ever get to ascend, I'm gonna be like "So what?" Especially if it can't be like my college dream. As it stands I care more about my incel advocacy mission and talking to this interviewer than I do ascending. It's a chore to jack off, it's a breeze to not jack off. And it used to be so different. When I was in my 20s, this thing worked like magic. I've said over on incels.is, things like "erectile dysfunction" were literally beyond my comprehension. I just figured it was something that old people suffered from. Very old people. Who didn't take care of their bodies. The idea that a man would find himself with a beautiful woman but not find his dick and balls throbbing in harmony, I didn't understand it. But look where I am now. And I think that's what happens to most old people. And that's why they do drugs. Once you get old, you become bored with the world. And your hormones shift into Retirement Mode. So you augment life with drugs. You need them to carry you through life. My parents are old and they love drugs. But not just "Make you feel good" drugs. I mean pharmaceutical drugs. The kind I need to replace the ZMAs that aren't doing shit. There comes a time when just eating right and getting exercise doesn't do much.
Y'know, I say college, but it doesn't have to be college. It just needs to be a college-esque environment. Like a summer camp. I need to be in an environment of peers that I can interact with. Peers that will like me, and I can like back. A place where I can achieve "status" in a social circle. That's what the bar scene and the Spring Break scene lack. There's no time to admire the other person. You're just fucking because that's what you're looking for at the moment. You'll fuck anybody. I need to be liked. So I'm gonna heed the normie platitudes. I'm gonna be outgoing, I'm gonna greet everyone I see on the street, I'm gonna broaden my horizons, I'm gonna pick up hobbies. Specifically? I'm gonna try and sign up for some kind of class. Because that's pretty much like being in college. It's a group of peers that I'll be interacting with on a regular basis for an extended period of time. Getting to know them and growing closer to them. @Tyrionlannistercel suggests you take a class like yoga or cooking or cheerleading.
https://looksmax.org/threads/join-a-class-with-a-lot-of-girls-to-socialmax-and-statusmax.22982/
Why? Because those classes attract lots of women. Good advice, I'll keep it in mind. But know what else I think I need? I think I need a class that has a fixed start date and a fixed end date. I don't wanna join late, after everyone's already made friends and formed cliques. And I don't want anyone to graduate early, before I've had a chance to grow close to them. If we all start at the same time, we're all "freshmen." All on equal social footing. Well, unless a group of friends decide to all sign up for the class at once. Then their clique is set and I might not be able to break in. But Priority #1 in the Normie Advice Plan? Find me a class to take. I'm still doing my main plan, trying to find the right college/location to ascend. And at some point I need to figure out how to feel like I did when I was in my 20s. Probably will require drugs.
Which brings me to a topic I've been wanting to bring up. I don't wanna jinx anything, but I might be in some kind of journalism piece about incels soon. I've been doing a little bitching today about how I wanna be in pictures...
https://incels.is/threads/can-you-b...about-it-on-incels-co-or-lie-about-it.126341/
...asserting the belief that the only way I'm gonna be heard is if a journalist reaches out to me. And the only way a journalist is gonna reach out to me is if they find me on incels.is. And if I were some hypothetical incel who ascended, but wanted to be reached by journalists looking to talk to people in the incel community, they wouldn't be able to find me there. Because according to RageAgainstTDL, you cannot let the community know you've ascended. Because it would complicate things. So if I had ascended, WHICH I HAVE NOT, but wanted to be contacted by a journalist, I would be outta luck. Why am I so sure I'd be outta luck? Why am I so sure that if I wanted to be approached by a journalist I would have to be on incels.is? Because that's where the journalist who is talking to me now found me. She's doing some sorta true crime piece, I think she said? We've mostly been talking on the phone and my phone is shitty to flat-out broken. We talked about a lot of stuff. And I insisted that I not be anonymous. So if/when this thing gets published, a lot will come out about me...
But we talked about a lot of stuff and one of the things we talked about was my regret over not making good use of my youth. How I didn't get to hang with campus sluts. And whatever potential ascension I find in the future, I don't think it'll be good enough unless I can somehow capture whatever it is I missed out on. And what does she tell me? "You didn't miss out on much. It's a nice experience, but it isn't that great. There are much better things out there."I mentioned in "Mom's Basement" how if I was to follow the normie platitudes of being more friendly and finding a hobby and so on, and then maybe find a woman, but still not feel fulfilled due to the emptiness left in me by not living the college life, and then go on Reddit to ask for guidance, the response would probably be "Yeah, life kinda sucks, but you have to live it." But I forgot, there's another response I might get: The "You don't like your new life? Something's wrong with your brain and you need to fix it" response. The thinking that slaying in college and being a Toys "R" Us Kid is somehow inferior to being a dull-ass dry-ass senior fucking citizen. My interviewer has suggested this, my father has suggested this, my mother has suggested this, that there's "age appropriate fun" out there for me that will definitely satisfy me. And if it doesn't satisfy me? Something's wrong with me. Because I should be mature enough that young jackasses annoy me and intelligent, mature people entice me. I should want meaningful pursuits, not trashy rowdiness. But I just don't see it right now. I've talked about this before, those "20s vs. 30s" jokes people tell. The very thought of which infuriates me. How fucking obtuse can you be? I don't give a fuck how mature you think you are. Fuck your "I don't play games" mentality. I wanna play games. And they say "Well you shouldn't wanna play games. You should wanna be like the 30s couple." Or they'll tell me "People in their 30s still have fun! Don't listen to those jokes!" Forgot to mention, my therapist, a therapist I had once upon a time, said this to me. That being old was no reason to feel like the fun had to end. They suggested I join Hash House Harriers. And I gave them a try.
This is Hash House Harriers.
https://looksmax.org/threads/do-these-people-look-like-they-fuck.22207/
I don't know exactly how much fucking these guys are doing, but when I was there I was disgusted to even look at these people. Don't get me wrong, I love drunken debauchery, but this was not that. It was actually the opposite, if you can believe it. Masquerading as drunken debauchery, desperately propped up by the copingest old people who ever drank their feelings. See, they do a bunch of crass sexual stuff like give new members sexually offensive nicknames. But it's all pretend. It's fake debauchery. Like those sorority banners might be. And so you've got all these old people sitting around on a porch with a new recruit like "Teehee your new name is Cunt Lips, welcome aboard, Harriette!
" And I'm looking around at this like "It's not the same. It's not the same." Wanna know how I know it's not the same? Because so fake is this pretend frat environment, every now and then the Harriers will hold a thing that you can bring the whole family to. Usually some chintzy Pumpkin Patch campfire shit or something. God, I hate the Harriers. So much did I hate the Harriers that it manifested as something weird in my brain. The Harriers didn't solve my problem, but I didn't wanna put that headache in my therapist's lap. They seemed to be excited about how it was gonna work for me. But it just absolutely did not. And I didn't wanna take my anger out on them like "That was the absolute shittiest time ever. You were WAY off mark there. You could not have been more incorrect." Because they did try and I can understand, based on what we talked about, why they would think I would wanna be a Harrier. On top of that? If the Harriers were my therapist's big guns? I don't think they've got much else and I don't wanna put pressure on a pump that's just about empty. So what I did was kinda convince my therapist that I was "cured" and didn't need our talks anymore. Even though I was still very unhappy. And that's how I bailed on both my therapy and Hash House Harriers. Maybe if I had stuck with therapy we would've found something. But based solely on what Hash House Harriers taught me, I find this to be true: Old people are boring. Normal, mentally stable old people. They aren't "college kid" fun. By simple virtue of growing into a soggy, cottage cheese person. Prove me wrong, if you can. Show me an old person you think is like a college kid and I'll point out how they aren't. And I don't just mean by looking like an old person, I mean in the way they talk, act, and think. The kind of talking, acting, and thinking I can't stand to be around. The kind that makes me wanna shoot myself. The kind that maybe, MAYBE, keeps me from looksmaxing? Because why do it, if I can't turn that into going back to college?But this is the "age appropriate fun" people want me to have. I don't understand how men my age and older can be happy with it. I always thought they settled. @MadMong seems to disagree. Seems to believe they're actually very happy with women their age. Having the fun that's appropriate for their age.
"Settling won't make your dick hard, so it has to be something else." I can believe that. But what is it? I opened this post talking about substances that would get me to "feel" again, and that's what I wanted to talk about: These old people are happy together because one or more people in the arrangement are under the influence/augmentation of the kinds of substances that make you "feel." I want ratchet college sluts to like me and want to fuck me. I would be unhappy if I didn't get that. I don't get excited for things that aren't that. But if there was some pill or some drink that would MAKE me excited for that? Make me forget about college girls and instead want whatever I can get my hands on? I dunno, there's people on Looksmax who have chalked up tranny sex to being jacked up on substances. If enough gear can make you fuck a dude? I just need enough that I can settle for a mediocre roll-around with somebody's lonely grandmother. If there is a pill out there that can make me want that. That really is my whole problem summarized. I don't "feel." I'm trying to get my boners back, but I can't find them. I feel like shit. I don't get turned on like I used to. Not like I did when I was in my 20s. In fact, a lot of me was better in my 20s. I had more hope, more imagination, more inspiration, more motivation, that all went away when I got old. Now it's like, on the off chance I do ever get to ascend, I'm gonna be like "So what?" Especially if it can't be like my college dream. As it stands I care more about my incel advocacy mission and talking to this interviewer than I do ascending. It's a chore to jack off, it's a breeze to not jack off. And it used to be so different. When I was in my 20s, this thing worked like magic. I've said over on incels.is, things like "erectile dysfunction" were literally beyond my comprehension. I just figured it was something that old people suffered from. Very old people. Who didn't take care of their bodies. The idea that a man would find himself with a beautiful woman but not find his dick and balls throbbing in harmony, I didn't understand it. But look where I am now. And I think that's what happens to most old people. And that's why they do drugs. Once you get old, you become bored with the world. And your hormones shift into Retirement Mode. So you augment life with drugs. You need them to carry you through life. My parents are old and they love drugs. But not just "Make you feel good" drugs. I mean pharmaceutical drugs. The kind I need to replace the ZMAs that aren't doing shit. There comes a time when just eating right and getting exercise doesn't do much.
Y'know, I say college, but it doesn't have to be college. It just needs to be a college-esque environment. Like a summer camp. I need to be in an environment of peers that I can interact with. Peers that will like me, and I can like back. A place where I can achieve "status" in a social circle. That's what the bar scene and the Spring Break scene lack. There's no time to admire the other person. You're just fucking because that's what you're looking for at the moment. You'll fuck anybody. I need to be liked. So I'm gonna heed the normie platitudes. I'm gonna be outgoing, I'm gonna greet everyone I see on the street, I'm gonna broaden my horizons, I'm gonna pick up hobbies. Specifically? I'm gonna try and sign up for some kind of class. Because that's pretty much like being in college. It's a group of peers that I'll be interacting with on a regular basis for an extended period of time. Getting to know them and growing closer to them. @Tyrionlannistercel suggests you take a class like yoga or cooking or cheerleading.
https://looksmax.org/threads/join-a-class-with-a-lot-of-girls-to-socialmax-and-statusmax.22982/
Why? Because those classes attract lots of women. Good advice, I'll keep it in mind. But know what else I think I need? I think I need a class that has a fixed start date and a fixed end date. I don't wanna join late, after everyone's already made friends and formed cliques. And I don't want anyone to graduate early, before I've had a chance to grow close to them. If we all start at the same time, we're all "freshmen." All on equal social footing. Well, unless a group of friends decide to all sign up for the class at once. Then their clique is set and I might not be able to break in. But Priority #1 in the Normie Advice Plan? Find me a class to take. I'm still doing my main plan, trying to find the right college/location to ascend. And at some point I need to figure out how to feel like I did when I was in my 20s. Probably will require drugs.
FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
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- #156
@Arkantos
I'm still here, I spent some time with my dad for Father's Day.
Long story short, after our talk he gave me some past-authoring homework.
After I'm finished thinking, I'll make an entry.
I'm still here, I spent some time with my dad for Father's Day.
https://incels.is/threads/say-hello-to-my-dad.126577/
Long story short, after our talk he gave me some past-authoring homework.
https://incels.is/threads/when-i-was-11-one-of-the-boys-at-school-squeezed-my-butt.126904/
https://incels.is/threads/oldcels-do-you-know-all-of-the-things-in-this-name-the-90s-quiz.127505/
https://incels.is/threads/can-you-r...-led-you-to-being-as-angry-as-you-are.127976/
https://incels.is/threads/did-anyone-own-a-3do-what-games-did-you-have-for-it.128137/
After I'm finished thinking, I'll make an entry.
FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
- Joined
- Sep 10, 2018
- Posts
- 2,081
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- #157
"Founding Father" or "Milk & Cigarettes 0: The Line At Walmart Ain't No Joke"
TL;DR: It's 4th of July, but I meant to post on Father's Day. But I couldn't because I've been gone. I was given some past authoring homework and I've been busy thinking. But I've also been busy gearing up for 4th of July. I've been sent to past author because my dad says it'll uncover what it is I really want out of life and what valuable experience I've accrued. I will try and past author as many notable events from my past that shaped my ambitions, and I'll try to keep it under 30,000 characters.
Happy 4th of July! 
If you can get it. I think 4th of July is one of those incel-unfriendly holidays. Because what are you supposed to do to celebrate 4th of July properly? Some kind of grilling or picnic? Or ice cream? Maybe at the city park by the waterfront? Or on the beach? Maybe go to a baseball game? And then watch and/or shoot off fireworks? These aren't much fun when you're alone. Maybe your city is holding something today. You could go. Alone. But what are you supposed to do for hours, surrounded by thousands of people? Many of which might be barely dressed prime foids, as they say? That's what people complain about a lot over on incels.is. There's been this week long 4th of July thing in my area and while people are barely dressed, I wouldn't call them "prime foids." Rather, a 10,000+ strong testament to flabby American excess. Some people think this is fat.
No, I'm talking about seriously huge people. Ropes of cheese and frosting swinging from their lips, smeared into the glistening sweat of their bosoms. Gorging themselves on street vendor food, marked up by 1000%. Fries that would normally cost 1.29? Now $12.99. And they'll happily pay the price. Meanwhile homeless panhandlers show up, thinking "Well if they'll pay $13 for fries they've surely got a couple dollars here and there to spare." But they've got nothing. So you have this perverse orgy from Hell, flesh mounds of people moaning and grunting in ecstasy, slathered in sweat and food like they're having sex with it, while the starving homeless look on just for the tiniest taste of the dream. America.
Me? My family went down there, set up a blanket, and grilled. We had a lot of food, so I went around giving some to the homeless I saw around the festival grounds. I don't wanna get too full of myself, but damn, I'm so much better than everyone else. How am I still a virgin?
Besides, I don't wanna talk about 4th of July. I wanna talk about 16th of June. Father's Day. I meant to post around then. I wanted to talk about the stuff me and my dad talked about then, because we spent it on incels.is together.
But I kinda disappeared. Why? Well, he and I got to talking about my life and the regrets I have, and he had some things to say about that. Like I said in "A Life of Substance," my dad is in the "You shouldn't have regrets because you wouldn't have wanted to do those things anyway and you're gonna find a much better life OUTSIDE of the college environment. Or at least you should. You should enjoy the post-college grownup environment more than the college environment." My dad's position hands primarily on this tenet: Your past was not a "mistake." Don't be sad because you didn't spend college getting your (...). You could've specced into being that kind of person, but you didn't. Because you consciously decided to be some other kind of person. You could've pursued booty, but you did not, and that wasn't a mistake you were busy doing something else that, deep down, you know you prefer over the pursuit of booty. Had you pursued booty, you would've missed out on whatever it is you did back then. So, why didn't I pursue booty? What had me so captivated that I didn't? What did I pursue throughout my life instead of booty? Figuring that out, he says, is the key to finding my happiness. I'll learn what I've wanted all along, but forgot that I wanted. I'll learn what good, what substance, I actually have built up for my life. And so he sent me off to meditate on that.
That's what I've been doing all this time. "Past-authoring."
www.selfauthoring.com
Which I kinda already did last year, in this thread where RREEEEEEEEE asked for our life stories if we were over 30. I think I really committed to the concept. But let's call that post "Version One" start it up again. And really think about what it was I wanted to do with my life, starting from the earliest I can remember. But also? Let's have a care for the database. Because I tried to do that earlier, but realized it was kind of a big post. Bigger than the character limits on this forum allow. @Sergeant has bandwidth bills to pay, so he can't just allow posts to be several hundred thousand characters long. He suggested I break them up into separate posts. But how small should THOSE posts be? I asked Looksmax.me.
10 votes. A lot of people can't read 10,000 characters. Some will read over 100,000 if the price is right. And I can't guarantee the price is right. So I'm gonna settle for around where everyone else voted: About 30,000 - 40,000 characters. I don't know how many posts that's gonna be, and to conserve characters, I'm gonna cut this one off now and start the first "chapter" from the beginning. Consider this the foreword to my life story. Revised Edition.
TL;DR: It's 4th of July, but I meant to post on Father's Day. But I couldn't because I've been gone. I was given some past authoring homework and I've been busy thinking. But I've also been busy gearing up for 4th of July. I've been sent to past author because my dad says it'll uncover what it is I really want out of life and what valuable experience I've accrued. I will try and past author as many notable events from my past that shaped my ambitions, and I'll try to keep it under 30,000 characters.
Happy 4th of July! If you can get it. I think 4th of July is one of those incel-unfriendly holidays. Because what are you supposed to do to celebrate 4th of July properly? Some kind of grilling or picnic? Or ice cream? Maybe at the city park by the waterfront? Or on the beach? Maybe go to a baseball game? And then watch and/or shoot off fireworks? These aren't much fun when you're alone. Maybe your city is holding something today. You could go. Alone. But what are you supposed to do for hours, surrounded by thousands of people? Many of which might be barely dressed prime foids, as they say? That's what people complain about a lot over on incels.is. There's been this week long 4th of July thing in my area and while people are barely dressed, I wouldn't call them "prime foids." Rather, a 10,000+ strong testament to flabby American excess. Some people think this is fat.No, I'm talking about seriously huge people. Ropes of cheese and frosting swinging from their lips, smeared into the glistening sweat of their bosoms. Gorging themselves on street vendor food, marked up by 1000%. Fries that would normally cost 1.29? Now $12.99. And they'll happily pay the price. Meanwhile homeless panhandlers show up, thinking "Well if they'll pay $13 for fries they've surely got a couple dollars here and there to spare." But they've got nothing. So you have this perverse orgy from Hell, flesh mounds of people moaning and grunting in ecstasy, slathered in sweat and food like they're having sex with it, while the starving homeless look on just for the tiniest taste of the dream. America.
Me? My family went down there, set up a blanket, and grilled. We had a lot of food, so I went around giving some to the homeless I saw around the festival grounds. I don't wanna get too full of myself, but damn, I'm so much better than everyone else. How am I still a virgin?Besides, I don't wanna talk about 4th of July. I wanna talk about 16th of June. Father's Day. I meant to post around then. I wanted to talk about the stuff me and my dad talked about then, because we spent it on incels.is together.
https://incels.is/threads/say-hello-to-my-dad.126577/
But I kinda disappeared. Why? Well, he and I got to talking about my life and the regrets I have, and he had some things to say about that. Like I said in "A Life of Substance," my dad is in the "You shouldn't have regrets because you wouldn't have wanted to do those things anyway and you're gonna find a much better life OUTSIDE of the college environment. Or at least you should. You should enjoy the post-college grownup environment more than the college environment." My dad's position hands primarily on this tenet: Your past was not a "mistake." Don't be sad because you didn't spend college getting your (...). You could've specced into being that kind of person, but you didn't. Because you consciously decided to be some other kind of person. You could've pursued booty, but you did not, and that wasn't a mistake you were busy doing something else that, deep down, you know you prefer over the pursuit of booty. Had you pursued booty, you would've missed out on whatever it is you did back then. So, why didn't I pursue booty? What had me so captivated that I didn't? What did I pursue throughout my life instead of booty? Figuring that out, he says, is the key to finding my happiness. I'll learn what I've wanted all along, but forgot that I wanted. I'll learn what good, what substance, I actually have built up for my life. And so he sent me off to meditate on that.
That's what I've been doing all this time. "Past-authoring."
Self Authoring - Past Authoring
www.selfauthoring.com
Which I kinda already did last year, in this thread where RREEEEEEEEE asked for our life stories if we were over 30. I think I really committed to the concept. But let's call that post "Version One" start it up again. And really think about what it was I wanted to do with my life, starting from the earliest I can remember. But also? Let's have a care for the database. Because I tried to do that earlier, but realized it was kind of a big post. Bigger than the character limits on this forum allow. @Sergeant has bandwidth bills to pay, so he can't just allow posts to be several hundred thousand characters long. He suggested I break them up into separate posts. But how small should THOSE posts be? I asked Looksmax.me.
10 votes. A lot of people can't read 10,000 characters. Some will read over 100,000 if the price is right. And I can't guarantee the price is right. So I'm gonna settle for around where everyone else voted: About 30,000 - 40,000 characters. I don't know how many posts that's gonna be, and to conserve characters, I'm gonna cut this one off now and start the first "chapter" from the beginning. Consider this the foreword to my life story. Revised Edition.
fukmylyf
Kraken
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hogs me
manlet cUnt
every day is cope day
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FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
- Joined
- Sep 10, 2018
- Posts
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- #160
"Founding Father" or "Milk & Cigarettes 1: Imaginary Friends"
TL;DR: I talk about why @FrothySolutions' identity mattered, inside and outside of school.
TL;DR: I talk about why @FrothySolutions' identity mattered, inside and outside of school.
1,000th post! I've been deliberately not posting because I wanted to save my 1,000th post for this. A labor of several weeks of deep introspect, phone calls to old acquaintances, and looking through old hard drives. The entire history of me.
Looksmaxing, I believe, isn't just about making your face look good. Or your naked body look good. It's your fashion sense, it's the car you drive, it's the way your house looks. But I think the biggest hurdle to all these things is, what look do you go for? What car should you drive? What should the inside of your house look like? What is your "style?" I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Has anyone heard of MVMT Watches? I was looking at that, because in the 21st century Rolexes are no longer a status symbol and now we buy watches from Internet startups. And recently they started selling sunglasses.
They come in a variety of styles, each with its own name. Like the Mogul.
The kind of glasses a mogul would wear. Like a rap guy. Or the Navigator.
Aviator-style sunglasses for a classy looking guy, maybe a pilot. Or the Zodiac.
For if you're some kind of creep.
I'm sure r/malefashionadvice could break down the tropes of these sunglasses better than I can. And looking at all these sunglasses made me think, which of these sunglasses are me? I thought about it, and honestly? I don't see me wearing sunglasses. I'm not a sunglasses kind of guy. Sunglasses are for the sophisticated man. The man who splurges on the luxury of not having the sun in his eyes. The kind of guy who might also buy a MVMT Watch. But I'm not a sunglasses guy. Or a watch guy. I'm not into any of these "sophisticated" fashion directions. So what IS my style?
It's a question I've thought about for years. Since I was a boy. Questions like "What's your favorite color" were questions I thought long and hard about because I figured, once I learned what my favorite color was, I could start building a life around that color. Paint my room that color, for instance. Use that color to express myself. But let's start from the very beginning. The very earliest date in my life that I can confirm. Picture this...
1973. It's a cold winter's morn. The powers of evil prevail today, @FrothySolutions is born.
I missed Roe v. Wade by a mere week. Whew! Just made it. The first in a lifelong pattern of skin-of-my-balls victories.
After that, it's a hazy collection of memories I can't place the dates for. I remember at one point I was reading a Frog and Toad book, but I didn't know that, in some words, the "k" is silent. So I was confidently reading out loud "'Yes,' said Toad, 'if you kuh-now one!'" I couldn't follow or understand the story, and I don't remember caring what the story was. Because reading, for me back then, wasn't about understanding or retaining anything. It was about knowing how to pronounce the words in front of me. It was a challenge to finish as fast as possible and then put behind me. The only thing I thought mattered was knowing how to pronounce the words in front of me, even if I forgot them immediately afterward. But my family, all they saw was that I was reading and said "He's so smart! He read that whole book!" When all I was really doing was trying to sound out words. I think that attitude of "Don't worry about 'learning,' just complete the objective however you can" stayed with me.
But I did care about some "books." Like my dad's stash. Those weren't really about words, mostly pictures. I explained in Version One of my life story that I got into those at an early age.
And it wasn't just my dad's secret magazines. It was lingerie catalogues, it was any picture of a beautiful female model I could find. And I know that this was at least before I started going to school. I know because my exposure to that stuff informed my mindset when I finally did go to school. Picture this...
1978. A crisp autumn noon. You recently started kindergarten and it's Picture Day. You got a new red and black sweater with with your first initial monogrammed onto it, and you got your hair done special. You've been to the barber before, but for this you had to go to a parlor. For GIRLS. They do a good job and you can't stop touching your silky, curly, pliant hair, but at the same time you have reservations about having gone to a beauty shop. You don't send boys to the Girl Scouts, you don't send boys to the beauty shop. Otherwise what's the point of having separate Scouts and shops??? You didn't make the rules! You assumed this was what we all agreed on! You and your dad pull up to the school building and he walks in with you. Then when you get outside of your classroom... he leaves. Wait, why is Dad leaving? What do you mean he can't stay? You look around, and to be fair, no one else's parents are here, but for some reason you had it in your head that Dad was gonna stay for the whole Picture Day. So you cry. Teacher tries to console you, but you don't really want ot stop crying. To stop crying would be dignifying this injustice. This is not okay. You will not be okay. Dad was supposed to here. But you don't wanna be a hassle so you tell Teacher that in time you'll calm down. You just need a break. You go into the coat room to take off your coat and put away your backpack. And in the coat room you see this girl from your class. She's changing her shirt or dress or top or something. The memory is fuzzy. But you can see the strap to her underslip. She says "Hi, @FrothySolutions!" You mumble "H-Hi..." It's all you can muster. Not because you're sad that Dad's not here, no, you've moved past that. Now you're excited and breathtaken. Because here this girl is changing in front of you, some random dude from class, totally fine with you seeing her like this. You're basically a stranger to her and she's like "Oh, hi, @FrothySolutions! Can you help me get out of this?" Well, she didn't say all that, but this was close enough without it. When the time comes to get your picture taken, you're still a little snotty from crying, but you've got other things on your mind now.
So to summarize my ambitions at this point...
1. Look smart/be good at schoolwork.
2. Talk to girls/impress girls/spend time with girls.
But it wasn't just my impression on girls I was worried about, it was my impression in general. Putting myself out there. Wearing my "self" on my sleeve/monogrammed on my sweater. And so I would often ask myself "Who am I?" What's my thing? What's my style? What's my "persona?" One time this was especially relevant was Halloween. My first real Halloween was when I was in kindergarten. We were to have a Halloween party and we were encouraged to come in costume. But what would I be? Because the way I saw it, your Halloween costume is a reflection of self. So what costume idea was "me?" I wasn't going as a princess, no, that's not me. A vampire? No, also not me. I'm not sure how I came to the conclusion, but I eventually went with "Pirate." And my mom, she was always super invested in our Halloween costumes. She always had ideas to contribute and investments she was willing to make and creative touches to add to make our costumes pop. She gave me an aluminum foil earring and drew a beard on me with a makeup pencil. I remember it scratched like a pin. And my dad went out and bought me a toy sword! It wasn't a cutlass though. It wasn't the kind of sword you associate with a pirate. It was more like a knight's sword. But I didn't care, because it wasn't soft, plasticky grey like other toy swords. It was stiff, and had a silvery coating, and a sheath to put it in. This was like a REAL sword! This was something I could show the class. It was so cash. So baller. I was king for a day. Later that night my family and I went Trick or Treating as a group with my aunts, uncles, and cousins. And I was among the oldest of the kids. So I felt like a protector. Any time we got out of the car to walk the block, I rested my hand on the pommel of my sword, like I was ready to defend the team at a moment's notice.
So to re-summarize my ambitions, I guess what I wanted to do was be the best, most impressive "me" I could be and show that self, that style, my "thing," to my social environment. Mostly the girls though. Kid 1 is a princess, Kid 2 is a vampire, FrothySolutions is a pirate. What do you think of that, Kid 1?
Speaking of the self I put forward, it was around this time in my life that I experienced the "Punchinello in the Shoe Incident."
As you can see, my "personality profile" is something I've cared about from an early age. My favorite color, my trademark Halloween costume, my Punchinello thing... I'm not sure if this was kindergarten or 1st grade, so let's bridge the gap and fast forward a little. Picture this...
1980. We're in the middle of January but still in that cozy Christmassy/New Yearsy spirit. Maybe I was still jazzed about getting to fill my new Jawa Sandcrawler car with Lego men. But it was probably because the TV was broken, and because my parents had no TV to watch, they decided to read us a bedtime story every night. Until the TV was fixed. They read us "The Silver Chair" from The Chronicles of Narnia.
We hadn't read the other books and it affected my grasp of the story, but I didn't really care. I was there to hear Jill's story. I wanted to go to bed and dream about her. Because at this point I figured that dreams are a good way to approximate fantasies as close to real as possible. I thought about how she cried, and how if I was there? I would hold her and protect her and stuff. I wanted to hold her and touch her and kiss her and stuff. I wanted to experience what it was like to insert myself into this story. And so I asked my parents "How can I make myself dream what I want to dream?" I explained I wanted to dream about Narnia. Because it was such an exciting story. I didn't reveal my feelings for Jill. They gave me some tips on how to focus on what I wanna dream about, and I took it to heart. I don't remember it working, but I would continue to try.
Now I know that that's called "lucid dreaming" and today there's whole communities who try to chase that dragon. But anyway, whether it was girls at school or girls in books, I had girls on my mind. I didn't tell my parents this. Until around Valentine's Day.
The TV was fixed by now. And there was this girl in my class named Déjà. I don't know if she felt anything for me, but I felt something for her. And Valentine's Day was coming up so we had to buy Valentine's Day cards to pass out to everyone. And I needed my parents to buy me some Valentine's Day cards. And while we were on the subject, I guess I just felt like I should tell them about Déjà. I told them she was special. That I was wondering about maybe writing her a love letter. And that it was very important that I picked the Valentine's Day cards that represented me. Everyone was gonna have different Valentine's Day cards and I was concerned about how mine would stand out relative to everyone else's. Because this isn't just the impression I leave on the rest of the class, it's an impression I'll be leaving on Déjà. And they were very encouraging. Very supportive. Very very supportive. But see, I know they weren't "teasing" me per se, but eventually this became embarrassing. Always mentioning her to me, like "OooOOOOOOooooOOOOoooh, you like Déjà! What are you gonna do for Déjà?" Mom, Dad, my sisters, at least one of my aunts, it was getting out of hand. So I never ended up writing that love letter. And my Valentines? I didn't write anything on those either. I planned on writing a message on each one for each person I handed them out to, but I figured if I'm getting OooOOOOOOooooOOOOooohs for my consideration, maybe it's not worth the trouble. Thus began an "edgy" phase in my life. Where, at least at face value, I looked down on "mushy stuff" like romance. And goodness and light. I know no one meant any harm, but the whole Déjà thing convinced me, I'd rather be cool and edgy than soft and romantic. And this spread to all things. I rooted for the bad guy whenever I could. One of my earliest memories of watching TV was watching the Olympics with my parents. And this was during the thick of the Cold War so the Olympics were "more than a game" at this point. Nations would sit out the Games as a political gesture, it was serious business. And I took it upon myself to root for the Soviet Union, just so I could be the bad guy.
But I didn't wanna be "cruel" during this edgy phase. More like "cold." Not an "I hate goodness" style, more of a "Meh, your emotions are illogical" style. So I eventually softened into less of a bad guy and into more of a... very disciplined Boy Scout. Because I didn't wanna be a bad guy, I just didn't wanna be mushy or embarrass myself. Didn't wanna be vulnerable. So I pulled back on the whole edginess thing, but I never talked about having a crush on anybody or anything like that. Even though in my private moments I was always imagining being with one or another distant princess. Someone to fantasize about after school, or when I was bored. Speaking of school, let's fast forward to the 3rd grade. Picture this...
1981. Back home after school, and you are exhausted. Maybe it's the 1/3rd of a mile you had to slog back home with a loaded backpack. Maybe you should've left your textbooks at school. But you can't do that. Because you're the "Smart Kid." And for some reason that means always having your textbooks onhand. You drop your backpack in the living room. Mom is watching Texas with a plate of homemade steak fries. You walk past to kiss her hello and feel her stomach. That was a foot. Any day now. Your sisters are outside playing with the rest of the neighborhood kids who just got of class. You're not interested in that. You head over to the bookshelf and grab an armful of the World Book.
Then you head into the kitchen to scavenge the last of the Blueberry Waffelos. You take it all back into the living room. Keeping up this "Smart Kid" persona at school is hard work, so it's a good thing parts of that persona are true. Like how you read the encyclopedia a lot. You crack open one of the volumes to a piece on "moon dogs." Whoa, those sound trippy. You'd probably freak out if you saw one for real. Then you read a piece on space storms. Allegedly, they cause electronics and magnetic things to go haywire here on Earth. Compass needles jiggle and television images distort. Whoa. You've got some trivia to drop on the kids at school tomorrow, but do these things really exist out in the universe?
There's a proverb that says you have 3 faces. I think that describes this phase of my life pretty well. In Version One I described how eventually I started up this "Smart Kid" persona. This lie that I lived when I was at school.
Thinking back, this was a stupid thing to do. Because my sisters went to the same school as I did, and said school was only down the street from my house. So said classmates were probably neighbors of mine. Probably saw me around the neighborhood. "School FrothySolutions" and "Home FrothySolutions" were two different boys. School FrothySolutions was a prodigy child who lived in wealth and privilege. His house was always clean, he was disciplined and well-mannered, didn't crack jokes, didn't play games, read books for fun, lived to serve the ends of his teachers, his parents kept a bible of family rules with gold trimmed pages... and as a result of this lie, if people actually believed it, I was respected at school. Being the Smart Kid means your opinion matters. You get praise from the teacher, you get admiration from the students. I don't know if I was "fun" or "cool," but what I know for sure is, my opinion mattered. When I had an opinion, people listened. Because I was the Smart Kid and I knew best. I was smartest, wisest, most disciplined and therefore most righteous.
Then there was Home FrothySolutions, who was none of that stuff. Home FrothySolutions ate Waffelos. School FrothySolutions would never eat kiddy cereals. He was sophisticated. But not in an "I'm better than you" way. He didn't look down on anyone for eating kiddy cereals, he just genuinely preferred grownup food. It's just the kinda guy he was. School FrothySolutions watches the news. Home FrothySolutions gleans talking points from his parents so he has something in case someone at school calls his news-watching bluff. A more honest FrothySolutions. But the most honest FrothySolutions was "Private FrothySolutions." Who was pretty much Home FrothySolutions, except he felt a certain kind of way about girls and snuck into his dad's porn. I lied to my family because I didn't want to show the vulnerability of liking girls. Or get in trouble for looking at porn. And I guess I lied to my classmates because I wanted to be interesting. How is a 3rd grader supposed to be interesting, especially to other 3rd graders? But then again, it probably wasn't as complicated as I was making it out to be, because this was a time when every kid was every other kid's friend, just because we were all at that age where you just played with everybody. Anybody who wanted to play and had something to play with. Everyone was friendly solely, if for no other reason than the principle that you should be friendly to everyone.
Which reminds me, this was the first time I learned I was short. Like I said, every kid tried to be friendly and positive and encouraging, and one day at recess I'm walking and talking with this kid, and he's like "Don't feel bad about being short. Short kids are late bloomers and end up having super growth spurts when they get older. You're probably gonna be, like, 7 feet tall, man." I thanked him. But at this point I wasn't really that worried about being short. Was I short? I guess? This kid was bigger than me, yes. But I feel like I was pretty much on par with most kids in my grade. And even if I was, at this point I didn't see being short as a downside. Yet. It was like having blue eyes or red hair. It meant nothing. What would mean something though? If he knew the real me behind the "School FrothySolutions" charade.
The real me kinda wished "School FrothySolutions" was real. The discipline and stuff would've been a drag, but it would've been nice to actually be smart, and actually have money to throw around. I spent a lot of time imagining up fantasies like this. And about women. I had moved on from peeking into my dad's magazines and hoarding lingerie spreads to making lists of sexy concepts that excited me. Making notes to try and dream about them. In addition to lingerie catalogues, I would also collect shopper's ads and coupon books and stuff. For all the attractive pictures of food. And I'm not the only one, apparently.
The best time for attractive food pictures was around Christmas, I found. And I would look at these pictures, and I would have this specific fantasy in my mind. A cold winter's night, the snow is thick outside. Not a creature is stirring. I walk through the brightly lit living room to the kitchen, and look through the full cupboards for something to eat. All of my food looks pretty like in the shopper's ads. I invite people in to partake of my warmth, and my meal. That's what I'd do, if I had money. Also if I had money, I would build my dream room. I would look through electronics catalogues & mailers, and I drew up a map of what my dream room would look like if money was no object. I wanted a room like a hi-tech base. Or a secret laboratory. Or a civil defense shack. The idea of being geared up with all kinds of useful tech and electronics felt good. Maybe it made me feel secure. Or empowered.
So to summarize my ambitions so far...
1. Be interesting to my classmates.
2. Be with women, if only in my dreams.
3. Be rich and have food at Christmas.
4. Kit out my room with tech.
Let's fast forward a few months to around early summer. Picture this...
1982. You've been doing this after school Boy Scouts thing for a while. You're not really sure what rank you hold, you've heard about Cub Scouts and Eagle Scouts and Wolf Scouts and Webelos Scouts and Eagle Scouts. Can't really get a straight answer and you wouldn't know who to ask. But anyway, you're in the gym with the boys and you're working on soapbox derby cars. They're divided into teams and you're pouring your blood, sweat, and tears into your team's car. After the end of the school year, this car is going up to camp where it'll race against other cars. And you can't wait to go. But there's the whistle, the Boy Scouts meeting is over for today. Time to head out. You see other Scouts with ice cream and/or cans of soda. You're not interested in that. You start to head home, but one of the adults stops you and reminds you to get some ice cream and soda. Sure, whatever, you get some ice cream and soda. While you're doing this, you ask how exactly you're supposed to make sure you make it to camp. Will a bus come to your house? Are your parents supposed to drive you? You haven't been told very much about any of this Boy Scouts stuff. And it's then you learn: You're not going to camp. Only the "big kids" get to go to camp. That's why they're holding this ice cream and soda thing. It's a consolation, specifically for the "little kids," because they're not going to camp. Big kids get camp, little kids get ice cream.
You're crushed. Suddenly it all makes sense. They more or less let you do whatever, they didn't care. It was the big kids they were keen to keep apprised. Who were truly involved. They were the "real" Scouts. You're just being babysat. You think about all the work you put into that soapbox car. Did they think they were doing you a favor? Allowing you the "privilege" to work on a car you didn't get to even see perform? Did they think getting to rub elbows with "real Scouts" was enough? They are wrong. And they are stupid for thinking you would be okay with this. But you don't cry in front of them. You accept their explanation and briskly head out. The streets are kinda clear, it's been a while since the other neighbor kids got home. So there's probably no one around. Coast is clear. You break out into hissing, grunting, sobbing fits. Storming the last little bit of walk home. It's not fast storming, it's slow storming. You're weighed down by that backpack. And sadness. When you get home, you lug yourself up the stairs and put your backpack in your room. You go to your parents room and find your mom asleep with your recently born baby brother. You crawl into bed with her. "M-Mom??? They... they, they wouldn't- they said I couldn't go to camp... that I'm too little... I HATE BOY SCOUTS!!! I'M NEVER GOING BACK!!! I QUIT!!!" She hugs you and says it's okay, you don't have to go back to Boy Scouts. You lie with her for a while, then you go to your room. You produce your copy of Boys' Life.
You take it downstairs to the kitchen. You light the stove top. And you burn it. And then you run out the back door and drop the burning magazine in the grass of the backyard. Look what they made you do! You could've burned yourself, or something in the house! You didn't want to have to lash out like this. But they pushed you to this. They made you burn that magazine. You bake yourself some frozen fries and them up to your room, turn on your box fan, and cool off. You're burning up with anger. You take out your toys. You've kinda imagined up a city/world with your toys, named characters and everything. You open up your copy of "Tomorrow and Beyond: Masterpieces of Science Fiction Art."
Your anger has given you an idea for a new storyline. Where the angry wrath of some great alien beast changes the face of your city and the lives of the heroes who live in it.
In addition to imagining up dream girls and dream rooms and dream pantries full of dream food at Christmas, I imagined up adventures with my toys. And I kept track of their stories. I don't think they were good stories, but because I kept track of them, they had continuity. I've always been an easy audience to keep if you promise me a story with continuity, even if that story isn't written very well. I got my family involved in my stories too. For instance, my sisters. They had toys. I had adventures with my toys, they had adventures with their toys, and so a lot of the time, if not most of the time, we would put our toys together. I had a city with my toys, but so did they. And I took it upon myself to keep track of our adventures. Also, by the time I started 4th grade, in Writing class we had to do a lot of creative writing. I dunno, like, write a story synopsis like the kind you'd see on the back of a book for a made up story. So if I was given homework like that, I would use that as an excuse to ask my parents to be in my fantasy story. I would ask them to develop themselves as characters in the fantasy world that is this homework assignment. Things like that.
And yet? I was friendless, as far as the kids at school were concerned. I couldn't really be friends with them anyway, I was living a lie. Friends are people you enjoy interests with, probably, why didn't I try and rope in some of my classmates into my pretend play? Why didn't I make friends who wanted to be in my stories and write stories of their own? Well, I don't think I had much faith in my stories. They were kinda stupid. Furthermore, playing pretend is stupid. All I could've contributed to a friendship was my imagination, and it doesn't sound like it would be fun for a normal kid to spend all day thinking "Man, what if instead of going to school we just took over the school and made it a party hall for the kids? What if that?" That's all I could contribute. Just ideas for that pretend fantasy. And I gotta imagine most kids, most people period, eventually wanna do something real.
We're approaching 30,000 characters, so I'm gonna stop it here. To summarize, from ages 5-9 I would fantasize about characters I created and dream girls I wanted to be with. At school I put on airs because I wanted to be interesting and admired, but deep down I was afraid of letting anyone know about my dumb pretend games, or my taste for girls, or my laid-back & slovenly home life, or any of my other vulnerabilities. At school I was a genius prodigy child, an unwavering model of discipline and maturity. And I was respected for it. But was anyone really my friend?
Punchinello In The Shoe. Did I obsess over it because I wanted to be myself? Or because I wanted to be interesting? Or did I want to be myself because I thought knowing myself and being myself would make me interesting?
Looksmaxing, I believe, isn't just about making your face look good. Or your naked body look good. It's your fashion sense, it's the car you drive, it's the way your house looks. But I think the biggest hurdle to all these things is, what look do you go for? What car should you drive? What should the inside of your house look like? What is your "style?" I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Has anyone heard of MVMT Watches? I was looking at that, because in the 21st century Rolexes are no longer a status symbol and now we buy watches from Internet startups. And recently they started selling sunglasses.
They come in a variety of styles, each with its own name. Like the Mogul.
The kind of glasses a mogul would wear. Like a rap guy. Or the Navigator.
Aviator-style sunglasses for a classy looking guy, maybe a pilot. Or the Zodiac.
For if you're some kind of creep.
I'm sure r/malefashionadvice could break down the tropes of these sunglasses better than I can. And looking at all these sunglasses made me think, which of these sunglasses are me? I thought about it, and honestly? I don't see me wearing sunglasses. I'm not a sunglasses kind of guy. Sunglasses are for the sophisticated man. The man who splurges on the luxury of not having the sun in his eyes. The kind of guy who might also buy a MVMT Watch. But I'm not a sunglasses guy. Or a watch guy. I'm not into any of these "sophisticated" fashion directions. So what IS my style?
It's a question I've thought about for years. Since I was a boy. Questions like "What's your favorite color" were questions I thought long and hard about because I figured, once I learned what my favorite color was, I could start building a life around that color. Paint my room that color, for instance. Use that color to express myself. But let's start from the very beginning. The very earliest date in my life that I can confirm. Picture this...
1973. It's a cold winter's morn. The powers of evil prevail today, @FrothySolutions is born.
I missed Roe v. Wade by a mere week. Whew! Just made it. The first in a lifelong pattern of skin-of-my-balls victories.
After that, it's a hazy collection of memories I can't place the dates for. I remember at one point I was reading a Frog and Toad book, but I didn't know that, in some words, the "k" is silent. So I was confidently reading out loud "'Yes,' said Toad, 'if you kuh-now one!'" I couldn't follow or understand the story, and I don't remember caring what the story was. Because reading, for me back then, wasn't about understanding or retaining anything. It was about knowing how to pronounce the words in front of me. It was a challenge to finish as fast as possible and then put behind me. The only thing I thought mattered was knowing how to pronounce the words in front of me, even if I forgot them immediately afterward. But my family, all they saw was that I was reading and said "He's so smart! He read that whole book!" When all I was really doing was trying to sound out words. I think that attitude of "Don't worry about 'learning,' just complete the objective however you can" stayed with me.
But I did care about some "books." Like my dad's stash. Those weren't really about words, mostly pictures. I explained in Version One of my life story that I got into those at an early age.
FrothySolutions said:
And it wasn't just my dad's secret magazines. It was lingerie catalogues, it was any picture of a beautiful female model I could find. And I know that this was at least before I started going to school. I know because my exposure to that stuff informed my mindset when I finally did go to school. Picture this...
1978. A crisp autumn noon. You recently started kindergarten and it's Picture Day. You got a new red and black sweater with with your first initial monogrammed onto it, and you got your hair done special. You've been to the barber before, but for this you had to go to a parlor. For GIRLS. They do a good job and you can't stop touching your silky, curly, pliant hair, but at the same time you have reservations about having gone to a beauty shop. You don't send boys to the Girl Scouts, you don't send boys to the beauty shop. Otherwise what's the point of having separate Scouts and shops??? You didn't make the rules! You assumed this was what we all agreed on! You and your dad pull up to the school building and he walks in with you. Then when you get outside of your classroom... he leaves. Wait, why is Dad leaving? What do you mean he can't stay? You look around, and to be fair, no one else's parents are here, but for some reason you had it in your head that Dad was gonna stay for the whole Picture Day. So you cry. Teacher tries to console you, but you don't really want ot stop crying. To stop crying would be dignifying this injustice. This is not okay. You will not be okay. Dad was supposed to here. But you don't wanna be a hassle so you tell Teacher that in time you'll calm down. You just need a break. You go into the coat room to take off your coat and put away your backpack. And in the coat room you see this girl from your class. She's changing her shirt or dress or top or something. The memory is fuzzy. But you can see the strap to her underslip. She says "Hi, @FrothySolutions!" You mumble "H-Hi..." It's all you can muster. Not because you're sad that Dad's not here, no, you've moved past that. Now you're excited and breathtaken. Because here this girl is changing in front of you, some random dude from class, totally fine with you seeing her like this. You're basically a stranger to her and she's like "Oh, hi, @FrothySolutions! Can you help me get out of this?" Well, she didn't say all that, but this was close enough without it. When the time comes to get your picture taken, you're still a little snotty from crying, but you've got other things on your mind now.
So to summarize my ambitions at this point...
1. Look smart/be good at schoolwork.
2. Talk to girls/impress girls/spend time with girls.
But it wasn't just my impression on girls I was worried about, it was my impression in general. Putting myself out there. Wearing my "self" on my sleeve/monogrammed on my sweater. And so I would often ask myself "Who am I?" What's my thing? What's my style? What's my "persona?" One time this was especially relevant was Halloween. My first real Halloween was when I was in kindergarten. We were to have a Halloween party and we were encouraged to come in costume. But what would I be? Because the way I saw it, your Halloween costume is a reflection of self. So what costume idea was "me?" I wasn't going as a princess, no, that's not me. A vampire? No, also not me. I'm not sure how I came to the conclusion, but I eventually went with "Pirate." And my mom, she was always super invested in our Halloween costumes. She always had ideas to contribute and investments she was willing to make and creative touches to add to make our costumes pop. She gave me an aluminum foil earring and drew a beard on me with a makeup pencil. I remember it scratched like a pin. And my dad went out and bought me a toy sword! It wasn't a cutlass though. It wasn't the kind of sword you associate with a pirate. It was more like a knight's sword. But I didn't care, because it wasn't soft, plasticky grey like other toy swords. It was stiff, and had a silvery coating, and a sheath to put it in. This was like a REAL sword! This was something I could show the class. It was so cash. So baller. I was king for a day. Later that night my family and I went Trick or Treating as a group with my aunts, uncles, and cousins. And I was among the oldest of the kids. So I felt like a protector. Any time we got out of the car to walk the block, I rested my hand on the pommel of my sword, like I was ready to defend the team at a moment's notice.
So to re-summarize my ambitions, I guess what I wanted to do was be the best, most impressive "me" I could be and show that self, that style, my "thing," to my social environment. Mostly the girls though. Kid 1 is a princess, Kid 2 is a vampire, FrothySolutions is a pirate. What do you think of that, Kid 1?
Speaking of the self I put forward, it was around this time in my life that I experienced the "Punchinello in the Shoe Incident."
FrothySolutions said:
As you can see, my "personality profile" is something I've cared about from an early age. My favorite color, my trademark Halloween costume, my Punchinello thing... I'm not sure if this was kindergarten or 1st grade, so let's bridge the gap and fast forward a little. Picture this...
1980. We're in the middle of January but still in that cozy Christmassy/New Yearsy spirit. Maybe I was still jazzed about getting to fill my new Jawa Sandcrawler car with Lego men. But it was probably because the TV was broken, and because my parents had no TV to watch, they decided to read us a bedtime story every night. Until the TV was fixed. They read us "The Silver Chair" from The Chronicles of Narnia.
We hadn't read the other books and it affected my grasp of the story, but I didn't really care. I was there to hear Jill's story. I wanted to go to bed and dream about her. Because at this point I figured that dreams are a good way to approximate fantasies as close to real as possible. I thought about how she cried, and how if I was there? I would hold her and protect her and stuff. I wanted to hold her and touch her and kiss her and stuff. I wanted to experience what it was like to insert myself into this story. And so I asked my parents "How can I make myself dream what I want to dream?" I explained I wanted to dream about Narnia. Because it was such an exciting story. I didn't reveal my feelings for Jill. They gave me some tips on how to focus on what I wanna dream about, and I took it to heart. I don't remember it working, but I would continue to try.
Now I know that that's called "lucid dreaming" and today there's whole communities who try to chase that dragon. But anyway, whether it was girls at school or girls in books, I had girls on my mind. I didn't tell my parents this. Until around Valentine's Day.
The TV was fixed by now. And there was this girl in my class named Déjà. I don't know if she felt anything for me, but I felt something for her. And Valentine's Day was coming up so we had to buy Valentine's Day cards to pass out to everyone. And I needed my parents to buy me some Valentine's Day cards. And while we were on the subject, I guess I just felt like I should tell them about Déjà. I told them she was special. That I was wondering about maybe writing her a love letter. And that it was very important that I picked the Valentine's Day cards that represented me. Everyone was gonna have different Valentine's Day cards and I was concerned about how mine would stand out relative to everyone else's. Because this isn't just the impression I leave on the rest of the class, it's an impression I'll be leaving on Déjà. And they were very encouraging. Very supportive. Very very supportive. But see, I know they weren't "teasing" me per se, but eventually this became embarrassing. Always mentioning her to me, like "OooOOOOOOooooOOOOoooh, you like Déjà! What are you gonna do for Déjà?" Mom, Dad, my sisters, at least one of my aunts, it was getting out of hand. So I never ended up writing that love letter. And my Valentines? I didn't write anything on those either. I planned on writing a message on each one for each person I handed them out to, but I figured if I'm getting OooOOOOOOooooOOOOooohs for my consideration, maybe it's not worth the trouble. Thus began an "edgy" phase in my life. Where, at least at face value, I looked down on "mushy stuff" like romance. And goodness and light. I know no one meant any harm, but the whole Déjà thing convinced me, I'd rather be cool and edgy than soft and romantic. And this spread to all things. I rooted for the bad guy whenever I could. One of my earliest memories of watching TV was watching the Olympics with my parents. And this was during the thick of the Cold War so the Olympics were "more than a game" at this point. Nations would sit out the Games as a political gesture, it was serious business. And I took it upon myself to root for the Soviet Union, just so I could be the bad guy.
But I didn't wanna be "cruel" during this edgy phase. More like "cold." Not an "I hate goodness" style, more of a "Meh, your emotions are illogical" style. So I eventually softened into less of a bad guy and into more of a... very disciplined Boy Scout. Because I didn't wanna be a bad guy, I just didn't wanna be mushy or embarrass myself. Didn't wanna be vulnerable. So I pulled back on the whole edginess thing, but I never talked about having a crush on anybody or anything like that. Even though in my private moments I was always imagining being with one or another distant princess. Someone to fantasize about after school, or when I was bored. Speaking of school, let's fast forward to the 3rd grade. Picture this...
1981. Back home after school, and you are exhausted. Maybe it's the 1/3rd of a mile you had to slog back home with a loaded backpack. Maybe you should've left your textbooks at school. But you can't do that. Because you're the "Smart Kid." And for some reason that means always having your textbooks onhand. You drop your backpack in the living room. Mom is watching Texas with a plate of homemade steak fries. You walk past to kiss her hello and feel her stomach. That was a foot. Any day now. Your sisters are outside playing with the rest of the neighborhood kids who just got of class. You're not interested in that. You head over to the bookshelf and grab an armful of the World Book.
Then you head into the kitchen to scavenge the last of the Blueberry Waffelos. You take it all back into the living room. Keeping up this "Smart Kid" persona at school is hard work, so it's a good thing parts of that persona are true. Like how you read the encyclopedia a lot. You crack open one of the volumes to a piece on "moon dogs." Whoa, those sound trippy. You'd probably freak out if you saw one for real. Then you read a piece on space storms. Allegedly, they cause electronics and magnetic things to go haywire here on Earth. Compass needles jiggle and television images distort. Whoa. You've got some trivia to drop on the kids at school tomorrow, but do these things really exist out in the universe?
There's a proverb that says you have 3 faces. I think that describes this phase of my life pretty well. In Version One I described how eventually I started up this "Smart Kid" persona. This lie that I lived when I was at school.
FrothySolutions said:
Thinking back, this was a stupid thing to do. Because my sisters went to the same school as I did, and said school was only down the street from my house. So said classmates were probably neighbors of mine. Probably saw me around the neighborhood. "School FrothySolutions" and "Home FrothySolutions" were two different boys. School FrothySolutions was a prodigy child who lived in wealth and privilege. His house was always clean, he was disciplined and well-mannered, didn't crack jokes, didn't play games, read books for fun, lived to serve the ends of his teachers, his parents kept a bible of family rules with gold trimmed pages... and as a result of this lie, if people actually believed it, I was respected at school. Being the Smart Kid means your opinion matters. You get praise from the teacher, you get admiration from the students. I don't know if I was "fun" or "cool," but what I know for sure is, my opinion mattered. When I had an opinion, people listened. Because I was the Smart Kid and I knew best. I was smartest, wisest, most disciplined and therefore most righteous.
Then there was Home FrothySolutions, who was none of that stuff. Home FrothySolutions ate Waffelos. School FrothySolutions would never eat kiddy cereals. He was sophisticated. But not in an "I'm better than you" way. He didn't look down on anyone for eating kiddy cereals, he just genuinely preferred grownup food. It's just the kinda guy he was. School FrothySolutions watches the news. Home FrothySolutions gleans talking points from his parents so he has something in case someone at school calls his news-watching bluff. A more honest FrothySolutions. But the most honest FrothySolutions was "Private FrothySolutions." Who was pretty much Home FrothySolutions, except he felt a certain kind of way about girls and snuck into his dad's porn. I lied to my family because I didn't want to show the vulnerability of liking girls. Or get in trouble for looking at porn. And I guess I lied to my classmates because I wanted to be interesting. How is a 3rd grader supposed to be interesting, especially to other 3rd graders? But then again, it probably wasn't as complicated as I was making it out to be, because this was a time when every kid was every other kid's friend, just because we were all at that age where you just played with everybody. Anybody who wanted to play and had something to play with. Everyone was friendly solely, if for no other reason than the principle that you should be friendly to everyone.
Which reminds me, this was the first time I learned I was short. Like I said, every kid tried to be friendly and positive and encouraging, and one day at recess I'm walking and talking with this kid, and he's like "Don't feel bad about being short. Short kids are late bloomers and end up having super growth spurts when they get older. You're probably gonna be, like, 7 feet tall, man." I thanked him. But at this point I wasn't really that worried about being short. Was I short? I guess? This kid was bigger than me, yes. But I feel like I was pretty much on par with most kids in my grade. And even if I was, at this point I didn't see being short as a downside. Yet. It was like having blue eyes or red hair. It meant nothing. What would mean something though? If he knew the real me behind the "School FrothySolutions" charade.
The real me kinda wished "School FrothySolutions" was real. The discipline and stuff would've been a drag, but it would've been nice to actually be smart, and actually have money to throw around. I spent a lot of time imagining up fantasies like this. And about women. I had moved on from peeking into my dad's magazines and hoarding lingerie spreads to making lists of sexy concepts that excited me. Making notes to try and dream about them. In addition to lingerie catalogues, I would also collect shopper's ads and coupon books and stuff. For all the attractive pictures of food. And I'm not the only one, apparently.
https://incels.is/threads/yet-another-incel-trait.138811/
The best time for attractive food pictures was around Christmas, I found. And I would look at these pictures, and I would have this specific fantasy in my mind. A cold winter's night, the snow is thick outside. Not a creature is stirring. I walk through the brightly lit living room to the kitchen, and look through the full cupboards for something to eat. All of my food looks pretty like in the shopper's ads. I invite people in to partake of my warmth, and my meal. That's what I'd do, if I had money. Also if I had money, I would build my dream room. I would look through electronics catalogues & mailers, and I drew up a map of what my dream room would look like if money was no object. I wanted a room like a hi-tech base. Or a secret laboratory. Or a civil defense shack. The idea of being geared up with all kinds of useful tech and electronics felt good. Maybe it made me feel secure. Or empowered.
So to summarize my ambitions so far...
1. Be interesting to my classmates.
2. Be with women, if only in my dreams.
3. Be rich and have food at Christmas.
4. Kit out my room with tech.
Let's fast forward a few months to around early summer. Picture this...
1982. You've been doing this after school Boy Scouts thing for a while. You're not really sure what rank you hold, you've heard about Cub Scouts and Eagle Scouts and Wolf Scouts and Webelos Scouts and Eagle Scouts. Can't really get a straight answer and you wouldn't know who to ask. But anyway, you're in the gym with the boys and you're working on soapbox derby cars. They're divided into teams and you're pouring your blood, sweat, and tears into your team's car. After the end of the school year, this car is going up to camp where it'll race against other cars. And you can't wait to go. But there's the whistle, the Boy Scouts meeting is over for today. Time to head out. You see other Scouts with ice cream and/or cans of soda. You're not interested in that. You start to head home, but one of the adults stops you and reminds you to get some ice cream and soda. Sure, whatever, you get some ice cream and soda. While you're doing this, you ask how exactly you're supposed to make sure you make it to camp. Will a bus come to your house? Are your parents supposed to drive you? You haven't been told very much about any of this Boy Scouts stuff. And it's then you learn: You're not going to camp. Only the "big kids" get to go to camp. That's why they're holding this ice cream and soda thing. It's a consolation, specifically for the "little kids," because they're not going to camp. Big kids get camp, little kids get ice cream.
You're crushed. Suddenly it all makes sense. They more or less let you do whatever, they didn't care. It was the big kids they were keen to keep apprised. Who were truly involved. They were the "real" Scouts. You're just being babysat. You think about all the work you put into that soapbox car. Did they think they were doing you a favor? Allowing you the "privilege" to work on a car you didn't get to even see perform? Did they think getting to rub elbows with "real Scouts" was enough? They are wrong. And they are stupid for thinking you would be okay with this. But you don't cry in front of them. You accept their explanation and briskly head out. The streets are kinda clear, it's been a while since the other neighbor kids got home. So there's probably no one around. Coast is clear. You break out into hissing, grunting, sobbing fits. Storming the last little bit of walk home. It's not fast storming, it's slow storming. You're weighed down by that backpack. And sadness. When you get home, you lug yourself up the stairs and put your backpack in your room. You go to your parents room and find your mom asleep with your recently born baby brother. You crawl into bed with her. "M-Mom??? They... they, they wouldn't- they said I couldn't go to camp... that I'm too little... I HATE BOY SCOUTS!!! I'M NEVER GOING BACK!!! I QUIT!!!" She hugs you and says it's okay, you don't have to go back to Boy Scouts. You lie with her for a while, then you go to your room. You produce your copy of Boys' Life.
You take it downstairs to the kitchen. You light the stove top. And you burn it. And then you run out the back door and drop the burning magazine in the grass of the backyard. Look what they made you do! You could've burned yourself, or something in the house! You didn't want to have to lash out like this. But they pushed you to this. They made you burn that magazine. You bake yourself some frozen fries and them up to your room, turn on your box fan, and cool off. You're burning up with anger. You take out your toys. You've kinda imagined up a city/world with your toys, named characters and everything. You open up your copy of "Tomorrow and Beyond: Masterpieces of Science Fiction Art."
Your anger has given you an idea for a new storyline. Where the angry wrath of some great alien beast changes the face of your city and the lives of the heroes who live in it.
In addition to imagining up dream girls and dream rooms and dream pantries full of dream food at Christmas, I imagined up adventures with my toys. And I kept track of their stories. I don't think they were good stories, but because I kept track of them, they had continuity. I've always been an easy audience to keep if you promise me a story with continuity, even if that story isn't written very well. I got my family involved in my stories too. For instance, my sisters. They had toys. I had adventures with my toys, they had adventures with their toys, and so a lot of the time, if not most of the time, we would put our toys together. I had a city with my toys, but so did they. And I took it upon myself to keep track of our adventures. Also, by the time I started 4th grade, in Writing class we had to do a lot of creative writing. I dunno, like, write a story synopsis like the kind you'd see on the back of a book for a made up story. So if I was given homework like that, I would use that as an excuse to ask my parents to be in my fantasy story. I would ask them to develop themselves as characters in the fantasy world that is this homework assignment. Things like that.
And yet? I was friendless, as far as the kids at school were concerned. I couldn't really be friends with them anyway, I was living a lie. Friends are people you enjoy interests with, probably, why didn't I try and rope in some of my classmates into my pretend play? Why didn't I make friends who wanted to be in my stories and write stories of their own? Well, I don't think I had much faith in my stories. They were kinda stupid. Furthermore, playing pretend is stupid. All I could've contributed to a friendship was my imagination, and it doesn't sound like it would be fun for a normal kid to spend all day thinking "Man, what if instead of going to school we just took over the school and made it a party hall for the kids? What if that?" That's all I could contribute. Just ideas for that pretend fantasy. And I gotta imagine most kids, most people period, eventually wanna do something real.
We're approaching 30,000 characters, so I'm gonna stop it here. To summarize, from ages 5-9 I would fantasize about characters I created and dream girls I wanted to be with. At school I put on airs because I wanted to be interesting and admired, but deep down I was afraid of letting anyone know about my dumb pretend games, or my taste for girls, or my laid-back & slovenly home life, or any of my other vulnerabilities. At school I was a genius prodigy child, an unwavering model of discipline and maturity. And I was respected for it. But was anyone really my friend?
Punchinello In The Shoe. Did I obsess over it because I wanted to be myself? Or because I wanted to be interesting? Or did I want to be myself because I thought knowing myself and being myself would make me interesting?
Ritalincel
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not even the title
Ritalincel
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16 minutes ago
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not a letter
BonesAndHarmony
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FrothySolutions
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16 minutes ago
"Founding Father" or "Milk & Cigarettes 2: Dogpilled"
TL;DR: Oh yeah! @Ritalincel is right, I was recently banned from r/IncelTears. For being too nice, I guess. It reminds me of how wronged I felt in my teen/tween years, when teachers and classmates, despite my Nice Smart Good Boy persona, started to be mean to me.
I don't argue with people to add notches to my "Internet Battles Won" counter. I argue with people because I want to know the world hasn't gone insane. I don't think I ask very much of people. I don't even ask to get laid. All I ask is that if we're gonna write feel good pieces about toxic misogynists getting their comeuppance, we need to start writing about the toxic misandrists too. And we don't see that. And society should be called out for letting this slide for so long. That's not too much to ask, right?
For IncelTears, however, it must be. Because I was banned.
I appealed, and just today I got a response from u/SoloTheFord. Their words...
"Some of the mods." Suggesting not all the mods were onboard with banning me? Hmmmmmm. Go through my posts, at my most audacious all I did was demand that everyone get the same social justice ticker tape parade that women get. That it should be equal. That we shouldn't diminish people's suffering by saying "Yeah but you don't have it as bad as these other people so check your privilege." I don't think that's too much to ask. But as I repeat it, I can see why a group like IncelTears might be against it. And oh lad at that "We have a number of mods who are women here." Gimme some fuckin' credit. Like I would only be on my best behavior in the presence of women. This is that prejudice, man. They don't know me. But they judge me.
It reminds me of when I crossed into double digits. And my classmates and I faced the challenges of puberty. The hormones made them cruel where they used to be tolerant. And it made the teachers cruel because at this point they figure "All these hormonal boys are alike, even FrothySolutions." Because they don't know me yet. And truth be told, they never did know me. Not unlike the Gang Weeders of the now, the "real me" was lost in imaginary fantasies. Picture this...
1983. You're at Stereo Discounters with your dad, your aunt & uncle, some of their friends, a handful of your cousins, and all of your sisters. You just got back from a raid on McDonalds and your belly is full with McNuggets. The theme from Flashdance is playing on the store radio. Some of the other kids are flinging Wacky WallWalkers on the TVs, but not you. You are focused. You are here to get stuff for your new room at the new house you're moving to. Specifically, two things. Your main concern is finally getting your own TV. But your dad? Well, recently your parents saw this commercial...
"Someday, both kids will be looking for a job." That line sold them. Are kids seriously doing advanced computer stuff like this already? If so, this Commodore VIC-20 isn't some "toy" like other game consoles. This is an investment in the kids' literacy and job future. If they can afford it, and if you feel like you're up to it, getting a VIC-20 sounds like a really smart idea. They asked you how you felt about trying this "programming" thing. And why not? You're smart, right? Right??? And making your own video games sounds cool. You could make video games of all your stupid little adventures. How hard could it be? If kids like you are doing it? So you say yes, you're interested in this and will commit. Programming is gonna be a hobby of yours. If they can afford it. And lucky you, the Video Game Crash of 1983 is underway, and VIC-20s are in stock for well under $100. Well under. You got yourself a computer now.
I barely touched that VIC-20. There was TV to watch. But I definitely pretended like I was heavy into working on it. Thankfully my parents were kinda hands-off for the whole thing. They got me some cartridges and a BASIC textbook and said that once I felt I had mastered it, they would get me new textbooks. So if anyone asked how the programming was coming along, I could just be like "Well, I'm in that textbook, lemme tell ya..." Plus, they didn't know what "programming" looked like. And neither did I. So any "work" they saw on the screen, I could just tell them it was code in progress. Now, I never created anything with that VIC-20. But pretending to be working on stuff was a good opportunity to rope my family into my pretend play. Instead of playing with my toys I could be like "Hey I'm making a video game and I wanna put you in it. If you were in a medieval fairy tale world, what kind of fighter would you be?" And I would work with concepts like that, put together crude stories with those characters, and that was fun, but I never made anything "real."
I also told the kids and teachers at school about me having a VIC-20. And that I was busy writing programs and stuff. And why wouldn't I be? I'm smart, right? My grades are good, I don't skip class, I'm well behaved, if that's not the kind of kid who builds code, what is? So they believed it. Or at least I'm pretty sure they believed it. And me, I started to believe too. In my Smart Kid persona. Because not only were my grades and attendance and behavior good, but as I and my classmates entered double-digit age I found that everyone else's grades and attendance and behavior was much worse than mine. So I thought "Okay, I must really be special then." But I wasn't finger-waggy about it, I wasn't judging my classmates for their failure or rubbing their noses in my success. So why were they suddenly so cruel to me? I spent 4th and 5th grade at two different schools, but it was at both of these schools, around this age bracket, that I started to get made fun of and picked on. How my hair looked. How I ate food at lunch. One time we went to this museum for a field trip, and at this point in your school life you notice cliques starting to form. And so we're going around looking at this exhibit of African mini-statues, right? And one of the boys, one of the "Cool Kids" clique, is looking at one of the mini-statues and is like "Whoa... it's FrothySolutions..." See, he's saying I'm ugly. That I look like that statue. And so in my head I'm thinking, well he didn't announce it to the whole class, he said it quietly, like it was meant only for his group of boys. So somehow that's... acceptable? Like he didn't mean for me to hear it so he's not really bullying me? But then again, I was nearby. So maybe he meant for me to hear it? Also, I wasn't the only kid they made fun of. They made fun of a few of us. And to add further complexity to this, some of the kids they made fun of also seemed to be part of the "Cool Kids?" Like one day they'll be passing around a drawing of this fat kid in our class, and then the next day that same fat kid will be crackin' wise with them at their table at lunch. And so in the end I guess I figured "It's all in good fun, that's just how they interact." I wasn't interested in that, but I just kinda let it happen. Also I kinda felt like it would be against my character motivations as "Smart Kid" to tell on them? See, I was smart enough to code and get good grades, but too dumb to know when I was being made fun of. So pure was I. A kid as good as I was can't know what a "Yo Mama" joke is, for instance.
But it wasn't just the students who were no longer swayed by my "Smart Kid" persona. There were a few teachers here and there who weren't quite with the program, and didn't know that I was the good boy who was not to be yelled at. I mentioned in Version One about the time I, somehow, ended up on the after school basketball team.
It's understandable where this sudden rough treatment comes from. A prejudice towards boys my age. I didn't used to get treated like this ever. But that was during a time when none of us were really treated like this ever. Because we were all good kids. But now that we're getting older, some kids are getting more "headstrong" let's say. And you meet enough headstrong young men, you think "All Boys Are Like That."
But not me. I was apple polisher as fuck at school. But I wasn't immune to the effects of getting older. Let's skip ahead a little and picture this...
1984. There isn't a toy on shelves that doesn't have its own cartoon. You're up bright and early before your sisters, waiting for Saturday Supercade to start. You've got a matching variety pack of Pac-Man SpaghettiOs and you're trying to finish them all before anyone wakes up, and then you see this commercial...
Wait a minute, that girl dog though.
Are you crazy, or was that skirt kinda short? The way she looked in that skirt... you can't yet quite come to terms with why, but you wanna see more of this girl dog. You don't need the Skate & Plush. But if there's a toy for it, there must be a show for it. What'd they say he was from? "The Get Along Gang?" So there must be a Get Along Gang show. But you haven't seen any commercials for it or anything. Damn it, if it was any other cartoon you could ask for it by name! Why is this one so hard to find?!!
Days turn to weeks, and still no Get Along Gang. You're checking the newspaper TV listings every day, and your parents wanna know what it is you're trying to catch. You don't usually read the TV listings so there must be something specific you're looking for. And you realize, you can't ask anyone for help with this. You know what this is. and the shame is too much. No one can know! That girl dog! You're consumed by her. And it's a vulnerability you can't expose. Especially because she's a dog. If this were a human girl, even that you couldn't be out and proud about. But this??? How could you even begin to explain it??? Your attraction to an animal??? They're not supposed to be sexy! But damn it... she was. Damn it! She was onscreen for maybe 2 seconds. A honey shot. It should've meant nothing. But now you cannot rest. You can't ask for the toys, obviously, because that would mean sharing your unexplained interest in this Get Along show. But even if you could, these feelings are different than how you feel about other toys. You have your city, and you have your adventures, but what you feel for this girl dog isn't a desire to make her part of your world. No. You want to be part of her world. And Someday You'll Find Her.
And then, that fateful day. You hear it. The Get Along Gang! Tonight at 7:30! Your guiltiest passion yet, consummated at last. Tonight at 7:30.
Her name is Dotty Dog. Or Dottie Dog. The spelling varies. There was a thread on incels.is that asked what our TV crushes were.
Implying we only ever had one. I said I had many. Which is true. But Dotty was notable amongst them for sure... she's a sexy dog, okay?! There, I said it!!! Are you happy now, American Greetings? Is that what you wanted me to say??? It's out there, eternally bound to the name and reputation of FrothySolutions. And saying that does NOT make me a pedophile. Why? Because I was 11 at the time. And according to Wikipedia, everyone in The Get Along Gang was 12-14. So who's the real pedophile??? Dotty is. Dotty is the pedophile. Besides, why aren't we talking about how deliberately sexy they made her? All those gratuitous shots of her pantied ass??? Think I don't know what that's about???
Pantyshots are a lewdness trope! You got pantyshots? You got lewds. But a lot of people will say they aren't. I dunno about anybody else, but the "Is this lewd" debate is one I've had time and again. Maybe you don't like people calling your favorite anime fanservicey bullshit, so you're like "No, that's not even that hot" or something. I'm sure you've seen people talk about this. But lemme ask those people this: What about this picture?
It's just a pantyshot, right? But you're telling me this isn't lewds? This isn't ecchi? Where is the line? Whether this is or isn't lewds, where is the line? How do we know when something is lewds, and when I'm "misinterpreting" something? Go watch the pilot, see if I'm not right. Maybe watch the full season, for good measure. I'll tell you this much, I'm not alone.
Dotty represented a shift in my priorities. If nothing else, she was my first TV crush that actually invoked ambition in me. And that's what this whole past-authoring thing is about, trying to figure out what dreams and ambitions I might've lost sight of. Not unlike Jake Goldman, I wanted in. I wanted to be part of her world. Yes, I knew it was a cartoon. Maybe it was the hormones, if I wasn't going through The Change I was definitely approaching it. I guess I just figured... the enigmatic myriad of forces at work in the universe??? People talk about Gods and afterlives, ghosts, other dimensions... dreamscapes, thoughtscapes... plus my dad has always been very spiritual. I just figured, if there is power somewhere in this universe, it can take me to Get Along Gang World. I didn't know how. If God can be called the creator of our universe, maybe Get Along Gang World exists as a universe within the mind of its creator. Some men pray to go to Anime World when they die. Me? I prayed to join The Get Along Gang. If nothing else, it was a nice fantasy. A boy can dream, right?
But there were a couple problems with that. A couple. Not many, but a couple. Exactly two problems. First, I had to concede, Dotty was probably already with somebody. The leader of the Gang, Montgomery "Good News" Moose. Can't compete with him. Untouchable. Athletic, but also a scientist? I believed in honoring the sanctity of a canon 'ship. But even if I didn't, the other problem? This is a world of animals. I as a human would not fit in this world. So I would have to "become" something that did fit. An animal type character. And that's what makes Dotty so notable amongst the "distant princesses" I was prone to having crushes on. She was the first one I developed an "original character" for. Not unlike Jake Goldman. And thousands upon thousands of deviantArtists. But like my Halloween costume and my Valentines, I couldn't pick just anything. If I'm designing myself as an animal, I had to pick the right animal. The animal that was me. But what animal is me? Well, Dotty is a spaniel because that works with her character. Spaniel? Or a golden retriever? I'm not sure. But anyway, whatever kind of dog she is, the ears of that breed make for good pigtails, and pigtails make for a sassy, spunky, vibrant-but-kinda-airheaded microskirt-wearing cheerleader. So who am I, really? And what animal evokes those traits best if I had to sit down and draw that character? The character that is me? A "fursona," before I even knew what furries were.
This awakening might've also shifted my thinking. Where once I was mostly interested in building my fantasy world, this was when I started being interested in living in other people's fantasy worlds. Before this, I didn't wanna be on He-Man or Superfriends or G.I. Joe or Transformers, but Get Along Gang got me thinking. If I was on those shows, what would my character be? I got my siblings involved too, not my brother right away because he was too little, but his time would come. Obviously I didn't talk about how I wanted to fuck Dotty Dog, but the idea of making characters for shows seemed to interest them as much as it interested me.
It wasn't just me and my classmates going through changes. I mentioned earlier, between 4th grade and 5th grade I switched schools because of a move. So I was living in a new neighborhood. And unlike the last neighborhood, my school was a couple miles away from home. Instead of a couple blocks. So I wasn't running into my classmates around this neighborhood. But the effects of being a bigger kid were apparent even here. Where once every neighbor kid was a friend, I found myself getting made fun of, getting into fights. Fortunately, because there was little fear of running into my classmates when I was out of school, I was freer to be myself. So I was able to fight back. If this were school, I couldn't fight back. For one, we would both get in trouble. For two, it would compromise my Good & Smart Kid persona. But while I probably wasn't really a Good & Smart Kid, I wasn't a tough kid either. For instance, there were these brothers who would throw rocks at my window. And they showed no sign of stopping. So I see them on their front porch one day and I decide to confront them. What I thought I would do is paraphrase lines I knew by Dirty Harry, threatening them if they ever threw rocks at my window again. I must've messed up the delivery because it didn't work. And whenever they'd see me they'd make fun of me by paraphrasing what I said to THEM, but in some kinda cartoon voice. Implying that that's what I sound like. We would fight often. Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost. One time they kicked me in the mouth while I was down. It was a bad beating. No kid just has one fight growing up, I think? There was a thread on incels.is that asked about that.
Like most kids, I made lots of enemies. Another case, I was usually called in to intervene when other kids were messing with my siblings and/or their friends. I got into fights with those people. One time the kids' parents went to my parents, and I had to apologize. I apologized to them and they apologized to me. Which I thought was bullshit because those kids hit my sisters first, and no apology was offered to them. And all I was doing was defending my sisters. An ethic my parents drilled into me, that I should stick up for my family. I was pissed for the rest of the day.
I made a lot of enemies, and no friends. But you know what? I did have a "role" back then. I didn't have any friends, but my sisters did. And so I was like "friends in law" with those guys. To my sisters' friends, I held the "friend's older brother" role. They and my sisters would have their fun or whatever, and I would drop in now and then, not actually involved, but keeping a mild interest. Sort of a guardian, sort of an overseer. Ranging from "chill" to "stoic." Mysterious, distant, but not "detached." Watching from the shadows. In the other room doing boring big brother stuff if you need me. "Friend's older brother." You know the role. But I didn't really feel it at the time because I wasn't bigger than their friends. I was older, but not bigger. I feel like I could've owned the role a little better if I was could've just been big. And was, like, good at sports. But both were physically impossible for me to change. It was physically impossible for me to grow any faster, and physically impossible for me to watch less TV. And also? It kinda sucks that the closest thing to a social life wasn't really a life of my own, but a life in service to my siblings and their friends. Kinda sucks. I did wanna look out for them, but in hindsight, outside looking in, if this was someone else's life I was looking at, I would look at this guy and think it pretty sad that he doesn't have a crew of his own. I could've had friends but still been a big brother to my siblings and their friends.
There were times when my school life and home life crossed paths. Again, my sisters went to the same school as me. So there was still a limit to how brazenly I could lie. But also, the school we went to was very... personal. Very candid. They were close with the parents. They upheld the "It takes a village to raise a child" proverb so parents were involved with the school, and school was often involved with the family. For instance, in 6th grade, on the last day of school before winter/Christmas break, my sisters and I at school well after hours, waiting for our parents to pick us up. We were the last kids there, except for the principal's own children. It had been a long day of "Last Day Before Christmas Break" arts and crafts and snack eating and general slacking off. A school day in name only. But there were still plenty of cookies and soda to get rid of, and unexplored nooks and crannies of the school to check out. It wasn't against any rules, so I didn't think it challenged my Smart Good persona. So we're basically just chillin', sky's gotten dark but it's no hassle because it's winter. And sometimes our parents are late to pick us up. But then the principal comes in and says that our parents called, and they want her to take us to meet them at the hospital. Mom is fine, but she's at the hospital. And so it becomes a night of me, my sisters, the principal, and her kids, piled into a van, going around running errands and picking up OTHER kids before we head to the hospital. I was nervous for a lot of the time, I didn't want anybody getting too comfortable. McDonalds was present, and people were getting friendly. We stopped to pick up some other kids from karate, and we had to wait in the van for the last few minutes of karate class to end. Just us, nothing to do but talk and get to know one another. Know the truths about each other. So I was quiet, obviously. And then, finally, to the hospital. So concerned about keeping face was I, I forgot to worry what might've happened to my mom. Turns out my mom broke her arm. No one tells me, but I'm pretty sure
she broke it because she was drunk. And I'm worried that my principal knows this now. Knows the truth about my home life. I need to relax, take my mind off the fear of my worlds colliding. And I find that the hospital, at Christmastime, is actually pretty peaceful. There's a calm, Christmas cheer about the place. There are lights and decorations up, people are gathered, TVs are on in the lobby and some kinda Christmas special is airing, I'm not sure what. I felt like this was what I wanted for Christmas. Moments like these. When you think about it though, no one is ever at a hospital for a good reason. It's because something bad happened and medicine is needed to stop the bad thing. But in that moment it didn't feel like that. I wasn't worried about anyone finding about my drunken roughneck parents, I was at peace, and felt kinship with the principal's kids and everyone else on Earth that night. Christmas magic.
A less magical time when my worlds collided? 6th grade camp. What I hear is, not everyone knows what 6th grade camp is. But it's exactly what it sounds like. At the end of the school year, 6th graders go to camp. And just a few years earlier it was my dream to go to camp for several days. As a Boy Scout. But now I was worried about missing my shows. See how ambitions change? "Fortunately" this 6th grade camp wouldn't be out in the wilderness like real camp. It was technically part of our Spanish class, and so as a cultural thing we went to Spanish Harlem. We stayed in a hotel. Our Spanish teacher brought her daughter. And every time our Spanish teacher got mad at her, she would scold her in Spanish. I remember one time when her daughter was getting out of line, she said "Cállate, que es???" I didn't know what the "que es" meant, but I definitely knew "cállate." You're supposed to scold your kids in another language so that we don't know that you're scolding her. But every kid's first lesson in a foreign language is the fun words like "cállate." You wanna say cuss words and things like "shut up." She had to know we all knew what she was saying. Also her daughter was hot. And here's me living this lie, so it's not like I can tell her how hot I think she is. But I looked at her a lot throughout the trip. Anyway, I figured this was gonna be a pretty fun couple of days. I wasn't too into the attractions of the trip, we went to this one place that had free chips & salsa. I don't even remember us ordering anything. And I remember the bathroom door was open and there was a mop bucket filled with water in there. We did not order the chips & salsa, I'm positive they were complimentary. And the salsa didn't taste like store bought salsa either. It was much worse. Like a very spicy tomato. All heat, no flavor. Also, it was super hot outside for the whole trip. But I didn't care, as long as I got to go back to the hotel and watch TV.
Problem is, my roommates made life hard for me. I was in the room with all the boys, obviously. And I wanted to watch TV. But so did they, and I wasn't really in a position to be like "I wanna watch The Get Along Gang can we change the channel?" I kinda blocked out most of those days, it was so rough staying with those boys. But I do remember calling our chaperone on the phone. He was in another room. But instead of intervening and laying down some law, here's what he does. He asks me "How old are you?" I say "12?" I was 12 at this point. And he says "Act like it." And there it was again. When I was 9 or younger, I could have any teacher or principal or lunch lady or janitor running to my aid. Now they're like "He must be like those other kids" or "If he's not like one of those other kids, he needs to start acting like it because I don't feel like babysitting." I didn't know what else to say, I was, I mean, that 100% clipped my stride. All I could think was "The principal and other upper staff, when I go tell on him, boy..." He sounded exhausted though. Like he was in bed and couldn't be bothered to calm the chaos in our room. But I didn't care. Here I was, a fifth wheel in this nonstop party into the night that I wasn't even invited to. Watching adult cartoons on some cable channel I hadn't heard of yet. Also there was live action nudity. I don't know what channels they were watching but it's not like I could've joined them, because of my persona. But also, I was genuinely angry at this point and didn't even wanna join them. You know what I probably called the chaperone for? I couldn't sleep and I needed somewhere to sleep. Because these guys didn't wanna sleep. I couldn't go sleep in the girls' room, obviously. I wasn't gonna get to sleep, I wasn't gonna get to watch my shows, I couldn't enjoy the porn, I couldn't be near the Spanish teacher's hot daughter, and the chaperone had the audacity to just be like "Fuck you" to me. Tattled as soon as we got back. What an insufferable bitch I was. If this school was a village, I was the town crier. In that I actually cried. But he said "Act like it." He had a job to do and he didn't. He deserved what he got. Whatever it was.
With the trip under my belt, that was the last of my 6th grade obligations. So closes my grade school career. And so closes this post, because we're approaching the character limit. Twice I have had my heart broken by promises of camp fun. To summarize, from an early age I fantasized about dream girls and adventures with my toys. And my sisters' toys. I didn't share my interest in pretend play with my classmates, I thought they would think it was stupid. And I didn't share my interest in girls with anyone, because I didn't want to expose the vulnerability. I was hiding my true self. And then I got a TV in my room (and a VIC-20) and I had more and more reason to cloister myself alone, in the the world of TV. Thanks to Dotty Dog, my focus shifted to developing original characters for shows I liked. I got my sisters roped into this too. But no one from school or from the neighborhood. And I don't think my sisters' friends did either. That's what I mean, it didn't make sense as an interest to share with anyone outside of my family. But I was respected. Not at school anymore, that power was starting to fade as puberty set in. Teachers were telling me to act my age because I must be like all the other boys my age, right? But to my sisters' friends and my sisters, I had as much respect as a "friend's older brother" can have.
Puberty bubbles within me like a hot poison. Ask any incel, the hardest urge to deny is the sexual urge. Stunt it, stifle it, something's got to give. Something's going to go wrong with you. Goodbye grade school, hello junior high.
For IncelTears, however, it must be. Because I was banned.
https://incels.is/threads/ban-appeal.139071/
I appealed, and just today I got a response from u/SoloTheFord. Their words...
SoloTheFord said:
"Some of the mods." Suggesting not all the mods were onboard with banning me? Hmmmmmm. Go through my posts, at my most audacious all I did was demand that everyone get the same social justice ticker tape parade that women get. That it should be equal. That we shouldn't diminish people's suffering by saying "Yeah but you don't have it as bad as these other people so check your privilege." I don't think that's too much to ask. But as I repeat it, I can see why a group like IncelTears might be against it. And oh lad at that "We have a number of mods who are women here." Gimme some fuckin' credit. Like I would only be on my best behavior in the presence of women. This is that prejudice, man. They don't know me. But they judge me.
It reminds me of when I crossed into double digits. And my classmates and I faced the challenges of puberty. The hormones made them cruel where they used to be tolerant. And it made the teachers cruel because at this point they figure "All these hormonal boys are alike, even FrothySolutions." Because they don't know me yet. And truth be told, they never did know me. Not unlike the Gang Weeders of the now, the "real me" was lost in imaginary fantasies. Picture this...
1983. You're at Stereo Discounters with your dad, your aunt & uncle, some of their friends, a handful of your cousins, and all of your sisters. You just got back from a raid on McDonalds and your belly is full with McNuggets. The theme from Flashdance is playing on the store radio. Some of the other kids are flinging Wacky WallWalkers on the TVs, but not you. You are focused. You are here to get stuff for your new room at the new house you're moving to. Specifically, two things. Your main concern is finally getting your own TV. But your dad? Well, recently your parents saw this commercial...
"Someday, both kids will be looking for a job." That line sold them. Are kids seriously doing advanced computer stuff like this already? If so, this Commodore VIC-20 isn't some "toy" like other game consoles. This is an investment in the kids' literacy and job future. If they can afford it, and if you feel like you're up to it, getting a VIC-20 sounds like a really smart idea. They asked you how you felt about trying this "programming" thing. And why not? You're smart, right? Right??? And making your own video games sounds cool. You could make video games of all your stupid little adventures. How hard could it be? If kids like you are doing it? So you say yes, you're interested in this and will commit. Programming is gonna be a hobby of yours. If they can afford it. And lucky you, the Video Game Crash of 1983 is underway, and VIC-20s are in stock for well under $100. Well under. You got yourself a computer now.
I barely touched that VIC-20. There was TV to watch. But I definitely pretended like I was heavy into working on it. Thankfully my parents were kinda hands-off for the whole thing. They got me some cartridges and a BASIC textbook and said that once I felt I had mastered it, they would get me new textbooks. So if anyone asked how the programming was coming along, I could just be like "Well, I'm in that textbook, lemme tell ya..." Plus, they didn't know what "programming" looked like. And neither did I. So any "work" they saw on the screen, I could just tell them it was code in progress. Now, I never created anything with that VIC-20. But pretending to be working on stuff was a good opportunity to rope my family into my pretend play. Instead of playing with my toys I could be like "Hey I'm making a video game and I wanna put you in it. If you were in a medieval fairy tale world, what kind of fighter would you be?" And I would work with concepts like that, put together crude stories with those characters, and that was fun, but I never made anything "real."
I also told the kids and teachers at school about me having a VIC-20. And that I was busy writing programs and stuff. And why wouldn't I be? I'm smart, right? My grades are good, I don't skip class, I'm well behaved, if that's not the kind of kid who builds code, what is? So they believed it. Or at least I'm pretty sure they believed it. And me, I started to believe too. In my Smart Kid persona. Because not only were my grades and attendance and behavior good, but as I and my classmates entered double-digit age I found that everyone else's grades and attendance and behavior was much worse than mine. So I thought "Okay, I must really be special then." But I wasn't finger-waggy about it, I wasn't judging my classmates for their failure or rubbing their noses in my success. So why were they suddenly so cruel to me? I spent 4th and 5th grade at two different schools, but it was at both of these schools, around this age bracket, that I started to get made fun of and picked on. How my hair looked. How I ate food at lunch. One time we went to this museum for a field trip, and at this point in your school life you notice cliques starting to form. And so we're going around looking at this exhibit of African mini-statues, right? And one of the boys, one of the "Cool Kids" clique, is looking at one of the mini-statues and is like "Whoa... it's FrothySolutions..." See, he's saying I'm ugly. That I look like that statue. And so in my head I'm thinking, well he didn't announce it to the whole class, he said it quietly, like it was meant only for his group of boys. So somehow that's... acceptable? Like he didn't mean for me to hear it so he's not really bullying me? But then again, I was nearby. So maybe he meant for me to hear it? Also, I wasn't the only kid they made fun of. They made fun of a few of us. And to add further complexity to this, some of the kids they made fun of also seemed to be part of the "Cool Kids?" Like one day they'll be passing around a drawing of this fat kid in our class, and then the next day that same fat kid will be crackin' wise with them at their table at lunch. And so in the end I guess I figured "It's all in good fun, that's just how they interact." I wasn't interested in that, but I just kinda let it happen. Also I kinda felt like it would be against my character motivations as "Smart Kid" to tell on them? See, I was smart enough to code and get good grades, but too dumb to know when I was being made fun of. So pure was I. A kid as good as I was can't know what a "Yo Mama" joke is, for instance.
But it wasn't just the students who were no longer swayed by my "Smart Kid" persona. There were a few teachers here and there who weren't quite with the program, and didn't know that I was the good boy who was not to be yelled at. I mentioned in Version One about the time I, somehow, ended up on the after school basketball team.
FrothySolutions said:
It's understandable where this sudden rough treatment comes from. A prejudice towards boys my age. I didn't used to get treated like this ever. But that was during a time when none of us were really treated like this ever. Because we were all good kids. But now that we're getting older, some kids are getting more "headstrong" let's say. And you meet enough headstrong young men, you think "All Boys Are Like That."
But not me. I was apple polisher as fuck at school. But I wasn't immune to the effects of getting older. Let's skip ahead a little and picture this...
1984. There isn't a toy on shelves that doesn't have its own cartoon. You're up bright and early before your sisters, waiting for Saturday Supercade to start. You've got a matching variety pack of Pac-Man SpaghettiOs and you're trying to finish them all before anyone wakes up, and then you see this commercial...
Wait a minute, that girl dog though.
Are you crazy, or was that skirt kinda short? The way she looked in that skirt... you can't yet quite come to terms with why, but you wanna see more of this girl dog. You don't need the Skate & Plush. But if there's a toy for it, there must be a show for it. What'd they say he was from? "The Get Along Gang?" So there must be a Get Along Gang show. But you haven't seen any commercials for it or anything. Damn it, if it was any other cartoon you could ask for it by name! Why is this one so hard to find?!!
Days turn to weeks, and still no Get Along Gang. You're checking the newspaper TV listings every day, and your parents wanna know what it is you're trying to catch. You don't usually read the TV listings so there must be something specific you're looking for. And you realize, you can't ask anyone for help with this. You know what this is. and the shame is too much. No one can know! That girl dog! You're consumed by her. And it's a vulnerability you can't expose. Especially because she's a dog. If this were a human girl, even that you couldn't be out and proud about. But this??? How could you even begin to explain it??? Your attraction to an animal??? They're not supposed to be sexy! But damn it... she was. Damn it! She was onscreen for maybe 2 seconds. A honey shot. It should've meant nothing. But now you cannot rest. You can't ask for the toys, obviously, because that would mean sharing your unexplained interest in this Get Along show. But even if you could, these feelings are different than how you feel about other toys. You have your city, and you have your adventures, but what you feel for this girl dog isn't a desire to make her part of your world. No. You want to be part of her world. And Someday You'll Find Her.
And then, that fateful day. You hear it. The Get Along Gang! Tonight at 7:30! Your guiltiest passion yet, consummated at last. Tonight at 7:30.
Her name is Dotty Dog. Or Dottie Dog. The spelling varies. There was a thread on incels.is that asked what our TV crushes were.
https://incels.is/threads/what-tv-character-did-you-have-a-crush-on-as-a-kid.137382/
Implying we only ever had one. I said I had many. Which is true. But Dotty was notable amongst them for sure... she's a sexy dog, okay?! There, I said it!!! Are you happy now, American Greetings? Is that what you wanted me to say??? It's out there, eternally bound to the name and reputation of FrothySolutions. And saying that does NOT make me a pedophile. Why? Because I was 11 at the time. And according to Wikipedia, everyone in The Get Along Gang was 12-14. So who's the real pedophile??? Dotty is. Dotty is the pedophile. Besides, why aren't we talking about how deliberately sexy they made her? All those gratuitous shots of her pantied ass??? Think I don't know what that's about???
Pantyshots are a lewdness trope! You got pantyshots? You got lewds. But a lot of people will say they aren't. I dunno about anybody else, but the "Is this lewd" debate is one I've had time and again. Maybe you don't like people calling your favorite anime fanservicey bullshit, so you're like "No, that's not even that hot" or something. I'm sure you've seen people talk about this. But lemme ask those people this: What about this picture?
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It's just a pantyshot, right? But you're telling me this isn't lewds? This isn't ecchi? Where is the line? Whether this is or isn't lewds, where is the line? How do we know when something is lewds, and when I'm "misinterpreting" something? Go watch the pilot, see if I'm not right. Maybe watch the full season, for good measure. I'll tell you this much, I'm not alone.
Dotty represented a shift in my priorities. If nothing else, she was my first TV crush that actually invoked ambition in me. And that's what this whole past-authoring thing is about, trying to figure out what dreams and ambitions I might've lost sight of. Not unlike Jake Goldman, I wanted in. I wanted to be part of her world. Yes, I knew it was a cartoon. Maybe it was the hormones, if I wasn't going through The Change I was definitely approaching it. I guess I just figured... the enigmatic myriad of forces at work in the universe??? People talk about Gods and afterlives, ghosts, other dimensions... dreamscapes, thoughtscapes... plus my dad has always been very spiritual. I just figured, if there is power somewhere in this universe, it can take me to Get Along Gang World. I didn't know how. If God can be called the creator of our universe, maybe Get Along Gang World exists as a universe within the mind of its creator. Some men pray to go to Anime World when they die. Me? I prayed to join The Get Along Gang. If nothing else, it was a nice fantasy. A boy can dream, right?
But there were a couple problems with that. A couple. Not many, but a couple. Exactly two problems. First, I had to concede, Dotty was probably already with somebody. The leader of the Gang, Montgomery "Good News" Moose. Can't compete with him. Untouchable. Athletic, but also a scientist? I believed in honoring the sanctity of a canon 'ship. But even if I didn't, the other problem? This is a world of animals. I as a human would not fit in this world. So I would have to "become" something that did fit. An animal type character. And that's what makes Dotty so notable amongst the "distant princesses" I was prone to having crushes on. She was the first one I developed an "original character" for. Not unlike Jake Goldman. And thousands upon thousands of deviantArtists. But like my Halloween costume and my Valentines, I couldn't pick just anything. If I'm designing myself as an animal, I had to pick the right animal. The animal that was me. But what animal is me? Well, Dotty is a spaniel because that works with her character. Spaniel? Or a golden retriever? I'm not sure. But anyway, whatever kind of dog she is, the ears of that breed make for good pigtails, and pigtails make for a sassy, spunky, vibrant-but-kinda-airheaded microskirt-wearing cheerleader. So who am I, really? And what animal evokes those traits best if I had to sit down and draw that character? The character that is me? A "fursona," before I even knew what furries were.
This awakening might've also shifted my thinking. Where once I was mostly interested in building my fantasy world, this was when I started being interested in living in other people's fantasy worlds. Before this, I didn't wanna be on He-Man or Superfriends or G.I. Joe or Transformers, but Get Along Gang got me thinking. If I was on those shows, what would my character be? I got my siblings involved too, not my brother right away because he was too little, but his time would come. Obviously I didn't talk about how I wanted to fuck Dotty Dog, but the idea of making characters for shows seemed to interest them as much as it interested me.
It wasn't just me and my classmates going through changes. I mentioned earlier, between 4th grade and 5th grade I switched schools because of a move. So I was living in a new neighborhood. And unlike the last neighborhood, my school was a couple miles away from home. Instead of a couple blocks. So I wasn't running into my classmates around this neighborhood. But the effects of being a bigger kid were apparent even here. Where once every neighbor kid was a friend, I found myself getting made fun of, getting into fights. Fortunately, because there was little fear of running into my classmates when I was out of school, I was freer to be myself. So I was able to fight back. If this were school, I couldn't fight back. For one, we would both get in trouble. For two, it would compromise my Good & Smart Kid persona. But while I probably wasn't really a Good & Smart Kid, I wasn't a tough kid either. For instance, there were these brothers who would throw rocks at my window. And they showed no sign of stopping. So I see them on their front porch one day and I decide to confront them. What I thought I would do is paraphrase lines I knew by Dirty Harry, threatening them if they ever threw rocks at my window again. I must've messed up the delivery because it didn't work. And whenever they'd see me they'd make fun of me by paraphrasing what I said to THEM, but in some kinda cartoon voice. Implying that that's what I sound like. We would fight often. Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost. One time they kicked me in the mouth while I was down. It was a bad beating. No kid just has one fight growing up, I think? There was a thread on incels.is that asked about that.
https://incels.is/threads/were-you-ever-in-a-fist-fight.136173/
Like most kids, I made lots of enemies. Another case, I was usually called in to intervene when other kids were messing with my siblings and/or their friends. I got into fights with those people. One time the kids' parents went to my parents, and I had to apologize. I apologized to them and they apologized to me. Which I thought was bullshit because those kids hit my sisters first, and no apology was offered to them. And all I was doing was defending my sisters. An ethic my parents drilled into me, that I should stick up for my family. I was pissed for the rest of the day.
I made a lot of enemies, and no friends. But you know what? I did have a "role" back then. I didn't have any friends, but my sisters did. And so I was like "friends in law" with those guys. To my sisters' friends, I held the "friend's older brother" role. They and my sisters would have their fun or whatever, and I would drop in now and then, not actually involved, but keeping a mild interest. Sort of a guardian, sort of an overseer. Ranging from "chill" to "stoic." Mysterious, distant, but not "detached." Watching from the shadows. In the other room doing boring big brother stuff if you need me. "Friend's older brother." You know the role. But I didn't really feel it at the time because I wasn't bigger than their friends. I was older, but not bigger. I feel like I could've owned the role a little better if I was could've just been big. And was, like, good at sports. But both were physically impossible for me to change. It was physically impossible for me to grow any faster, and physically impossible for me to watch less TV. And also? It kinda sucks that the closest thing to a social life wasn't really a life of my own, but a life in service to my siblings and their friends. Kinda sucks. I did wanna look out for them, but in hindsight, outside looking in, if this was someone else's life I was looking at, I would look at this guy and think it pretty sad that he doesn't have a crew of his own. I could've had friends but still been a big brother to my siblings and their friends.
There were times when my school life and home life crossed paths. Again, my sisters went to the same school as me. So there was still a limit to how brazenly I could lie. But also, the school we went to was very... personal. Very candid. They were close with the parents. They upheld the "It takes a village to raise a child" proverb so parents were involved with the school, and school was often involved with the family. For instance, in 6th grade, on the last day of school before winter/Christmas break, my sisters and I at school well after hours, waiting for our parents to pick us up. We were the last kids there, except for the principal's own children. It had been a long day of "Last Day Before Christmas Break" arts and crafts and snack eating and general slacking off. A school day in name only. But there were still plenty of cookies and soda to get rid of, and unexplored nooks and crannies of the school to check out. It wasn't against any rules, so I didn't think it challenged my Smart Good persona. So we're basically just chillin', sky's gotten dark but it's no hassle because it's winter. And sometimes our parents are late to pick us up. But then the principal comes in and says that our parents called, and they want her to take us to meet them at the hospital. Mom is fine, but she's at the hospital. And so it becomes a night of me, my sisters, the principal, and her kids, piled into a van, going around running errands and picking up OTHER kids before we head to the hospital. I was nervous for a lot of the time, I didn't want anybody getting too comfortable. McDonalds was present, and people were getting friendly. We stopped to pick up some other kids from karate, and we had to wait in the van for the last few minutes of karate class to end. Just us, nothing to do but talk and get to know one another. Know the truths about each other. So I was quiet, obviously. And then, finally, to the hospital. So concerned about keeping face was I, I forgot to worry what might've happened to my mom. Turns out my mom broke her arm. No one tells me, but I'm pretty sure
she broke it because she was drunk. And I'm worried that my principal knows this now. Knows the truth about my home life. I need to relax, take my mind off the fear of my worlds colliding. And I find that the hospital, at Christmastime, is actually pretty peaceful. There's a calm, Christmas cheer about the place. There are lights and decorations up, people are gathered, TVs are on in the lobby and some kinda Christmas special is airing, I'm not sure what. I felt like this was what I wanted for Christmas. Moments like these. When you think about it though, no one is ever at a hospital for a good reason. It's because something bad happened and medicine is needed to stop the bad thing. But in that moment it didn't feel like that. I wasn't worried about anyone finding about my drunken roughneck parents, I was at peace, and felt kinship with the principal's kids and everyone else on Earth that night. Christmas magic.
A less magical time when my worlds collided? 6th grade camp. What I hear is, not everyone knows what 6th grade camp is. But it's exactly what it sounds like. At the end of the school year, 6th graders go to camp. And just a few years earlier it was my dream to go to camp for several days. As a Boy Scout. But now I was worried about missing my shows. See how ambitions change? "Fortunately" this 6th grade camp wouldn't be out in the wilderness like real camp. It was technically part of our Spanish class, and so as a cultural thing we went to Spanish Harlem. We stayed in a hotel. Our Spanish teacher brought her daughter. And every time our Spanish teacher got mad at her, she would scold her in Spanish. I remember one time when her daughter was getting out of line, she said "Cállate, que es???" I didn't know what the "que es" meant, but I definitely knew "cállate." You're supposed to scold your kids in another language so that we don't know that you're scolding her. But every kid's first lesson in a foreign language is the fun words like "cállate." You wanna say cuss words and things like "shut up." She had to know we all knew what she was saying. Also her daughter was hot. And here's me living this lie, so it's not like I can tell her how hot I think she is. But I looked at her a lot throughout the trip. Anyway, I figured this was gonna be a pretty fun couple of days. I wasn't too into the attractions of the trip, we went to this one place that had free chips & salsa. I don't even remember us ordering anything. And I remember the bathroom door was open and there was a mop bucket filled with water in there. We did not order the chips & salsa, I'm positive they were complimentary. And the salsa didn't taste like store bought salsa either. It was much worse. Like a very spicy tomato. All heat, no flavor. Also, it was super hot outside for the whole trip. But I didn't care, as long as I got to go back to the hotel and watch TV.
Problem is, my roommates made life hard for me. I was in the room with all the boys, obviously. And I wanted to watch TV. But so did they, and I wasn't really in a position to be like "I wanna watch The Get Along Gang can we change the channel?" I kinda blocked out most of those days, it was so rough staying with those boys. But I do remember calling our chaperone on the phone. He was in another room. But instead of intervening and laying down some law, here's what he does. He asks me "How old are you?" I say "12?" I was 12 at this point. And he says "Act like it." And there it was again. When I was 9 or younger, I could have any teacher or principal or lunch lady or janitor running to my aid. Now they're like "He must be like those other kids" or "If he's not like one of those other kids, he needs to start acting like it because I don't feel like babysitting." I didn't know what else to say, I was, I mean, that 100% clipped my stride. All I could think was "The principal and other upper staff, when I go tell on him, boy..." He sounded exhausted though. Like he was in bed and couldn't be bothered to calm the chaos in our room. But I didn't care. Here I was, a fifth wheel in this nonstop party into the night that I wasn't even invited to. Watching adult cartoons on some cable channel I hadn't heard of yet. Also there was live action nudity. I don't know what channels they were watching but it's not like I could've joined them, because of my persona. But also, I was genuinely angry at this point and didn't even wanna join them. You know what I probably called the chaperone for? I couldn't sleep and I needed somewhere to sleep. Because these guys didn't wanna sleep. I couldn't go sleep in the girls' room, obviously. I wasn't gonna get to sleep, I wasn't gonna get to watch my shows, I couldn't enjoy the porn, I couldn't be near the Spanish teacher's hot daughter, and the chaperone had the audacity to just be like "Fuck you" to me. Tattled as soon as we got back. What an insufferable bitch I was. If this school was a village, I was the town crier. In that I actually cried. But he said "Act like it." He had a job to do and he didn't. He deserved what he got. Whatever it was.
With the trip under my belt, that was the last of my 6th grade obligations. So closes my grade school career. And so closes this post, because we're approaching the character limit. Twice I have had my heart broken by promises of camp fun. To summarize, from an early age I fantasized about dream girls and adventures with my toys. And my sisters' toys. I didn't share my interest in pretend play with my classmates, I thought they would think it was stupid. And I didn't share my interest in girls with anyone, because I didn't want to expose the vulnerability. I was hiding my true self. And then I got a TV in my room (and a VIC-20) and I had more and more reason to cloister myself alone, in the the world of TV. Thanks to Dotty Dog, my focus shifted to developing original characters for shows I liked. I got my sisters roped into this too. But no one from school or from the neighborhood. And I don't think my sisters' friends did either. That's what I mean, it didn't make sense as an interest to share with anyone outside of my family. But I was respected. Not at school anymore, that power was starting to fade as puberty set in. Teachers were telling me to act my age because I must be like all the other boys my age, right? But to my sisters' friends and my sisters, I had as much respect as a "friend's older brother" can have.
Puberty bubbles within me like a hot poison. Ask any incel, the hardest urge to deny is the sexual urge. Stunt it, stifle it, something's got to give. Something's going to go wrong with you. Goodbye grade school, hello junior high.
framecel222
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FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
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"Founding Father" or "Milk & Cigarettes 3: Experiencing Screen Love"
TL;DR: At 12 I hit puberty and developed focused masturbation practices. At 13 I realized I was a teenager and decided on life goals, decided that I should get into computers but also that I wanted to somehow reach out and touch the TV shows I liked, also that I wanted to voice my opinion about global issues. At 14 I entered the world of high school, decided to get into video games so I had an interest to share with people, at 15 I got a Nintendo and started having something to talk about with people, but because I chose to live this fake persona, I was really boring to my so-called "friends."
TL;DR: At 12 I hit puberty and developed focused masturbation practices. At 13 I realized I was a teenager and decided on life goals, decided that I should get into computers but also that I wanted to somehow reach out and touch the TV shows I liked, also that I wanted to voice my opinion about global issues. At 14 I entered the world of high school, decided to get into video games so I had an interest to share with people, at 15 I got a Nintendo and started having something to talk about with people, but because I chose to live this fake persona, I was really boring to my so-called "friends."
So where we last left off, I was approaching puberty and what incels.is refers to as the "Teen Love" phase. But I also had a persona to maintain at school. Then, over the summer between 6th grade and 7th grade, one of my older cousins was arrested. For what? My parents don't seem to remember and neither do I. But around the same time he was arrested, we moved again. So new neighborhood, and new school. Picture this...
1985. Halloween Night, unlike any you've seen before. Crowds? Huge. Decorations? Huge. The whole neighborhood turned out for this one. "Haunted House" attractions on every block, blaring "Thriller," "Freaks Come out at Night," and the theme from Ghostbusters. But Oingo Boingo's "Dead Man's Party" is the album of choice in your parents' vehicle. Just as the cool trumpet part from "Weird Science" plays, you open the door and step out onto the street. You have arrived.
You notice a lot of people are going as pre-existing characters from movies and cartoons and arcade games. Not you. You wanted to be your own character. A concept you had planned early on: "The Grim Reaper If He Was Like A Ninja." Mom, again, was the costumes & makeup for you and your siblings. She fashions a wristblade out of your old pirate sword from kindergarten, paints most of your face white and hides the unpainted parts with some kind of cowl/shroud, and adds a few touches of her own like boots and leather gloves/jacket. So now you're more like The Grim Reaper If He Was Like A Ninja But Also A Biker. People don't get it. They think you're supposed to be Jason. But it doesn't matter. The haul is plentiful. You don't just get candy, you get Garbage Pail Kids, McDonald's Halloween Gift Certificates, and rolls of quarters. Your team sweeps the neighborhood thoroughly, you find the later you stay out the more candy people are willing to give up. Because you're the last few Trick or Treaters and they might as well unload the last of their supply. You get home just in time to clean yourself out of your gummy worms & Sour Patch Kids, and then get comfy for a well deserved night's rest.
The veil was thin that night, as it tends to be on Halloween. The otherworldly transformative powers to turn men into beasts was at its peak. As I detailed in Version One, it was this night, with the moon high overhead, that "The Change" in me was finally made official.
Puberty was really something to bring to school the next morning, where I was still living a lie. By this point I'm pretty sure everyone had hit puberty. I can't speak for everyone, but in all the grades of school that I've experienced personally? 7th and 8th graders were by far the most sex crazed. Hormones were running wild. I like to imagine they weren't actually having sex, that would be abhorrent. But they definitely bragged like they did. But whenever they did brag about their sexual exploits, it was never with anyone we knew. It was never with anyone from school. Always some nameless someone from far away. I think we were all living lies. By the way, this wasn't some "toxically masculine" rite of macho manliness either. Boys talked about fucking, girls talked about fucking, it was a real equal opportunity bevy of degeneracy. The girls in particular, they had this "joke" I guess where they would break out into fake orgasmic moans. Because that's supposed to be funny. Less funny was the time this one girl, allegedly, wiped the period filth from herself and touched me with it. I mentioned in Version One how people would mess with me because of my "Hakoiri Musume" brand of naivete. They would mess with me when they could get away with it, anyway. And one day this one girl complained to me that she needed to go to the bathroom because she was menstruating and needed to change. This is funny because I'm not supposed to know what that is, and so to see what my reaction is would be funny and interesting. And so to maintain my facade, all I could do was feign intrigued befuddlement. Even as she looked me in my eyes and grabbed my wrist with her period-slathered hand. She told me she had touched her period with it. She was amused by how I didn't freak out on her.
Sex talk and orgasm moans were really something to bring home after school every day. My "masturbate thrice a day" rule obviously didn't apply on school days, because I would be at school "throughout the day." But weekends I would really let loose. The start of my masturbatory career. In "Milk & Cigarettes 1: Imaginary Friends" I mentioned how I made lists of concepts that excited me. Things to try and dream about. Upon hitting puberty, I revisited making these lists. But fantasizing about women before puberty and fantasizing about women after puberty is slightly different. In that I wasn't trying to dream about these fantasies anymore, but jack off to them. I guess that's not really that different. But it was thanks to all the sex talk from my classmates that I had material to go off of. Producing masturbatory aids like "Girls Take Flustered Boy Into Girls Bathroom & Have Sex With Him." One of the things on my list. Sometimes I would just think about girls from school. In Version One I mentioned this one girl who would pick on me sometimes.
I have her to thank for my grades in math. Because when I saw how developed she was, my first thought was "What cup size is that?" Because I can't be with her, but if I'm looking for a date or something and would like to specify breasts like that, I would need to know the cup size and stuff. But I couldn't ask her, so what I did was eyeball the general size. About as big as grapefruits. And then calculated what the volume of a good sized grapefruit is in cubic centimeters. And then, I tried to compare that volume to the volume of implants in plastic surgery clinics. Or sometimes I would look at bras to see which ones looked like they could hold grapefruits. But the pursuit of getting a figure, a specific volume of the kind of breasts I liked, was what kept my math & geometry skills sharp throughout my schooling.
There's a thread on incels.is about the dangers of prone masturbation. Bedfucking. Like @blackoutwhitein does.
And apparently it's true. People who masturbate prone complain about how they can't cum during vaginal sex. Which I guess is a good thing, if you wanna be able to last long. But they're also experiencing erectile dysfunction. They don't get aroused as often or as strongly.
Shouldn't even sleep prone. It's one of the worst positions to be in, almost no one sleeps like that, let alone faps like that. Which surprised me when I learned it, because I'm also a bedfucker. It's how I masturbated the first time I produced a seed, and it's how I masturbated most times afterward. And because this was my preferred position of masturbation, I learned to sleep prone also. But why did I masturbate prone when so many other boys didn't? Because I wanted to approximate the act of sex. I needed something to hump and grind against. I wanted to kiss and squeeze and wrap my arms around my pillow. My parents would often accuse me of masturbating. I thought I was being discreet, and I felt so affronted when they confronted me about it. I'm pretty sure they must've heard me carrying on in my room, having sex with my bed. Or maybe it was the jizz-encrusted underwear I sometimes left around the house, thrusting against the fabric and then leaving them with the dirty laundry. Whatever it was, I learned to turn my fan on and make sure my door was closed whenever I wanted to masturbate. And I learned to lie like a bastard and deny everything when confronted. "Whaddaya mean 'make sure your door is closed, your sisters can hear you?' Hear what??? I'm NOT masturbating!!! You're wrong!!! Stop worrying about what I'm doing!!!" And in my heart I did believe I wasn't masturbating. I guess I convinced myself of the lie. Because masturbation, that's pulling your dick with your hand. I'm not some degenerate masturbator, I'm a savvy bedfucker. I have dignity. Masturbation is undignified. But bedfucking, it's like sex. Not real sex, but somehow in my mind I felt less like a loser for fucking my bed. It sounds backward now that I hear it today, but that's what I thought.
In Version One I talked about this "Red Car Incident" where I ran into someone from school while I was breaking character, out and about in my neighborhood.
But that actually happened in 7th grade, not high school. I misremembered because between junior high and high school I kept a lot of the same classmates. And the guy who saw me was one of the ones who stuck with me.
This might not have happened if I didn't walk everywhere I went. When we moved to this neighborhood my parents would send me to buy things for them. The payphone I met this guy at was outside of the grocery store they tended to send me to. I don't think he lived in my area, my school was once again miles away from my house. But this was a heavily trafficked market street. I just happened to catch him visiting this commonly visited store. If I had stayed closer to my house, let my parents just drive up to that store and buy the things themselves, this probably wouldn't have happened. But anyway, my parents sent me to buy them things, and them giving me permission to go do errands like that eventually expanded to trusting me to walk even farther. To the point where I could just walk downtown, a distance we would normally drive. Sometimes I feel like my parents trusted me a little too much. Because it was around this time that the crack scare was on. And there was real fear that drug traders were gonna hurt you or mug you in the bad parts of town. And my city had some bad parts. Some of the worst in the country. And often due to my own carelessness, I would end up walking the many miles home after pitch darkness. My parents figured I was fine, but I didn't feel fine.
After turning 13, it weighed on me that I was officially a teenager. And I had to figure out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. What job I wanted, and so forth. Picture this...
1986. 4th of July, Liberty Weekend. You just got back from the city fireworks show and you're in your room with a shirtful of leftover grilled hot dogs. There's still plenty of Liberty Weekend to go yet, and you're watching the last few bits of tonight's episode of the Liberty Weekend 4 Night special on ABC. Along the deck of your USS Flagg, the people of your toy city have assembled to watch the Liberty Weekend festivities too. As well as some characters you don't have toys for. You thought it would be cool to fold your TV show OCs into the canon of your city, as long as you didn't have anything better to do with them. Also? You've decided to consolidate characters. Instead of having one character for The Get Along Gang and another for Alvin and the Chipmunks, just have one character be assigned to both shows. Because they're both shows focused on animal main characters. And tonight that character stands on the deck of the Flagg with everyone else. You don't have an action figure for him or anything, but you don't need one. You know he's there. Because you have a character sheet for him. He's a chipmunk. You decided on "chipmunk" because it's the only animal that could fit into both shows. Get Along Gang allows for many animals. But Alvin and the Chipmunks, it only has chipmunks and humans. As you go over his and other character sheets, you notice the Liberty Weekend special is showing a kinda boring piece about Sam Waterston as Henry David Thoreau, and his "Civil Disobedience" speech.
Yadda yadda freedom, the British, etc. But then they start interviewing people they feel exemplify Thoreau's philosophy. And they come to this couple of teenage girls who claim to be in lesbians with each other.
And as you watch it on TV, somehow it really bothers you. Let's get one thing out of the way, you have no problem with gay people. But these are minors. Children. And matters of sexuality are only for adults. Yes, there's a place for the mechanics of sex in the curriculum. General health and all that. But the actual having of sex is not for kids. This is an adult thing! And yes, you as a minor have enjoyed adult materials. But you didn't do it like you were allowed to do it. You snuck around to do those things because it's not appropriate. There's a difference between you sneaking peeks at porn because you know you shouldn't, and your dad giving you, a minor, permission to look at his porn. This is about upholding the standard that porn, and other adult materials, are not appropriate for children. And here ABC is dignifying this idea that children should be thinking about their sexualities? Is this where this country is headed??? If only you could shout at the TV, "No! This is not okay for kids!!!"
Dad comes in. There's Banana "Dream" Pudding downstairs if you want some. You want some. He notices the VIC-20 gathering dust. He asks if you still do work on the VIC-20. You've never made anything on the VIC-20. But instead you tell him that you kinda fell out of working on the VIC-20 because now the Nintendo is the thing people care about. VIC-20 is an old technology, it has no place in today's market. And there are no books on how to make your own Nintendo games. Dad suggests you learn to make Nintendo games someday.
One bowl of Dream Pudding later and you've got a lot to think about. What are you gonna be when you grow up? Why not do video games? But is it what you want? What do you want? Do you even know? What you want... what you want is to live in the worlds of your favorite TV shows. Reach out and touch them, somehow. But how can you do that as a job? Be a writer? For multiple different shows? Can you do that? Could you write for Alvin and the Chipmunks and add your original character, but also write for The Get Along Gang and add that same character? If only you could cross them over somehow. But you know what else you'd like to do? Voice your opinions about what you perceive as the normalization of kids being involved with adult matters. How can you get people to hear your opinions on that? And how can you combine all of these things into one job, or role, or station in life?
Looking back at the footage, now I know that the girls weren't actually gay, they just decided to go together because they didn't have boyfriends. But about my dreams and ambitions. There wasn't much I could do right away to pursue those dreams and ambitions. Not right away. So I decided when I went to college, I would go to college for game design. And in the meantime, I would work on my original characters. Until the time comes when I can do something real with them. But before I could go to college, I had to go to high school.
Junior high was mostly kind of an intermission. Aside from the endless string of pussy jokes it was more of the usual. High school was different. High school seemed to be more productive. If for no other reason than this was the time in my life where I made friends. Picture this...
1987. You step off the bus with your 30-pound backpack and black suede steel-toed walking boots. Another day on the grind as a freshman in high school. The bell hasn't rung yet, so the cool kids with their cars are hanging out outside. "Here I Go Again" by Whitesnake plays out of some kid's Lincoln Continental.
You head right past said cool kids and go to the cafeteria to join the nerds for breakfast. Upon your arrival, you take notice of this one kid from your class. A freshman like you. He's sitting alone, as usual. But today is different. Today he has some kind of board game with him. A map covered in hexes, a stack of cards, a stack of books, some kinda plastic sleeve with paper in it? But most intriguing of all is that he's playing a board game. Don't you need more than one player for those? This guy is a lone wolf. You've never seen him hanging out with anyone. You take your seat and have your breakfast. As you eat, you notice he appears to either be setting something up for when the other person gets back, or playing by himself. Because it's been a few minutes now and he's still sitting alone. Not only that, but he's been moving pieces on the board. You almost leave it alone. You've got your own problems. But eventually you decide to bite the bullet and head over to his table. "Can I watch you guys play?" you ask. Cleverly worded, so that if he IS playing alone, he can correct you. Maybe say "It's just me playing" or something. But he just says "Sure." Guess he really is playing with someone else. You sit down and watch. And yet, no one shows up. Did he not hear you when you said "you guys?" Eventually you just assume he's playing by himself. "Is this a one-player board game?" you ask. "Yeah, it's Ambush." he answers.
In Version One I made a list of friends I made while I was in high school. This guy was my first friend. His name was Andre. He wanted to play college football someday. And eventually we came to be known as inseparable. I'm not saying we were inseparable, but in time everyone knew us to be those two nerds who would always be hanging out. It got to the point where people would mix up our names. Like, one day I'm at my locker between classes, getting the next book I need. And my locker happens to be next to this one girl's locker. Her name was Marva. And she's going to get her books too, but I'm crowding the locker area, so she's like "'Scuse me, Andre- I mean, FrothySolutions." Not out of hostility, it's just nerds like me and Andre, we all kinda blend together in a big grey mass of uninterestingness.
High school had bullies, but this was different from my younger days. I didn't get physically beat up. Because two young kids fighting, you break it up and you notify the parents. But two high school teenagers fighting, that's the point where the police might get involved. You're old enough that it's assault, not a playground scuffle. So you didn't bully somebody by fighting them. You fought somebody when you were actually angry with them. But Andre and I did get bullied in other ways. Gossip and snide comments behind our backs, stuff like that. I don't know if talking behind my back counts as "bullying" because it's not directed at me. Not meant for my ears. But what about being made fun of to your face? Does that count? Because Andre got this a lot. I said in Version One that he wasn't the kind of guy to let himself be laughed at. And so he would often speak up in his own defense when he heard people saying things about him. And those people didn't like that. Felt like he was out of line for standing up for himself. And so this had a double-edged effect I think is comparable to the whole "Incels Without Hate" thing. Not only were they meaner to him, but they started to be nicer to me. Because they're looking at me, and they're looking at Andre, and they're like "We like that FrothySolutions is actually making an effort to be civil. Not like Andre. We'll be nicer to him." And just like an Incel Without Hate, for all my civility I didn't get laid. And the bullies were blissfully unaware that they were the assholes, not Andre.
Most people never bullied me to my face. But there was one who did. His name was Rodgerick. He wasn't bigger than me, or tougher than me, I don't recall him laying a finger on anyone ever, but he and his all-girl squad regularly laughed at me. And he personally targeted me. Which I wouldn't mind, I can deal with people making fun of my hair or my skin or my clothes, but what he targeted me about was how he "knew" that my Good Boy Persona was a lie. I was still doing the Good Boy thing. And like any other bully, I couldn't fight back, lest I break character. It was especially important to not break character with Rodgerick, because he was specifically calling my bluff. I had to take it from him most of all, to prove I wasn't lying.
Also? One day at lunch I got up to clean my tray? And when I got back to my seat, someone drew dicks in my notebook. I don't know if Rodgerick did this, but he was the only one I knew who hated me enough to do it.
Having a friend gave me a reason to do stuff, where once I was content to sit and dream. For instance, I hadn't done a lot of video game playing yet at this point. I was still more of a toys guy. But Andre had played video games. And it was tough to talk about the video games he wanted to talk about because I hadn't played them. So if I wanted to be part of this fledgling video game "community," I had to get on the hype train. I needed a Nintendo. And so I told him I would get one. Eventually. And I did get one eventually. But not my freshman year. We have to fast forward again. Picture this...
1988. "Parents Just Don't Understand" drones through the store radio as you stack copies of "Eddie Murphy Raw" at your local home video rental outlet. The only place that would hire you.
It might have something to do with the fact that your aunt is dating the manager. They just started offering video games for rent and you, having recently decided you're a gamer, buttered up the manager with talk about how you're gonna be a great help on the floor, assisting customers with their video game selections. He probably didn't buy it. And he probably didn't care. You both know what this is. A summer part-time job. You're not expected to turn things around for the business, nor are you expected to turn this into a career. You're expected to be in by 1:00, keep everything running smoothly, then be out by 5:30. You even get a little TV to watch between customers.
If everything goes according to schedule, by the end of your tenure you should have your Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Mario Bros, and 3 extra games you haven't decided on yet. You'll save that purchase for when sophomore year starts. Andre will probably be there, you can buy whatever game he wants to talk about. Probably. You two haven't kept in touch over the summer. Your friendship is mostly school-only. In fact, whenever people pointed out that you and Andre are best friends, Andre is keen to point out that you are NOT his best friend, just "a friend." And you aren't bothered by him saying that. But if you're not gonna be best friends with Andre, who?
Andre was there, come sophomore year. The both of us having Nintendos and playing video games gave us a lot to talk about, not just between each other, but to other people. Like this one guy, Jeff. He was maybe 1 or 2 grades above me. When he heard I liked video games, he suggested the Castlevania series, and that I subscribe to Nintendo Power. He happened to have an issue with him, and was entertaining a gathering of students. Thing about Jeff was, he was a charisma chameleon. At my school we had the nerds, and we had the cool kids. But Jeff was able to bridge that gap. When talking to the nerds, he could signal like the nerds. When talking to the cool kids, he could signal like the cool kids. He spent his mornings at breakfast with the nerds, but he spent his lunches rappin' with the cool kids. He was friendly with everyone. Including me. Which was a little awkward because I kinda didn't like Jeff. I mean, I didn't hate Jeff, it was more of a "Hmm, that's strange" feeling than anything. Because what he was doing was bringing normies over into the nerd stuff. It was only "nerd stuff" when people like me did it. But when the cool kids see Jeff doing it, suddenly they're interested. Suddenly they wanna learn about it. And it wasn't just video games either. I can understand the broad appeal of video games. But this was board games and cartoons and comic books too. They would line up to ask him about this stuff, and he could relay it back to them so expertly, in their "cool kid" tongue. He commanded attention. He was a leader. I was probably jealous of him. And the idea of these cool kids doing my nerd stuff definitely looked weird to me. Why were these hobbies so repulsive up until when Jeff starts doing them? Best I could figure was, what made me a nerd wasn't the nerdy things I did, but the cool things I didn't do. Jeff did nerdy things, but he also did cool things. When I do it's like "Yeah, FrothySolutions probably would like that nerdy thing." But when Jeff does it it's like "Hey, what's that thing Jeff is doing? He doesn't seem like the kind of person who would be into something like that. But if he's doing it, there must be some appeal to it. I'll ask him what the appeal is." If you're secure in your coolness and your normieness, you can do nerd things and it's not a problem.
I wouldn't say video games were really a "nerd thing" at my school. So you might be thinking "Wouldn't being open about your video game hobbies contradict your Smart Obedient Nerd persona?" I was still playing that role. But like I said, because I didn't do certain cool things or get angry at people, that was enough to convince everyone I was truly all the nerd I claimed to be. I played video games, but that was barely anything. Everyone played video games. My point is, I was still maintaining the lie. But with my friends, I could be marginally more myself. More open. Not perfectly open though. For example, Andre and I had this other friend. His name was Henry, and of all the friends in the group we would eventually grow to, he was probably the coolest. Like Jeff he had appeal on both the "nerd" and "cool kid" sides of the aisle. Jeff wasn't really part of my group, he was friends with everyone. But Henry was the closest thing our exclusive group had to a Jeff. Henry had good hair, Henry got in trouble with teachers, and yeah Jeff didn't have good hair or get in trouble with teachers but my point is, for these qualities Henry had appeal with the cool kids. Also, Henry wasn't as tight we Andre and I and Andre and I were as tight with each other. Probably because of his moonlighting over with the cool kids. Anyway, Henry would often have Vampirella books onhand, and other books I didn't know the names of. In one of the books was this comic called "Easy Way To A Tuff Surfboard!"
I committed the name of this comic to memory because, thanks to my persona, I couldn't openly enjoy it in front of the boys. But next time I got to a library, I was gonna look for a comic called "Easy Way To A Tuff Surfboard." But it's just the role I had to play. We also talked about girls at school we thought were hot. Girls like Marva. Girls with reputations. Girls whose names were on the boys' bathroom walls. And I was mostly a 3rd wheel when it came to that. Henry and Andre would get real exasperated with Prude FrothySolutions and eventually kinda cut me out of fun like this. Just one of several dysfunctions in this friendship so far. If this was a real friendship, and one of us had a Nintendo but one or more of us didn't, wouldn't real friends maybe go over that person's house to play Nintendo? But I never invited any of them over my house. And up to this point, I hadn't gone over any of their houses either. I might've been able to invite them over, but my parents kind of forbade it. They were always very shy of letting anyone come into our house unless it was spotless. They had 6 kids, the house was never gonna stay perfect. We argued with them a lot about this. But they wanted not a sock out of place. I don't remember if I said this already, but my parents always said they didn't want anyone "knowing our business." And this was probably part of it. Couldn't let people see the warts and all of normal family life. Had to be perfect, or no one could see. Maybe that's where I got the idea to live this fake persona? Anyway, I wasn't too bothered by it. It was my sisters who had the friends they wanted to invite over. Me, I was content to just be school friends with my group.
We only met at school, I was a stick in the mud when it came to girls, Andre had other friends he'd rather be with, Henry had other friends he'd rather be with, what exactly was holding our friendship together? Video games. I think the major appeal of video games at the time for me was how it introduced me to a community of people I could enjoy something with.
And that's the character limit. In summary, after puberty I started really thinking about my ambitions in life. What I was gonna do as a career. What my passions were. What my values were. Who I was as a person. Computers sounded like a pretty sure career path, but my fantasy worlds were where my mind still lived. Fortunately in high school I met some people who kinda felt the same way about cartoons and video games, so we got together to share our interests. But that's really all we did. As friends, we weren't very close. In part because I was still putting on the facade with my so-called friends. I couldn't even be honest with them. And so the depth of our friendship was showing up to school for watercooler talk.
Why didn't I long for something more? Why didn't I see the writing on the wall and either say "Hey we should hang out more often" or find new friends? I think I came to really understand how I felt about my friends in my junior year.
1985. Halloween Night, unlike any you've seen before. Crowds? Huge. Decorations? Huge. The whole neighborhood turned out for this one. "Haunted House" attractions on every block, blaring "Thriller," "Freaks Come out at Night," and the theme from Ghostbusters. But Oingo Boingo's "Dead Man's Party" is the album of choice in your parents' vehicle. Just as the cool trumpet part from "Weird Science" plays, you open the door and step out onto the street. You have arrived.
You notice a lot of people are going as pre-existing characters from movies and cartoons and arcade games. Not you. You wanted to be your own character. A concept you had planned early on: "The Grim Reaper If He Was Like A Ninja." Mom, again, was the costumes & makeup for you and your siblings. She fashions a wristblade out of your old pirate sword from kindergarten, paints most of your face white and hides the unpainted parts with some kind of cowl/shroud, and adds a few touches of her own like boots and leather gloves/jacket. So now you're more like The Grim Reaper If He Was Like A Ninja But Also A Biker. People don't get it. They think you're supposed to be Jason. But it doesn't matter. The haul is plentiful. You don't just get candy, you get Garbage Pail Kids, McDonald's Halloween Gift Certificates, and rolls of quarters. Your team sweeps the neighborhood thoroughly, you find the later you stay out the more candy people are willing to give up. Because you're the last few Trick or Treaters and they might as well unload the last of their supply. You get home just in time to clean yourself out of your gummy worms & Sour Patch Kids, and then get comfy for a well deserved night's rest.
The veil was thin that night, as it tends to be on Halloween. The otherworldly transformative powers to turn men into beasts was at its peak. As I detailed in Version One, it was this night, with the moon high overhead, that "The Change" in me was finally made official.
FrothySolutions said:
Puberty was really something to bring to school the next morning, where I was still living a lie. By this point I'm pretty sure everyone had hit puberty. I can't speak for everyone, but in all the grades of school that I've experienced personally? 7th and 8th graders were by far the most sex crazed. Hormones were running wild. I like to imagine they weren't actually having sex, that would be abhorrent. But they definitely bragged like they did. But whenever they did brag about their sexual exploits, it was never with anyone we knew. It was never with anyone from school. Always some nameless someone from far away. I think we were all living lies. By the way, this wasn't some "toxically masculine" rite of macho manliness either. Boys talked about fucking, girls talked about fucking, it was a real equal opportunity bevy of degeneracy. The girls in particular, they had this "joke" I guess where they would break out into fake orgasmic moans. Because that's supposed to be funny. Less funny was the time this one girl, allegedly, wiped the period filth from herself and touched me with it. I mentioned in Version One how people would mess with me because of my "Hakoiri Musume" brand of naivete. They would mess with me when they could get away with it, anyway. And one day this one girl complained to me that she needed to go to the bathroom because she was menstruating and needed to change. This is funny because I'm not supposed to know what that is, and so to see what my reaction is would be funny and interesting. And so to maintain my facade, all I could do was feign intrigued befuddlement. Even as she looked me in my eyes and grabbed my wrist with her period-slathered hand. She told me she had touched her period with it. She was amused by how I didn't freak out on her.
Sex talk and orgasm moans were really something to bring home after school every day. My "masturbate thrice a day" rule obviously didn't apply on school days, because I would be at school "throughout the day." But weekends I would really let loose. The start of my masturbatory career. In "Milk & Cigarettes 1: Imaginary Friends" I mentioned how I made lists of concepts that excited me. Things to try and dream about. Upon hitting puberty, I revisited making these lists. But fantasizing about women before puberty and fantasizing about women after puberty is slightly different. In that I wasn't trying to dream about these fantasies anymore, but jack off to them. I guess that's not really that different. But it was thanks to all the sex talk from my classmates that I had material to go off of. Producing masturbatory aids like "Girls Take Flustered Boy Into Girls Bathroom & Have Sex With Him." One of the things on my list. Sometimes I would just think about girls from school. In Version One I mentioned this one girl who would pick on me sometimes.
FrothySolutions said:
I have her to thank for my grades in math. Because when I saw how developed she was, my first thought was "What cup size is that?" Because I can't be with her, but if I'm looking for a date or something and would like to specify breasts like that, I would need to know the cup size and stuff. But I couldn't ask her, so what I did was eyeball the general size. About as big as grapefruits. And then calculated what the volume of a good sized grapefruit is in cubic centimeters. And then, I tried to compare that volume to the volume of implants in plastic surgery clinics. Or sometimes I would look at bras to see which ones looked like they could hold grapefruits. But the pursuit of getting a figure, a specific volume of the kind of breasts I liked, was what kept my math & geometry skills sharp throughout my schooling.
There's a thread on incels.is about the dangers of prone masturbation. Bedfucking. Like @blackoutwhitein does.
https://incels.is/threads/dont-prone-masturbate.138429/
And apparently it's true. People who masturbate prone complain about how they can't cum during vaginal sex. Which I guess is a good thing, if you wanna be able to last long. But they're also experiencing erectile dysfunction. They don't get aroused as often or as strongly.
HealthyStrokes.com
Information about Prone Masturbation and the problems it causes
www.healthystrokes.com
Shouldn't even sleep prone. It's one of the worst positions to be in, almost no one sleeps like that, let alone faps like that. Which surprised me when I learned it, because I'm also a bedfucker. It's how I masturbated the first time I produced a seed, and it's how I masturbated most times afterward. And because this was my preferred position of masturbation, I learned to sleep prone also. But why did I masturbate prone when so many other boys didn't? Because I wanted to approximate the act of sex. I needed something to hump and grind against. I wanted to kiss and squeeze and wrap my arms around my pillow. My parents would often accuse me of masturbating. I thought I was being discreet, and I felt so affronted when they confronted me about it. I'm pretty sure they must've heard me carrying on in my room, having sex with my bed. Or maybe it was the jizz-encrusted underwear I sometimes left around the house, thrusting against the fabric and then leaving them with the dirty laundry. Whatever it was, I learned to turn my fan on and make sure my door was closed whenever I wanted to masturbate. And I learned to lie like a bastard and deny everything when confronted. "Whaddaya mean 'make sure your door is closed, your sisters can hear you?' Hear what??? I'm NOT masturbating!!! You're wrong!!! Stop worrying about what I'm doing!!!" And in my heart I did believe I wasn't masturbating. I guess I convinced myself of the lie. Because masturbation, that's pulling your dick with your hand. I'm not some degenerate masturbator, I'm a savvy bedfucker. I have dignity. Masturbation is undignified. But bedfucking, it's like sex. Not real sex, but somehow in my mind I felt less like a loser for fucking my bed. It sounds backward now that I hear it today, but that's what I thought.
In Version One I talked about this "Red Car Incident" where I ran into someone from school while I was breaking character, out and about in my neighborhood.
FrothySolutions said:I remember once I walked out to a payphone a few blocks from my house. In my bare feet. Because that was acceptable in my neck of the woods. But who should I see before I make my call? Some guy from my school in his car. I run across rough sidewalk for... hold on lemme Google Maps it... 0.3 miles, all the way home. Some people on their porch asked me what I was running so fast from, and I just shouted "RED CAR!!!
But that actually happened in 7th grade, not high school. I misremembered because between junior high and high school I kept a lot of the same classmates. And the guy who saw me was one of the ones who stuck with me.
This might not have happened if I didn't walk everywhere I went. When we moved to this neighborhood my parents would send me to buy things for them. The payphone I met this guy at was outside of the grocery store they tended to send me to. I don't think he lived in my area, my school was once again miles away from my house. But this was a heavily trafficked market street. I just happened to catch him visiting this commonly visited store. If I had stayed closer to my house, let my parents just drive up to that store and buy the things themselves, this probably wouldn't have happened. But anyway, my parents sent me to buy them things, and them giving me permission to go do errands like that eventually expanded to trusting me to walk even farther. To the point where I could just walk downtown, a distance we would normally drive. Sometimes I feel like my parents trusted me a little too much. Because it was around this time that the crack scare was on. And there was real fear that drug traders were gonna hurt you or mug you in the bad parts of town. And my city had some bad parts. Some of the worst in the country. And often due to my own carelessness, I would end up walking the many miles home after pitch darkness. My parents figured I was fine, but I didn't feel fine.
After turning 13, it weighed on me that I was officially a teenager. And I had to figure out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. What job I wanted, and so forth. Picture this...
1986. 4th of July, Liberty Weekend. You just got back from the city fireworks show and you're in your room with a shirtful of leftover grilled hot dogs. There's still plenty of Liberty Weekend to go yet, and you're watching the last few bits of tonight's episode of the Liberty Weekend 4 Night special on ABC. Along the deck of your USS Flagg, the people of your toy city have assembled to watch the Liberty Weekend festivities too. As well as some characters you don't have toys for. You thought it would be cool to fold your TV show OCs into the canon of your city, as long as you didn't have anything better to do with them. Also? You've decided to consolidate characters. Instead of having one character for The Get Along Gang and another for Alvin and the Chipmunks, just have one character be assigned to both shows. Because they're both shows focused on animal main characters. And tonight that character stands on the deck of the Flagg with everyone else. You don't have an action figure for him or anything, but you don't need one. You know he's there. Because you have a character sheet for him. He's a chipmunk. You decided on "chipmunk" because it's the only animal that could fit into both shows. Get Along Gang allows for many animals. But Alvin and the Chipmunks, it only has chipmunks and humans. As you go over his and other character sheets, you notice the Liberty Weekend special is showing a kinda boring piece about Sam Waterston as Henry David Thoreau, and his "Civil Disobedience" speech.
Yadda yadda freedom, the British, etc. But then they start interviewing people they feel exemplify Thoreau's philosophy. And they come to this couple of teenage girls who claim to be in lesbians with each other.
And as you watch it on TV, somehow it really bothers you. Let's get one thing out of the way, you have no problem with gay people. But these are minors. Children. And matters of sexuality are only for adults. Yes, there's a place for the mechanics of sex in the curriculum. General health and all that. But the actual having of sex is not for kids. This is an adult thing! And yes, you as a minor have enjoyed adult materials. But you didn't do it like you were allowed to do it. You snuck around to do those things because it's not appropriate. There's a difference between you sneaking peeks at porn because you know you shouldn't, and your dad giving you, a minor, permission to look at his porn. This is about upholding the standard that porn, and other adult materials, are not appropriate for children. And here ABC is dignifying this idea that children should be thinking about their sexualities? Is this where this country is headed??? If only you could shout at the TV, "No! This is not okay for kids!!!"
Dad comes in. There's Banana "Dream" Pudding downstairs if you want some. You want some. He notices the VIC-20 gathering dust. He asks if you still do work on the VIC-20. You've never made anything on the VIC-20. But instead you tell him that you kinda fell out of working on the VIC-20 because now the Nintendo is the thing people care about. VIC-20 is an old technology, it has no place in today's market. And there are no books on how to make your own Nintendo games. Dad suggests you learn to make Nintendo games someday.
One bowl of Dream Pudding later and you've got a lot to think about. What are you gonna be when you grow up? Why not do video games? But is it what you want? What do you want? Do you even know? What you want... what you want is to live in the worlds of your favorite TV shows. Reach out and touch them, somehow. But how can you do that as a job? Be a writer? For multiple different shows? Can you do that? Could you write for Alvin and the Chipmunks and add your original character, but also write for The Get Along Gang and add that same character? If only you could cross them over somehow. But you know what else you'd like to do? Voice your opinions about what you perceive as the normalization of kids being involved with adult matters. How can you get people to hear your opinions on that? And how can you combine all of these things into one job, or role, or station in life?
Looking back at the footage, now I know that the girls weren't actually gay, they just decided to go together because they didn't have boyfriends. But about my dreams and ambitions. There wasn't much I could do right away to pursue those dreams and ambitions. Not right away. So I decided when I went to college, I would go to college for game design. And in the meantime, I would work on my original characters. Until the time comes when I can do something real with them. But before I could go to college, I had to go to high school.
Junior high was mostly kind of an intermission. Aside from the endless string of pussy jokes it was more of the usual. High school was different. High school seemed to be more productive. If for no other reason than this was the time in my life where I made friends. Picture this...
1987. You step off the bus with your 30-pound backpack and black suede steel-toed walking boots. Another day on the grind as a freshman in high school. The bell hasn't rung yet, so the cool kids with their cars are hanging out outside. "Here I Go Again" by Whitesnake plays out of some kid's Lincoln Continental.
You head right past said cool kids and go to the cafeteria to join the nerds for breakfast. Upon your arrival, you take notice of this one kid from your class. A freshman like you. He's sitting alone, as usual. But today is different. Today he has some kind of board game with him. A map covered in hexes, a stack of cards, a stack of books, some kinda plastic sleeve with paper in it? But most intriguing of all is that he's playing a board game. Don't you need more than one player for those? This guy is a lone wolf. You've never seen him hanging out with anyone. You take your seat and have your breakfast. As you eat, you notice he appears to either be setting something up for when the other person gets back, or playing by himself. Because it's been a few minutes now and he's still sitting alone. Not only that, but he's been moving pieces on the board. You almost leave it alone. You've got your own problems. But eventually you decide to bite the bullet and head over to his table. "Can I watch you guys play?" you ask. Cleverly worded, so that if he IS playing alone, he can correct you. Maybe say "It's just me playing" or something. But he just says "Sure." Guess he really is playing with someone else. You sit down and watch. And yet, no one shows up. Did he not hear you when you said "you guys?" Eventually you just assume he's playing by himself. "Is this a one-player board game?" you ask. "Yeah, it's Ambush." he answers.
In Version One I made a list of friends I made while I was in high school. This guy was my first friend. His name was Andre. He wanted to play college football someday. And eventually we came to be known as inseparable. I'm not saying we were inseparable, but in time everyone knew us to be those two nerds who would always be hanging out. It got to the point where people would mix up our names. Like, one day I'm at my locker between classes, getting the next book I need. And my locker happens to be next to this one girl's locker. Her name was Marva. And she's going to get her books too, but I'm crowding the locker area, so she's like "'Scuse me, Andre- I mean, FrothySolutions." Not out of hostility, it's just nerds like me and Andre, we all kinda blend together in a big grey mass of uninterestingness.
High school had bullies, but this was different from my younger days. I didn't get physically beat up. Because two young kids fighting, you break it up and you notify the parents. But two high school teenagers fighting, that's the point where the police might get involved. You're old enough that it's assault, not a playground scuffle. So you didn't bully somebody by fighting them. You fought somebody when you were actually angry with them. But Andre and I did get bullied in other ways. Gossip and snide comments behind our backs, stuff like that. I don't know if talking behind my back counts as "bullying" because it's not directed at me. Not meant for my ears. But what about being made fun of to your face? Does that count? Because Andre got this a lot. I said in Version One that he wasn't the kind of guy to let himself be laughed at. And so he would often speak up in his own defense when he heard people saying things about him. And those people didn't like that. Felt like he was out of line for standing up for himself. And so this had a double-edged effect I think is comparable to the whole "Incels Without Hate" thing. Not only were they meaner to him, but they started to be nicer to me. Because they're looking at me, and they're looking at Andre, and they're like "We like that FrothySolutions is actually making an effort to be civil. Not like Andre. We'll be nicer to him." And just like an Incel Without Hate, for all my civility I didn't get laid. And the bullies were blissfully unaware that they were the assholes, not Andre.
Most people never bullied me to my face. But there was one who did. His name was Rodgerick. He wasn't bigger than me, or tougher than me, I don't recall him laying a finger on anyone ever, but he and his all-girl squad regularly laughed at me. And he personally targeted me. Which I wouldn't mind, I can deal with people making fun of my hair or my skin or my clothes, but what he targeted me about was how he "knew" that my Good Boy Persona was a lie. I was still doing the Good Boy thing. And like any other bully, I couldn't fight back, lest I break character. It was especially important to not break character with Rodgerick, because he was specifically calling my bluff. I had to take it from him most of all, to prove I wasn't lying.
Also? One day at lunch I got up to clean my tray? And when I got back to my seat, someone drew dicks in my notebook. I don't know if Rodgerick did this, but he was the only one I knew who hated me enough to do it.
Having a friend gave me a reason to do stuff, where once I was content to sit and dream. For instance, I hadn't done a lot of video game playing yet at this point. I was still more of a toys guy. But Andre had played video games. And it was tough to talk about the video games he wanted to talk about because I hadn't played them. So if I wanted to be part of this fledgling video game "community," I had to get on the hype train. I needed a Nintendo. And so I told him I would get one. Eventually. And I did get one eventually. But not my freshman year. We have to fast forward again. Picture this...
1988. "Parents Just Don't Understand" drones through the store radio as you stack copies of "Eddie Murphy Raw" at your local home video rental outlet. The only place that would hire you.
It might have something to do with the fact that your aunt is dating the manager. They just started offering video games for rent and you, having recently decided you're a gamer, buttered up the manager with talk about how you're gonna be a great help on the floor, assisting customers with their video game selections. He probably didn't buy it. And he probably didn't care. You both know what this is. A summer part-time job. You're not expected to turn things around for the business, nor are you expected to turn this into a career. You're expected to be in by 1:00, keep everything running smoothly, then be out by 5:30. You even get a little TV to watch between customers.
If everything goes according to schedule, by the end of your tenure you should have your Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Mario Bros, and 3 extra games you haven't decided on yet. You'll save that purchase for when sophomore year starts. Andre will probably be there, you can buy whatever game he wants to talk about. Probably. You two haven't kept in touch over the summer. Your friendship is mostly school-only. In fact, whenever people pointed out that you and Andre are best friends, Andre is keen to point out that you are NOT his best friend, just "a friend." And you aren't bothered by him saying that. But if you're not gonna be best friends with Andre, who?
Andre was there, come sophomore year. The both of us having Nintendos and playing video games gave us a lot to talk about, not just between each other, but to other people. Like this one guy, Jeff. He was maybe 1 or 2 grades above me. When he heard I liked video games, he suggested the Castlevania series, and that I subscribe to Nintendo Power. He happened to have an issue with him, and was entertaining a gathering of students. Thing about Jeff was, he was a charisma chameleon. At my school we had the nerds, and we had the cool kids. But Jeff was able to bridge that gap. When talking to the nerds, he could signal like the nerds. When talking to the cool kids, he could signal like the cool kids. He spent his mornings at breakfast with the nerds, but he spent his lunches rappin' with the cool kids. He was friendly with everyone. Including me. Which was a little awkward because I kinda didn't like Jeff. I mean, I didn't hate Jeff, it was more of a "Hmm, that's strange" feeling than anything. Because what he was doing was bringing normies over into the nerd stuff. It was only "nerd stuff" when people like me did it. But when the cool kids see Jeff doing it, suddenly they're interested. Suddenly they wanna learn about it. And it wasn't just video games either. I can understand the broad appeal of video games. But this was board games and cartoons and comic books too. They would line up to ask him about this stuff, and he could relay it back to them so expertly, in their "cool kid" tongue. He commanded attention. He was a leader. I was probably jealous of him. And the idea of these cool kids doing my nerd stuff definitely looked weird to me. Why were these hobbies so repulsive up until when Jeff starts doing them? Best I could figure was, what made me a nerd wasn't the nerdy things I did, but the cool things I didn't do. Jeff did nerdy things, but he also did cool things. When I do it's like "Yeah, FrothySolutions probably would like that nerdy thing." But when Jeff does it it's like "Hey, what's that thing Jeff is doing? He doesn't seem like the kind of person who would be into something like that. But if he's doing it, there must be some appeal to it. I'll ask him what the appeal is." If you're secure in your coolness and your normieness, you can do nerd things and it's not a problem.
I wouldn't say video games were really a "nerd thing" at my school. So you might be thinking "Wouldn't being open about your video game hobbies contradict your Smart Obedient Nerd persona?" I was still playing that role. But like I said, because I didn't do certain cool things or get angry at people, that was enough to convince everyone I was truly all the nerd I claimed to be. I played video games, but that was barely anything. Everyone played video games. My point is, I was still maintaining the lie. But with my friends, I could be marginally more myself. More open. Not perfectly open though. For example, Andre and I had this other friend. His name was Henry, and of all the friends in the group we would eventually grow to, he was probably the coolest. Like Jeff he had appeal on both the "nerd" and "cool kid" sides of the aisle. Jeff wasn't really part of my group, he was friends with everyone. But Henry was the closest thing our exclusive group had to a Jeff. Henry had good hair, Henry got in trouble with teachers, and yeah Jeff didn't have good hair or get in trouble with teachers but my point is, for these qualities Henry had appeal with the cool kids. Also, Henry wasn't as tight we Andre and I and Andre and I were as tight with each other. Probably because of his moonlighting over with the cool kids. Anyway, Henry would often have Vampirella books onhand, and other books I didn't know the names of. In one of the books was this comic called "Easy Way To A Tuff Surfboard!"
I committed the name of this comic to memory because, thanks to my persona, I couldn't openly enjoy it in front of the boys. But next time I got to a library, I was gonna look for a comic called "Easy Way To A Tuff Surfboard." But it's just the role I had to play. We also talked about girls at school we thought were hot. Girls like Marva. Girls with reputations. Girls whose names were on the boys' bathroom walls. And I was mostly a 3rd wheel when it came to that. Henry and Andre would get real exasperated with Prude FrothySolutions and eventually kinda cut me out of fun like this. Just one of several dysfunctions in this friendship so far. If this was a real friendship, and one of us had a Nintendo but one or more of us didn't, wouldn't real friends maybe go over that person's house to play Nintendo? But I never invited any of them over my house. And up to this point, I hadn't gone over any of their houses either. I might've been able to invite them over, but my parents kind of forbade it. They were always very shy of letting anyone come into our house unless it was spotless. They had 6 kids, the house was never gonna stay perfect. We argued with them a lot about this. But they wanted not a sock out of place. I don't remember if I said this already, but my parents always said they didn't want anyone "knowing our business." And this was probably part of it. Couldn't let people see the warts and all of normal family life. Had to be perfect, or no one could see. Maybe that's where I got the idea to live this fake persona? Anyway, I wasn't too bothered by it. It was my sisters who had the friends they wanted to invite over. Me, I was content to just be school friends with my group.
We only met at school, I was a stick in the mud when it came to girls, Andre had other friends he'd rather be with, Henry had other friends he'd rather be with, what exactly was holding our friendship together? Video games. I think the major appeal of video games at the time for me was how it introduced me to a community of people I could enjoy something with.
And that's the character limit. In summary, after puberty I started really thinking about my ambitions in life. What I was gonna do as a career. What my passions were. What my values were. Who I was as a person. Computers sounded like a pretty sure career path, but my fantasy worlds were where my mind still lived. Fortunately in high school I met some people who kinda felt the same way about cartoons and video games, so we got together to share our interests. But that's really all we did. As friends, we weren't very close. In part because I was still putting on the facade with my so-called friends. I couldn't even be honest with them. And so the depth of our friendship was showing up to school for watercooler talk.
Why didn't I long for something more? Why didn't I see the writing on the wall and either say "Hey we should hang out more often" or find new friends? I think I came to really understand how I felt about my friends in my junior year.
FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
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"Founding Father" or "Milk & Cigarettes 4: Funeral for the Smart One"
TL;DR: For the last two years of high school, my persona of the smart and obedient "joy to have in class" started to fade. And my social circle started to fade. But what was real about me did persevere, and I did maintain a good reputation with my teachers.I just didn't make any friends.
TL;DR: For the last two years of high school, my persona of the smart and obedient "joy to have in class" started to fade. And my social circle started to fade. But what was real about me did persevere, and I did maintain a good reputation with my teachers.I just didn't make any friends.
Labor Day! Back when I was in school, Labor Day was a formality. One day off. Almost nothing. But as an adult, I cherish every moment away from work. I blow my load just for half a day off. Because any time off is time I can turn my hand to ambitions I actually care about. And I had ambitions as a teenager too, but I was maybe a little complacent back then. It took a whole Christmas break for me to settle down and look toward the future. Picture this...
1989. Specifically, the night of December 19th. You just got back from looking at video games at the mall, after a showing of The Wizard. You're making the long trek home, on foot. You're 16 going on 17, approaching manhood. You have no car, and you don't know how to drive. But that's fine, by now you're accustomed to walking everywhere.
In fact, tonight you'd rather walk. There's a rare Christmas magic in the air and you wanna drink it all in slowly. Not only is Christmastime here, but we're nearing the turn of the decade. The prospect of the coming '90s and all their potential make these times especially exciting. They started taking down the Berlin Wall, times are changing, so you plan on entering the new year with fiery motivation. For Christmas you should be getting a Power Glove. You plan on wearing it as part of your fashion style. Also, you're gonna grow your hair out long like Bon Jovi. You're gonna be a jacket-wearing guy. And at some point you should learn to drive. You're not in a hurry to learn to drive, but at some point you should. Tonight though? You're looking forward to a bottomless mug of cocoa, microwave Toll House Cookies, and a night of TV stacked with Christmas specials. Followed by Shadowgate until you pass out the overwhelming coziness of all your proof against winter. Yes, it's the most wonderful time of the year.
Just then, a police cruiser pulls up to the curb where you're walking. You stop. Do they wanna talk to you? The cops get out of the car. Oh no, they wanna talk to you. One of the cops asks "Do you know what you did on that tree a little while ago?" You don't remember any specific tree. There were many trees. What are they getting at? What they're getting at is, they say you peed on a tree. And now you're under arrest.
What you'd like to say is "When did I pee on a tree?" Because you seriously don't remember. You would go to the spot and breathe deep of the piss fumes if you really did because first of all, you're pretty sure you didn't, and second, if you DID, this would be a preferable punishment than to be arrested. You can't believe this is happening to you. The goodest fucking boy. Facing, what these cops say, are serious charges. Next thing you know, backup arrives. Actual goddamn backup. Now there's two chick cops and an old Wilford Brimley looking motherfucker for a total of 5 cops and 3 cruisers, just to see you. The tears are flowing. But they don't see a boy. They see a thug, a crook, a monster. They're making it hard for you. "I didn't mean to hurt anybody, why are you doing this" you sob, cowering under your hands in fear. "EEeeeEEEEeeeeeeEEHHHH??? You REALLY thought you could just whip out your DICK???? Teeheeheeheeheeheehee~" the lady cops smugly retort, leering over you with predatory hunger. You're baring your soul to these cops, you're CLEARLY a good kid, you're CRYING, you are a CHILD, there's no mistaking that, and they feel NOTHING. How can they be so cold? You are at once scared for your life and mind-boggled. Again, you don't remember even peeing on any trees. But even if you did? You've been peeing on trees all your life! And so has everyone else! Not long ago in THIS VERY NEIGHBORHOOD, you saw an old man, not a kid, but an old man, peeing on the sidewalk. Not on a tree, just standing in the middle of the sidewalk, cock hanging out, dribbling piss. You figured he must've been on drugs or something because he was right out in the open. But you? IF you peed on a tree? The point of peeing on a tree is that you're obscured by being close up against the tree. The point of peeing on a tree isn't to expose yourself, it's to hide yourself. With the tree. That's why everyone does it!!! It's a modest alternative to pissing yourself!!! They make you get in the back of the cruiser of the two original cops who pulled up on you. What do you say for yourself? "I don't actually think I did?" Yeah, that oughta go well. "Everyone pees on trees?" What you end up stammering out is "I didn't know..." The cops only get rougher on you. "That's a sex crime! You could be charged with a sex crime! Do you realize how serious this is???" You're silent as they lecture you. Then they take you home, not jail. They talk with your parents about how to proceed from here.
And just like that, your life is over. You don't wanna watch TV, or play Shadowgate, and you're not hungry. You went from feeling like a man on the cusp of the first days of the rest of his life, to a boy, foisted upon responsibilities you don't deserve. You are 16. Just a boy. But by the time you get out of prison, maybe you'll be a man.
I didn't go to jail, I got a disorderly conduct charge and had to do community service. Of all the threats to my school persona, this was the greatest. But then, maybe my persona had been slowly coming apart over the years, and not destroyed all at once? Speaking of things coming apart over years, by my junior year I was introduced to the brothers Randy and Donnie. Randy was a junior like us, and Donnie was just joining as a freshman. Funny thing about those guys, they have an Asian last name, but they are both totally white. No Asian but Caucasian in them. And that always puzzled me. Anyway, I think these guys are the "best friends" Andre was talking about when he said I wasn't his best friend. I think he knew them outside of school and everything. Whenever Andre wasn't with me, I would find him talking to them, or playing games with them. And somehow people still thought he and I were the best friends. So, there was Andre, Randy, Donnie, sometimes Henry, and me. And between Andre and the brothers, we really hit a stride of tabletop roleplaying campaigns. Every lunch period, at the very least. Mostly Shadowrun. I can't find a picture of the original version but basically it was really hard for me to wrap my head around. Shadowrun, amongst other RPGs, is notoriously sophisticated. Which was a shame, because the opportunity to take a character I created and play as it in a game or something? I was really interested in that. If only it didn't have to be this complicated. RPGs earned us another friend, a guy named Kian. He's the guy from Version One who got his shoes made fun of.
I think Kian and I had the most chemistry. Or maybe I just cared about him more. Seeing him get picked on, and not fight back. Andre fights back. This guy is just taking it and looks like it bothers him.
And finally, there was Jason. A freshman like Donnie. I forget exactly what drew him toward us, he didn't really roleplay. Also, he was almost constantly pissed off at one person or another in the group. And he would play these pranks on people, including us, that I think maybe strayed too far. Like giving us cookies, but baking them with laxatives. That's what he did to us when the upperclassmen went to a baseball game. Before he left he gave me some cookies to eat, and said that I should eat them, and that I should share them with Andre. I didn't eat them OR give them to Andre, they didn't look good. But when we got back I didn't wanna be like "We didn't eat your garbage cookies they look like garbage," but I also couldn't say "Yeah I shared them with Andre" because I didn't confer with Andre before coming up with the lie. So I told him I ate all of the cookies. And he's like "You ate ALL of the cookies??? Wahaha, those had laxatives in them! Are you okay??? Wahaha!!!" And he had all these connections to indie garage metal bands, I think Jason had some mental issues. I mean, we all did, but I think Jason had some violent tendencies.
So, there was Andre, Randy, Donnie, Henry, Kian, Jason, and me. But some of us were closer to others. And I think we could be divided into two subgroups. There was Andre's Group, which was Andre and the brothers and sometimes Henry (He was very spotty with hanging out), and there was my group, which was me, Kian, and Jason. And Andre and I were the links between those groups. Jason didn't really talk to Andre, he talked to Andre through me. Because I was supposedly Andre's best friend. Randy and Donnie didn't talk to Kian, they talked to Kian through Andre who then talked to me and then I talked to Kian. And Henry just kept it loose in general. Not much of a gang, really. But I didn't see it that way. I saw us as a loyal crew. I had dreams and aspirations for us as a group. Which is another hindrance to us as friends. I was actively trying to make them into something, and they were clearly not interested. I'm like the guy who wants to get everyone matching banchō jackets with cool nicknames, and I wanna know "Hey if we got jackets, what would your cool nickname be," and almost none of those guys would be interested. Kian would've been kinda interested, Jason might've been kinda interested if only to give himself a name like "The Blood God." Everyone else probably couldn't come up with a nickname or the motivation to try. But I just didn't see it. At this point I started carrying around all of my original character sheets, as well as profiles on all of my "friends" in order to give them the "original character" treatment, basically. Like I would ask them what their signature animal was, right? And take notes on that, and come up with ways to use it. Like maybe fantasizing about everyone having a jacket with their signature animal emblazoned on it. Or everyone comes to school with shirts in their signature color. We could be the gang of friends who does that. I had ideas like that, and while I never got to see them executed in practice, I kept them written down on those sheets. And I called them my "files." I didn't let anyone look at them, not even my family. No one, except that group of friends.
But I wasn't the only one fooling myself into thinking we were a tight group. We all liked video games, right? And so we got it in our heads that we would stick together and develop video games together. Kian was the one who got the ball rolling. I mentioned in Version One he did a lot of creative writing and fantasizing.
We also wanted to have it on Nintendo and Sega. We were dreaming big, there's no law against that, right? But I really believed we might do it. After all, I said I was gonna go to college to be a programmer. Why shouldn't this be my future? It's just, I didn't actually like the idea for the game. I went along with it, but so far it looked like level after level of mostly identical puzzles. Like you might see in an arcade game. I wanted more variety, like you might see in a console game's levels. And I didn't want it to be military themed. I wanted it to be whimsical and fantastic, like a Mario game. Also, Kian and I wanted to somehow put ourselves in the game. Each of the group, as characters in the game. Somehow. But I still went along with it. I figured at some point in our partnership we'd make the kind of game I wanted to make.
Speaking of big dreams that won't pan out, towards the end of 1989 the Berlin Wall was coming down, and it was big news. And I was still fronting with this pretend persona at school. And I was still fooling myself into believe we were a tight knit group of friends. Even though Andre said from the beginning I was not his best friend, I wasn't dissuaded. So what I did was tell my friends that my family was planning a trip to the Eastern Bloc for summer vacation. A bold lie that would come apart if any of them saw me around the city over that summer. But not only did I say this, but I told them that my family was gonna take them AND their immediate family members with us. Obviously none of that could ever happen, but I wanted to hype the group up with some kind of adventure that we could all go on, as a group. If they BELIEVED they were all going to the Eastern Bloc as a group, they might feel like a group. I didn't need Andre to be my best singular friend anyway, I wanted us all to be a team of equal members. But what was I gonna do when the school year ended and there was no trip? Well, I chose my words carefully. I said a vacation was being planned. Planned. Not necessarily definitely happening. So I can inevitably bail myself out with "Dudes, the vacation plan fell through, I'm sorry."
By 1990 we were in full farce mode. Maybe it was the freshness of a new decade, but we were really growing apart by now, interested in other people and things. Though we tried to stay together. For the kids. Picture this...
1990. Specifically, the afternoon of April 7th. You're finally visiting a friend outside of school. It's Donnie's birthday and half of the gang is all here. You're here, Andre is here, Donnie is here, obviously, and Randy is here because he lives here. You meet their kid sister, their mom, and their stepdad. All of them totally white, despite the Asian sounding last name. Thankfully, no one presses you about the summer vacation plans.
The party starts with a couple of Pizza Hut pizzas.
After the pizzas arrive, the mom and stepdad retire to the bedroom, leaving the door ajar. While everyone's eating pizza, you wander around the house, because you're mentally challenged and you think it's appropriate to go check on the parents. Andre stops you, explaining subtly that the parents are probably having sex and you shouldn't bother them. It really didn't occur to you, you thought they were taking a nap.
Because all of the applicable party members are here, you touch on a little of an ongoing Shadowrun campaign. Just as a formality. Then you spend the rest of the night watching Randy and Donny play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Batman: The Video Game. You don't ask, and they don't tell, but it's implied that they don't wanna share the controllers with you. So you're just watching.
Watching them play, you're inspired. You ask "Hey, what if we were in a New York City that was a mixture of Batman and Ninja Turtles? And we were a street gang in that city? What would our gang name be? What would our weapons be? What would we wear? What would our allegiances be? Imagine helping Batman one night, and the Turtles another night, in like a massive crossover war?" No one here has an answer for you. You figure if nothing else, it would be a good idea for a game. Someday. After you make this prisoner rescue puzzle. Ah, kickin' it with the boys...
Come May, there wasn't much school year left. And I had to start my community service for allegedly peeing on that tree. So my head was in another place. And I think on May 4th, we had a Cinco de Mayo party in Spanish class? It was around the actual Cinco de Mayo. And I had an eye for my Spanish teacher. Unusually young, she couldn't have been older than 24. And so she had a youthful naivete. Which didn't mix well with a class that didn't want to learn. But not only was she having a hard time with us as a class, but she was being hassled by other teachers & staff. I know one of the teachers, my history teacher from junior high who had transferred to this school so I had built up years of good will and apple polishing with her, didn't like my Spanish teacher. None of the teachers told me this, I overheard it while she was crying on the shoulder of one of the school security guards. I used to think the teachers hated her because of how unorthodox her teaching was, and how unprofessional her demeanor was, but now I think what it actually was was that she was fucking some of the staff. Like maybe that security guard. You shouldn't dip your pen in the Spanish teacher's ink. But she had this way about her. Of making you feel needed. Appreciated. Making you want to be with her. Which has gotta be a security guard's weakness. But it was also my weakness. There's a free period after Spanish where we go to the gym, and it's usually where I hang out with the boys. But eventually I stopped going to gym and spending my free period staying after in Spanish class. To be with my teacher. And it came to a head on the day of the Cinco de Mayo party.
I bailed on my friends to orbit my teacher. Which I might feel more guilty for if we were actually as close as I tried to make us. I guess what I should really feel guilty for is trying to make them into something they didn't want to be. Shape them into this team or crew. But what about my needs??? They should be free to be themselves, but I should be free to seek the people I wanna be with, right? To build my wolf pack? My Pussy Posse?
The school year ended. At this point Rodgerick was flat out cornering me in the halls, calling me a liar. I never even touched bases with my friends about the fake summer vacation offer. After the last day, we never saw each other again. I didn't check Randy and Donnie's house, I had no one's phone number so I couldn't call anyone, and thank God I didn't see any of them around the city. After my community service ended, I played a lot of Wizardry over the summer. Thinking about the 3 years I spent at that school.
Wizardry is a game where you build a party of characters and explore a dungeon maze. I would make my family in this game, ask them what their stats should be and what their actions should be per turn. It would've been nice to do this with friends though. If only things had worked out differently. But you know what that school's problem was? No clique diversity. I would've liked something like The Breakfast Club. A clearly defined of "classes." Jocks, nerds, preps, punks, goths, etc. What I got was a hodgepodge of cool kids and a hodgepodge of uncool kids. Occasionally mixing. No sense of identity or flavor. If I'm gonna be a jackets and Power Glove guy, you need a community worth wearing those things for. Where everyone else will be dressed according to their clique. I had one more year of high school, for most, no time at all. But maybe I can pull something off. My sisters' school was an art-focused school, and as a result the students are generally more expressive. It was a few blocks down the street from my school. I had seen the parking lot there, all manner of freaks and geeks, they looked like fun. So for my senior year I got a transfer there, and hit the ground running trying to be somebody. Picture this...
1991. The halls are flooded as you head to your locker change books. No Power Glove, but you're in your Billabong t-shirt & wide leg camo print cargo pants. The Smashing Pumpkins' "I Am One" plays from the Chemistry classroom.
When suddenly, a traffic jam in the hallway. People are rushing to see something. You try to find out, but there's the bell.
You only find out after school what happened: One of the students jumped from the school roof. He survived, but he had to be taken to the hospital. When they picked him up, he was conscious, but he didn't even remember jumping. Art school. How's that for baggage?
This school definitely had a colorful cast of characters. So first part of my strategy to be part of these guys? I abandoned the persona. The way Version One is worded, it sounds like I went to my old school for my senior year, but that's not what happened. I had decided early on to abandon the persona, but I was worrying about how I would pull that off if I went back to my old school. How I would explain the change. It was easier to just switch schools. My old school WAS mere blocks away from my new school, so if I was caught at the bus I might've had some explaining to do. But safe inside the school, with no one I've ever met before save for my sisters, it was a relief to not have to cover my ass with a fake identity. I really couldn't this time, because not only were my sisters at this school, but they weren't little anymore and I couldn't be like "If anybody asks you about me, just tell them this." I can't persuade them into going along with my lies. So just be myself, right? Problem was, I didn't really know who "myself" was. And so I spent most of my time just trying to fit into the cliques that looked right for me. It didn't work. My senior year was more or less friendless as far as this new school factored in. Not just because I was a poseur. It was mostly because I had showed up late. Not like my sisters who joined as freshmen, built up reputations over months and years and over summers. By senior year you're supposed to have friends picked out already. In the shadow of my sister, a lead dancer/performance artist, I was able to gather some relevance, being her brother. But other than that? I was nobody.
Nobody to the students, anyway. Persona or not, I still had a way with teachers. Some teachers. The reason the whole Good Smart Boy persona stops working has less to do with teachers not believing the persona is genuine, and more to do with how at a certain age kids are more mature, and don't wanna fail their classes. So everyone's working hard and getting good grades and not risking their academic status. But being good and smart was still appreciated by teachers. Like my Literature teacher. Same formula as usual. Be polite, do your homework, et cetera. I was there early every morning because she had this book collection and I would leaf through the interesting ones. One that I spent a lot of time re-reading was "A Dictionary of Superstitions."
It had the tropes and themes that were related to certain animals and vegetables and minerals and colors and stuff, which was good for me as somebody who liked to come up with characters and stuff. Anyway, she would see me reading books like this every day and she was glad to see students taking the initiative to enlighten themselves. And one day she starts us on this assignment on the themes of karma in literature. Specifically, "Crime and Punishment." I forget what it was exactly, but we were supposed to write something. Long story short, I was one of the few who did. There was some kind of epidemic in that class of people who, I think, cheated? Or didn't do the assignment? Or did the assignment poorly? I forget what. But on the day of going over the assignments she addresses the whole class. She's heartbroken. She's actually crying. She feels let down because it's like none of us care about themes of karma in literature, which she thought she was really engaging us on. We all felt really guilty. Even me, and I did the assignment. But anyway, because of the massive failure rate, she has to retool tomorrow, we're gonna try this again. Next day, I'm in early, reading the books, and in comes my teacher. She sits next to me, puts her hand on my wrist, and imparts her thanks for my dedication to literature. She whispers that I don't have to do the retooled project, obviously because I did the first one right. She asks me my thoughts on the books that I read in her class. We talk like this until class actually starts. She was the closest thing to a friend I made there.
One friend I would've liked to make was this girl Judy, she was like 20-something. She and I would've been legal because I was 18 in spring. What was a 20-something year old doing in high school? She had to drop out when she was younger due to a horrific fire accident. By the time she had rehabilitated she was an adult. But she decided to go back to school anyway. She was a triumph of the human spirit. But also her body was outstanding. You could see a little bit of stretchiness where the fire got her, but she filled out jeans and sweaters like god damned cartoon character. Here's the conflict though: She was very very Christian. She lived out in Amish Country, and also she survived a horrific burning. So she probably has good reason to be religious. And so I all I could do was admire her from afar. I was pretty sure I was gonna skip prom, I wasn't a big dance guy, but I told myself "If by some miracle Judy asks me to prom, I'll go to prom." She didn't, so I didn't bother with the hassle. It was video games and TV at home. As usual. I could've spent that time with my old friends, could've checked on Randy and Donnie, but I didn't.
And then, at long last, the final day of my senior year of high school. The fulfillment of my legal obligation to education. This being an art school, most of the students were getting together with their friends to make big plans for their futures together. I had no friends to plan a future with. Except my old friends, who I did plan a future with but that fell through. Like a kid whose parents didn't show up to the recital, Like a man with no family to remember him at his funeral, I would have to be rescued. Enter my Literature teacher. She sees me reading the books, and knows that when I leave, I won't be able to read them anymore. Unless she gives them to me. And she does. She gives me A Dictionary of Superstitions. And she signs it.
I did not visit her. It kinda hurts to transcribe that, even now. She was good to me and all of her students. She asked me to visit her and I didn't. I tried to look her up on Facebook today. She died 4 years ago. So now I can never visit her.
That'll do it for the character count then. Moral of this story? I should've run shota game. From kindergarten to 12th grade, the one group I did reliably well with was my teachers. Yeah every now and then I would be made to run laps, or told to act my age, but while most of my persona was fake, the grades were real. The respect for my teachers was real. I think I can attribute my path in childhood to this persona I made. The rewards I should've reaped should've come from that. I didn't have sex with my teachers. But I did get A Dictionary of Superstitions. And it would serve me well in the years to come, but today it means more than it ever did. Goodbye, Literature Teacher. I'll never forget the sacrifices you made for our education. That time you did that rap? You didn't have to do that. But you did it for us.
1989. Specifically, the night of December 19th. You just got back from looking at video games at the mall, after a showing of The Wizard. You're making the long trek home, on foot. You're 16 going on 17, approaching manhood. You have no car, and you don't know how to drive. But that's fine, by now you're accustomed to walking everywhere.
In fact, tonight you'd rather walk. There's a rare Christmas magic in the air and you wanna drink it all in slowly. Not only is Christmastime here, but we're nearing the turn of the decade. The prospect of the coming '90s and all their potential make these times especially exciting. They started taking down the Berlin Wall, times are changing, so you plan on entering the new year with fiery motivation. For Christmas you should be getting a Power Glove. You plan on wearing it as part of your fashion style. Also, you're gonna grow your hair out long like Bon Jovi. You're gonna be a jacket-wearing guy. And at some point you should learn to drive. You're not in a hurry to learn to drive, but at some point you should. Tonight though? You're looking forward to a bottomless mug of cocoa, microwave Toll House Cookies, and a night of TV stacked with Christmas specials. Followed by Shadowgate until you pass out the overwhelming coziness of all your proof against winter. Yes, it's the most wonderful time of the year.
Just then, a police cruiser pulls up to the curb where you're walking. You stop. Do they wanna talk to you? The cops get out of the car. Oh no, they wanna talk to you. One of the cops asks "Do you know what you did on that tree a little while ago?" You don't remember any specific tree. There were many trees. What are they getting at? What they're getting at is, they say you peed on a tree. And now you're under arrest.
What you'd like to say is "When did I pee on a tree?" Because you seriously don't remember. You would go to the spot and breathe deep of the piss fumes if you really did because first of all, you're pretty sure you didn't, and second, if you DID, this would be a preferable punishment than to be arrested. You can't believe this is happening to you. The goodest fucking boy. Facing, what these cops say, are serious charges. Next thing you know, backup arrives. Actual goddamn backup. Now there's two chick cops and an old Wilford Brimley looking motherfucker for a total of 5 cops and 3 cruisers, just to see you. The tears are flowing. But they don't see a boy. They see a thug, a crook, a monster. They're making it hard for you. "I didn't mean to hurt anybody, why are you doing this" you sob, cowering under your hands in fear. "EEeeeEEEEeeeeeeEEHHHH??? You REALLY thought you could just whip out your DICK???? Teeheeheeheeheeheehee~" the lady cops smugly retort, leering over you with predatory hunger. You're baring your soul to these cops, you're CLEARLY a good kid, you're CRYING, you are a CHILD, there's no mistaking that, and they feel NOTHING. How can they be so cold? You are at once scared for your life and mind-boggled. Again, you don't remember even peeing on any trees. But even if you did? You've been peeing on trees all your life! And so has everyone else! Not long ago in THIS VERY NEIGHBORHOOD, you saw an old man, not a kid, but an old man, peeing on the sidewalk. Not on a tree, just standing in the middle of the sidewalk, cock hanging out, dribbling piss. You figured he must've been on drugs or something because he was right out in the open. But you? IF you peed on a tree? The point of peeing on a tree is that you're obscured by being close up against the tree. The point of peeing on a tree isn't to expose yourself, it's to hide yourself. With the tree. That's why everyone does it!!! It's a modest alternative to pissing yourself!!! They make you get in the back of the cruiser of the two original cops who pulled up on you. What do you say for yourself? "I don't actually think I did?" Yeah, that oughta go well. "Everyone pees on trees?" What you end up stammering out is "I didn't know..." The cops only get rougher on you. "That's a sex crime! You could be charged with a sex crime! Do you realize how serious this is???" You're silent as they lecture you. Then they take you home, not jail. They talk with your parents about how to proceed from here.
And just like that, your life is over. You don't wanna watch TV, or play Shadowgate, and you're not hungry. You went from feeling like a man on the cusp of the first days of the rest of his life, to a boy, foisted upon responsibilities you don't deserve. You are 16. Just a boy. But by the time you get out of prison, maybe you'll be a man.
I didn't go to jail, I got a disorderly conduct charge and had to do community service. Of all the threats to my school persona, this was the greatest. But then, maybe my persona had been slowly coming apart over the years, and not destroyed all at once? Speaking of things coming apart over years, by my junior year I was introduced to the brothers Randy and Donnie. Randy was a junior like us, and Donnie was just joining as a freshman. Funny thing about those guys, they have an Asian last name, but they are both totally white. No Asian but Caucasian in them. And that always puzzled me. Anyway, I think these guys are the "best friends" Andre was talking about when he said I wasn't his best friend. I think he knew them outside of school and everything. Whenever Andre wasn't with me, I would find him talking to them, or playing games with them. And somehow people still thought he and I were the best friends. So, there was Andre, Randy, Donnie, sometimes Henry, and me. And between Andre and the brothers, we really hit a stride of tabletop roleplaying campaigns. Every lunch period, at the very least. Mostly Shadowrun. I can't find a picture of the original version but basically it was really hard for me to wrap my head around. Shadowrun, amongst other RPGs, is notoriously sophisticated. Which was a shame, because the opportunity to take a character I created and play as it in a game or something? I was really interested in that. If only it didn't have to be this complicated. RPGs earned us another friend, a guy named Kian. He's the guy from Version One who got his shoes made fun of.
FrothySolutions said:
I think Kian and I had the most chemistry. Or maybe I just cared about him more. Seeing him get picked on, and not fight back. Andre fights back. This guy is just taking it and looks like it bothers him.
And finally, there was Jason. A freshman like Donnie. I forget exactly what drew him toward us, he didn't really roleplay. Also, he was almost constantly pissed off at one person or another in the group. And he would play these pranks on people, including us, that I think maybe strayed too far. Like giving us cookies, but baking them with laxatives. That's what he did to us when the upperclassmen went to a baseball game. Before he left he gave me some cookies to eat, and said that I should eat them, and that I should share them with Andre. I didn't eat them OR give them to Andre, they didn't look good. But when we got back I didn't wanna be like "We didn't eat your garbage cookies they look like garbage," but I also couldn't say "Yeah I shared them with Andre" because I didn't confer with Andre before coming up with the lie. So I told him I ate all of the cookies. And he's like "You ate ALL of the cookies??? Wahaha, those had laxatives in them! Are you okay??? Wahaha!!!" And he had all these connections to indie garage metal bands, I think Jason had some mental issues. I mean, we all did, but I think Jason had some violent tendencies.
So, there was Andre, Randy, Donnie, Henry, Kian, Jason, and me. But some of us were closer to others. And I think we could be divided into two subgroups. There was Andre's Group, which was Andre and the brothers and sometimes Henry (He was very spotty with hanging out), and there was my group, which was me, Kian, and Jason. And Andre and I were the links between those groups. Jason didn't really talk to Andre, he talked to Andre through me. Because I was supposedly Andre's best friend. Randy and Donnie didn't talk to Kian, they talked to Kian through Andre who then talked to me and then I talked to Kian. And Henry just kept it loose in general. Not much of a gang, really. But I didn't see it that way. I saw us as a loyal crew. I had dreams and aspirations for us as a group. Which is another hindrance to us as friends. I was actively trying to make them into something, and they were clearly not interested. I'm like the guy who wants to get everyone matching banchō jackets with cool nicknames, and I wanna know "Hey if we got jackets, what would your cool nickname be," and almost none of those guys would be interested. Kian would've been kinda interested, Jason might've been kinda interested if only to give himself a name like "The Blood God." Everyone else probably couldn't come up with a nickname or the motivation to try. But I just didn't see it. At this point I started carrying around all of my original character sheets, as well as profiles on all of my "friends" in order to give them the "original character" treatment, basically. Like I would ask them what their signature animal was, right? And take notes on that, and come up with ways to use it. Like maybe fantasizing about everyone having a jacket with their signature animal emblazoned on it. Or everyone comes to school with shirts in their signature color. We could be the gang of friends who does that. I had ideas like that, and while I never got to see them executed in practice, I kept them written down on those sheets. And I called them my "files." I didn't let anyone look at them, not even my family. No one, except that group of friends.
But I wasn't the only one fooling myself into thinking we were a tight group. We all liked video games, right? And so we got it in our heads that we would stick together and develop video games together. Kian was the one who got the ball rolling. I mentioned in Version One he did a lot of creative writing and fantasizing.
FrothySolutions said:
We also wanted to have it on Nintendo and Sega. We were dreaming big, there's no law against that, right? But I really believed we might do it. After all, I said I was gonna go to college to be a programmer. Why shouldn't this be my future? It's just, I didn't actually like the idea for the game. I went along with it, but so far it looked like level after level of mostly identical puzzles. Like you might see in an arcade game. I wanted more variety, like you might see in a console game's levels. And I didn't want it to be military themed. I wanted it to be whimsical and fantastic, like a Mario game. Also, Kian and I wanted to somehow put ourselves in the game. Each of the group, as characters in the game. Somehow. But I still went along with it. I figured at some point in our partnership we'd make the kind of game I wanted to make.
Speaking of big dreams that won't pan out, towards the end of 1989 the Berlin Wall was coming down, and it was big news. And I was still fronting with this pretend persona at school. And I was still fooling myself into believe we were a tight knit group of friends. Even though Andre said from the beginning I was not his best friend, I wasn't dissuaded. So what I did was tell my friends that my family was planning a trip to the Eastern Bloc for summer vacation. A bold lie that would come apart if any of them saw me around the city over that summer. But not only did I say this, but I told them that my family was gonna take them AND their immediate family members with us. Obviously none of that could ever happen, but I wanted to hype the group up with some kind of adventure that we could all go on, as a group. If they BELIEVED they were all going to the Eastern Bloc as a group, they might feel like a group. I didn't need Andre to be my best singular friend anyway, I wanted us all to be a team of equal members. But what was I gonna do when the school year ended and there was no trip? Well, I chose my words carefully. I said a vacation was being planned. Planned. Not necessarily definitely happening. So I can inevitably bail myself out with "Dudes, the vacation plan fell through, I'm sorry."
By 1990 we were in full farce mode. Maybe it was the freshness of a new decade, but we were really growing apart by now, interested in other people and things. Though we tried to stay together. For the kids. Picture this...
1990. Specifically, the afternoon of April 7th. You're finally visiting a friend outside of school. It's Donnie's birthday and half of the gang is all here. You're here, Andre is here, Donnie is here, obviously, and Randy is here because he lives here. You meet their kid sister, their mom, and their stepdad. All of them totally white, despite the Asian sounding last name. Thankfully, no one presses you about the summer vacation plans.
The party starts with a couple of Pizza Hut pizzas.
After the pizzas arrive, the mom and stepdad retire to the bedroom, leaving the door ajar. While everyone's eating pizza, you wander around the house, because you're mentally challenged and you think it's appropriate to go check on the parents. Andre stops you, explaining subtly that the parents are probably having sex and you shouldn't bother them. It really didn't occur to you, you thought they were taking a nap.
Because all of the applicable party members are here, you touch on a little of an ongoing Shadowrun campaign. Just as a formality. Then you spend the rest of the night watching Randy and Donny play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Batman: The Video Game. You don't ask, and they don't tell, but it's implied that they don't wanna share the controllers with you. So you're just watching.
Watching them play, you're inspired. You ask "Hey, what if we were in a New York City that was a mixture of Batman and Ninja Turtles? And we were a street gang in that city? What would our gang name be? What would our weapons be? What would we wear? What would our allegiances be? Imagine helping Batman one night, and the Turtles another night, in like a massive crossover war?" No one here has an answer for you. You figure if nothing else, it would be a good idea for a game. Someday. After you make this prisoner rescue puzzle. Ah, kickin' it with the boys...
Come May, there wasn't much school year left. And I had to start my community service for allegedly peeing on that tree. So my head was in another place. And I think on May 4th, we had a Cinco de Mayo party in Spanish class? It was around the actual Cinco de Mayo. And I had an eye for my Spanish teacher. Unusually young, she couldn't have been older than 24. And so she had a youthful naivete. Which didn't mix well with a class that didn't want to learn. But not only was she having a hard time with us as a class, but she was being hassled by other teachers & staff. I know one of the teachers, my history teacher from junior high who had transferred to this school so I had built up years of good will and apple polishing with her, didn't like my Spanish teacher. None of the teachers told me this, I overheard it while she was crying on the shoulder of one of the school security guards. I used to think the teachers hated her because of how unorthodox her teaching was, and how unprofessional her demeanor was, but now I think what it actually was was that she was fucking some of the staff. Like maybe that security guard. You shouldn't dip your pen in the Spanish teacher's ink. But she had this way about her. Of making you feel needed. Appreciated. Making you want to be with her. Which has gotta be a security guard's weakness. But it was also my weakness. There's a free period after Spanish where we go to the gym, and it's usually where I hang out with the boys. But eventually I stopped going to gym and spending my free period staying after in Spanish class. To be with my teacher. And it came to a head on the day of the Cinco de Mayo party.
FrothySolutions said:
I bailed on my friends to orbit my teacher. Which I might feel more guilty for if we were actually as close as I tried to make us. I guess what I should really feel guilty for is trying to make them into something they didn't want to be. Shape them into this team or crew. But what about my needs??? They should be free to be themselves, but I should be free to seek the people I wanna be with, right? To build my wolf pack? My Pussy Posse?
The school year ended. At this point Rodgerick was flat out cornering me in the halls, calling me a liar. I never even touched bases with my friends about the fake summer vacation offer. After the last day, we never saw each other again. I didn't check Randy and Donnie's house, I had no one's phone number so I couldn't call anyone, and thank God I didn't see any of them around the city. After my community service ended, I played a lot of Wizardry over the summer. Thinking about the 3 years I spent at that school.
Wizardry is a game where you build a party of characters and explore a dungeon maze. I would make my family in this game, ask them what their stats should be and what their actions should be per turn. It would've been nice to do this with friends though. If only things had worked out differently. But you know what that school's problem was? No clique diversity. I would've liked something like The Breakfast Club. A clearly defined of "classes." Jocks, nerds, preps, punks, goths, etc. What I got was a hodgepodge of cool kids and a hodgepodge of uncool kids. Occasionally mixing. No sense of identity or flavor. If I'm gonna be a jackets and Power Glove guy, you need a community worth wearing those things for. Where everyone else will be dressed according to their clique. I had one more year of high school, for most, no time at all. But maybe I can pull something off. My sisters' school was an art-focused school, and as a result the students are generally more expressive. It was a few blocks down the street from my school. I had seen the parking lot there, all manner of freaks and geeks, they looked like fun. So for my senior year I got a transfer there, and hit the ground running trying to be somebody. Picture this...
1991. The halls are flooded as you head to your locker change books. No Power Glove, but you're in your Billabong t-shirt & wide leg camo print cargo pants. The Smashing Pumpkins' "I Am One" plays from the Chemistry classroom.
When suddenly, a traffic jam in the hallway. People are rushing to see something. You try to find out, but there's the bell.
You only find out after school what happened: One of the students jumped from the school roof. He survived, but he had to be taken to the hospital. When they picked him up, he was conscious, but he didn't even remember jumping. Art school. How's that for baggage?
This school definitely had a colorful cast of characters. So first part of my strategy to be part of these guys? I abandoned the persona. The way Version One is worded, it sounds like I went to my old school for my senior year, but that's not what happened. I had decided early on to abandon the persona, but I was worrying about how I would pull that off if I went back to my old school. How I would explain the change. It was easier to just switch schools. My old school WAS mere blocks away from my new school, so if I was caught at the bus I might've had some explaining to do. But safe inside the school, with no one I've ever met before save for my sisters, it was a relief to not have to cover my ass with a fake identity. I really couldn't this time, because not only were my sisters at this school, but they weren't little anymore and I couldn't be like "If anybody asks you about me, just tell them this." I can't persuade them into going along with my lies. So just be myself, right? Problem was, I didn't really know who "myself" was. And so I spent most of my time just trying to fit into the cliques that looked right for me. It didn't work. My senior year was more or less friendless as far as this new school factored in. Not just because I was a poseur. It was mostly because I had showed up late. Not like my sisters who joined as freshmen, built up reputations over months and years and over summers. By senior year you're supposed to have friends picked out already. In the shadow of my sister, a lead dancer/performance artist, I was able to gather some relevance, being her brother. But other than that? I was nobody.
Nobody to the students, anyway. Persona or not, I still had a way with teachers. Some teachers. The reason the whole Good Smart Boy persona stops working has less to do with teachers not believing the persona is genuine, and more to do with how at a certain age kids are more mature, and don't wanna fail their classes. So everyone's working hard and getting good grades and not risking their academic status. But being good and smart was still appreciated by teachers. Like my Literature teacher. Same formula as usual. Be polite, do your homework, et cetera. I was there early every morning because she had this book collection and I would leaf through the interesting ones. One that I spent a lot of time re-reading was "A Dictionary of Superstitions."
It had the tropes and themes that were related to certain animals and vegetables and minerals and colors and stuff, which was good for me as somebody who liked to come up with characters and stuff. Anyway, she would see me reading books like this every day and she was glad to see students taking the initiative to enlighten themselves. And one day she starts us on this assignment on the themes of karma in literature. Specifically, "Crime and Punishment." I forget what it was exactly, but we were supposed to write something. Long story short, I was one of the few who did. There was some kind of epidemic in that class of people who, I think, cheated? Or didn't do the assignment? Or did the assignment poorly? I forget what. But on the day of going over the assignments she addresses the whole class. She's heartbroken. She's actually crying. She feels let down because it's like none of us care about themes of karma in literature, which she thought she was really engaging us on. We all felt really guilty. Even me, and I did the assignment. But anyway, because of the massive failure rate, she has to retool tomorrow, we're gonna try this again. Next day, I'm in early, reading the books, and in comes my teacher. She sits next to me, puts her hand on my wrist, and imparts her thanks for my dedication to literature. She whispers that I don't have to do the retooled project, obviously because I did the first one right. She asks me my thoughts on the books that I read in her class. We talk like this until class actually starts. She was the closest thing to a friend I made there.
One friend I would've liked to make was this girl Judy, she was like 20-something. She and I would've been legal because I was 18 in spring. What was a 20-something year old doing in high school? She had to drop out when she was younger due to a horrific fire accident. By the time she had rehabilitated she was an adult. But she decided to go back to school anyway. She was a triumph of the human spirit. But also her body was outstanding. You could see a little bit of stretchiness where the fire got her, but she filled out jeans and sweaters like god damned cartoon character. Here's the conflict though: She was very very Christian. She lived out in Amish Country, and also she survived a horrific burning. So she probably has good reason to be religious. And so I all I could do was admire her from afar. I was pretty sure I was gonna skip prom, I wasn't a big dance guy, but I told myself "If by some miracle Judy asks me to prom, I'll go to prom." She didn't, so I didn't bother with the hassle. It was video games and TV at home. As usual. I could've spent that time with my old friends, could've checked on Randy and Donnie, but I didn't.
And then, at long last, the final day of my senior year of high school. The fulfillment of my legal obligation to education. This being an art school, most of the students were getting together with their friends to make big plans for their futures together. I had no friends to plan a future with. Except my old friends, who I did plan a future with but that fell through. Like a kid whose parents didn't show up to the recital, Like a man with no family to remember him at his funeral, I would have to be rescued. Enter my Literature teacher. She sees me reading the books, and knows that when I leave, I won't be able to read them anymore. Unless she gives them to me. And she does. She gives me A Dictionary of Superstitions. And she signs it.
I did not visit her. It kinda hurts to transcribe that, even now. She was good to me and all of her students. She asked me to visit her and I didn't. I tried to look her up on Facebook today. She died 4 years ago. So now I can never visit her.
That'll do it for the character count then. Moral of this story? I should've run shota game. From kindergarten to 12th grade, the one group I did reliably well with was my teachers. Yeah every now and then I would be made to run laps, or told to act my age, but while most of my persona was fake, the grades were real. The respect for my teachers was real. I think I can attribute my path in childhood to this persona I made. The rewards I should've reaped should've come from that. I didn't have sex with my teachers. But I did get A Dictionary of Superstitions. And it would serve me well in the years to come, but today it means more than it ever did. Goodbye, Literature Teacher. I'll never forget the sacrifices you made for our education. That time you did that rap? You didn't have to do that. But you did it for us.
FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
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- #171
"Founding Father" or "Milk & Cigarettes 5: Off-Campus Housing"
TL;DR: I talk about how I spent my college years playing Sega and watching Seinfeld. How instead of hanging out with friends I looked after my family. How I spent the height of my sex drive jacking off alone instead of hooking up at house parties and in girls' dorms. Wondering who I belonged with. Wondering where I belonged. Florida, where Spring Break is? Or up north, where the snow is? I eventually decided to abandon the college party dream and work toward living in a swank apartment in New York City.
TL;DR: I talk about how I spent my college years playing Sega and watching Seinfeld. How instead of hanging out with friends I looked after my family. How I spent the height of my sex drive jacking off alone instead of hooking up at house parties and in girls' dorms. Wondering who I belonged with. Wondering where I belonged. Florida, where Spring Break is? Or up north, where the snow is? I eventually decided to abandon the college party dream and work toward living in a swank apartment in New York City.
Back To School season is upon us, and it's Move In Day at the school I used to go to way back when. Actually, in my city multiple colleges are bunched together in one district, along with the student housing. So a few Move In Days have passed, and I've been visiting the student housing areas on these days to see if any fun banners are going up. Like the kind I posted about in "The Lists That Matter."
What a disaster. I checked my school, I checked the other schools, there were barely any banners at all. And when there were banners, they were "We Believe Survivors" and banners of that sort. And I get it, I'm not a rapist either. But what do these people want, an award? You hang a banner saying you won't rape anybody. Wow, you're a fuckin' hero. Really committing to the bare minimum here. Just another sign that my school, if not my whole city, is not the party spot I need it to be. But when I was going to school I can't help but feel like I was missing out on something. Maybe not at my school, but somewhere. My college experience was lonely, and I think it was because I didn't live on campus. I lived at home. And so I wasn't forced into cohabitation with a roommate to grow closer to and expand my social circle. First of all, after high school I didn't go straight to college. I'm not sure if that's a thing most kids do or what, I saw a lot of kids in my senior year already making plans for college. But first, we took a family trip to Walt Disney World. And after that, I took a year off to mooch off my parents. In place of friends or romance I spent time with my family. Going to gatherings like the Disney World trip. And I had no friends or romance for the whole of my college period, and the gap year that came before it. And really for all the years after that. Picture this...
1992. You lie prone on your bed, flipping through the enclosed instruction book for Sonic the Hedgehog, taking time to ruminate on the themes of each Badnik and comparing them to the notes in your Dictionary of Superstitions. Like the Burrobot.
The Burrobot is a drilling enemy, and a mole. Why is it a mole? Probably because of what the Dictionary of Superstitions suggests about it: It's "an animal of the earth." Moles dig and live in the ground, so a creative thing to do would be to make them some kind of drilling/excavation enemy.
What's great about video games is, they come with these books. Isn't it great that they come with these books? So you can still enjoy the content of the game even while you're not playing the game. While you watch this hour long Seinfeld double feature. One of the standup bits starts...
That is so true! You don't see your parents socializing like younger people do, do you? How is Seinfeld always so right about everything? George, he's literally you! A jobless loser trying to scheme his way through mooching off of someone! But if Jerry is right, you better get started on making some friends before you're 30. Probably at school. That's where you'll make friends. You'll make friends, you'll finally kiss a girl, you'll do all that stuff. With people who are of legal age.
You head to the bathroom over the commercial break. You walk past your parents' room. The door is ajar and your dad is asleep. After finishing up, you head back the other way, passing their room again from the other side. You notice the TV. And you stop. There's an unsimulated sex act playing out on the screen. A blowjob. The first you've ever seen in your life. You stand there and watch it play out, and time seems to stop. Until eventually it dawns on you: Dad shouldn't have the door open like this, asleep, with porn in the VCR. Your brother and some of your sisters are here. Wouldn't be appropriate. Should you eject the tape? Close the door? You can't eject the tape because he'll know you touched his tape. That you saw what happened. You have to do something, but also make it seem like you were never there. But before you can come to a decision, you realize you've jizzed in your pants. The first you've ever done in your life.
I talk a lot today about my low testosterone. And in the quest to remedy that, I often cite the ages of 19 to 20 as my peak testosterone years. Because this happened. The goal is to feel like this again. Get aroused to the point that I'm jizzing in my pants. But I would need to know how to figure out what my test levels were back then. Another clue that I was at peak hormones during those ages? I was weirdly depressed. I mean, I've been sad, but it was around the age of 19 that I was just slumped over onto the table, crippled with misery. And I couldn't quite figure out why. The littlest things would just fill me with despair. Like the world was ending. I wasn't sad about being lovelorn or friendless or anything, that much I know. If I'm being honest, I was pretty complacent with that because I was pretty sure once I made it to college, that would work out. I wasn't "worried" about that. I guess what it really was was, I was frustrated about feelings I had about issues and stuff, and those feelings about issues weren't being heard. Don't let the end of the Cold War fool you, these were turbulent times, and world was as divided as ever. Nintendo vs. Sega, Coke vs. Pepsi, Disney World vs. Warner Bros & Six Flags, there were a lot of sociopolitical shifts and discussions happening and I felt like I had feelings that weren't being heard. Dr. Kevorkian was big back then, and today it's pretty much understood that assisted suicide is, if nothing else, not a happy thing. But back then they were legitimizing the idea. And it frustrated me that people felt that way. I felt like the world was going crazy. I had no way to be heard in the "assisted suicide" debate.
And this was before I went to college! I started classes later that same year in the fall, and almost immediately I noticed an explosion of ideas like these from around campus. Student organizations and stuff. Bulletins about this thing and that thing... I felt powerless before it all, at least at the time. But eventually that gave way. I guess college left me too busy to be depressed. I think I fell out of it around 1993. Picture this...
1993. A chilly November evening. Your last class let out and you're decompressing for a while in the Student Center. The lounge is sparsely populated with twentysomethings in Doc Martens and African patterned belly shirts, quietly doing homework and sipping Clearly Canadian. The sight of it makes you wanna get home and drink something warm and chocolatey. You hike up your backpack and get moving.
On the way home you pass a block of student housing. Every porch has excited screaming coming from it. You stop to admire one from afar. How? How do you get invited to one of those things? Who do you have to know? And how do you meet them? Last year you made no progress. And you're not gonna be here forever. But you're still totally clueless about how to be a part of that kind of social circle. You wouldn't know where to start. By now you realize people aren't gonna walk up to you and invite you. So is there someone you have to approach instead? If only you could watch someone do it. Shadow them, and have them explain the process, in steps, from freshman to partying with people like that. You will soon be 21. Old enough to drink, and therefore have it be appropriate to be at a party like this. Imagine, having a squad to spend Spring Break 1994 with. But how do you become tight with someone in that short an amount of time? You just need a roadmap. To that social circle.
After you get home you catch the midnight showing of In Living Color, just in time to jack yourself off to sleep to the Fly Girls.
As I've implied before, I still live near that school. And looking back, while also looking at the present, maybe my school wasn't as jumpin' as I remember it. Really, it was a lot of standing around and drinking. And as I and Vic624 have said before, that's not much to write home about.
It's not what I'm looking for in a party. But even if my school wasn't the proper party school, what matters is I never got to go to those dream parties. Maybe I went to the wrong school. But I knew there was potential out there. I had seen it. On MTV Spring Break. But I wasn't picky... yet. I thought about many fantastic options for some kind of physical action. There was this show that used to air called "Street Match."
The premise is real simple. Host Ricky Paull Goldin walks around with a camera crew approaching random people, looking for someone single. When he finds someone, he walks around with them looking for someone else single, and he hooks them up for a date. But what's the appeal of a show like this? Maybe you're not into shows like Blind Date or The 5th Wheel. But why is that an interesting premise for a show? Aside from wanting to see new people every episode try and hook up? Because cold approaching isn't supposed to work. It's not normal to walk up to someone and make a date. But Street Match tries to make it work anyway. And I liked to wonder how to get on a show like that. I liked to imagine being able to pick anyone I wanted out of a crowd. But then I remembered that the AIDS epidemic is in full swing right now, maybe I don't wanna be fuckin' around with strangers?
I also noticed on this, and other shows both fictional and nonfictional, people tended to get matched with people who complimented their personalities. I mean they were compatible, "'ship dynamics-wise." Remember 'ship dynamics? It's all about how people work together, and what way of working together is best. And so I was wondering, what kind of person am I? For instance, Home Improvement was a popular show at the time, I didn't watch it as much as Seinfeld but I watched enough of it to know that Tim's friend Al was, for the most part, single. Now, a guy like Tim, he's reckless and headstrong. So who do you pair him with? Someone who is also headstrong. Jill. And how do they work together? They challenge each other. Well, it's mostly Jill who challenges Tim. But Al, he's not reckless and headstrong. He's what 'ship dynamics students might call a "cinnamon roll." Where Tim is vibrant and abrasive, Al is levelheaded and sensible. A nerd. Al is a nerd. And so if you're writing for Home Improvement, you have to ask "How might certain women pair with Al?" And it was around this time that they introduced who would be Al's longest running and most iconic girlfriend, the Susan Ross to his George Costanza, Ilene. Her dynamic? She was just as pure, just as cinnamon, as Al. The idea being that he should not be hooked up with someone that will overwhelm him. He's not a "practiced" kind of guy. And I kinda saw myself in Al. Because I was inexperienced too. And so I thought "Does that mean I need a virgin? Like I'm a virgin?" And I answered myself, "No." I didn't want it like Al. I wanted to be overwhelmed. I wanted a drunken degenerate who would help me catch up to everyone else, sexually. Again, I'm not so much an Al Borland, I'm more of a George Costanza. But I needed to find out who I was. And I figured a good way to do that was to figure out what my tropes and signatures applied to me. What my signature color was, my signature animal, etc. I spent a lot of time meditating on my Dictionary of Superstitions. But I also spent a lot of time watching Power Rangers. That show was all about what your spirit animal and spirit color was. For instance, Kimberly wore pink and carried the power of the Pterodactyl. And it fit her personality. And so I wondered, what would mine be? And can I work my favorite color into my wardrobe, like I'm a for-real Power Ranger? And if I was on a team of Rangers, like if I had friends, what kind of friends would I need? What dynamics would they have to have to play off of me in a good way?
Then came the summer of 1994. When the crime of the century happened. Picture this...
It's already nightfall, but the sweltering heat has parched you down to the throat. On your way home you stop by the nearest carryout and pick up two bottles of Strawberry Passion Awareness Fruitopia.
You need to hydrate for the long march back home. You just picked up Mortal Kombat, Sparkster, and Awesome Possum from the video game rental store. You've made this trip a thousand times by now. But tonight will be different.
You're walking near two other guys. They're having a conversation, you don't think much of it. You eventually pass them. Turns out, they let you pass them. Because as soon as you pass into the shadows where the street lights don't reach, something grabs you from behind. Arms latch around your neck and someone commands "GIMME YO MONEY!!!" It's one of the guys that you just walked past. Are you being mugged? He holds you somewhat steady, in the panic of the moment you don't really do as much as you could to fight back. The other guy shows up and starts punching you. He shouts "Where's the wallet, cuz? ON BLOOD, WHERE'S THE WALLET?!!" You are being mugged. But it doesn't really register with you all the way. It feels like you're being jumped. You've been jumped before. It's not that this isn't as bad as you thought a mugging would be, it's just... for some reason it's hard to believe that this is a mugging. Maybe you expected a gun. Maybe you expected them to be older. These guys look like teenagers. You could try and push the first guy's arms from around your neck, but you've got the bag of games around one of your wrists, and, y'know, the panic of the moment, you feel like if you lift the bag higher they'll steal the bag. So you stand there and let yourself get punched for a while until you wriggle enough to throw the first guy off of your head. You try to run, but someone grabs your shirt. You stumble forward, Your arms swing out at your sides, and someone grabs the bag of games. "Book!" one of the guys yells and they disappear down a side street. The fight took you all the way to another street light. You sit in its glow, wondering what the fuck just happened.
The fees I had to pay to replace those games, my God. When I say I felt violated, when I say it wasn't fair... I didn't think it could happen to me. I had been jumped before, but I wanted revenge for this. I tried reporting it to the cops. I knew it was someone from the corner store I stopped at, I went and got surveillance footage from them and everything. Brought it to the police. Got the guys on camera. Albeit shitty quality. And all they could do for me was "Well if you see 'em around, let us know, and we'll come scoop 'em up!" That might've deterred a less angry man. But I wanted revenge. I was prepared to case that store and wait for them to come back. Figure out where they lived. So I got the detective's phone number and I set out to do just that. The pursuit consumed me. It was all I could think about until I had to go to school again that fall. And later that year we moved again because after my parents heard what happened, they didn't wanna be in this neighborhood anymore. So the hunt was basically over. We moved across town, to be closer to my aunts, uncles, and grandparents. It wasn't practical to head out there every day and just wait. If I had a car and knew how to drive, it might've been. When my family heard that I was gonna call the hunt off, my great aunt was particularly thankful. She took it as me forgiving those guys and she applauded my bigheartedness. I was kinda mad at her for that. If I was younger, and I had an older family member to stick up for me? Someone would've found those muggers.
Also, the OJ Simpson thing happened in 1994, and continued into 1995. Speaking of 1995 and being close to my family, picture this...
You're "babysitting" two of your young cousins who wanna watch "Puzzle Place." You don't know what channel that's on but they swear it's on right now. You scour the usual channels. Mighty Max... Captain Planet... wait, what's this cartoon with this blue-haired girl?
Fortunately for you, your cousins are interested too. But only for a few minutes. One of them turns to a hueg and unshapely eyesore gathering dust in the corner. "Is that a VCR?" he asks. "No" you answer. "It's a 3DO."
You explain to them how your Sonic Hedgehogs and Super Mario Men might look nice for cartoons, the 3DO can produce true-to-life graphics like the real world! They wanna see it. So you pop in Station Invasion.
They tire of it almost immediately. And you never did find Puzzle Place.
Depending on your age and whether or not you're the oldest of a set group of people, you had certain "roles" in my family. Like that one older cousin of mine who got arrested. Before he was arrested, he had a certain "role" to play in the family. He was released in 1995, but by the time he was released, I was the same age he was when he was first picked up. And so I had his shoes to fill. As one of the "big kids" of the family. Which is essentially what I've always been, to some extent, but after a certain age I had to put away some things. My last proper Halloween, with Trick or Treating, was when I was 16. When I became one of the "big kids" it became my job to make Halloween happen for the younger ones. The last Christmas where I got presents from my parents and extended family was right before college. As one of the big kids I bought my own presents, and instead made Christmas happen for the younger ones. A guardian, an overseer, like I said in "Dogpilled." But the difference between me and my older cousin that my family picked up on was, I was not the headbustery type. I used to get into fights for my sisters when I was a kid, but I had made a name for myself in my family as a soft-spoken sort of guy. Plus I was short. So there was a lot of babysitting and things like that for me to do. Because I didn't have a job, I just went to college. And so that left me with whole days free, sometimes. I was kinda bitter, because this free time is what a normal college student would use to hang out with his friends. But I had no right to complain, I had no friends to spend that time with. It was funny, maybe it was only ostensibly, but I was able to make friends in high school. Why not in college? Why was college such an isolated experience? What I figured was, at least one key difference is that in high school you see some people all day, 5 days a week at least. I went to lunch with those people. We had time to grow accustomed to each other. But college, it's rare that you have the same people in more than one class. You might have a class 3 times a week, or even once a week, for an hour. And that's all you ever see of them. And then they disappear off to the life they care about and the people they care about. So how do you make friends in college? My guess was roommates. I didn't live on campus, I lived with my parents. And so I was missing that key experience of college-going. If I had dorm mates that I saw every night, I would probably grow close to those people. I have to imagine dorm mates are the first domino in the chain that leads to getting to be at a fun college party. And so without living on the dorms, I figured maybe it just couldn't happen for me. So what was I supposed to do?
There was good TV to cope with? The 80s, as far as cartoons, were ruled by CBS, NBC, and ABC. But there was a shift, come the 90s, and Fox became the new rising king of Saturday mornings. Thanks in large part to what Warner Bros. was coming up with. Disney was having its Renaissance in movies, Warner Bros. having its Renaissance on TV. Eventually the stuff on Fox spun off into WB and Kids WB. What I liked the most about The WB was the brand campaign. The whole "Dubba-Dubba" thing? This world where everyone on all of their shows lives on the same lot and interacts with one another despite being on separate shows? But Fox Kids, both Saturday mornings and after-school syndication blocks, was still the main place to go for cartoons. But while Fox had that professional, quality-made toons feel about it, a quaint favorite of mine was Cartoon Network. 90s Cartoon Network was very experimental. Like they would just try anything. Because it was untested ground. It was like some cardboard box operation run by a handful of people. Shows like Cartoon Planet. And the 4 hour marathons and 8 hour marathons, these marathons were like events. And I needed events in my life because I didn't have anywhere else to be. Plus I still needed to find Dragon Ball.
My dedication to the family continued into the next year, when my commitment was truly tested. Picture this...
1996. January. Jack Frost just shot the thickest layer all over the United States East Coast. You're at your grandparents' house, and your family is currently in snowstorm operations. You've been hoofing it through snow all day touching base with your family, your boots are drying on the vent, your bones are slowly warming from a volatile mixture of coffee, hot chocolate, and Theraflu, and now you're watching the news & weather. Vehicles are forbidden from the roads right now, but you've got people on the streets anyway. So you have to sit by the phone and wait for people to call with updates. There's something electric about this. Maybe you like the idea of everyone coming together. But it's for times like these that you love winter. This effort to bunker down. Gathering supplies. Securing warmth. It somehow enhances the coziness. When you went to Disney World, you considered you might live down in Florida. Make trips to Disney World as common as trips to the movies. But you can't leave this! You need winter. It's moments like these that you seek now, instead of Christmas presents. You don't need gifts, if moments like these can be your gift.
Just then, some of your family shows up with a passel of your young cousins. You greet them as they're herded up the spiral stairs into what you're guessing are the guest rooms. Your uncle asks you to help unload some stuff from the car. You step into your boots, hot from sitting on the vent, and you head out to join him. But on the way out he stops you. "Why're you walkin' like that? Holdin' your arms like that?" He usually asks you this, you don't know what he's talking about. You usually just hit him with the "What do you mean?" and try to straighten your posture as best you can. You figure your posture is fine. But this time he demonstrates what you look like. He cocks himself to the right and holds his wrists out limply at either side. Like a zombie, or something. You don't look like that... do you?
Eventually I had my mom look at my back. There was a noticeable curve. I should've noticed in when I got my ID photo taken. But my back was out of alignment, my shoulders were tilted, my scapulae were winged, I was a disaster back there. On incels.is they talk a lot about how missing out on various early life experiences can stunt you. Here's an example where missing out on a life experience literally stunted me, physically. Because I never learned to drive, I walked everywhere. Often with a heavy backpack. And because of that, I developed scoliosis, winged scapulae, nerd neck, tilted shoulders, and I didn't realize it yet, but anterior pelvic tilt, weak abs, weak glutes, & weak posterior chain. I thought all that walking was strengthening my legs, turns out I was only half right. I exhausted my glutes to the point that they checked out, and it's my quads that were strengthened, not my glutes. The part that matters. To this day I can't do a sit-up, and when I tell people this it sounds so foreign to them. "You can't do ONE sit-up?" No, I can't do one sit-up. Am I really that crippled? This, and my prone masturbation. These two things came together to ruin my body. But my feeling was "Eh, I'll fix it later. How bad could it get?" I was more concerned about making the best of the last smatterings of my college tenure. I only had a few more credits to go, it didn't look like I was gonna meet anybody in college. But the lives I was seeing on TV, those started to look attractive. Maybe I was too late for the college experience. But on Seinfeld and Friends and Frasier and all the other shows like that of the time, the characters were making friends in their careers and general encounters through life. And yeah, it was just TV, but I didn't think that was the unrealistic part. That you could meet people in life and be friends with them or have sex with them. Why wouldn't it be? What do people who get out of college do? But then, what about that Seinfeld bit about making friends after 30? I never saw my parents or aunts or uncles or grandparents getting up to any Must See TV style hijinks. Probably because they were all married and had settled down. But... I wasn't 30 yet. So even if Seinfeld is right, I still have some time. And with that, I gave up trying to make anything out of college. I focused on getting these last few credit hours under my belt and getting out.
College continued to be an isolating experience, but it was fine because I was gonna make friends at work. Get a nice apartment in the city, it doesn't have to have floor-to-ceiling windows, but floor-to-ceiling windows would be nice. A place to look at the city, blanketed in its unique winter magic. A place I can be proud to invite women up to. A place that says "This guy is worth having sex with." Swank apartment. That was the new dream. Obviously I don't achieve that dream because I'm posting about it here, but how do I fail? What do I do instead? I'll talk about that in the next entry. My college graduate years.
What a disaster. I checked my school, I checked the other schools, there were barely any banners at all. And when there were banners, they were "We Believe Survivors" and banners of that sort. And I get it, I'm not a rapist either. But what do these people want, an award? You hang a banner saying you won't rape anybody. Wow, you're a fuckin' hero. Really committing to the bare minimum here. Just another sign that my school, if not my whole city, is not the party spot I need it to be. But when I was going to school I can't help but feel like I was missing out on something. Maybe not at my school, but somewhere. My college experience was lonely, and I think it was because I didn't live on campus. I lived at home. And so I wasn't forced into cohabitation with a roommate to grow closer to and expand my social circle. First of all, after high school I didn't go straight to college. I'm not sure if that's a thing most kids do or what, I saw a lot of kids in my senior year already making plans for college. But first, we took a family trip to Walt Disney World. And after that, I took a year off to mooch off my parents. In place of friends or romance I spent time with my family. Going to gatherings like the Disney World trip. And I had no friends or romance for the whole of my college period, and the gap year that came before it. And really for all the years after that. Picture this...
1992. You lie prone on your bed, flipping through the enclosed instruction book for Sonic the Hedgehog, taking time to ruminate on the themes of each Badnik and comparing them to the notes in your Dictionary of Superstitions. Like the Burrobot.
The Burrobot is a drilling enemy, and a mole. Why is it a mole? Probably because of what the Dictionary of Superstitions suggests about it: It's "an animal of the earth." Moles dig and live in the ground, so a creative thing to do would be to make them some kind of drilling/excavation enemy.
What's great about video games is, they come with these books. Isn't it great that they come with these books? So you can still enjoy the content of the game even while you're not playing the game. While you watch this hour long Seinfeld double feature. One of the standup bits starts...
That is so true! You don't see your parents socializing like younger people do, do you? How is Seinfeld always so right about everything? George, he's literally you! A jobless loser trying to scheme his way through mooching off of someone! But if Jerry is right, you better get started on making some friends before you're 30. Probably at school. That's where you'll make friends. You'll make friends, you'll finally kiss a girl, you'll do all that stuff. With people who are of legal age.
You head to the bathroom over the commercial break. You walk past your parents' room. The door is ajar and your dad is asleep. After finishing up, you head back the other way, passing their room again from the other side. You notice the TV. And you stop. There's an unsimulated sex act playing out on the screen. A blowjob. The first you've ever seen in your life. You stand there and watch it play out, and time seems to stop. Until eventually it dawns on you: Dad shouldn't have the door open like this, asleep, with porn in the VCR. Your brother and some of your sisters are here. Wouldn't be appropriate. Should you eject the tape? Close the door? You can't eject the tape because he'll know you touched his tape. That you saw what happened. You have to do something, but also make it seem like you were never there. But before you can come to a decision, you realize you've jizzed in your pants. The first you've ever done in your life.
I talk a lot today about my low testosterone. And in the quest to remedy that, I often cite the ages of 19 to 20 as my peak testosterone years. Because this happened. The goal is to feel like this again. Get aroused to the point that I'm jizzing in my pants. But I would need to know how to figure out what my test levels were back then. Another clue that I was at peak hormones during those ages? I was weirdly depressed. I mean, I've been sad, but it was around the age of 19 that I was just slumped over onto the table, crippled with misery. And I couldn't quite figure out why. The littlest things would just fill me with despair. Like the world was ending. I wasn't sad about being lovelorn or friendless or anything, that much I know. If I'm being honest, I was pretty complacent with that because I was pretty sure once I made it to college, that would work out. I wasn't "worried" about that. I guess what it really was was, I was frustrated about feelings I had about issues and stuff, and those feelings about issues weren't being heard. Don't let the end of the Cold War fool you, these were turbulent times, and world was as divided as ever. Nintendo vs. Sega, Coke vs. Pepsi, Disney World vs. Warner Bros & Six Flags, there were a lot of sociopolitical shifts and discussions happening and I felt like I had feelings that weren't being heard. Dr. Kevorkian was big back then, and today it's pretty much understood that assisted suicide is, if nothing else, not a happy thing. But back then they were legitimizing the idea. And it frustrated me that people felt that way. I felt like the world was going crazy. I had no way to be heard in the "assisted suicide" debate.
And this was before I went to college! I started classes later that same year in the fall, and almost immediately I noticed an explosion of ideas like these from around campus. Student organizations and stuff. Bulletins about this thing and that thing... I felt powerless before it all, at least at the time. But eventually that gave way. I guess college left me too busy to be depressed. I think I fell out of it around 1993. Picture this...
1993. A chilly November evening. Your last class let out and you're decompressing for a while in the Student Center. The lounge is sparsely populated with twentysomethings in Doc Martens and African patterned belly shirts, quietly doing homework and sipping Clearly Canadian. The sight of it makes you wanna get home and drink something warm and chocolatey. You hike up your backpack and get moving.
On the way home you pass a block of student housing. Every porch has excited screaming coming from it. You stop to admire one from afar. How? How do you get invited to one of those things? Who do you have to know? And how do you meet them? Last year you made no progress. And you're not gonna be here forever. But you're still totally clueless about how to be a part of that kind of social circle. You wouldn't know where to start. By now you realize people aren't gonna walk up to you and invite you. So is there someone you have to approach instead? If only you could watch someone do it. Shadow them, and have them explain the process, in steps, from freshman to partying with people like that. You will soon be 21. Old enough to drink, and therefore have it be appropriate to be at a party like this. Imagine, having a squad to spend Spring Break 1994 with. But how do you become tight with someone in that short an amount of time? You just need a roadmap. To that social circle.
After you get home you catch the midnight showing of In Living Color, just in time to jack yourself off to sleep to the Fly Girls.
As I've implied before, I still live near that school. And looking back, while also looking at the present, maybe my school wasn't as jumpin' as I remember it. Really, it was a lot of standing around and drinking. And as I and Vic624 have said before, that's not much to write home about.
vic624 said:
It's not what I'm looking for in a party. But even if my school wasn't the proper party school, what matters is I never got to go to those dream parties. Maybe I went to the wrong school. But I knew there was potential out there. I had seen it. On MTV Spring Break. But I wasn't picky... yet. I thought about many fantastic options for some kind of physical action. There was this show that used to air called "Street Match."
The premise is real simple. Host Ricky Paull Goldin walks around with a camera crew approaching random people, looking for someone single. When he finds someone, he walks around with them looking for someone else single, and he hooks them up for a date. But what's the appeal of a show like this? Maybe you're not into shows like Blind Date or The 5th Wheel. But why is that an interesting premise for a show? Aside from wanting to see new people every episode try and hook up? Because cold approaching isn't supposed to work. It's not normal to walk up to someone and make a date. But Street Match tries to make it work anyway. And I liked to wonder how to get on a show like that. I liked to imagine being able to pick anyone I wanted out of a crowd. But then I remembered that the AIDS epidemic is in full swing right now, maybe I don't wanna be fuckin' around with strangers?
I also noticed on this, and other shows both fictional and nonfictional, people tended to get matched with people who complimented their personalities. I mean they were compatible, "'ship dynamics-wise." Remember 'ship dynamics? It's all about how people work together, and what way of working together is best. And so I was wondering, what kind of person am I? For instance, Home Improvement was a popular show at the time, I didn't watch it as much as Seinfeld but I watched enough of it to know that Tim's friend Al was, for the most part, single. Now, a guy like Tim, he's reckless and headstrong. So who do you pair him with? Someone who is also headstrong. Jill. And how do they work together? They challenge each other. Well, it's mostly Jill who challenges Tim. But Al, he's not reckless and headstrong. He's what 'ship dynamics students might call a "cinnamon roll." Where Tim is vibrant and abrasive, Al is levelheaded and sensible. A nerd. Al is a nerd. And so if you're writing for Home Improvement, you have to ask "How might certain women pair with Al?" And it was around this time that they introduced who would be Al's longest running and most iconic girlfriend, the Susan Ross to his George Costanza, Ilene. Her dynamic? She was just as pure, just as cinnamon, as Al. The idea being that he should not be hooked up with someone that will overwhelm him. He's not a "practiced" kind of guy. And I kinda saw myself in Al. Because I was inexperienced too. And so I thought "Does that mean I need a virgin? Like I'm a virgin?" And I answered myself, "No." I didn't want it like Al. I wanted to be overwhelmed. I wanted a drunken degenerate who would help me catch up to everyone else, sexually. Again, I'm not so much an Al Borland, I'm more of a George Costanza. But I needed to find out who I was. And I figured a good way to do that was to figure out what my tropes and signatures applied to me. What my signature color was, my signature animal, etc. I spent a lot of time meditating on my Dictionary of Superstitions. But I also spent a lot of time watching Power Rangers. That show was all about what your spirit animal and spirit color was. For instance, Kimberly wore pink and carried the power of the Pterodactyl. And it fit her personality. And so I wondered, what would mine be? And can I work my favorite color into my wardrobe, like I'm a for-real Power Ranger? And if I was on a team of Rangers, like if I had friends, what kind of friends would I need? What dynamics would they have to have to play off of me in a good way?
Then came the summer of 1994. When the crime of the century happened. Picture this...
It's already nightfall, but the sweltering heat has parched you down to the throat. On your way home you stop by the nearest carryout and pick up two bottles of Strawberry Passion Awareness Fruitopia.
You need to hydrate for the long march back home. You just picked up Mortal Kombat, Sparkster, and Awesome Possum from the video game rental store. You've made this trip a thousand times by now. But tonight will be different.
You're walking near two other guys. They're having a conversation, you don't think much of it. You eventually pass them. Turns out, they let you pass them. Because as soon as you pass into the shadows where the street lights don't reach, something grabs you from behind. Arms latch around your neck and someone commands "GIMME YO MONEY!!!" It's one of the guys that you just walked past. Are you being mugged? He holds you somewhat steady, in the panic of the moment you don't really do as much as you could to fight back. The other guy shows up and starts punching you. He shouts "Where's the wallet, cuz? ON BLOOD, WHERE'S THE WALLET?!!" You are being mugged. But it doesn't really register with you all the way. It feels like you're being jumped. You've been jumped before. It's not that this isn't as bad as you thought a mugging would be, it's just... for some reason it's hard to believe that this is a mugging. Maybe you expected a gun. Maybe you expected them to be older. These guys look like teenagers. You could try and push the first guy's arms from around your neck, but you've got the bag of games around one of your wrists, and, y'know, the panic of the moment, you feel like if you lift the bag higher they'll steal the bag. So you stand there and let yourself get punched for a while until you wriggle enough to throw the first guy off of your head. You try to run, but someone grabs your shirt. You stumble forward, Your arms swing out at your sides, and someone grabs the bag of games. "Book!" one of the guys yells and they disappear down a side street. The fight took you all the way to another street light. You sit in its glow, wondering what the fuck just happened.
The fees I had to pay to replace those games, my God. When I say I felt violated, when I say it wasn't fair... I didn't think it could happen to me. I had been jumped before, but I wanted revenge for this. I tried reporting it to the cops. I knew it was someone from the corner store I stopped at, I went and got surveillance footage from them and everything. Brought it to the police. Got the guys on camera. Albeit shitty quality. And all they could do for me was "Well if you see 'em around, let us know, and we'll come scoop 'em up!" That might've deterred a less angry man. But I wanted revenge. I was prepared to case that store and wait for them to come back. Figure out where they lived. So I got the detective's phone number and I set out to do just that. The pursuit consumed me. It was all I could think about until I had to go to school again that fall. And later that year we moved again because after my parents heard what happened, they didn't wanna be in this neighborhood anymore. So the hunt was basically over. We moved across town, to be closer to my aunts, uncles, and grandparents. It wasn't practical to head out there every day and just wait. If I had a car and knew how to drive, it might've been. When my family heard that I was gonna call the hunt off, my great aunt was particularly thankful. She took it as me forgiving those guys and she applauded my bigheartedness. I was kinda mad at her for that. If I was younger, and I had an older family member to stick up for me? Someone would've found those muggers.
Also, the OJ Simpson thing happened in 1994, and continued into 1995. Speaking of 1995 and being close to my family, picture this...
You're "babysitting" two of your young cousins who wanna watch "Puzzle Place." You don't know what channel that's on but they swear it's on right now. You scour the usual channels. Mighty Max... Captain Planet... wait, what's this cartoon with this blue-haired girl?
Fortunately for you, your cousins are interested too. But only for a few minutes. One of them turns to a hueg and unshapely eyesore gathering dust in the corner. "Is that a VCR?" he asks. "No" you answer. "It's a 3DO."
You explain to them how your Sonic Hedgehogs and Super Mario Men might look nice for cartoons, the 3DO can produce true-to-life graphics like the real world! They wanna see it. So you pop in Station Invasion.
They tire of it almost immediately. And you never did find Puzzle Place.
Depending on your age and whether or not you're the oldest of a set group of people, you had certain "roles" in my family. Like that one older cousin of mine who got arrested. Before he was arrested, he had a certain "role" to play in the family. He was released in 1995, but by the time he was released, I was the same age he was when he was first picked up. And so I had his shoes to fill. As one of the "big kids" of the family. Which is essentially what I've always been, to some extent, but after a certain age I had to put away some things. My last proper Halloween, with Trick or Treating, was when I was 16. When I became one of the "big kids" it became my job to make Halloween happen for the younger ones. The last Christmas where I got presents from my parents and extended family was right before college. As one of the big kids I bought my own presents, and instead made Christmas happen for the younger ones. A guardian, an overseer, like I said in "Dogpilled." But the difference between me and my older cousin that my family picked up on was, I was not the headbustery type. I used to get into fights for my sisters when I was a kid, but I had made a name for myself in my family as a soft-spoken sort of guy. Plus I was short. So there was a lot of babysitting and things like that for me to do. Because I didn't have a job, I just went to college. And so that left me with whole days free, sometimes. I was kinda bitter, because this free time is what a normal college student would use to hang out with his friends. But I had no right to complain, I had no friends to spend that time with. It was funny, maybe it was only ostensibly, but I was able to make friends in high school. Why not in college? Why was college such an isolated experience? What I figured was, at least one key difference is that in high school you see some people all day, 5 days a week at least. I went to lunch with those people. We had time to grow accustomed to each other. But college, it's rare that you have the same people in more than one class. You might have a class 3 times a week, or even once a week, for an hour. And that's all you ever see of them. And then they disappear off to the life they care about and the people they care about. So how do you make friends in college? My guess was roommates. I didn't live on campus, I lived with my parents. And so I was missing that key experience of college-going. If I had dorm mates that I saw every night, I would probably grow close to those people. I have to imagine dorm mates are the first domino in the chain that leads to getting to be at a fun college party. And so without living on the dorms, I figured maybe it just couldn't happen for me. So what was I supposed to do?
There was good TV to cope with? The 80s, as far as cartoons, were ruled by CBS, NBC, and ABC. But there was a shift, come the 90s, and Fox became the new rising king of Saturday mornings. Thanks in large part to what Warner Bros. was coming up with. Disney was having its Renaissance in movies, Warner Bros. having its Renaissance on TV. Eventually the stuff on Fox spun off into WB and Kids WB. What I liked the most about The WB was the brand campaign. The whole "Dubba-Dubba" thing? This world where everyone on all of their shows lives on the same lot and interacts with one another despite being on separate shows? But Fox Kids, both Saturday mornings and after-school syndication blocks, was still the main place to go for cartoons. But while Fox had that professional, quality-made toons feel about it, a quaint favorite of mine was Cartoon Network. 90s Cartoon Network was very experimental. Like they would just try anything. Because it was untested ground. It was like some cardboard box operation run by a handful of people. Shows like Cartoon Planet. And the 4 hour marathons and 8 hour marathons, these marathons were like events. And I needed events in my life because I didn't have anywhere else to be. Plus I still needed to find Dragon Ball.
My dedication to the family continued into the next year, when my commitment was truly tested. Picture this...
1996. January. Jack Frost just shot the thickest layer all over the United States East Coast. You're at your grandparents' house, and your family is currently in snowstorm operations. You've been hoofing it through snow all day touching base with your family, your boots are drying on the vent, your bones are slowly warming from a volatile mixture of coffee, hot chocolate, and Theraflu, and now you're watching the news & weather. Vehicles are forbidden from the roads right now, but you've got people on the streets anyway. So you have to sit by the phone and wait for people to call with updates. There's something electric about this. Maybe you like the idea of everyone coming together. But it's for times like these that you love winter. This effort to bunker down. Gathering supplies. Securing warmth. It somehow enhances the coziness. When you went to Disney World, you considered you might live down in Florida. Make trips to Disney World as common as trips to the movies. But you can't leave this! You need winter. It's moments like these that you seek now, instead of Christmas presents. You don't need gifts, if moments like these can be your gift.
Just then, some of your family shows up with a passel of your young cousins. You greet them as they're herded up the spiral stairs into what you're guessing are the guest rooms. Your uncle asks you to help unload some stuff from the car. You step into your boots, hot from sitting on the vent, and you head out to join him. But on the way out he stops you. "Why're you walkin' like that? Holdin' your arms like that?" He usually asks you this, you don't know what he's talking about. You usually just hit him with the "What do you mean?" and try to straighten your posture as best you can. You figure your posture is fine. But this time he demonstrates what you look like. He cocks himself to the right and holds his wrists out limply at either side. Like a zombie, or something. You don't look like that... do you?
Eventually I had my mom look at my back. There was a noticeable curve. I should've noticed in when I got my ID photo taken. But my back was out of alignment, my shoulders were tilted, my scapulae were winged, I was a disaster back there. On incels.is they talk a lot about how missing out on various early life experiences can stunt you. Here's an example where missing out on a life experience literally stunted me, physically. Because I never learned to drive, I walked everywhere. Often with a heavy backpack. And because of that, I developed scoliosis, winged scapulae, nerd neck, tilted shoulders, and I didn't realize it yet, but anterior pelvic tilt, weak abs, weak glutes, & weak posterior chain. I thought all that walking was strengthening my legs, turns out I was only half right. I exhausted my glutes to the point that they checked out, and it's my quads that were strengthened, not my glutes. The part that matters. To this day I can't do a sit-up, and when I tell people this it sounds so foreign to them. "You can't do ONE sit-up?" No, I can't do one sit-up. Am I really that crippled? This, and my prone masturbation. These two things came together to ruin my body. But my feeling was "Eh, I'll fix it later. How bad could it get?" I was more concerned about making the best of the last smatterings of my college tenure. I only had a few more credits to go, it didn't look like I was gonna meet anybody in college. But the lives I was seeing on TV, those started to look attractive. Maybe I was too late for the college experience. But on Seinfeld and Friends and Frasier and all the other shows like that of the time, the characters were making friends in their careers and general encounters through life. And yeah, it was just TV, but I didn't think that was the unrealistic part. That you could meet people in life and be friends with them or have sex with them. Why wouldn't it be? What do people who get out of college do? But then, what about that Seinfeld bit about making friends after 30? I never saw my parents or aunts or uncles or grandparents getting up to any Must See TV style hijinks. Probably because they were all married and had settled down. But... I wasn't 30 yet. So even if Seinfeld is right, I still have some time. And with that, I gave up trying to make anything out of college. I focused on getting these last few credit hours under my belt and getting out.
College continued to be an isolating experience, but it was fine because I was gonna make friends at work. Get a nice apartment in the city, it doesn't have to have floor-to-ceiling windows, but floor-to-ceiling windows would be nice. A place to look at the city, blanketed in its unique winter magic. A place I can be proud to invite women up to. A place that says "This guy is worth having sex with." Swank apartment. That was the new dream. Obviously I don't achieve that dream because I'm posting about it here, but how do I fail? What do I do instead? I'll talk about that in the next entry. My college graduate years.
AscendenceImminent
red flesh and white bones
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what the fuck?
FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
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"Founding Father" or "Milk & Cigarettes 6: Commander FrothySolutions"
TL;DR: After college I got a job, a computer, and moved out. I couldn't afford to live in Manhattan like I saw on Must See TV, because I had to kick money back to my family. But as long as I had the Internet, I didn't need much. I found myself distracted by copes like hentai, Flash games, games you had to download, shitposting in AOL chatrooms, trying out new web technology, and reading articles/watching documentaries about whatever I couldn't afford to actually do. Otherwise I could've gone to live at one of the hotspots featured on Wild On, but I didn't. I could've lived in that Manhattan apartment and impressed women with my wealth and status, but what social environment does a man have to earn status in after college? For me, the status to earn was in the chatrooms of America Online.
TL;DR: After college I got a job, a computer, and moved out. I couldn't afford to live in Manhattan like I saw on Must See TV, because I had to kick money back to my family. But as long as I had the Internet, I didn't need much. I found myself distracted by copes like hentai, Flash games, games you had to download, shitposting in AOL chatrooms, trying out new web technology, and reading articles/watching documentaries about whatever I couldn't afford to actually do. Otherwise I could've gone to live at one of the hotspots featured on Wild On, but I didn't. I could've lived in that Manhattan apartment and impressed women with my wealth and status, but what social environment does a man have to earn status in after college? For me, the status to earn was in the chatrooms of America Online.
Area 51 Weekend draws to a close. 
And the memes du now are all about how nothing happened, but at least everyone had fun and hey maybe they could turn this into an annual thing. Boo. Also,i they DO try and go back every year, I give this thing 2 years TOPS before it becomes another Occupy Wall Street, lost to time. I bought all these snacks for nothing.
Speaking of snacks, I can finally eat, after a 4 day waterfast. That I was forced into. Last Sunday, thanks to a bank error, I was overdrawn by $700+. So I was flat busted until my next paycheck. But I decided to look on the bright side: Just call it a waterfast. See how much weight I lose. First two days it was kinda rough. But the last two days I'm like "Wow I don't need very much to live at all." And now that I finally have money again, I broke my fast with a powerful diuretic and shit out all the water in my body. Now let's see how much I weigh.
I started at: 163 lbs.
I ended up at: 160 lbs.
Alright, let's break off the math here. Assuming 1 pound is 3500 calories, I burned 10,500 calories over 4 days. Actually, 5 days if you count Friday evening. Because I didn't eat until I weighed myself. 10,500 calories, 5 twenty-four hour period, an average of... 2100 calories a day??? Hold on, that feels off by a few hundred. I'm 5 foot 5, 160 pounds at the LIGHTEST... BMR calculators of all formulas estimate that my BMR is around 1600. And that for "moderate activity" I should multiply that by 1.55. Or 1.6. Or 1.5. Either way, I'm short a few hundred calories. And yeah I understand it's an estimate, not an exact science, but every calorie is precious. Next time? I'm foodfasting.
Being tricked into having more money than I actually do reminds me of when I got my first real job after college. In the last post I went on about how I had dreams of living in a Manhattan apartment and dishing with my friends about how we're gonna get other women in the city we know to sleep with us. Like on TV. First of all, I was sorely mistaken about the prices of New York City real estate, no further explanation needed. Second, I realized I wasn't very sophisticated. Even compared to the characters on Friends I was like a child. I was big into channels like Cartoon Network, and was pretty sure I had to put things like that away. And then one night I'm watching Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and I see this guy, "Commander Andy."
I realized that I wasn't George Costanza. I was this guy. I was Andy Merrill.
Third and most hindering, what money I did make, a lot of it I had to give to my family. Not just my immediate family, my extended family. It was just a thing you did in my family. If you made money, you were asked to help the larger whole. So even if I stayed in my own much cheaper city, I couldn't afford to live like an eligible bachelor in a swanky sleek apartment. There were fringe benefits to this, like sometimes we went on trips as a group, but there wasn't much for me to enjoy on my own. Picture this...
1997. It's been a long day of long lines at Six Flags Great America. You awake in your shared hotel room the middle of the night. Everyone else is asleep and their DVD of Space Jam has looped back to the menu. You packed for exactly this scenario. A pair of headphones to plug into the TV, a thick comforter blanket to throw over the TV and sit under, a Surge from the lobby vending machine to clear up that just-woke-up grogginess, and this bad boy.
When I finally finished college, first of all I was late to the ceremony. Second, there wasn't a feeling of "Yes! My life begins now!" Or even a feeling of "The party's over. I'm gonna miss this place." It was a feeling of "Finally, the nightmare is over." I think that says a lot. I think maybe a more successful or ambitious person would've felt like their life was beginning. But me, I was happiest to not have assignments and deadlines to look forward to. I just wanted to not have to do anything. But in my defense, toward the end of my last few credits, it became apparent to me that I wasn't taking that life-changing trip to New York City to strike out and find my fortune. I had streets to feed. What I was now was a "contributing adult" in this family. So all I really had time and money to pursue were the same kinds of average hobbies I had pursued through college. TV, video games, things like that. But honestly? Those hobbies became very important to me. You might call them "copes," but at a time I was ready to build a life around them.
My first apartment was a 900 square foot slice of unassuming, close enough to the university district without it being close enough to be "student housing." My first step into independence? No. Trifling, compared to my next step: My first computer. I think that was when my destiny was sealed. A normal person gets a computer and they're like "Oh this is neat for chatting and e-mail and seeing what things have websites." Me? I was like "This is going to be my life forever. The graduations on the timeline of my life will be marked by what happens to me on the Internet." That's how I now know that I wasn't cut out for a normal social life. America Online was a must get. Nothing but fond memories of America Online. Oh, take me back. Hard to say what it was about America Online that was so great. What was America Online? A social media platform? Because we still have that today. But I dunno. America Online was different. It was the WHOLE Internet, but curated by the hand of America Online. I could've used Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, but I didn't. I was real OCD about it, I made sure to open every link in America Online. I wanted everything I got from the Internet to come from America Online, preferably through one of its proprietary services. I just felt so... snug. Behind the sturdy walls of the America Online kindgom, all together with the rest of the known world, as if part of some communal sleepover. Know what I do know about America Online? There wasn't any "Does this have a liberal bias? A conservative bias?" No, the news was just the news when it was reported by AOL. Maybe that had more to do with the times we were living in. All I know is, this reputation of the Internet being a place of angry idiots, that wasn't the Internet we believed in back then. This is the Internet we believed in. America's Internet.
They had recently switched to a monthly billing plan that was comfortably within my budget. But more important than that was how America Online was this revolutionary new world where you could not just send e-mails to people, but everyone on America Online had a name. And with that name you could talk to them directly, or talk to groups of people in "chatrooms." Something I was sorely lacking in my life: Friends. Or "Buddies" as we called them back then. But you didn't just socialize on America Online, you carried an identity. And so I was first introduced to the concept of the "profile." Arising out of how this whole World Wide Web thing was a place where people could interact with other people. If that's what this thing is for, if this is a place to introduce yourself to new people and have new people introduce themselves to you, you should provide some of yourself to share. Age, sex, location, your job, your hobbies, favorite shows, favorite books, favorite movies, favorite video games, favorite foods, favorite color, favorite animal, favorite season, favorite holiday, and a host of other criteria depending on what subcultures you happen to belong to. And if you can somehow quantify all that within a username? I definitely tried to. But who was I? I still didn't know. A thing I should've figured out in college. If a profile is the sum of your interests, maybe I can figure out who I am by going through my interests? What I like? What makes me feel good? I knew one thing that had captivated me. 1997 was the year I made my formal discovery of anime and manga. It was at my local library, I was over in the "kids' section," when I stumbled upon something that looked like a cross between a comic book and a regular book. It was called "No Need For Tenchi."
Looking at the cover I thought "Oh, this must be some kinda comic for girls." And in my defense, it was in a section of the library for children. A common mistake with libraries. But when I flipped through it... all these feelings began to mix within me. I mean, there were totally nekkid ladies in this. Even back in high school when my friends brought in Vampirella comics, I don't think I ever saw an entirely naked 2D woman. And these women were all on Tenchi's dick like something out of a fantasy, I was intrigued. I wanted more of whatever this was, I wanted to "get in" on this somehow. But also it didn't sit right with me. Surely this isn't meant for children? It's clearly sexual. And in stepped the Internet to tell me about a wacky place called Japan. Or at least the narrative we believed about Japan. Yeah, it's totally normal for kids to buy and read and watch cartoon erotica over in Japan. It's no big deal, they market it directly to them. Also, if you think the anime you watch and manga you read is racy now, consider that they can't even show half of what's actually in these things on American TV. It's a cultural obsession over there, with bright-eyed big tiddy barely clothed barely legal cartoon girls. And it reached the point that just looking at the cover of that book sparked a twinge in me, that I was proceeding to engage with something forbidden. So for a number of reasons, I wanted to get in on this anime & manga thing. Find that on the Internet. Find other fans of it. I also liked video games. Mostly ones from Japan, so it kinda rocked my world to learn that the place that was making my video games was also allegedly obsessed with sexy cartoons. I didn't get that impression from my video games, but maybe they had been censored, like the people online were talking about. Also, I had made a decision about what my "signature" animal would be. Kinda. I decided on the locust. But by "locust" I meant like a scarab beetle or a praying mantis, something in that family. But a locust is a grasshopper. But whatever I was thinking of, they were like Power Rangers characters, equipped with hand blades and wings and armor. The idea of a wrist blade had always appealed to me since that one Halloween. But if I was a bug man, I would wanna have energy blades on my wrists. Also? I was really into big mobile bases, flying helicarriers, spaceships and space stations and things like that. Saw it first in levels like Wing Fortress Zone and Flying Battery Zone from Sonic the Hedgehog. The Empire's "Ark" spaceship from Gunstar Heroes is one I remember really fondly. And then there were space stations like on Deep Space 9 and Babylon 5. If I had to get to the root of why, I guess it's because flying fortresses and big starships and space stations evoke ideas of everybody being gathered together. I mean, one of these things is called "The Ark." That really embodies it. A big vessel that everyone is accounted for on, fully equipped and protected with defenses and utilities. Also I liked how Babylon 5 was a hub, so all manner of character across the galaxy could show up there. So I think the username I ended up settling on was "WingshipMantis" or something like that. I don't exactly remember.
Like most people, my beginning days on the Internet were spent exploring. Just kinda seeing what was on the menu, what was recommended, things like that. The first website I ever visited was Nintendo.com. Just to see if it existed. What about you?
In these threads it seems like most people went on the Internet for video game stuff, Flash/Shockwave/Java games, videos/animations about video games, videos in general, browser MMOs, social networks, and porn. That more or less describes my early browsing habits too. There were the chatrooms, mostly sought out as a companion piece to my interests. I watched TV, I wanted people to talk to while I watched those shows. I played video games, I wanted people to talk to about the things I saw in those games. This was where I was introduced to websites like Anipike and OtakuWorld. There was a video game chat room, I bought a collection of DOS games off of somebody there. My first experience in PC gaming. Games like Hero's Heart, The Pack Rat, SkyRoads, Champions of Zulula, Hocus Pocus, Baldies, the Hugo trilogy, and this one game whose name I can't remember but it was a platformer and it took place in a forest and the characters were like gnomes, but it wasn't The Smurfs. I remember liking these games, but still feeling like console gaming was superior because console gaming was in 3D. These were nice for a lark, they had charm. Also good for a lark? I discovered the world of browser games and clickable gadgets. Like Ezone and their Lenny Loosejocks series/cinematic universe. But what really captivated me about Ezone was how they got into whatever holiday season was going on. For Halloween they did the site up in a Halloween theme and released Halloween games and e-mailable Halloween clickables, for Thanksgiving they did the site up with Thanksgiving colors and cursors and turkey gobble sound effects, they had games like "It's Turkey Time," for Christmas they released games like "Santa Goes Butt Boardin'," for Valentine's Day they had "The Birds n Bees," and so on. I love a seasonal mood, and Ezone really capitalized on that. That, coupled with the camaraderie I felt with the America Online communities? It was a good feeling.
I read a lot about anime, but I didn't get to actually watch anime on the regular until 1998, when the "anime invasion" began with the debut of Toonami and Pokémon, as well as Powerpuff Girls which a lot of people called anime even though it wasn't. Picture this...
You're in the middle of a heated Battlefield skirmish on Bonus when that damn commercial comes on again...
This Pokémon thing sure did explode fast. They're selling a Pikachu Tamagotchi. But why make a handheld Pikachu when the Pokémon game itself is handheld? Your handheld Pikachu is in the actual game. You're not a big handheld gamer, you don't own a Game Boy. But now that it comes in Color, and this new Pokémon game is an option? You like the idea of having a Pokémon companion, probably because you have the Pokémon anime to inspire your imagination. What Pokémon would fit with you the way Pikachu fits with Ash? The only thing missing is that Pokémon isn't an online game. If only it could be more like Battlefield. You and your Pokémon ally, interacting with a community of other trainers and their Pokémon. Maybe someday. Later you put the finishing touches on your "Thanksgiving" theme for your computer, comprised of Microsoft Plus assets and images you found online. Again, if only other people could enjoy this with you. You can't take your computer and show it to your family over the holidays. But a funny Mastercard meme about Thanksgiving catches your eye. Except you don't call them "memes" yet. You search the site to see if you can find someone's AIM or ICQ and invite them to your chat group. Family IRL, friends online, two separate worlds.
In my AOL communities I had gained some clout, because I could do rainbow faded text. So lots of people wanted to talk to me about the anime that Cartoon Network and Kids WB was airing. Mostly Dragon Ball Z. I finally learned that the show I saw flipping through channels long ago was Dragon Ball. I don't know what channel it could've aired on because as far as I knew, anime was only starting to become a thing in the United States right now. Dragon Ball Z became a staple of my viewing for sure, but what I was intrigued by was Sailor Moon. Because of the miniskirts, right? But what people explained to me was "Sailor Moon isn't supposed to be that 'sexy'." Because it was created by a woman, for women. "Shoujo" they called it. So unless she's gay or something... that would be like me drawing a bunch of sexualized barely clothed men. People tend to draw what they like, right? So it must not be meant to be "lewd" or "fanservice." But so entrenched into Japanese culture is this, even their not-that-sexy cartoons are too sexy for Americans like me. Take Misty from Pokémon. Ostensibly a kid's cartoon. But she's barely clothed. This was just how anime was. I was getting those mixed feelings again. I'm not crazy for thinking Jessie's supposed to be sexy, am I? I'm not "misinterpreting" anything, am I? Speaking of TV, we were in the era of Cartoon Network that sticks out most prominently in my memory: The Powerhouse Era. At this point I had abandoned live action TV almost entirely, I was hooked on cartoons. Between Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and Kids WB, this era had the best shows, best holiday marathons, best everything. The live action TV I did watch was MTV for the music videos, and E! for a show called Wild On. It was in the vein of MTV's Spring Break special, they would go around to wild travel destinations and show how sexed up everything was. I noticed there were a lot of shows like that on cable, and my ambition was to find them. This was the era the "Girls Gone Wild" type of content started to flourish. Shows, mostly airing on E!, were talking up how party beaches were rife with drunken topless women. And I would take notes on what beaches they mentioned on these shows, thinking I might go to them someday. But for the time being I was content to dream.
Besides, I couldn't leave my family! Especially now. By 1998, most of my "generation" was well into maturity. My brother and youngest sibling was getting ready to head off to college. We were all grown up. And the large amount of "earning age" members of my family meant the family was bringing in a lot of money. This was when we started really getting active. My uncle started up this youth outreach/basketball slam dunk contest that we heard a lot about on the radio at the time. And my family would always talk about how such-and-such basketballer was gonna be there. I forget who it was. My grandmother on my mom's side opened a restaurant. I mentioned fringe benefits earlier, but for all the money I invested into my family's experiments, I didn't see any benefit from these. I didn't enter my uncle contest because I wasn't eligible, I didn't eat a bite at my grandmother's restaurant. But years down the line during some kinda state senate race, she would receive a postcard from one of the candidates. It looked personally written. They called her a "community leader" and wanted to come by the restaurant to talk about what the community needed from their elected officials. I wasn't part of that meeting. Thinking about it now, all the work I put in for my family the least they could've done is help me ascend? But also thinking about it now, what I wanted (and still want) is to network through a community. I needed to be able to have sex with someone, and be good enough at it that rumors spread about me. And I don't think my family could've helped me with that because my family didn't seem to be very "social." We kept to ourselves, and other very trusted friends. It really was like living in a bubble, sometimes.
If there's anything I can definitely blame my failures on, at least partially, it's how distracting my copes were. My job sometimes had me working crunch time past when I was supposed to go home. Which ordinarily wasn't a problem until Toonami showed up, and the weekday block, if I wanted to catch it, I needed to be home on time. And I let my co-workers know about this. I didn't let them know what I was watching, but I let them know that if I wasn't able to get home on time to watch whatever I was gonna watch, that was gonna be a problem. I needed to catch Toonami, and I needed to catch the pre and post discussion on AOL. I had really developed a kinship with this community, we didn't just talk about the shows, it was like a lounge where we could just talk about anything. But somehow they all seemed to have more time than I did to watch TV. I didn't know why. Fortunately something called Tivo would come along, as the end of the century drew near. Picture this...
1999. New Year's Eve. "New Millennium Fever" has gripped the planet. "Will 2K" is all over the radio and Backstreet Boys' "Larger Than Life" is all over the MTV. But there's also real fear about this "Y2K Bug?" Which is why you're getting all manner of Y2K-themed "very special episodes" on TV now, and funny Cartoon Network interstitials like this.
As with all doom prophecies, there are a lot of naysayers who believe nothing will happen. But you? You hope something does happen. Just because it would be exciting. You don't wanna head into a whole new millennium and have it just be more of the same. You want sweeping change for humanity as a whole. You've been spoiled with futuristic fantasies, worlds of chrome and hanging out with aliens and robots. You want life as we know it to change, for better or worse. Nickelodeon seems to believe it'll change for the better.
You could've watched any Year 2000 special tonight, but this is the one you're going with. A 5 hour marathon of New Year/future/millennium themed shows, culminating at midnight (provided the world's computers don't start crashing) with a "Wishbag Pop" and the Nickellenium special, where kids, being that they are the future, share their hopes and expectations for the new years to come. Midnight draws near, and your Wishbag is at the ready. Like all criminals, you are superstitious and cowardly. You allow yourself to dream. Dream that the world might be thrust into sudden and dramatic upheaval in the year 2000. So you might as well dream that there's some power to this Wishbag Pop. You close your eyes and meditate on the long drawn out specifics of your dream life. For you and everyone you love. Planning out just how you're going to word it, because you might as well be talking to your personal genie right now, that's how serious you're taking this. You whisper it in at midnight, inflate the bag, and pop.
But before we go into the 21st century, we need to cover what I brought into it. Late 1998 and early 1999, I started really deep diving into anime/manga pictures. "Shrines" a lot of them were called. I don't know if anyone remembers it, but I saw a lot of this picture back then.
It was part of an artbook called "Mon Mon Candy" or something.
I didn't know that at the time, at the time there wasn't a huge focus on the source of images. You just worried about what sites to go to. What sites did you go to? Well, every sexy anime picture website was kinda "connected." See, back in the day there were webpages called "ranking lists" or "topsites lists." Lists of websites, usually themed around a certain kind of content. For instance, one ranking list was GameSites200.com. This is a little later than 1999, but it had a big list of MMORPGs on it. Ranked by popularity. How did it calculate popularity? Well, every MMORPG website that wanted to be popular would register to be on these ranking lists, and then link to that ranking list. Usually in the form of a 90x30 sidebar button. You click the link to the ranking list, and you're given an option to vote for the MMORPG whose website you just came from. And the more votes, the higher you are on the ranking list. And like I said, there were ranking list pages for sexy anime picture sites. Sites like NeoTokyo and AdultCartoon. But you often didn't need a ranking site to find "toon porn" either. Because like Mon Mon Candy, some art was viral. Reposted everywhere. And that art often was signed or watermarked with the website it came from. Like the 3Darlings of 3rd-Art.com. Or the FUCKunny series from Sextoon.com.
Or you could just search for it on AltaVista. They had recently released something that blew my mind: A search engine that can search images, not just links? I remember the first search I ever did on it. I had recently learned about Dragon Ball GT, and "Black Star Dragonballs." So I searched for "black star" just to see what I would get. And I actually got images that were related to "black" and "stars!" And that blew my mind! My job didn't involve concepts like search engine optimization so I had no idea how it worked. As far as I knew, the search engine was somehow intelligent enough to take in the string "star" and know what a star was. Image search engines got a lot of play from me when I learned the words "hentai" and "ecchi." And "Digimon." The anime invasion rolled on in 1999 with the United States premiere of Digimon on Fox Kids. We got a real taste for the supposed "rivalry" that was Pokémon vs. Digimon. And by the time I was introduced, the Internet had already gotten to work on Digimon porn. I wasn't looking for it, I did search for Digimon images, but I wasn't looking for porn. It just kinda sprung itself on me. I was on a website that had this "Type in two characters' names and see how romantically compatible" psychic web gadget, see, and it was on a Digimon themed website, and one click led to another and there I saw it. My point is, this was when I really took advantage of the Internet for its porn. Flash interactive porn, Whitehouse.com obviously, there was 3D modeler named "p_arn" who made this movie of Lara Croft that I really liked and still have. I lived alone, there was no threat of anyone barging in on me, I was finally free to explore this to my heart's content.
In non-porn related developments, this was also the year of two important games. Sonic Adventure, and Smash Bros. Sonic, and Sega as a whole, had been more or less dead to me after 1994. Unbeknownst to me though, something was happening at Sega at the time. Something called Sonic X-treme for the Sega Saturn was in the works, and later cancelled. And out of that cancellation came a culture shift at Sega. The pre-1994 Sonic was "going away." And work would begin on the slender, less cutesy, more extreme Sonic who could talk. At this point I had forgotten about Sega. Playstation had filled whatever Sega's role was as far as a counterpoint to Nintendo. Crash Bandicoot filled in for Sonic. Until Sega's triumphant return with the Dreamcast and Sonic Adventure. I took this as the belated answer to Super Mario 64. To explore 3D semi-sandboxy worlds with Sonic as I did with Mario. I was hyped to get back on the bandwagon. And then there was Smash Bros. You've all seen the commercial.
It was somehow everything I had always wanted, but nothing I could've predicted. Yes! What if Mario and Pokémon and Zelda and all of Nintendo were part of the same universe and they interacted? I wanted an expansive world where all of the Nintendo characters were involved but never thought it could really happen. I needed to somehow be part of the community for Smash Bros. It felt like the perfect game. Except that it was only Nintendo. And so I thought, Sega should make a game like this with all of its Sega characters. And then I thought... what Sega characters? Besides Sonic characters? One of the problems I saw as far as Sega keeping up with Nintendo, Sega just didn't have the brand strength. But maybe with this Dreamcast they would develop brand strength, and I won't be the only one clamoring for Sega Smash Bros.
I think that's the character limit. I guess you could summarize these last 3 years as follows: I moved out and discovered the Internet. But at this stage in my life I'm not actually trying to "achieve" much, am I? Except to follow and support my favorite hentai and cartoon porn producers as a notable fan in the community. It didn't occur to me to do anything to become "notable." It didn't occur to me to maybe be a 3D porn artist like p_arn. But in the early 2000s, I would start to find my ambition. Learn what it was I wanted to actually have to my name.
And the memes du now are all about how nothing happened, but at least everyone had fun and hey maybe they could turn this into an annual thing. Boo. Also,i they DO try and go back every year, I give this thing 2 years TOPS before it becomes another Occupy Wall Street, lost to time. I bought all these snacks for nothing.Speaking of snacks, I can finally eat, after a 4 day waterfast. That I was forced into. Last Sunday, thanks to a bank error, I was overdrawn by $700+. So I was flat busted until my next paycheck. But I decided to look on the bright side: Just call it a waterfast. See how much weight I lose. First two days it was kinda rough. But the last two days I'm like "Wow I don't need very much to live at all." And now that I finally have money again, I broke my fast with a powerful diuretic and shit out all the water in my body. Now let's see how much I weigh.
I started at: 163 lbs.
I ended up at: 160 lbs.
Alright, let's break off the math here. Assuming 1 pound is 3500 calories, I burned 10,500 calories over 4 days. Actually, 5 days if you count Friday evening. Because I didn't eat until I weighed myself. 10,500 calories, 5 twenty-four hour period, an average of... 2100 calories a day??? Hold on, that feels off by a few hundred. I'm 5 foot 5, 160 pounds at the LIGHTEST... BMR calculators of all formulas estimate that my BMR is around 1600. And that for "moderate activity" I should multiply that by 1.55. Or 1.6. Or 1.5. Either way, I'm short a few hundred calories. And yeah I understand it's an estimate, not an exact science, but every calorie is precious. Next time? I'm foodfasting.
Being tricked into having more money than I actually do reminds me of when I got my first real job after college. In the last post I went on about how I had dreams of living in a Manhattan apartment and dishing with my friends about how we're gonna get other women in the city we know to sleep with us. Like on TV. First of all, I was sorely mistaken about the prices of New York City real estate, no further explanation needed. Second, I realized I wasn't very sophisticated. Even compared to the characters on Friends I was like a child. I was big into channels like Cartoon Network, and was pretty sure I had to put things like that away. And then one night I'm watching Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and I see this guy, "Commander Andy."
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I realized that I wasn't George Costanza. I was this guy. I was Andy Merrill.
Third and most hindering, what money I did make, a lot of it I had to give to my family. Not just my immediate family, my extended family. It was just a thing you did in my family. If you made money, you were asked to help the larger whole. So even if I stayed in my own much cheaper city, I couldn't afford to live like an eligible bachelor in a swanky sleek apartment. There were fringe benefits to this, like sometimes we went on trips as a group, but there wasn't much for me to enjoy on my own. Picture this...
1997. It's been a long day of long lines at Six Flags Great America. You awake in your shared hotel room the middle of the night. Everyone else is asleep and their DVD of Space Jam has looped back to the menu. You packed for exactly this scenario. A pair of headphones to plug into the TV, a thick comforter blanket to throw over the TV and sit under, a Surge from the lobby vending machine to clear up that just-woke-up grogginess, and this bad boy.
When I finally finished college, first of all I was late to the ceremony. Second, there wasn't a feeling of "Yes! My life begins now!" Or even a feeling of "The party's over. I'm gonna miss this place." It was a feeling of "Finally, the nightmare is over." I think that says a lot. I think maybe a more successful or ambitious person would've felt like their life was beginning. But me, I was happiest to not have assignments and deadlines to look forward to. I just wanted to not have to do anything. But in my defense, toward the end of my last few credits, it became apparent to me that I wasn't taking that life-changing trip to New York City to strike out and find my fortune. I had streets to feed. What I was now was a "contributing adult" in this family. So all I really had time and money to pursue were the same kinds of average hobbies I had pursued through college. TV, video games, things like that. But honestly? Those hobbies became very important to me. You might call them "copes," but at a time I was ready to build a life around them.
My first apartment was a 900 square foot slice of unassuming, close enough to the university district without it being close enough to be "student housing." My first step into independence? No. Trifling, compared to my next step: My first computer. I think that was when my destiny was sealed. A normal person gets a computer and they're like "Oh this is neat for chatting and e-mail and seeing what things have websites." Me? I was like "This is going to be my life forever. The graduations on the timeline of my life will be marked by what happens to me on the Internet." That's how I now know that I wasn't cut out for a normal social life. America Online was a must get. Nothing but fond memories of America Online. Oh, take me back. Hard to say what it was about America Online that was so great. What was America Online? A social media platform? Because we still have that today. But I dunno. America Online was different. It was the WHOLE Internet, but curated by the hand of America Online. I could've used Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, but I didn't. I was real OCD about it, I made sure to open every link in America Online. I wanted everything I got from the Internet to come from America Online, preferably through one of its proprietary services. I just felt so... snug. Behind the sturdy walls of the America Online kindgom, all together with the rest of the known world, as if part of some communal sleepover. Know what I do know about America Online? There wasn't any "Does this have a liberal bias? A conservative bias?" No, the news was just the news when it was reported by AOL. Maybe that had more to do with the times we were living in. All I know is, this reputation of the Internet being a place of angry idiots, that wasn't the Internet we believed in back then. This is the Internet we believed in. America's Internet.
They had recently switched to a monthly billing plan that was comfortably within my budget. But more important than that was how America Online was this revolutionary new world where you could not just send e-mails to people, but everyone on America Online had a name. And with that name you could talk to them directly, or talk to groups of people in "chatrooms." Something I was sorely lacking in my life: Friends. Or "Buddies" as we called them back then. But you didn't just socialize on America Online, you carried an identity. And so I was first introduced to the concept of the "profile." Arising out of how this whole World Wide Web thing was a place where people could interact with other people. If that's what this thing is for, if this is a place to introduce yourself to new people and have new people introduce themselves to you, you should provide some of yourself to share. Age, sex, location, your job, your hobbies, favorite shows, favorite books, favorite movies, favorite video games, favorite foods, favorite color, favorite animal, favorite season, favorite holiday, and a host of other criteria depending on what subcultures you happen to belong to. And if you can somehow quantify all that within a username? I definitely tried to. But who was I? I still didn't know. A thing I should've figured out in college. If a profile is the sum of your interests, maybe I can figure out who I am by going through my interests? What I like? What makes me feel good? I knew one thing that had captivated me. 1997 was the year I made my formal discovery of anime and manga. It was at my local library, I was over in the "kids' section," when I stumbled upon something that looked like a cross between a comic book and a regular book. It was called "No Need For Tenchi."
Looking at the cover I thought "Oh, this must be some kinda comic for girls." And in my defense, it was in a section of the library for children. A common mistake with libraries. But when I flipped through it... all these feelings began to mix within me. I mean, there were totally nekkid ladies in this. Even back in high school when my friends brought in Vampirella comics, I don't think I ever saw an entirely naked 2D woman. And these women were all on Tenchi's dick like something out of a fantasy, I was intrigued. I wanted more of whatever this was, I wanted to "get in" on this somehow. But also it didn't sit right with me. Surely this isn't meant for children? It's clearly sexual. And in stepped the Internet to tell me about a wacky place called Japan. Or at least the narrative we believed about Japan. Yeah, it's totally normal for kids to buy and read and watch cartoon erotica over in Japan. It's no big deal, they market it directly to them. Also, if you think the anime you watch and manga you read is racy now, consider that they can't even show half of what's actually in these things on American TV. It's a cultural obsession over there, with bright-eyed big tiddy barely clothed barely legal cartoon girls. And it reached the point that just looking at the cover of that book sparked a twinge in me, that I was proceeding to engage with something forbidden. So for a number of reasons, I wanted to get in on this anime & manga thing. Find that on the Internet. Find other fans of it. I also liked video games. Mostly ones from Japan, so it kinda rocked my world to learn that the place that was making my video games was also allegedly obsessed with sexy cartoons. I didn't get that impression from my video games, but maybe they had been censored, like the people online were talking about. Also, I had made a decision about what my "signature" animal would be. Kinda. I decided on the locust. But by "locust" I meant like a scarab beetle or a praying mantis, something in that family. But a locust is a grasshopper. But whatever I was thinking of, they were like Power Rangers characters, equipped with hand blades and wings and armor. The idea of a wrist blade had always appealed to me since that one Halloween. But if I was a bug man, I would wanna have energy blades on my wrists. Also? I was really into big mobile bases, flying helicarriers, spaceships and space stations and things like that. Saw it first in levels like Wing Fortress Zone and Flying Battery Zone from Sonic the Hedgehog. The Empire's "Ark" spaceship from Gunstar Heroes is one I remember really fondly. And then there were space stations like on Deep Space 9 and Babylon 5. If I had to get to the root of why, I guess it's because flying fortresses and big starships and space stations evoke ideas of everybody being gathered together. I mean, one of these things is called "The Ark." That really embodies it. A big vessel that everyone is accounted for on, fully equipped and protected with defenses and utilities. Also I liked how Babylon 5 was a hub, so all manner of character across the galaxy could show up there. So I think the username I ended up settling on was "WingshipMantis" or something like that. I don't exactly remember.
Like most people, my beginning days on the Internet were spent exploring. Just kinda seeing what was on the menu, what was recommended, things like that. The first website I ever visited was Nintendo.com. Just to see if it existed. What about you?
https://incels.is/threads/what-was-...e-service-you-visited-on-the-internet.146128/
In these threads it seems like most people went on the Internet for video game stuff, Flash/Shockwave/Java games, videos/animations about video games, videos in general, browser MMOs, social networks, and porn. That more or less describes my early browsing habits too. There were the chatrooms, mostly sought out as a companion piece to my interests. I watched TV, I wanted people to talk to while I watched those shows. I played video games, I wanted people to talk to about the things I saw in those games. This was where I was introduced to websites like Anipike and OtakuWorld. There was a video game chat room, I bought a collection of DOS games off of somebody there. My first experience in PC gaming. Games like Hero's Heart, The Pack Rat, SkyRoads, Champions of Zulula, Hocus Pocus, Baldies, the Hugo trilogy, and this one game whose name I can't remember but it was a platformer and it took place in a forest and the characters were like gnomes, but it wasn't The Smurfs. I remember liking these games, but still feeling like console gaming was superior because console gaming was in 3D. These were nice for a lark, they had charm. Also good for a lark? I discovered the world of browser games and clickable gadgets. Like Ezone and their Lenny Loosejocks series/cinematic universe. But what really captivated me about Ezone was how they got into whatever holiday season was going on. For Halloween they did the site up in a Halloween theme and released Halloween games and e-mailable Halloween clickables, for Thanksgiving they did the site up with Thanksgiving colors and cursors and turkey gobble sound effects, they had games like "It's Turkey Time," for Christmas they released games like "Santa Goes Butt Boardin'," for Valentine's Day they had "The Birds n Bees," and so on. I love a seasonal mood, and Ezone really capitalized on that. That, coupled with the camaraderie I felt with the America Online communities? It was a good feeling.
I read a lot about anime, but I didn't get to actually watch anime on the regular until 1998, when the "anime invasion" began with the debut of Toonami and Pokémon, as well as Powerpuff Girls which a lot of people called anime even though it wasn't. Picture this...
You're in the middle of a heated Battlefield skirmish on Bonus when that damn commercial comes on again...
This Pokémon thing sure did explode fast. They're selling a Pikachu Tamagotchi. But why make a handheld Pikachu when the Pokémon game itself is handheld? Your handheld Pikachu is in the actual game. You're not a big handheld gamer, you don't own a Game Boy. But now that it comes in Color, and this new Pokémon game is an option? You like the idea of having a Pokémon companion, probably because you have the Pokémon anime to inspire your imagination. What Pokémon would fit with you the way Pikachu fits with Ash? The only thing missing is that Pokémon isn't an online game. If only it could be more like Battlefield. You and your Pokémon ally, interacting with a community of other trainers and their Pokémon. Maybe someday. Later you put the finishing touches on your "Thanksgiving" theme for your computer, comprised of Microsoft Plus assets and images you found online. Again, if only other people could enjoy this with you. You can't take your computer and show it to your family over the holidays. But a funny Mastercard meme about Thanksgiving catches your eye. Except you don't call them "memes" yet. You search the site to see if you can find someone's AIM or ICQ and invite them to your chat group. Family IRL, friends online, two separate worlds.
In my AOL communities I had gained some clout, because I could do rainbow faded text. So lots of people wanted to talk to me about the anime that Cartoon Network and Kids WB was airing. Mostly Dragon Ball Z. I finally learned that the show I saw flipping through channels long ago was Dragon Ball. I don't know what channel it could've aired on because as far as I knew, anime was only starting to become a thing in the United States right now. Dragon Ball Z became a staple of my viewing for sure, but what I was intrigued by was Sailor Moon. Because of the miniskirts, right? But what people explained to me was "Sailor Moon isn't supposed to be that 'sexy'." Because it was created by a woman, for women. "Shoujo" they called it. So unless she's gay or something... that would be like me drawing a bunch of sexualized barely clothed men. People tend to draw what they like, right? So it must not be meant to be "lewd" or "fanservice." But so entrenched into Japanese culture is this, even their not-that-sexy cartoons are too sexy for Americans like me. Take Misty from Pokémon. Ostensibly a kid's cartoon. But she's barely clothed. This was just how anime was. I was getting those mixed feelings again. I'm not crazy for thinking Jessie's supposed to be sexy, am I? I'm not "misinterpreting" anything, am I? Speaking of TV, we were in the era of Cartoon Network that sticks out most prominently in my memory: The Powerhouse Era. At this point I had abandoned live action TV almost entirely, I was hooked on cartoons. Between Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and Kids WB, this era had the best shows, best holiday marathons, best everything. The live action TV I did watch was MTV for the music videos, and E! for a show called Wild On. It was in the vein of MTV's Spring Break special, they would go around to wild travel destinations and show how sexed up everything was. I noticed there were a lot of shows like that on cable, and my ambition was to find them. This was the era the "Girls Gone Wild" type of content started to flourish. Shows, mostly airing on E!, were talking up how party beaches were rife with drunken topless women. And I would take notes on what beaches they mentioned on these shows, thinking I might go to them someday. But for the time being I was content to dream.
Besides, I couldn't leave my family! Especially now. By 1998, most of my "generation" was well into maturity. My brother and youngest sibling was getting ready to head off to college. We were all grown up. And the large amount of "earning age" members of my family meant the family was bringing in a lot of money. This was when we started really getting active. My uncle started up this youth outreach/basketball slam dunk contest that we heard a lot about on the radio at the time. And my family would always talk about how such-and-such basketballer was gonna be there. I forget who it was. My grandmother on my mom's side opened a restaurant. I mentioned fringe benefits earlier, but for all the money I invested into my family's experiments, I didn't see any benefit from these. I didn't enter my uncle contest because I wasn't eligible, I didn't eat a bite at my grandmother's restaurant. But years down the line during some kinda state senate race, she would receive a postcard from one of the candidates. It looked personally written. They called her a "community leader" and wanted to come by the restaurant to talk about what the community needed from their elected officials. I wasn't part of that meeting. Thinking about it now, all the work I put in for my family the least they could've done is help me ascend? But also thinking about it now, what I wanted (and still want) is to network through a community. I needed to be able to have sex with someone, and be good enough at it that rumors spread about me. And I don't think my family could've helped me with that because my family didn't seem to be very "social." We kept to ourselves, and other very trusted friends. It really was like living in a bubble, sometimes.
If there's anything I can definitely blame my failures on, at least partially, it's how distracting my copes were. My job sometimes had me working crunch time past when I was supposed to go home. Which ordinarily wasn't a problem until Toonami showed up, and the weekday block, if I wanted to catch it, I needed to be home on time. And I let my co-workers know about this. I didn't let them know what I was watching, but I let them know that if I wasn't able to get home on time to watch whatever I was gonna watch, that was gonna be a problem. I needed to catch Toonami, and I needed to catch the pre and post discussion on AOL. I had really developed a kinship with this community, we didn't just talk about the shows, it was like a lounge where we could just talk about anything. But somehow they all seemed to have more time than I did to watch TV. I didn't know why. Fortunately something called Tivo would come along, as the end of the century drew near. Picture this...
1999. New Year's Eve. "New Millennium Fever" has gripped the planet. "Will 2K" is all over the radio and Backstreet Boys' "Larger Than Life" is all over the MTV. But there's also real fear about this "Y2K Bug?" Which is why you're getting all manner of Y2K-themed "very special episodes" on TV now, and funny Cartoon Network interstitials like this.
As with all doom prophecies, there are a lot of naysayers who believe nothing will happen. But you? You hope something does happen. Just because it would be exciting. You don't wanna head into a whole new millennium and have it just be more of the same. You want sweeping change for humanity as a whole. You've been spoiled with futuristic fantasies, worlds of chrome and hanging out with aliens and robots. You want life as we know it to change, for better or worse. Nickelodeon seems to believe it'll change for the better.
You could've watched any Year 2000 special tonight, but this is the one you're going with. A 5 hour marathon of New Year/future/millennium themed shows, culminating at midnight (provided the world's computers don't start crashing) with a "Wishbag Pop" and the Nickellenium special, where kids, being that they are the future, share their hopes and expectations for the new years to come. Midnight draws near, and your Wishbag is at the ready. Like all criminals, you are superstitious and cowardly. You allow yourself to dream. Dream that the world might be thrust into sudden and dramatic upheaval in the year 2000. So you might as well dream that there's some power to this Wishbag Pop. You close your eyes and meditate on the long drawn out specifics of your dream life. For you and everyone you love. Planning out just how you're going to word it, because you might as well be talking to your personal genie right now, that's how serious you're taking this. You whisper it in at midnight, inflate the bag, and pop.
But before we go into the 21st century, we need to cover what I brought into it. Late 1998 and early 1999, I started really deep diving into anime/manga pictures. "Shrines" a lot of them were called. I don't know if anyone remembers it, but I saw a lot of this picture back then.
It was part of an artbook called "Mon Mon Candy" or something.
I didn't know that at the time, at the time there wasn't a huge focus on the source of images. You just worried about what sites to go to. What sites did you go to? Well, every sexy anime picture website was kinda "connected." See, back in the day there were webpages called "ranking lists" or "topsites lists." Lists of websites, usually themed around a certain kind of content. For instance, one ranking list was GameSites200.com. This is a little later than 1999, but it had a big list of MMORPGs on it. Ranked by popularity. How did it calculate popularity? Well, every MMORPG website that wanted to be popular would register to be on these ranking lists, and then link to that ranking list. Usually in the form of a 90x30 sidebar button. You click the link to the ranking list, and you're given an option to vote for the MMORPG whose website you just came from. And the more votes, the higher you are on the ranking list. And like I said, there were ranking list pages for sexy anime picture sites. Sites like NeoTokyo and AdultCartoon. But you often didn't need a ranking site to find "toon porn" either. Because like Mon Mon Candy, some art was viral. Reposted everywhere. And that art often was signed or watermarked with the website it came from. Like the 3Darlings of 3rd-Art.com. Or the FUCKunny series from Sextoon.com.
Or you could just search for it on AltaVista. They had recently released something that blew my mind: A search engine that can search images, not just links? I remember the first search I ever did on it. I had recently learned about Dragon Ball GT, and "Black Star Dragonballs." So I searched for "black star" just to see what I would get. And I actually got images that were related to "black" and "stars!" And that blew my mind! My job didn't involve concepts like search engine optimization so I had no idea how it worked. As far as I knew, the search engine was somehow intelligent enough to take in the string "star" and know what a star was. Image search engines got a lot of play from me when I learned the words "hentai" and "ecchi." And "Digimon." The anime invasion rolled on in 1999 with the United States premiere of Digimon on Fox Kids. We got a real taste for the supposed "rivalry" that was Pokémon vs. Digimon. And by the time I was introduced, the Internet had already gotten to work on Digimon porn. I wasn't looking for it, I did search for Digimon images, but I wasn't looking for porn. It just kinda sprung itself on me. I was on a website that had this "Type in two characters' names and see how romantically compatible" psychic web gadget, see, and it was on a Digimon themed website, and one click led to another and there I saw it. My point is, this was when I really took advantage of the Internet for its porn. Flash interactive porn, Whitehouse.com obviously, there was 3D modeler named "p_arn" who made this movie of Lara Croft that I really liked and still have. I lived alone, there was no threat of anyone barging in on me, I was finally free to explore this to my heart's content.
In non-porn related developments, this was also the year of two important games. Sonic Adventure, and Smash Bros. Sonic, and Sega as a whole, had been more or less dead to me after 1994. Unbeknownst to me though, something was happening at Sega at the time. Something called Sonic X-treme for the Sega Saturn was in the works, and later cancelled. And out of that cancellation came a culture shift at Sega. The pre-1994 Sonic was "going away." And work would begin on the slender, less cutesy, more extreme Sonic who could talk. At this point I had forgotten about Sega. Playstation had filled whatever Sega's role was as far as a counterpoint to Nintendo. Crash Bandicoot filled in for Sonic. Until Sega's triumphant return with the Dreamcast and Sonic Adventure. I took this as the belated answer to Super Mario 64. To explore 3D semi-sandboxy worlds with Sonic as I did with Mario. I was hyped to get back on the bandwagon. And then there was Smash Bros. You've all seen the commercial.
It was somehow everything I had always wanted, but nothing I could've predicted. Yes! What if Mario and Pokémon and Zelda and all of Nintendo were part of the same universe and they interacted? I wanted an expansive world where all of the Nintendo characters were involved but never thought it could really happen. I needed to somehow be part of the community for Smash Bros. It felt like the perfect game. Except that it was only Nintendo. And so I thought, Sega should make a game like this with all of its Sega characters. And then I thought... what Sega characters? Besides Sonic characters? One of the problems I saw as far as Sega keeping up with Nintendo, Sega just didn't have the brand strength. But maybe with this Dreamcast they would develop brand strength, and I won't be the only one clamoring for Sega Smash Bros.
I think that's the character limit. I guess you could summarize these last 3 years as follows: I moved out and discovered the Internet. But at this stage in my life I'm not actually trying to "achieve" much, am I? Except to follow and support my favorite hentai and cartoon porn producers as a notable fan in the community. It didn't occur to me to do anything to become "notable." It didn't occur to me to maybe be a 3D porn artist like p_arn. But in the early 2000s, I would start to find my ambition. Learn what it was I wanted to actually have to my name.
SuperSaiyanGymcel
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i am laughing so hard reading this thread, how did i not discover it earlier wtf
FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
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"Founding Father" or "Milk & Cigarettes 7: Overlapping Circus"
TL;DR: My early 2000s were dominated by anime, hentai, ecchi, cartoons, fanart, fanfics, card games & Beyblades, original characters, Graal Online, furry porn on Yahoo! Groups, other kinds of porn on Yahoo! Groups, video games I paid for, video game ROMs I pirated, crude jokes/Flash video e-mail newsletters, and energy drinks.
TL;DR: My early 2000s were dominated by anime, hentai, ecchi, cartoons, fanart, fanfics, card games & Beyblades, original characters, Graal Online, furry porn on Yahoo! Groups, other kinds of porn on Yahoo! Groups, video games I paid for, video game ROMs I pirated, crude jokes/Flash video e-mail newsletters, and energy drinks.
Did you hear the one about Braincels? The subreddit is no more. The last incel subreddit. We have, all of us, been driven from Reddit. What happens to us now? I actually tried to make another incel subreddit to fill the void. But I didn't want it attached to my main account, so I made a new account. And they surprised me with a rule that an account needs to be at least 30 days old and have such and such karma to make new subreddits. And all this, on the eve of that new incel movie? What was it called? Arthur the Socially Retarded Clown?
We're in a new era. Reminds me of when we were entering the 2000s. People talk about how the 90s were extreme, the 90s were not extreme. Not like the early 2000s were extreme. The 90s were "cool." The 2000s were extreme in a very edgy and action-packed way. The Sugar Rays and Hooties of the 90s were no match for the coming pop punk/rap metal/emocore renaissance. Cartoons were becoming less "cartoony." You move away from the TOM 1.0 style toward the TOM 2.0 style. The Classic Zoog Disney style to Zoog Disney 2.0 style. No more Goof Troop or Quack Pack style shows. Girls wanna see Kim Possible. Also, some boys wanna see Kim Possible. I'm not sure what the catalyst was, or what kept it going, maybe we can find out as we look back. Picture this...
The Year 2000. The robots have taken over. Robots named Poo-Chi, Tekno, and Johnny Apple Bot. You're at a local theater that your niece's school has booked for an elementary school talent show. She and her friends are performing their act: the choreography from Destiny's Child's "Say My Name" set to Britney Spears' "Oops!... I Did It Again." Standing ovation. They're living the dream. Wouldn't it have been cool if you had friends when you were their age, and you got together for a talent show and rocked the house like from Revenge of the Nerds? Or like how your niece and her friends are doing right now, in reality? Maybe there are adult talent shows. But what talents do you have? There was that time you beat the Pepsi Challenge, but that's not really a "talent." It has to be something you can perform on a stage. Your niece and her friends plan on making a career out of this someday too. So it should also be something you can make a living out of. If only you had a band or something. Envy sets in. You realize, you need to "do" something. Something you can show people.
It being a new year, new century new millennium, I was thinking a lot about reinventing myself. Making 2000 the first step in a brand new life. I was feeling unhappy with my current life, I guess because I didn't have any goals. No calling. I was just going to work and getting on AOL. Yeah Toonami and Kids WB were a big part of my life, but what was I "doing" with that? I needed to "do" something with my fandom besides watch the shows. Cartoon Network offered me an option: Cartoon Orbit.
It was a community where you collected characters and other animated assets from Cartoon Network shows and arranged them in a world. The commercial says you can trade cartoon characters, but you could trade more than that. It was characters, it was objects/items, it was like playing with action figures mixed with writing fanfiction. You could show people your world too. And so I had my first real goal that I cared about: To curate my fanfic world of Cartoon Network characters and have the coolest and best world, as if my world was the authority on Cartoon Orbit worlds. Cartoon Orbit launched in the fall, if I remember, and around November they started adding Thanksgiving assets. And so I thought "I'm gonna make my characters have a communal Thanksgiving feast." And I, at 27 years old, was so proud of it. But I couldn't really show it off like I wanted. I couldn't become a famous Cartoon Orbit "storyteller." Because chat was severely limited. This was around the time websites really started worrying about COPPA compliance. There were two ways sites tended to deal with that: One way is to offer free chat, but if you're 12 or younger you had to have your parents sign and fax/mail in a permission slip so you can use it. Then there's what Cartoon Orbit did, which was only allow people to chat with predefined phrases picked from a drop-down menu. One of the I lost interest pretty quick, using it only to register codes from Cartoon Cartoon Fridays, just in case I ever wanted to seriously Orbit again.
Besides, there were other channels besides Cartoon Network. Fox Kids, for instance, was really capitalizing on this anime craze with Digimon, rival to Pokémon and the centerpiece amidst the table dressings of Monster Rancher, Flint the Time Detective, and the blink-and-you'll-miss-it Escaflowne. In the summer of 2000 they had a name for this block: Anime Invasion. With Pokémon and Digimon both I fantasized about potential original characters. But it was a little easier with Digimon because you only get the one Digimon. As opposed to Pokémon where you need a whole team and need to figure out typing, Digimon had a game too, but as far as the show and Digimon original characters, none of that mattered. You made a cool sidekick and drew them up some Digivolutions. And this kind of creativity was encouraged by Fox Kids themselves, they put it in our heads that we WERE Digidestined and they wanted to see our original Digimon concepts. And they published them in Fox Kids Magazine. I wasn't really an artist, so I didn't draw, but I made character sheets. Which unfortunately weren't enough for Fox Kids Magazine, but I figured, someday. Someday soon I would draw my Digimon. That isn't weird, right? Because I don't see any 27 year old men entering these contests. And it is called Fox "Kids." Maybe I'm in the wrong place. But then I justify my fandom by pointing out how sexy they made Digimon like Angewomon. There's sex appeal to be appreciated here. I'm not crazy.
2000 was kind of a false start. My identity as an Internet user, just like the United States' identity as a country, would really start to take shape in the following year. Picture this...
2001. Just before 9:00. A crisp September morn. You're at work, making idle brush strokes on something in Illustrator. iMesh is open, and you're looking for the heavy version of "Bodies" by Drowning Pool. The Today Show is on the office TVs and Matt Lauer says they've got breaking news about the World Trade Center after the commercial break. Probably stocks or something. You're barely paying attention. What even is the "World Trade Center?"
But after the commercial they waste no time in showing it. Smoke rises from the North Tower as reports come in that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center. You and your co-workers are captivated. You think to yourself "Ooooh, what a tragic accident. It's too bad this accident happened." And then the second plane hit. And the reality of what this is becomes clear. "Shit... Y2K!!! We didn't stop it!!!"
I think enough time has passed where I can safely say without angering anyone, we were never more united as a nation back then. That's not me talkin', that's Gallup polls. Bush's approval rating skyrocketed to an erection-worthy 90%. The highest in ever. Because we were all in agreement. Fuck them terrorists, right? A solidarity on WWII levels, we will probably never see togetherness like that again. Because we have the Internet as we know it now. It's too easy to find "dissenting opinions" and "open minds." If that's what you're into. But damn, was it good to be an American back then. Good to be a Republican. Good to be a Bush. Bad to be Iraqi though. I would browse my anime shrines and stuff. "Support Freedom" buttons as far as the eye could see. From Geocities to Tripod to Angelfire, even if you weren't American if you hated terrorism you got yourself a button. I didn't mind it for the most part, but what I did mind was when it seeped into my Fox Kids Magazine. I didn't need Davis and Izzy talking to me about love triumphing over hate. But things would get even more uncomfortable with Fox Kids Magazine later that year, when they announced they were cancelling production of the magazine. They said it was to save trees or some shit. But I was too old to fall for that. I thought it might be money reasons, I don't remember actually paying money for my Fox Kids Club membership. All I knew was, now I don't have a place that will dignify my Digimon fandom. I mean, there's AOL chatrooms, but I'm starting to notice a little snobbery. Sub snobbery. Nitpicking about how such and such thing isn't like the original. What can I say, I wanna watch it in English and I accept the version Fox Kids says is true. I don't like people telling me my version isn't real. So I started to try out other chatrooms, other communities. Fortunately for me, this was when the MMORPG was starting to become viable. And it was here that I found what I think was my first real Internet time sink: Graal Online.
I played the Graal2001 client, I'm not sure how close this is to that but it looks more or less the same. As you can see it's basically A Link To The Past, The MMORPG. And like every good MMORPG, it had chat channels. PMing, Global Chat, etc. So I started to visit AOL chatrooms less and do my chatting in Graal more. But what was unique about Graal was that it was a game you could make your own. Technically. I forget the specifics of how, but there were characters, armors, shields, swords, items, whole "playerworlds" that you could create yourself, powered by their proprietary GScript language. That's how people made the worlds that I played on, like Unholy Nation. And one thing I noticed, if you made a playerworld people liked, you became a notable name in the Graal community. To this day I recall names like LiquidIce, AcidIce, and Jubei Saotome. I wanted to be like those guys. Not just to have my name attached to some fame, but because I wanted to make a world of my own, and bring people into it. And so I started work on my second real goal: Make a Graal level and attach my name/alter ego to it. So I can be a known figure in this community. And this community spread wider than just Graal. Jubei is a good example of this, he was just famous in general. He was known for his Graal work not just on Graal, but in other fandoms. And because he had cred as a Graal developer, people paid attention to his other exploits. He was a Flash animator. He was a... player of other games. I wanted to be that. I wanted my Internet alter ego to have a portfolio of Graal work and other work and to be known for it. But what would I call myself? WingshipMantis? Locust bugs were still my "signature animal" but I was a human in Graal. If I was gonna be a bug man, it would have to be in a strictly furry universe. Instead I decided to put that on the back burner. If I'm making a whole playerworld with multiple characters, I can take my love of locusts and do something else with it. Make a separate OC. I could have many OCs. But what I would go by primarily as a Graal playerworld maker was "Gunther Kane." The implication I would go for was I was like an allegory for Cain, history's first murderer and ancestor of evil. Hiding in secret. Thousands of years old, like Vandal Savage. Before I did whatever I needed to do to officially host a playerworld online, I would build maps and code characters/NPCs offline. Browse the Internet for extra MIDIs to add to my maps. Just to dwell on the concepts that would make up my world. What I probably spent the most time on though was this "indoor city," it was like a palace the size of a city, paved with velvet carpet, and it had regular rooms like a palace would, throne room, ballroom, etc, but because it was so big it had houses inside the palace. With this world, I would establish all of my OCs past and present. I started going over them all and kinda "translating" them to Graal. I couldn't put my old OCs that I made for cartoons into those cartoons, but I could put them into this world. That would be establishment enough.
But you know what everyone with an alter ego or Internet persona had back then? A webpage. A shrine or something. You had to have some kind of presence. So I made a page for myself/my alter ego, and the rest of my OCs. Normally one's corner of the Internet has a name, like "Giniko-chan's Anime Toy Chest" or something. I named mine after my palace city. So it was like the visitor was visiting the palace city. Until I learned to draw, I couldn't do everything I wanted to do with this page, but the plan was this: I would have a Character Page going over me/Gunther and everyone else accounted for in my OC collection/star system, with art drawn of them. Also, an art page. Eventually becoming known enough that people ask me for art requests and people do art trades with me. A list of places to contact me (AOL, ICQ, etc) and a link to download the Graal client and the name of my playerworld, once I made it. A section for "Adoptables," all of whom I considered OCs and would translate into Graal as well. This was like a hub for my universe of characters, see. A section for reviewing shows, except it wasn't so much "reviewing" as it was water cooler talk about what the latest developments were in those shows. Bearing in mind I only watched localized anime. Also, the posts for these shows would have Gunther, or someone, drawn as if they were in the universe of the show. That's how I would kinda have them in the show without actually having them in the show. For instance, if I had a original Digimon. I wouldn't call them a Digimon necessarily. I would make them in Graal as my own character. But I would draw them in Digimon scenes for my "What happened last time on Digimon" water cooler talks. Also, I would have journals/water cooler talks about video games I had been playing at the time. I was big into Dark Cloud at the time, and I would give my thoughts and updates on my progress. And I would have a journal just for my general thoughts/day to day stuff. And a Poll section for questions I had for my visitors. And a Guestbook. Every page needs a Guestbook. And a front page to tie it all together with a counter, links in the sidebar to my friends/affiliates, awards I'd won, badges that show what I'm about and what I'm a fan of, my current "status" courtesy of imood, and a News section for what had recently been updated on the site.
This page was basically a hub for all that was me, filtered through the prism of my Internet weeb alter ego. My art (as soon as I started making some), my OCs, the shows I watched, the games I played, the things I was a member of, etc. And later I would discover a new interest. I don't remember how I found it, but some time in 2001 I stumbled upon a page full of art. And one of the pictures was of a large breasted mouse girl in full body latex. It was then that I realized that all of the art was erotic. And while it wasn't the first time I was ever attracted to cartoon animals, it was my discovery of bonafide furry porn and the furry subculture. The page led me to Yahoo! Groups, another thing I was just now discovering, where I was invited to join a group for erotic furry art. Specifically the Skunkworks group, managed by James Hardiman. It was early goings, but the furry clubs were out there and I found myself joining whichever ones I could find. Problem was, 18+ groups were hidden from the Yahoo! Groups search directory, so in order to find new groups you had to have someone link you directly to the group. That's how I found the ones I joined. In the message boards of furry groups, people would post lists to other furry groups, like some kinda pornographic underground railroad. I wanted to be part of this, like I wanted to be part of Graal. But I needed a "fursona." Which was basically was I was working on way back in my Get Along Gang days. So what would mine be? What's my "signature animal?" Some kinda mantis/scarab/locust? How's that supposed to work? It was here that I realized I shouldn't have picked the locust as my signature animal. Bug types aren't really seen in furry stuff. It's all mammals and dragons. Sometimes other lizards. And the odd bird here and there. But no bugs. They're too armory. Which is why I thought they were so cool in the first place. But no one wants to have sex with a bug. I thought I could maybe wrangle some kind of Perfect Cell sort of character, and part of me felt there was something to having a unique character. Everyone's doing skunks and bunnies. Mice and squirrels. Wolves and lions. You have a bug! That's cool, right? On the other hand, you have a bug. That's weird, right? I just wasn't feeling it anymore. I'd rather be compatible than stand out for the sake of "uniqueness." And so it was back to the drawing board with whatever my "signature animal" would be.
I added a section to my webpage for Yahoo! Groups that I was a member of, and put a hold on things for a while as I re-shopped my signature animal. And while I was thinking, maybe revisit some of my other signature stuff. The idea was to shape everything so that it was compatible with this new "furry" fandom I had discovered. An "obsession," I guess you could call it, that would start to power my other interests too. Picture this...
2002. Scratch & Burn is on. Maybe it's the Monster Energy Drink, but this show is hilarious right now. You catch your breath over the commercial break, when you see this.
Blinx: The Time Sweeper. For the Xbox. You've heard talk about the console, mostly centered around Halo. But it didn't look like your kind of game. This though? Blinx looks like he could be the Mario or Sonic of the Xbox. You could use a "Sonic" option ever since the death of the Dreamcast. Plus you're really into universes headed by anthropomorphic animals right now. This fandom is just starting, and the idea of getting in on something big from the ground floor excites you. Yes, you will do this Blinx thing. And if no one else will? You'll start a Blinx group on Yahoo!
The Xbox came at, or might've been the cause of, the perfect time for itself. This is where that early 2000s extremeness I was talking about really started to get noticed, and I think a lot of it had to do with the "Doritos & Mountain Dew" brand Microsoft was establishing for the Xbox. Like in this Xbox Live promo disc video.
This was before Call of Duty was a thing, and yet all the tropes are here. Or maybe we were already headed toward a culture like this and the Xbox was on time to capitalize on it. Could the aesthetic surrounding the Xbox and its style of gamer be described as "American?" People, specifically Gamestop and stand-up comedian Dara O'Briain, always talk about games in two forms: Cute & cartoony, which is what Japan is supposed to make, and serious gun business, which is what the West is supposed to make. The Xbox had a focus on the latter, and so did America as a whole at the time. The grip of 9/11 still had us. Case in point, the show "24." And most shows/movies that involve terrorists. Pre-9/11, the terrorists are always of indeterminate nationality, or some kinda Slavic. Like in Die Hard. Or in the first season of 24. Which was produced before 9/11 happened. In 2002, 24 opens with a Middle Eastern sect called "Second Wave." If there was no 9/11, Kiefer Sutherland would still be in cartoons. But American actioniness wasn't entirely American. Maybe America just happened to be more receptive of it in the early 2000s, but a lot of the early 2000s action came from Japan. Fox Kids was going away, but what it had done with the Anime Invasion, maybe even more than Pokémon, laid the groundwork for the likes of Yu-Gi-Oh! and Beyblade. Shows that said "Buy these toys and fight your friends!"
And that's the part that kept my focus. The anime part. I had discovered websites like Anime Cafe, Animetric, AnimeAddiction.net, and the homepage of "Da Black Goku." To learn about titles that didn't air on American TV, because this is the only way I would ever hear about them. And I learned that there was kind of an overlap with weebs and furries. Like there was an overlap with anime and video games. Or anime and "toon porn." Because anime was full of catgirls and wolfboys and cabbits. And fans with their OCs and alter egos would make themselves into catgirls and wolfboys and cabbits. The idea was to try and cover all of the overlapping categories of weebdom so that each was represented on my page. As far as my OCs, because of Blinx and catgirls & the furry fandom, I semi-settled on being a catboy. But I wanted to flesh out my OCs. I had a plan to write stories/detail adventures on that webpage, featuring my characters. Like fanfics, except they only involved my characters. And I wanted my guests to affect the story by interacting with the characters in it. AND whenever I got my Graal playerworld up and running, I wanted those stories to carryover in Graal. But first I had to design these OCs. One tool that got a lot of play in designing these characters was Super Smash Bros. Melee. Why? I used their NPC matches to power the battles between the characters in the stories. The Melee characters and levels were arranged to represent the characters in my stories. A lot like how Spirit Battles work in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. For instance, Pauline is not a playable fighter in the game. But to kinda make it like she is, so you can fight her, they represent her with Peach, because she's kinda like Peach. But in a red dress. And put on the 75m stage with Mario, Donkey Kong and Hammers.
That's basically what I did, but with my characters. So I had to design them with the question in mind, who do they most match from Smash Bros.? Speaking of Smash Bros., what I did for Gunther Kane was unique, because he was my alter ego. I listed every Special move and exhibited power of every Smash combatant, and tried to combine them all into a cogent character. Something that made sense without being a grab bag of powers. Because I entertained the idea that, if a miracle should happen someday and Gunther Kane becomes a real video game character, and crosses over with a game, he should be compatible with whatever universe he was crossing into. And I figured borrowing from every Smash Brother would ensure that. These OCs were originally designed to be slotted into shows and games that I liked, but the approach I took from this point was to kinda straddle the line between "Character made for a show/game" and "Character inspired by a show/game." Because I was reluctant to give these characters over entirely to these shows I liked, right? I was torn between these characters being part of original stories I was writing that had nothing to do with the shows that inspired them, and having them be directly tied to the universes that inspired them. Like if I ever wanted to write fanfics about shows/games, and not just my original stories.
Speaking of Smash Bros. one more time, ever since Smash Bros. 64 there were characters represented I hadn't heard of. Like Ness and Captain Falcon. Never played whatever games they were from. But in 2002 I discovered a way to revisit the older eras of video gaming to play the titles I missed, for free: Emulation, and free ROM sites. My webpage never got completely finished, I never realized everything I wanted to do with it, but two aspects that definitely did get updated regularly were the OC stuff, and the video game stuff. It started with a .ZIP folder full of ROMs for NES, SNES, and Sega Genesis. Some of them regular rips of the original games, others were hacks. Like "Pussy City Pimps" or "Bizarrio." And those led to the sites they came from. EmuParadise, CoolRom, ROMNation, AngelRoms... between ROMs, Graal, porn on Yahoo! Groups, and porn elsewhere, my free time was booked. Particularly the ROM sites, because those tended to also provide me porn. Because they would always run those ads, right? Ranging from the slightly lewd to the explicit? We all saw these everywhere, right?
If you ever wanted to know where those come from, they come from a game called Magical Drop, a tarot themed game. The girl in question is "The World" and she's supposed to have a third eye. And I'm pretty sure the guy who made the edit that spread around the Internet was a guy named "super0sonic." But it wasn't just the ads. There was overlap. If you liked video games, you probably liked porn. And so sites like Angel Roms didn't just run lewd ads, they had sections for lewd pictures. Angel Roms in particular had an "Anime Girl Pictures" section and an "Angel Roms Babes" section where you could rate the "Daily Babe," a responsibility I didn't shirk. I loved those babes, both 2D and 3D. And I'm really kicking myself today, knowing many of those pictures are lost to time. I should've saved them. I should've learned their source. But I just didn't think to do that. I could've made a shrine like other people did with their lewd pictures, but I didn't. Why? Because it didn't ever occur to me that I would lose it. I didn't save porn if it was just on a website I could visit. There was no point in wasting space. Now, torrented porn, I obviously did save, because it was only viewable by downloading it. Here's one that always stood out in my memory. Sailor and the 7 Ballz... for sale on Newegg???
www.newegg.com
I remember the day I happened upon the review on Animetric.
I was like "Wait a minute, Sailor Mercury's breasts aren't usually that big." And then I learned it was an unauthorized parody. One of two, the other being "Star Ballz," which was 7 Ballz but with a Star Wars twist. There was a rumor that Lucasfilms sued because of Star Ballz. But I'm getting ahead of the story. 7 Ballz was what it sounded like, a "Dragonmoon" style crossover between the biggest anime & video game properties of the time, with explicit sex. I had my reservations at first, because I was told it was bad. But also, it felt redundant. Vanilla Sailor Moon was sexy enough. Right? But people tell me it's not supposed to be. So fine, I'll go where I'm wanted and watch the thing that is supposed to be sexy. Nowadays people still talk about how bad it is. It, and everything produced by the people who made this, isn't even hentai, technically. It's cheap toon porn by Western hands. But I didn't care. It blew my mind when I saw it. The cover alone, I pored over every curve of Sailor Moon's hyperdeveloped body. The scant length of her microskirt. Today? I feel nothing for this. Speaking of cheap toon porn by Western hands, e-mail newsletters were big. And it was around 2002 that I discovered Mondo Media, who I guess are most famous today for Happy Tree Friends. But back then they were pushing their Mondo Mini Shows that were updated week to week. Shows like Piki & Poko, or Absolute Zero, or The God & Devil Show.
As you can see, it's got that crude, sexual-but-are-you-actually-supposed-to-fap-to-it style that would come to define Newgrounds & Albino Black Sheep as the 2000s proceeded. Again, I feel nothing for it now, but back in 2002 this haunted my fantasies. I wish I felt this way again. Maybe I'm running low on testosterone?
That'll do it for this therapy session, clowncels. I'm gonna see that Joker movie. I wanna see what makes him so sad. I wonder if a longing for youth is what makes him so sad. That's what they say attachment to clowns is about. But also? Revisiting my past like this makes me long for my youth. Specifically, the part where I could maintain an erection.
We're in a new era. Reminds me of when we were entering the 2000s. People talk about how the 90s were extreme, the 90s were not extreme. Not like the early 2000s were extreme. The 90s were "cool." The 2000s were extreme in a very edgy and action-packed way. The Sugar Rays and Hooties of the 90s were no match for the coming pop punk/rap metal/emocore renaissance. Cartoons were becoming less "cartoony." You move away from the TOM 1.0 style toward the TOM 2.0 style. The Classic Zoog Disney style to Zoog Disney 2.0 style. No more Goof Troop or Quack Pack style shows. Girls wanna see Kim Possible. Also, some boys wanna see Kim Possible. I'm not sure what the catalyst was, or what kept it going, maybe we can find out as we look back. Picture this...
The Year 2000. The robots have taken over. Robots named Poo-Chi, Tekno, and Johnny Apple Bot. You're at a local theater that your niece's school has booked for an elementary school talent show. She and her friends are performing their act: the choreography from Destiny's Child's "Say My Name" set to Britney Spears' "Oops!... I Did It Again." Standing ovation. They're living the dream. Wouldn't it have been cool if you had friends when you were their age, and you got together for a talent show and rocked the house like from Revenge of the Nerds? Or like how your niece and her friends are doing right now, in reality? Maybe there are adult talent shows. But what talents do you have? There was that time you beat the Pepsi Challenge, but that's not really a "talent." It has to be something you can perform on a stage. Your niece and her friends plan on making a career out of this someday too. So it should also be something you can make a living out of. If only you had a band or something. Envy sets in. You realize, you need to "do" something. Something you can show people.
It being a new year, new century new millennium, I was thinking a lot about reinventing myself. Making 2000 the first step in a brand new life. I was feeling unhappy with my current life, I guess because I didn't have any goals. No calling. I was just going to work and getting on AOL. Yeah Toonami and Kids WB were a big part of my life, but what was I "doing" with that? I needed to "do" something with my fandom besides watch the shows. Cartoon Network offered me an option: Cartoon Orbit.
It was a community where you collected characters and other animated assets from Cartoon Network shows and arranged them in a world. The commercial says you can trade cartoon characters, but you could trade more than that. It was characters, it was objects/items, it was like playing with action figures mixed with writing fanfiction. You could show people your world too. And so I had my first real goal that I cared about: To curate my fanfic world of Cartoon Network characters and have the coolest and best world, as if my world was the authority on Cartoon Orbit worlds. Cartoon Orbit launched in the fall, if I remember, and around November they started adding Thanksgiving assets. And so I thought "I'm gonna make my characters have a communal Thanksgiving feast." And I, at 27 years old, was so proud of it. But I couldn't really show it off like I wanted. I couldn't become a famous Cartoon Orbit "storyteller." Because chat was severely limited. This was around the time websites really started worrying about COPPA compliance. There were two ways sites tended to deal with that: One way is to offer free chat, but if you're 12 or younger you had to have your parents sign and fax/mail in a permission slip so you can use it. Then there's what Cartoon Orbit did, which was only allow people to chat with predefined phrases picked from a drop-down menu. One of the I lost interest pretty quick, using it only to register codes from Cartoon Cartoon Fridays, just in case I ever wanted to seriously Orbit again.
Besides, there were other channels besides Cartoon Network. Fox Kids, for instance, was really capitalizing on this anime craze with Digimon, rival to Pokémon and the centerpiece amidst the table dressings of Monster Rancher, Flint the Time Detective, and the blink-and-you'll-miss-it Escaflowne. In the summer of 2000 they had a name for this block: Anime Invasion. With Pokémon and Digimon both I fantasized about potential original characters. But it was a little easier with Digimon because you only get the one Digimon. As opposed to Pokémon where you need a whole team and need to figure out typing, Digimon had a game too, but as far as the show and Digimon original characters, none of that mattered. You made a cool sidekick and drew them up some Digivolutions. And this kind of creativity was encouraged by Fox Kids themselves, they put it in our heads that we WERE Digidestined and they wanted to see our original Digimon concepts. And they published them in Fox Kids Magazine. I wasn't really an artist, so I didn't draw, but I made character sheets. Which unfortunately weren't enough for Fox Kids Magazine, but I figured, someday. Someday soon I would draw my Digimon. That isn't weird, right? Because I don't see any 27 year old men entering these contests. And it is called Fox "Kids." Maybe I'm in the wrong place. But then I justify my fandom by pointing out how sexy they made Digimon like Angewomon. There's sex appeal to be appreciated here. I'm not crazy.
2000 was kind of a false start. My identity as an Internet user, just like the United States' identity as a country, would really start to take shape in the following year. Picture this...
2001. Just before 9:00. A crisp September morn. You're at work, making idle brush strokes on something in Illustrator. iMesh is open, and you're looking for the heavy version of "Bodies" by Drowning Pool. The Today Show is on the office TVs and Matt Lauer says they've got breaking news about the World Trade Center after the commercial break. Probably stocks or something. You're barely paying attention. What even is the "World Trade Center?"
But after the commercial they waste no time in showing it. Smoke rises from the North Tower as reports come in that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center. You and your co-workers are captivated. You think to yourself "Ooooh, what a tragic accident. It's too bad this accident happened." And then the second plane hit. And the reality of what this is becomes clear. "Shit... Y2K!!! We didn't stop it!!!"
I think enough time has passed where I can safely say without angering anyone, we were never more united as a nation back then. That's not me talkin', that's Gallup polls. Bush's approval rating skyrocketed to an erection-worthy 90%. The highest in ever. Because we were all in agreement. Fuck them terrorists, right? A solidarity on WWII levels, we will probably never see togetherness like that again. Because we have the Internet as we know it now. It's too easy to find "dissenting opinions" and "open minds." If that's what you're into. But damn, was it good to be an American back then. Good to be a Republican. Good to be a Bush. Bad to be Iraqi though. I would browse my anime shrines and stuff. "Support Freedom" buttons as far as the eye could see. From Geocities to Tripod to Angelfire, even if you weren't American if you hated terrorism you got yourself a button. I didn't mind it for the most part, but what I did mind was when it seeped into my Fox Kids Magazine. I didn't need Davis and Izzy talking to me about love triumphing over hate. But things would get even more uncomfortable with Fox Kids Magazine later that year, when they announced they were cancelling production of the magazine. They said it was to save trees or some shit. But I was too old to fall for that. I thought it might be money reasons, I don't remember actually paying money for my Fox Kids Club membership. All I knew was, now I don't have a place that will dignify my Digimon fandom. I mean, there's AOL chatrooms, but I'm starting to notice a little snobbery. Sub snobbery. Nitpicking about how such and such thing isn't like the original. What can I say, I wanna watch it in English and I accept the version Fox Kids says is true. I don't like people telling me my version isn't real. So I started to try out other chatrooms, other communities. Fortunately for me, this was when the MMORPG was starting to become viable. And it was here that I found what I think was my first real Internet time sink: Graal Online.
I played the Graal2001 client, I'm not sure how close this is to that but it looks more or less the same. As you can see it's basically A Link To The Past, The MMORPG. And like every good MMORPG, it had chat channels. PMing, Global Chat, etc. So I started to visit AOL chatrooms less and do my chatting in Graal more. But what was unique about Graal was that it was a game you could make your own. Technically. I forget the specifics of how, but there were characters, armors, shields, swords, items, whole "playerworlds" that you could create yourself, powered by their proprietary GScript language. That's how people made the worlds that I played on, like Unholy Nation. And one thing I noticed, if you made a playerworld people liked, you became a notable name in the Graal community. To this day I recall names like LiquidIce, AcidIce, and Jubei Saotome. I wanted to be like those guys. Not just to have my name attached to some fame, but because I wanted to make a world of my own, and bring people into it. And so I started work on my second real goal: Make a Graal level and attach my name/alter ego to it. So I can be a known figure in this community. And this community spread wider than just Graal. Jubei is a good example of this, he was just famous in general. He was known for his Graal work not just on Graal, but in other fandoms. And because he had cred as a Graal developer, people paid attention to his other exploits. He was a Flash animator. He was a... player of other games. I wanted to be that. I wanted my Internet alter ego to have a portfolio of Graal work and other work and to be known for it. But what would I call myself? WingshipMantis? Locust bugs were still my "signature animal" but I was a human in Graal. If I was gonna be a bug man, it would have to be in a strictly furry universe. Instead I decided to put that on the back burner. If I'm making a whole playerworld with multiple characters, I can take my love of locusts and do something else with it. Make a separate OC. I could have many OCs. But what I would go by primarily as a Graal playerworld maker was "Gunther Kane." The implication I would go for was I was like an allegory for Cain, history's first murderer and ancestor of evil. Hiding in secret. Thousands of years old, like Vandal Savage. Before I did whatever I needed to do to officially host a playerworld online, I would build maps and code characters/NPCs offline. Browse the Internet for extra MIDIs to add to my maps. Just to dwell on the concepts that would make up my world. What I probably spent the most time on though was this "indoor city," it was like a palace the size of a city, paved with velvet carpet, and it had regular rooms like a palace would, throne room, ballroom, etc, but because it was so big it had houses inside the palace. With this world, I would establish all of my OCs past and present. I started going over them all and kinda "translating" them to Graal. I couldn't put my old OCs that I made for cartoons into those cartoons, but I could put them into this world. That would be establishment enough.
But you know what everyone with an alter ego or Internet persona had back then? A webpage. A shrine or something. You had to have some kind of presence. So I made a page for myself/my alter ego, and the rest of my OCs. Normally one's corner of the Internet has a name, like "Giniko-chan's Anime Toy Chest" or something. I named mine after my palace city. So it was like the visitor was visiting the palace city. Until I learned to draw, I couldn't do everything I wanted to do with this page, but the plan was this: I would have a Character Page going over me/Gunther and everyone else accounted for in my OC collection/star system, with art drawn of them. Also, an art page. Eventually becoming known enough that people ask me for art requests and people do art trades with me. A list of places to contact me (AOL, ICQ, etc) and a link to download the Graal client and the name of my playerworld, once I made it. A section for "Adoptables," all of whom I considered OCs and would translate into Graal as well. This was like a hub for my universe of characters, see. A section for reviewing shows, except it wasn't so much "reviewing" as it was water cooler talk about what the latest developments were in those shows. Bearing in mind I only watched localized anime. Also, the posts for these shows would have Gunther, or someone, drawn as if they were in the universe of the show. That's how I would kinda have them in the show without actually having them in the show. For instance, if I had a original Digimon. I wouldn't call them a Digimon necessarily. I would make them in Graal as my own character. But I would draw them in Digimon scenes for my "What happened last time on Digimon" water cooler talks. Also, I would have journals/water cooler talks about video games I had been playing at the time. I was big into Dark Cloud at the time, and I would give my thoughts and updates on my progress. And I would have a journal just for my general thoughts/day to day stuff. And a Poll section for questions I had for my visitors. And a Guestbook. Every page needs a Guestbook. And a front page to tie it all together with a counter, links in the sidebar to my friends/affiliates, awards I'd won, badges that show what I'm about and what I'm a fan of, my current "status" courtesy of imood, and a News section for what had recently been updated on the site.
This page was basically a hub for all that was me, filtered through the prism of my Internet weeb alter ego. My art (as soon as I started making some), my OCs, the shows I watched, the games I played, the things I was a member of, etc. And later I would discover a new interest. I don't remember how I found it, but some time in 2001 I stumbled upon a page full of art. And one of the pictures was of a large breasted mouse girl in full body latex. It was then that I realized that all of the art was erotic. And while it wasn't the first time I was ever attracted to cartoon animals, it was my discovery of bonafide furry porn and the furry subculture. The page led me to Yahoo! Groups, another thing I was just now discovering, where I was invited to join a group for erotic furry art. Specifically the Skunkworks group, managed by James Hardiman. It was early goings, but the furry clubs were out there and I found myself joining whichever ones I could find. Problem was, 18+ groups were hidden from the Yahoo! Groups search directory, so in order to find new groups you had to have someone link you directly to the group. That's how I found the ones I joined. In the message boards of furry groups, people would post lists to other furry groups, like some kinda pornographic underground railroad. I wanted to be part of this, like I wanted to be part of Graal. But I needed a "fursona." Which was basically was I was working on way back in my Get Along Gang days. So what would mine be? What's my "signature animal?" Some kinda mantis/scarab/locust? How's that supposed to work? It was here that I realized I shouldn't have picked the locust as my signature animal. Bug types aren't really seen in furry stuff. It's all mammals and dragons. Sometimes other lizards. And the odd bird here and there. But no bugs. They're too armory. Which is why I thought they were so cool in the first place. But no one wants to have sex with a bug. I thought I could maybe wrangle some kind of Perfect Cell sort of character, and part of me felt there was something to having a unique character. Everyone's doing skunks and bunnies. Mice and squirrels. Wolves and lions. You have a bug! That's cool, right? On the other hand, you have a bug. That's weird, right? I just wasn't feeling it anymore. I'd rather be compatible than stand out for the sake of "uniqueness." And so it was back to the drawing board with whatever my "signature animal" would be.
I added a section to my webpage for Yahoo! Groups that I was a member of, and put a hold on things for a while as I re-shopped my signature animal. And while I was thinking, maybe revisit some of my other signature stuff. The idea was to shape everything so that it was compatible with this new "furry" fandom I had discovered. An "obsession," I guess you could call it, that would start to power my other interests too. Picture this...
2002. Scratch & Burn is on. Maybe it's the Monster Energy Drink, but this show is hilarious right now. You catch your breath over the commercial break, when you see this.
Blinx: The Time Sweeper. For the Xbox. You've heard talk about the console, mostly centered around Halo. But it didn't look like your kind of game. This though? Blinx looks like he could be the Mario or Sonic of the Xbox. You could use a "Sonic" option ever since the death of the Dreamcast. Plus you're really into universes headed by anthropomorphic animals right now. This fandom is just starting, and the idea of getting in on something big from the ground floor excites you. Yes, you will do this Blinx thing. And if no one else will? You'll start a Blinx group on Yahoo!
The Xbox came at, or might've been the cause of, the perfect time for itself. This is where that early 2000s extremeness I was talking about really started to get noticed, and I think a lot of it had to do with the "Doritos & Mountain Dew" brand Microsoft was establishing for the Xbox. Like in this Xbox Live promo disc video.
This was before Call of Duty was a thing, and yet all the tropes are here. Or maybe we were already headed toward a culture like this and the Xbox was on time to capitalize on it. Could the aesthetic surrounding the Xbox and its style of gamer be described as "American?" People, specifically Gamestop and stand-up comedian Dara O'Briain, always talk about games in two forms: Cute & cartoony, which is what Japan is supposed to make, and serious gun business, which is what the West is supposed to make. The Xbox had a focus on the latter, and so did America as a whole at the time. The grip of 9/11 still had us. Case in point, the show "24." And most shows/movies that involve terrorists. Pre-9/11, the terrorists are always of indeterminate nationality, or some kinda Slavic. Like in Die Hard. Or in the first season of 24. Which was produced before 9/11 happened. In 2002, 24 opens with a Middle Eastern sect called "Second Wave." If there was no 9/11, Kiefer Sutherland would still be in cartoons. But American actioniness wasn't entirely American. Maybe America just happened to be more receptive of it in the early 2000s, but a lot of the early 2000s action came from Japan. Fox Kids was going away, but what it had done with the Anime Invasion, maybe even more than Pokémon, laid the groundwork for the likes of Yu-Gi-Oh! and Beyblade. Shows that said "Buy these toys and fight your friends!"
And that's the part that kept my focus. The anime part. I had discovered websites like Anime Cafe, Animetric, AnimeAddiction.net, and the homepage of "Da Black Goku." To learn about titles that didn't air on American TV, because this is the only way I would ever hear about them. And I learned that there was kind of an overlap with weebs and furries. Like there was an overlap with anime and video games. Or anime and "toon porn." Because anime was full of catgirls and wolfboys and cabbits. And fans with their OCs and alter egos would make themselves into catgirls and wolfboys and cabbits. The idea was to try and cover all of the overlapping categories of weebdom so that each was represented on my page. As far as my OCs, because of Blinx and catgirls & the furry fandom, I semi-settled on being a catboy. But I wanted to flesh out my OCs. I had a plan to write stories/detail adventures on that webpage, featuring my characters. Like fanfics, except they only involved my characters. And I wanted my guests to affect the story by interacting with the characters in it. AND whenever I got my Graal playerworld up and running, I wanted those stories to carryover in Graal. But first I had to design these OCs. One tool that got a lot of play in designing these characters was Super Smash Bros. Melee. Why? I used their NPC matches to power the battles between the characters in the stories. The Melee characters and levels were arranged to represent the characters in my stories. A lot like how Spirit Battles work in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. For instance, Pauline is not a playable fighter in the game. But to kinda make it like she is, so you can fight her, they represent her with Peach, because she's kinda like Peach. But in a red dress. And put on the 75m stage with Mario, Donkey Kong and Hammers.
That's basically what I did, but with my characters. So I had to design them with the question in mind, who do they most match from Smash Bros.? Speaking of Smash Bros., what I did for Gunther Kane was unique, because he was my alter ego. I listed every Special move and exhibited power of every Smash combatant, and tried to combine them all into a cogent character. Something that made sense without being a grab bag of powers. Because I entertained the idea that, if a miracle should happen someday and Gunther Kane becomes a real video game character, and crosses over with a game, he should be compatible with whatever universe he was crossing into. And I figured borrowing from every Smash Brother would ensure that. These OCs were originally designed to be slotted into shows and games that I liked, but the approach I took from this point was to kinda straddle the line between "Character made for a show/game" and "Character inspired by a show/game." Because I was reluctant to give these characters over entirely to these shows I liked, right? I was torn between these characters being part of original stories I was writing that had nothing to do with the shows that inspired them, and having them be directly tied to the universes that inspired them. Like if I ever wanted to write fanfics about shows/games, and not just my original stories.
Speaking of Smash Bros. one more time, ever since Smash Bros. 64 there were characters represented I hadn't heard of. Like Ness and Captain Falcon. Never played whatever games they were from. But in 2002 I discovered a way to revisit the older eras of video gaming to play the titles I missed, for free: Emulation, and free ROM sites. My webpage never got completely finished, I never realized everything I wanted to do with it, but two aspects that definitely did get updated regularly were the OC stuff, and the video game stuff. It started with a .ZIP folder full of ROMs for NES, SNES, and Sega Genesis. Some of them regular rips of the original games, others were hacks. Like "Pussy City Pimps" or "Bizarrio." And those led to the sites they came from. EmuParadise, CoolRom, ROMNation, AngelRoms... between ROMs, Graal, porn on Yahoo! Groups, and porn elsewhere, my free time was booked. Particularly the ROM sites, because those tended to also provide me porn. Because they would always run those ads, right? Ranging from the slightly lewd to the explicit? We all saw these everywhere, right?
If you ever wanted to know where those come from, they come from a game called Magical Drop, a tarot themed game. The girl in question is "The World" and she's supposed to have a third eye. And I'm pretty sure the guy who made the edit that spread around the Internet was a guy named "super0sonic." But it wasn't just the ads. There was overlap. If you liked video games, you probably liked porn. And so sites like Angel Roms didn't just run lewd ads, they had sections for lewd pictures. Angel Roms in particular had an "Anime Girl Pictures" section and an "Angel Roms Babes" section where you could rate the "Daily Babe," a responsibility I didn't shirk. I loved those babes, both 2D and 3D. And I'm really kicking myself today, knowing many of those pictures are lost to time. I should've saved them. I should've learned their source. But I just didn't think to do that. I could've made a shrine like other people did with their lewd pictures, but I didn't. Why? Because it didn't ever occur to me that I would lose it. I didn't save porn if it was just on a website I could visit. There was no point in wasting space. Now, torrented porn, I obviously did save, because it was only viewable by downloading it. Here's one that always stood out in my memory. Sailor and the 7 Ballz... for sale on Newegg???
Sailor & the 7 Ballz - Newegg.com
Buy Sailor & the 7 Ballz with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Newegg shopping upgraded ™
I remember the day I happened upon the review on Animetric.
Hentai Review of Sailor and the 7 Ballz
Hentai Review of Sailor and the 7 Ballz. Including full screenshots, genres, streaming clips and trailers. Plus hundreds of other Anime, Hentai, Erotic Doujinshi and Bishoujo Game reviews!
www.animetric.com
I was like "Wait a minute, Sailor Mercury's breasts aren't usually that big." And then I learned it was an unauthorized parody. One of two, the other being "Star Ballz," which was 7 Ballz but with a Star Wars twist. There was a rumor that Lucasfilms sued because of Star Ballz. But I'm getting ahead of the story. 7 Ballz was what it sounded like, a "Dragonmoon" style crossover between the biggest anime & video game properties of the time, with explicit sex. I had my reservations at first, because I was told it was bad. But also, it felt redundant. Vanilla Sailor Moon was sexy enough. Right? But people tell me it's not supposed to be. So fine, I'll go where I'm wanted and watch the thing that is supposed to be sexy. Nowadays people still talk about how bad it is. It, and everything produced by the people who made this, isn't even hentai, technically. It's cheap toon porn by Western hands. But I didn't care. It blew my mind when I saw it. The cover alone, I pored over every curve of Sailor Moon's hyperdeveloped body. The scant length of her microskirt. Today? I feel nothing for this. Speaking of cheap toon porn by Western hands, e-mail newsletters were big. And it was around 2002 that I discovered Mondo Media, who I guess are most famous today for Happy Tree Friends. But back then they were pushing their Mondo Mini Shows that were updated week to week. Shows like Piki & Poko, or Absolute Zero, or The God & Devil Show.
As you can see, it's got that crude, sexual-but-are-you-actually-supposed-to-fap-to-it style that would come to define Newgrounds & Albino Black Sheep as the 2000s proceeded. Again, I feel nothing for it now, but back in 2002 this haunted my fantasies. I wish I felt this way again. Maybe I'm running low on testosterone?
That'll do it for this therapy session, clowncels. I'm gonna see that Joker movie. I wanna see what makes him so sad. I wonder if a longing for youth is what makes him so sad. That's what they say attachment to clowns is about. But also? Revisiting my past like this makes me long for my youth. Specifically, the part where I could maintain an erection.
Ritalincel
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FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
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- #177
"Founding Father" or "Milk & Cigarettes 8: The Merits of Being Emo, Part 1: When I Was A Young Boy"
TL;DR: In 2003 I lost my job, my hair, and a lot of my family due to growing old and apart and dead. With no job I was consumed by copes like late night trash TV, MMORPGs, fanart circles, and porn both Eastern and Western. And I decided I would somehow make fandom my livelihood.
TL;DR: In 2003 I lost my job, my hair, and a lot of my family due to growing old and apart and dead. With no job I was consumed by copes like late night trash TV, MMORPGs, fanart circles, and porn both Eastern and Western. And I decided I would somehow make fandom my livelihood.
We're wrist deep into the Halloween season, not that you could tell on incels.is. No one has been visiting my Halloween music tourney.
It's not an ego thing, I just really wanna know what Halloween music the community prefers. What Halloween aesthetic we like the most. I don't know any other way to do that except with these polls, but no one's in the mood for Halloween, it seems. Except for a scant few. Like @Ritalincel. Avatar in season, more than I can say for myself. I commend your spiritedness.
Anyway, recently I got my first trick and my first treat of the season. The trick? I saw a ghost in my mirror! My own ghostly visage. For when I went to shave my beard, I noticed grey hairs in it. That's it. That's the death sentence. As I explained in "Men of a Certain Age, Wage, & Weight." Bad skin, and grey hair. These are what make you look old. I'm still working on the skin. But grey hair? Typically I shave my face about once a week. It's gonna have to be near about daily now. I cannot let the grey show. Either that, or color it. And people can tell when you're coloring your facial hair. Just like in that Beta Force sketch.
My treat wasn't much better. I got ten dollars. But it came at incredible cost to someone else. I was sitting at the bus with this guy, and this other guy walks up to us both and gives us envelopes. Somber and silent. Then he walks off. We open our envelopes. Mine has 10 dollars. Pretty cool for a random find. But it came with a note explaining why he gave us the money: His mother, two years back to the day, died of breast & brain cancer. And so consumed by loss is he that he decided every year on his mother's death day he's gonna go around randomly handing out $1,000 in $10 denominations to people, in the hopes that they use it to go out for coffee with their loved ones or something. Make sure that others don't waste the precious moments.
I was absolutely ambushed. Imagine years pass after a tragedy, and it doesn't stop hurting. It's like it'll never stop hurting. My relationship with my parents is fine! But now I'm like, how can I help this guy, with his dead mom?
My relationship with my parents is fine, but this does remind me about how my relationship with some of my sisters and most of my extended family, right now, is NOT fine. And maybe that's what I should've spent the $10 on. In fact, 2003 was probably the last year we were a truly cohesive unit. Before my own period of loss began, and with it a 4 year sweet spot I like to call "The Emo Era."
Told in two posts, because the character count ran long and I had a lot to say about this period. Picture Part 1...
It's the Saturday after Memorial Day and the family just kinda found themselves in the mood for a cookout, so you grabbed your Xbox and Quantum Redshift and decided to pop in.
You're more into that punk rocker sk8er boi music the radio is playing nowadays, but there's something about the melancholy tones of the Solar City track. Carrying the mood of a cool summer's twilight. Something sad, something nostalgic, you don't quite understand it. But as the retries roll on eternal, you start hearing a different song, coming from downstairs. A song you understand all too well. One of two songs, that is. You fight a twinge of shame for recognizing the music, then you run downstairs. You have young nieces and nephews down there. And it's 2003, so it's still inappropriate for children to watch what you know is about to go down. You get to the landing, overlooking the living room. You're too late. People of all ages have gathered around the TV to watch the 2003 MTV Movie awards, and there on stage is an army of teenage girls, led in pillow combat by the most controversial band of our age, t.A.T.u.
As with all sex scenes, the best way to salvage this now is to just go back upstairs and try not to be noticed. You make sure the door is closed extra tight. You don't wanna be around right now.
There's a certain image that defines most decades. You think 70s, you think bell bottoms, afros, & degeneracy. You think 80s, you think synth, Outrun, and The Memphis Group. And when you think the 2000s? It has many facets, but I think at the core of it is one thing: Emo. Envision a scene kid, scrawny, greasy hair, skinny jeans, checkered Vans, candy bracelet, Invader Zim/Kingdom Heards/Nightmare Before Christmas t-shirt, speaks in "rawrs," that's the 2000s. A time remembered fondly by millennials. I think the late 80s/early 90s might be just a little more distinct for me because I had something like friends back then, and a social life, but the Emo Era is a close second. 24/7 bangers on the radio, the best MMORPGs, the best fanart/fanfic communities, the best videos... my relationship with my family was at its peak, so gatherings like this were a good cope. I still had no friends or sex life, but I was appreciating being an uncle. Having people to spend money on. Especially around the holidays. I had recently ditched my desktop and bought an Inspiron laptop, so I could take my computer with me when my family got together. And my love for the holidays meant I had to kit my computer out for the holidays too. Customize the display themes to fit the holiday. For instance, Halloween would involve a lot of orange and black, changing default fonts to Tempus Sans... and I had a neat custom cursor program called Comet Cursor. Which was technically adware, but I had all kinds of adware on my computer at the time.
I would go into Seasonal, pick the right Halloween cursor, and nieces and nephews just loved it. It was like the whole point of having a laptop. So I could make it holiday-themed, then show it to the kids, and just be the coolest. Holiday themes, Felix The Cat, BonziBuddy, I was the uncle with the cool computer.
This was my life, up until 2003. I think the last family moment, as we knew them, was when we went to Cedar Point to celebrate my kid brother's graduation from college. Then days turned dark. The family started to grow apart. I think the catalyst was my sister distancing herself and her wife and her kid/my nephew from our parents. We had never experienced anything as drastic as a "disowning" like that. And my other sister sided with her, and they spent their holidays with their new family. Or, our in-laws. And other family members around my age had kinda been following suit. Having kids and starting families of their own and kinda fading away from the pack. It wasn't an outright disowning like my sisters, more of a "We don't have time to come over because we're doing something with our own group." I think the heartbreak of this proved fatal for some of the older matriarchs and patriarchs of the family. Aunts and uncles started coming down with various organ failure diseases. Many died. All this loss, from growing old and/or apart, left us as way different as a family unit, compared to when it was me who was graduating college. Also, I think less money was coming in. So we stopped doing things as a family. I know I didn't have any money to kick back, because 2003 was also the year that I got laid off. And it was dire straits, I had to get any job/jobs I could. Maybe me losing my job was also a factor in the sudden instability of our family. It was almost definitely a factor in ANOTHER tragedy to befall me in 2003, I was going noticeably bald. I think the stress of financial uncertainty and being buried in so many things to do that I didn't know how I was gonna do them, the stress sped up the hair loss process. I had to have been losing it before 2003, but it was in 2003, after I lost my job, that I first took notice. When I was able to touch the top of my head, and just feel scalp. No buffer of hair at all. Thatched and ragged.
So here I was, heartbroken and foisted into slackerdom. I might not have had the hair for it, but spiritually, I was in my emo phase.
So what did I do with my life, frequently between jobs? I embraced the LDAR. I found myself with a lot more time on my hands where all I could do was wait for results. I didn't have to go bed as early, so I stayed up watching late night trash TV. TV Funhouse, The Man Show, Blind Date and The 5th Wheel. With commercials for Girls Gone Wild and We Are 18 interspersed. Thinking "Man, I totally gotta go out and see some of that someday." Just as I did for Wild On and Street Match. I never did. But it was a comfortable fantasy to keep in the back of my head. The idea that I could definitely, someday, go to where GGW is, or call We Are 18, or be on a dating show. I just needed to figure out what cities they did casting calls in, and go there. But a show that really stuck with me was this cartoon, Undergrads.
I was able to catch reruns of it when I didn't have a job. And yes, I realize it's a cartoon, but I saw so much of myself in the main character, Nitz. There's an episode where Nitz feels like he hasn't had enough social experiences in college. And I watch it, thinking, "That's how I feel about MY college experience!" There's an episode that focuses on how Nitz is a virgin, and feels sexual tension when his oneitis, Kimmy, invites him to the sexual health clinic where she works. And I watch it, thinking, "Man, I sure wish I had a crush to deftly navigate feelings with." There's an episode where he ends up rooming with a female friend of his, but because she's female and he's in her room where she isn't always totally clothed, there's sexual tension. And I watch it, thinking, "I wish I had a dormmate to foster sexual tension with." I wasn't working at the time, and the only social life I had was the Internet and my parents. So it was really weighing on me, I should go back to college, do it right this time. Or I would have, if I had the money. And I didn't, so I was stuck at home, alone, with my thoughts about how I had missed out on college. I wasn't beat up too much about not getting into college shenanigans, because I found something else that appealed to me: AmIHotOrNot.com.
I got it in my head that what I really wanted to do was meet one of the hot girls from Hot Or Not. I didn't know how I was gonna do it, but that didn't stop me from desperately orbiting every one that I found. I didn't even ask to meet, I just showered them with desperate adoration. "I just wanted to say you are very beautiful and blah blah blah." One woman actually reached out to me. She was a calendar model and "offered" me a chance to buy one of her calendars if I was "serious." So that was another thing I did. Browsed Hot Or Not and pondered the possibility of being with one of those women. Speaking of my sex drive, because the family wasn't getting together like it used to, I got rid of Felix and Bonzi. Replaced them with Kahli, Tahni, and Maeka. Seeing as I was the only person using my computer now.
Oska Deskmates had some "family friendly" screenmates too, but back then it seemed like everyone dabbled in toon porn on the side. Graal got a lot of attention, as usual, but sometimes I didn't play. Sometimes I just sat and listened to the MIDI soundtrack. Speaking of MIDIs, ROMs got a lot of play. And because ROMs got a lot of play, my interest turned to MIDI covers/remixes of video game songs. To be added to my webpage. And speaking of my webpage, and ROMs, and Graal, I also had my fandom to focus on. The Internet shrine and all that. And I did some thinking about demographic overlap again. It was Linkin Park's "Somewhere I Belong" music video that got me thinking. There's Gundams in it in the first few seconds.
I always felt like the kind of people who like anime are also the same people who would listen to Linkin Park. Just like how furriness and anime overlap. There were many "domains" of Internet weebdom. The shows you watch, the music you listen to, the games you play. And I wanted to be a notable name in all that, so I figured the best thing to do would be to have a hand in every overlapping jar. I like anime. What else do anime fans like? Alternative metal. They like to draw fanart. They like to write fanfics. They like skateboarding and other "punky" things. And goth things. And Invader Zim and Kingdom Hearts. On and on I went, compiling sort of a "hobbies" or "likes" list. But it wasn't enough to just like these things, I had to actually pursue these things. Do stuff with these things. I had to become a skateboarding guitarist fanartist who shops at Hot Topic and has a fursona, several video game achievements, and a developed server on Graal. Basically, I had to be that quintessential "emo" concept. And my image was a big part of it. Because I not only was it important to me to be a good... whatever this is, but through being the best this I can be, I might meet people in the community. As a fan of these things, I'll just go where ever other fans go. Interact with people there. Connect over our shared interests. I could have a rich social/sexual life even though I missed it in college. But what was I supposed to do with my hair? As balding as I was at this point, my hair was dead weight. I was better off without any of it. So that's what I went with. No dickin' around trying to make the impossible work. I shaved my head. I decided my image would lean towards a harder kind of "emo," or whatever it is I was being. Less sensitive guy, more headbutting skinhead guy.
The formal to-do list looked something like this:
1. Complete and maintain shrine
2. Learn how to play guitar
3. Learn how to skateboard
4. Learn to draw.
5. Draw profile cards for my OCs
6. Develop Graal content.
7. Get ROMs of all of the SNES/Sega CD and prior games, play them, write about them
8. Find the "main base" for the fandoms of the games I like and join
9. Find the "main base" for the groups on Yahoo! and join
10. Build your Pokémon team/Duel Monsters deck/Beyblade/any other toyetic stuff, run the tournament circuit
11. Use iMesh to get anime you can't watch on TV
12. Find KiSS dolls and follow their creators, collaborate with them
13. Make video game sprite flashes for Newgrounds, TX Mafia, VGDC, Razoric, etc
14. Buy clothes & accessories that fit your decided fashion style
15. Be a member on multiple MMORPGs & websites, have multiple profiles, to spread the brand
16. Set up journal/blogging accounts
For being a guitarist, I bought what guitar I could afford, and downloaded FruityLoops and Amplitube. Eventually I realized I was in over my head. I didn't "give up" per se, I told myself I would return to it when I had the means and resources to learn how to do it well. Skateboarding? I didn't have a park with a bowl, but I did have a steep highway nearby that was deserted in the early mornings and late afternoons. And I had no job, so I could just go out there and practice. Until something, I'm not sure what, happened to my right shin. Mayo Clinic calls it "Osgood-Schlatter disease," but it's been years now and it still hasn't cleared up. Whatever it is, I needed that leg to kick and flip with. And with no job I couldn't afford to go to a chiropractor, so I just let it be.
The drawing I think I was a little more successful with. I borrowed some "How To Draw Manga" books from the library and the rest was history. And me learning to draw came at a pivotal point in dubbed anime history. Dragon Ball Z had ended, and 4Kids had its own syndicated Saturday morning block with "The FoxBox." It would be here that I got most of my anime, after DBZ I kinda stopped watching Toonami. And Cartoon Network, period. As did a lot of older people, for it was around this time that the "Powerhouse Era" of Cartoon Network was drawing to a close. It wasn't officially dead yet, but with the end of Cartoon Cartoon Fridays it might as well have been. Kids' WB was only good for Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!, ABC Family was only good for Beyblade, and if there was any other dubbed anime to watch it was hidden somewhere in no-man's land on some nowhere channel like UPN. 4Kids basically had a monopoly on dub production and broadcast in the West. So these were the shows I drew fanart for and developed OCs for. Like most people, I cut my teeth on Sonic the Hedgehog. Just easier to draw, I guess. But what was key with my Sonic OCs, and all of my OCs, was that they not infringe on pre-existing characters. I couldn't take a dynamic that belonged to someone else. For instance, my OC couldn't be a super fast hedgehog. I had to come up with a role that hadn't been filled. Why? For one, it was seen as Mary Sue-ish. And it was nobler not to do that. Today "Mary Sue" is hard to define and is usually responded to with "Oh, so you don't like that she's strong because she's a girl?" But before everything got all mixed up and twisted, it was a lot simpler to not be a Mary Sue: Don't take any roles that already belong to someone else. You can't be more logical than Spock, you can't be stronger than Goku, and you can't be married to anyone who clearly already has a canon 'ship. Just have respect for the established canon. Not everyone heeded this, but those who didn't knew what they were doing. Some people just wanted to 'ship themselves with characters in shows, and the fan following that these fanartist/fanfic writers had understood it, maybe even followed them for it. For two? I guess, deep down, it was because I wanted to be able to fit into the show or game or whatever, if by some miracle I was able to be in those shows or games or whatever. There's no point in making a second fast hedgehog. They already have Sonic. Makes my OC all the more pointless. I made not one, but two Sonic OCs, "Vulcan the Ram" and "Barrel the Tortoise." I figured we had a fast guy in Sonic, but do we have a strong guy? I thought there wasn't one, because I had no knowledge of Mighty the Armadillo. And some might say that Knuckles is the strong one, but I thought about that, and I concluded that "super strength" wasn't really his thing. Punching was, climbing was, having big fists was, being tough was, but not being as strong as Sonic is fast. So that's what my two OCs would focus on.
You didn't need much to draw. Well, you did, but I didn't know that yet. I was yet unintroduced to the worlds of toner and special pencils and modeling dolls. Drawing was the simplest "productive" thing on my to-do list. Not like, for instance, Flash videos. They were fun to watch, the Mario vs. Sonic craze was at its peak in the early-to-mid 2000s, and I wanted to throw my hat into the community ring. Make something people would be excited about. And I knew about the Adobe Suite from my last job. But I didn't know enough about how to get sprites from games and animate them. Was everyone taking screenshots from emulators and cropping the assets? But mostly, it was too distracting just watching the sprite flashes.
I was able to make KiSS dolls though. I played them as well as making my own. I didn't get to collaborate with anyone, because I was still but a beginner. And these guys were producing high quality interactive erotic dolls. So I was content to just be a supportive fan for a while, as I sharpened my art skills. And promoted my brand. My brand/alter ego had gone through some retooling, and I decided peanuts were gonna be a big thing with me. So I made a Dancing Peanut KiSS doll. He was a dude. And as I was drawing his wardrobe, something occurred to me: There aren't a lot of male KiSS dolls. It's all girls. But why? Who is it for? This question bugged me. Because these dolls were way naked, so I figured they were meant to appeal to people who were attracted to women. But were they? Or if I was to say that, would the makers be like "No it's not supposed to be for that it's 'tasteful nudity' and it's actually targeted towards women?" It's essentially the Sailor Moon conundrum all over again. And so I kinda lost my taste for KiSS dolls. Unless I knew for sure that I was supposed to enjoy them for the lewd content. And it wasn't often that I could confirm that.
As far as "finding the main base" for fandoms like the games I liked, the idea was this: Where should I go if I want my fandom to be noticed by the highest of higher-ups? Where do I go if I wanna reach out and touch someone with my fandom? To someday, like, be mentioned in an interview? If I wanted Sonic Team to say "Hey, nice Sonic OC." Probably wouldn't happen if I stick to Yahoo! Groups. Or some underpopulated personal forum that no one knows exists. I didn't know where exactly I should go, but I figured it would have to be a big name in whatever industry I'm trying to make a name for myself in. So I figured, for video games, I should probably join IGN. Other Yahoo! Groups were a little harder to pinpoint. Especially as I kept finding new ones. There was a Group for the works of Blas Gallego. Where do I go if I wanna be deep into the Dolly fandom? There was a Group for the erotic writings of VC Nathan. Where do I go if I wanna submit my own Hilda Humper fanfics? There was a Group for art from Jab Comix. What about that? Or 3rd Art? Or Cherry Pop Tart? What if it wasn't 2D, but porn stars I wanted to orbit? So I made accounts where I thought I could reach the core fandom, but a lot of the time I was stuck on Yahoo! Groups.
As far as my look, it wasn't enough to just dress right. I had to express myself aesthetically through all things. How I looked, how my house looked, everything. I needed tattoos. I had seen Quan Chi from Mortal Kombat, right? And he was bald, but he had tattoos on his head. I wanted something like that. Also I was really into Oddworld games, so I wanted tattoos like Abe had. A big one on my chest, and two on each palm. I didn't even know if that was possible, let alone reasonable if I ever wanted to have a job again, but I figured other people in the community do stuff like this, why not me? Only posers cared about the consequences of getting a tattoo. I didn't wanna be like those preppies, I was gonna command attention, respect, and even admiration in the non-preppy community!
I also had to express myself through my Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and Pokémon team. On the show, one's personality was reflected in their deck. If you were a pallid, scrawny guy named Bones, you had lots of dark zombie cards. If you're a burly spearfisherman named Mako Tsunami, you had lots of fish and your flagship monster is The Legendary Fisherman. So what would my deck look like? Well, this was essentially like OC development. I'm coming up with a Pokémon for myself as if I was a Pokémon trainer. I'm coming up with a deck to run, as if I was a Duel Monsters player on Yu-Gi-Oh!. So the principle of "Don't infringe on another character" applied here. No Pikachu, no Dark Magician, etc, because those are the avatars of people already on those shows. My Pokémon was figured out pretty quickly. I needed a Pokémon that wasn't anyone's on the show, and it just so happened that Porygon was more or less banned from the show ever since "Electric Soldier Porygon." Including its evolution, Porygon2. And it was just too good an opportunity to pass up. No one had gotten in on this. If I couldn't just create my own Pokémon, like Fox Kids encouraged people to create their own Digimon, my Pokémon OC would travel around with a Porygon2. Yu-Gi-Oh! was a little tougher, because I was really into the dark Egyptian themed cards in the Pharaonic Guardian expansion. But I think that was kinda taken at the time. But eventually came the Dark Crisis booster pack, and it brought a new theme of card: The Archfiends. Chess-themed demon monsters.
And at the time, no one on the show ran a dedicated Archfiend deck. So if I couldn't make my own Duel Monsters monsters, my Yu-Gi-Oh! OC would run an Archfiend deck. But if a Porygon2 and an Archfiend deck are reflections of me, who am I? Who am I that my cards of choice would be Archfiend cards and my Pokémon of choice would be a Porygon2? While making peanut KiSS dolls? Whose animal avatars were a goat and a turtle? What "style" or "personality" does that reflect? That gave me a lot to think about.
Graal? I was pretty much ready to roll. I had levels built, I had assets drawn and coded, I just needed to get it online, however that worked. Until the following year, when I had to leave Graal. Something about it no longer being as free to play as it used to be? It was a devastating blow, it was my only community to chat with people. Besides AOL, which was becoming less of a community to me, and more of an accessory to other communities. I didn't go to AOL to find people, I found people first, and then we traded AOL screennames. I needed a new game. Preferably anime-esque, like Graal kinda is. Picture this...
2004. George H.W. Bush will almost certainly be re-elected. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the Governor of California, despite groping some women. Because he apologized and we all accepted it like adults and moved on. He remains a harmless object of fun for the late night circuit. Speaking of which, Conan is on in the background while you search for "anime style MMORPG" on Yahoo! Ragnarok Online comes up. You groan and refine your search to "free to play anime style MMORPG," lamenting your joblessness. The next sketch is starting. "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage." You haven't really seen much of this sketch, and you tend to change the channel when it's on because it's not that funny. But this time, you're hooked.
"I'm a huge fan of animation, especially Japanese anime." The anxiety is sudden and consuming. No!!! Talking about anime on mainstream normie TV??? What is he doing??? It's very important to you that the things you like not get mixed in with normie stuff. For one, it's like trying to explain Inuyasha to your dad. Just embarrassing and frustrating. For two, you don't want posers co-opting it and mixing it with the mainstream. He's RUINING IT!!! Why does everything have to be popular? Why does everything have to be twisted to appeal to a mass audience? Somebody has to take the fight to the posers and the sellouts. And you know just the people to complain about this to...
I discovered a lot of things in 2004. It was the year I discovered 4chan. My "people to complain to." I heard about it from talk on the Internet about a guy named Moot had allegedly run off with people's server donations to Mexico. It was 4chan that really affirmed my whole "Keep the normies out of my secret club" ethic. Because it was understood, people on 4chan are not normal people, and they, while not that keen to be my personal army, were keen enough that if I talk about how they mentioned anime on Conan, someone will acknowledge that that's an unusual thing. For instance, Linkin Park. For years I saw them as some kind of countercultural touchstone. It was from that music video that I connected the dots between anime and video games and butt rock and skateboarding and all the other things that people of a certain type tend to like. But then they released "Collision Course" with Jay-Z. And I was like "Jay-Z??? But that's normie music!!! This is just like with Pierre Bernard!" And I went on 4chan and talked about how weird it was. I was done with Linkin Park. It was Good Charlotte from now on for me. They certainly would never go mainstream, they more or less said so in "The Anthem." And people seemed to understand and agree. But I never really felt as much sense of community as I would've liked on 4chan. For one, the site was frequently under attack and shut down, so I didn't have a lot of opportunities to use it. For two, there are no usernames on 4chan. Just tripcodes. Because anonymity is the point. So when I went around posting with a tripcode and putting my e-mail in and signing each post, people didn't really like it, because that wasn't the point of 4chan. People would e-mail me, explicitly stating no one cared who I was. I guess signing each post was a little too far, but it was very important to me to have an identity on 4chan. As best I could. It was a shame, I had plenty of places to get Flash animations and 2D, but 4chan was a place where I could not only get it, but discuss it. And ask directly where to find more. It could've been so much more for me, if people weren't so hung up on anonymity. Fortunately, I had websites like Aeries Dies and Hongfire on the side. The imageboard/gallery format of website was really starting to snowball. Sites where you could browse hentai for free, instead of sites that tried to sell it to you. And while 4chan wanted anonymity, Hongfire had a community and forums. I had other things to join in 2004 that also had accounts. Like Albino Black Sheep and Newgrounds. Runescape and Gaia Online. Where you could customize profiles and express yourself through them. Which people mostly did through quizzes, the kind you saw on Quizilla or Quizdiva or Muted Faith, as discussed in the past. The one with the What Mage Are You quiz that I scored an Earth Mage on. Thanks to the various profile pages I was offered on various sites, I felt like I didn't need a Geocities or Angelfire or Tripod page. Because these services were so clunky and limited, I moved away from them and decided to link my Internet exploits together on the strength of my brand alone. LiquidIce and Jubei Saotome didn't have Geocities pages. You saw them on Graal, maybe on the Graal forums, saw their profiles, heard about some other things they did, or you searched their names, and you just saw other profiles for them come up on other websites.
Gaia was (and still is) a glorified chat room, I guess you could say. The real objective is to have as nice an avatar as you want, and then you mostly chat on the boards. "Community dress up" my brother called it. He didn't like it. But I did, mostly because I got to express myself/my brand through my avatar. A lot like in the next big game I spent most of my time on. 2004 was a big year for browser-based online games, but what really caught my eye was a client-based game called Endless Online.
www.endless-online.com
It's a long and complicated story, but it's kinda dead now, as you can see by the disrepair of the site. It was kinda always dead, come to think of it, but back in 2004 it was the first thing I signed onto when starting a day of doing nothing but browsing the Internet because I didn't have a job. I loved Endless Online. Maybe I still do. Here's a video of what it was like.
This is a very recent video and it's from a fanmade server, but this is a good approximation of what Endless Online was about. This was my "anime style MMORPG." I don't know if it was how early I joined, or the relatively small size of the community, but I was somebody on Endless Online. I spent most of my game in Global Chat, just talking about what the rest of the round table was talking about. Where in other games I might've been fighting enemies or whatever. Which was just as well. In these early days of Endless Online there was no stat system. So all the enemies died in one hit and their drops were frequent. So my avatar or "paperdoll" was built to my liking pretty quickly. Bartle's Taxonomy says the four types of online gamer are the Achiever, the Explorer, the Socializer, and the Killer. Socializing was kinda everything I wanted from a game.
elearningindustry.com
In addition to ingame Global Chat and forums on the website, there was an IRC chat that only the most tight knit of us paid any attention to. Just something to let run in the background while we were doing other things. People like Reizoku, Kaizoku, Ruki, Kaguya, Shroud, Arashi, Monk... those are the names I can remember off the top of my head. More can be found here. If you guys are out there...
We even had a fanmade Internet radio station for a while, hosted through Winamp. The hosts played whatever music they had on their computers, and as any good radio station does, they played Christmas music around the Christmas holidays. It played well with the game, which also shifted into Christmas mode around the same time. The rest of the year was dedicated to replaying songs from The Pettit Project.
Where I wasn't so much at home was the fanarting community. Specifically a place called Fanart-Central. Like I said earlier, I watched a lot of FoxBox/4Kids produced anime. And the fashionable thing to do back then was to complain about/laugh at the edits that were made to the shows. I didn't do that. I didn't want to undermine the shows I was watching with talk like "This isn't the REAL version! They had GUNS in the REAL version!" Shaman King got this a lot. It wasn't so much that everyone was united against me, it's just I had no one to unite with, me being in the minority of people who liked what 4Kids was producing. Back then, and I stress this for a reason, back THEN, 4Kids could do no right, no matter what show they aired. Accuracy to the original was paramount. So when I realized I was alone, I didn't really do much fanarting. I drew my Sonic OCs, I drew a lot of non-4Kids stuff, but I had no people on Fanart-Central. Not like I did on Endless. One thing Fanart-Central was good for, browsing the various categories of fanart was a good way to learn about shows and games and stuff that I hadn't heard of yet. And some that I had heard of, but hadn't been inspired to check out because I didn't see much of a fandom for. Like Fire Emblem. I heard about it from Smash Bros. Melee, but I mostly knew it as a Japan-exclusive game in the vein of Shining Force. But looking at Fanart-Central and the larger fanart community, there was a pretty big following there. Mostly of 14 year old girls making gay crack 'ships of the pretty, pretty men. It was thanks to this fandom that I decided to give Fire Emblem a shot. It didn't stick. For one, I came to understand it as a game for 14 year old girls making gay crack 'ships of the pretty, pretty men. For another, my experience was with Shining Force, not Fire Emblem. So permanent death, permanent weapon loss, no area of effect spells, most of the games needing translation patches, and an overbearing bishounen appeal, it was easy to drop Fire Emblem. Also, thanks to the fanart community's penchant for original Japanese over dubs, what was popular on Fanart-Central didn't always line up with what was on Western TV. Naruto was huge. But Naruto would not air on Toonami until the following year. So I couldn't relate. I didn't "import" like that unless it was hentai, which I never watched dubbed. But I did like F-ZERO, which was very unpopular on Fanart-Central due to it being a 4Kids produced dub. And the franchise as a whole remains unpopular to this day. But me seeing the show, and being like "Hey that's where Captain Falcon comes from" I was inspired to pick up F-ZERO GX. Which was really hard, especially for me coming from Quantum Redshift. Expecting there to be weapons or something. Like with Shining Force, I was spoiled by the "rip off." But it's just the price I pay, in both anime and video games I shirk "originals only elitism." Mine was a Shining Force and Quantum Redshift household.
Endless Online was good to me where Fanart-Central was less so. But you know who else was good to me? The Mortal Kombat community. Mortal Kombat: Deception was making news, and I hadn't bought a Mortal Kombat game since Mortal Kombat 4. My only exposure to Mortal Kombat was the odd "Scorpion vs. Ryu" animation. So I decided to see what was up in the community. I found that not only did Midway have its own forums, but Ed Boon himself and other development people at Midway would regularly host something called "Fight Night" on IRC Chat, where you could talk to them. My ambition from the beginning was to join forums that would put me in the sight of people like Ed Boon, the makers of the things I liked, so I could reach out and touch them. This was exactly that. So the Midway Forums were another frequent hang of mine starting in 2004. Where we discussed our OCs and fanmade Fatalities, shared many YTMNDs, and followed the Flash animation collection of Tabmok99 at The Kombat Pavilion.
The point of getting into "toyetic" franchises like Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! and Beyblade and so on was so I could play in tournaments and make a name for myself in the tournament circuit. If that was possible. Tournaments did happen, but I didn't know anyone who was "tournament famous." But maybe I could do well enough that I could be "tournament famous." Now, the only Pokémon tournaments I knew of were TCG tournaments. And I could only pick one to be the "real" Pokémon game. I wasn't gonna play a spin-off. So I couldn't play the card game, I was playing the video games. Beyblade? I couldn't find a tournament. And what even is the metagame for Beyblade? I would love to be as talented as Tyson and Kai and Brooklyn and everyone else from the show but I don't have a Bit Beast. LARPing can only take you so far. But Yu-Gi-Oh! was not only a game I myself could play, but the Yu-Gi-Oh! website had a Tournament Store Locator, so I could actually find out how to enter regional tournaments. I never saw an official regional tournament in my city, but the one I entered was at least in my state. 320-300 miles away, according to Google Maps. Might as well have been out of state. And I traveled all that way just to lose. To a child. I remember being so upset, because he was using Chaos monsters that I wasn't too keen on the rulings for. And I could've called over a ref to weigh in, but I just... didn't, for some reason. Didn't wanna call him a liar, I guess. What I do know is, when I went home I kept real busy trying to look up the specifics of the card in various cases, so I could complain about it on Pojo. I was still pretty sure I was robbed. But what stuck with me the most was that not only did I lose to a kid, but I was surrounded by kids. And it became very apparent to me: My hobbies are probably not for grown men. Moot, the founder of 4chan, was a goddamn teenager himself. And here I was. In my 30s. With no job. Playing kids games and LOSING. How the hell did he even make it to Otakon, did he tell his parents he created 4chan??? How did it work??? But for the most part the shame I felt was "I haven't done what I should with my life" shame. Towards the end of 2004 this would become a more powerful shame with the debut of a show that would go down in infamy: To Catch A Predator. Airing the filthy laundry of grown men who have explicitly sexual chats with underage girls. It gave me pause to look at myself. All the online games and fanart circles I was interacting with? Mostly minors. I didn't know everyone's age, but when I did know someone's age, they were usually a teenager. And throughout my Internet career... I had "cybered." And here's the thing. I made certain I never asked their ages. Because I knew deep down, I didn't want to know what the truth might be. Better yet, I never gave my age. That was the truly telling part. Deep down, I wanted them to believe I was younger than I was. I played these games and interacted with these kids because I had the mind and spirit of a child. And on the Internet I basically could be a child, as far as anyone knew. You spend so much time you barely notice that you're a 31 year-old trying to fit in with teenagers, you're just one of them now. And then along comes TCaP to snap you out of your delusion.
I had to make some changes in the new year. Changes that we'll discuss in Part 2. I'll put it up later today.
https://incels.is/threads/spookpill...st-halloween-music-the-70s-or-the-80s.153550/
It's not an ego thing, I just really wanna know what Halloween music the community prefers. What Halloween aesthetic we like the most. I don't know any other way to do that except with these polls, but no one's in the mood for Halloween, it seems. Except for a scant few. Like @Ritalincel. Avatar in season, more than I can say for myself. I commend your spiritedness.
Anyway, recently I got my first trick and my first treat of the season. The trick? I saw a ghost in my mirror! My own ghostly visage. For when I went to shave my beard, I noticed grey hairs in it. That's it. That's the death sentence. As I explained in "Men of a Certain Age, Wage, & Weight." Bad skin, and grey hair. These are what make you look old. I'm still working on the skin. But grey hair? Typically I shave my face about once a week. It's gonna have to be near about daily now. I cannot let the grey show. Either that, or color it. And people can tell when you're coloring your facial hair. Just like in that Beta Force sketch.
My treat wasn't much better. I got ten dollars. But it came at incredible cost to someone else. I was sitting at the bus with this guy, and this other guy walks up to us both and gives us envelopes. Somber and silent. Then he walks off. We open our envelopes. Mine has 10 dollars. Pretty cool for a random find. But it came with a note explaining why he gave us the money: His mother, two years back to the day, died of breast & brain cancer. And so consumed by loss is he that he decided every year on his mother's death day he's gonna go around randomly handing out $1,000 in $10 denominations to people, in the hopes that they use it to go out for coffee with their loved ones or something. Make sure that others don't waste the precious moments.
I was absolutely ambushed. Imagine years pass after a tragedy, and it doesn't stop hurting. It's like it'll never stop hurting. My relationship with my parents is fine! But now I'm like, how can I help this guy, with his dead mom?
My relationship with my parents is fine, but this does remind me about how my relationship with some of my sisters and most of my extended family, right now, is NOT fine. And maybe that's what I should've spent the $10 on. In fact, 2003 was probably the last year we were a truly cohesive unit. Before my own period of loss began, and with it a 4 year sweet spot I like to call "The Emo Era."
Told in two posts, because the character count ran long and I had a lot to say about this period. Picture Part 1...
It's the Saturday after Memorial Day and the family just kinda found themselves in the mood for a cookout, so you grabbed your Xbox and Quantum Redshift and decided to pop in.
You're more into that punk rocker sk8er boi music the radio is playing nowadays, but there's something about the melancholy tones of the Solar City track. Carrying the mood of a cool summer's twilight. Something sad, something nostalgic, you don't quite understand it. But as the retries roll on eternal, you start hearing a different song, coming from downstairs. A song you understand all too well. One of two songs, that is. You fight a twinge of shame for recognizing the music, then you run downstairs. You have young nieces and nephews down there. And it's 2003, so it's still inappropriate for children to watch what you know is about to go down. You get to the landing, overlooking the living room. You're too late. People of all ages have gathered around the TV to watch the 2003 MTV Movie awards, and there on stage is an army of teenage girls, led in pillow combat by the most controversial band of our age, t.A.T.u.
As with all sex scenes, the best way to salvage this now is to just go back upstairs and try not to be noticed. You make sure the door is closed extra tight. You don't wanna be around right now.
There's a certain image that defines most decades. You think 70s, you think bell bottoms, afros, & degeneracy. You think 80s, you think synth, Outrun, and The Memphis Group. And when you think the 2000s? It has many facets, but I think at the core of it is one thing: Emo. Envision a scene kid, scrawny, greasy hair, skinny jeans, checkered Vans, candy bracelet, Invader Zim/Kingdom Heards/Nightmare Before Christmas t-shirt, speaks in "rawrs," that's the 2000s. A time remembered fondly by millennials. I think the late 80s/early 90s might be just a little more distinct for me because I had something like friends back then, and a social life, but the Emo Era is a close second. 24/7 bangers on the radio, the best MMORPGs, the best fanart/fanfic communities, the best videos... my relationship with my family was at its peak, so gatherings like this were a good cope. I still had no friends or sex life, but I was appreciating being an uncle. Having people to spend money on. Especially around the holidays. I had recently ditched my desktop and bought an Inspiron laptop, so I could take my computer with me when my family got together. And my love for the holidays meant I had to kit my computer out for the holidays too. Customize the display themes to fit the holiday. For instance, Halloween would involve a lot of orange and black, changing default fonts to Tempus Sans... and I had a neat custom cursor program called Comet Cursor. Which was technically adware, but I had all kinds of adware on my computer at the time.
I would go into Seasonal, pick the right Halloween cursor, and nieces and nephews just loved it. It was like the whole point of having a laptop. So I could make it holiday-themed, then show it to the kids, and just be the coolest. Holiday themes, Felix The Cat, BonziBuddy, I was the uncle with the cool computer.
This was my life, up until 2003. I think the last family moment, as we knew them, was when we went to Cedar Point to celebrate my kid brother's graduation from college. Then days turned dark. The family started to grow apart. I think the catalyst was my sister distancing herself and her wife and her kid/my nephew from our parents. We had never experienced anything as drastic as a "disowning" like that. And my other sister sided with her, and they spent their holidays with their new family. Or, our in-laws. And other family members around my age had kinda been following suit. Having kids and starting families of their own and kinda fading away from the pack. It wasn't an outright disowning like my sisters, more of a "We don't have time to come over because we're doing something with our own group." I think the heartbreak of this proved fatal for some of the older matriarchs and patriarchs of the family. Aunts and uncles started coming down with various organ failure diseases. Many died. All this loss, from growing old and/or apart, left us as way different as a family unit, compared to when it was me who was graduating college. Also, I think less money was coming in. So we stopped doing things as a family. I know I didn't have any money to kick back, because 2003 was also the year that I got laid off. And it was dire straits, I had to get any job/jobs I could. Maybe me losing my job was also a factor in the sudden instability of our family. It was almost definitely a factor in ANOTHER tragedy to befall me in 2003, I was going noticeably bald. I think the stress of financial uncertainty and being buried in so many things to do that I didn't know how I was gonna do them, the stress sped up the hair loss process. I had to have been losing it before 2003, but it was in 2003, after I lost my job, that I first took notice. When I was able to touch the top of my head, and just feel scalp. No buffer of hair at all. Thatched and ragged.
So here I was, heartbroken and foisted into slackerdom. I might not have had the hair for it, but spiritually, I was in my emo phase.
So what did I do with my life, frequently between jobs? I embraced the LDAR. I found myself with a lot more time on my hands where all I could do was wait for results. I didn't have to go bed as early, so I stayed up watching late night trash TV. TV Funhouse, The Man Show, Blind Date and The 5th Wheel. With commercials for Girls Gone Wild and We Are 18 interspersed. Thinking "Man, I totally gotta go out and see some of that someday." Just as I did for Wild On and Street Match. I never did. But it was a comfortable fantasy to keep in the back of my head. The idea that I could definitely, someday, go to where GGW is, or call We Are 18, or be on a dating show. I just needed to figure out what cities they did casting calls in, and go there. But a show that really stuck with me was this cartoon, Undergrads.
I was able to catch reruns of it when I didn't have a job. And yes, I realize it's a cartoon, but I saw so much of myself in the main character, Nitz. There's an episode where Nitz feels like he hasn't had enough social experiences in college. And I watch it, thinking, "That's how I feel about MY college experience!" There's an episode that focuses on how Nitz is a virgin, and feels sexual tension when his oneitis, Kimmy, invites him to the sexual health clinic where she works. And I watch it, thinking, "Man, I sure wish I had a crush to deftly navigate feelings with." There's an episode where he ends up rooming with a female friend of his, but because she's female and he's in her room where she isn't always totally clothed, there's sexual tension. And I watch it, thinking, "I wish I had a dormmate to foster sexual tension with." I wasn't working at the time, and the only social life I had was the Internet and my parents. So it was really weighing on me, I should go back to college, do it right this time. Or I would have, if I had the money. And I didn't, so I was stuck at home, alone, with my thoughts about how I had missed out on college. I wasn't beat up too much about not getting into college shenanigans, because I found something else that appealed to me: AmIHotOrNot.com.
I got it in my head that what I really wanted to do was meet one of the hot girls from Hot Or Not. I didn't know how I was gonna do it, but that didn't stop me from desperately orbiting every one that I found. I didn't even ask to meet, I just showered them with desperate adoration. "I just wanted to say you are very beautiful and blah blah blah." One woman actually reached out to me. She was a calendar model and "offered" me a chance to buy one of her calendars if I was "serious." So that was another thing I did. Browsed Hot Or Not and pondered the possibility of being with one of those women. Speaking of my sex drive, because the family wasn't getting together like it used to, I got rid of Felix and Bonzi. Replaced them with Kahli, Tahni, and Maeka. Seeing as I was the only person using my computer now.
I always felt like the kind of people who like anime are also the same people who would listen to Linkin Park. Just like how furriness and anime overlap. There were many "domains" of Internet weebdom. The shows you watch, the music you listen to, the games you play. And I wanted to be a notable name in all that, so I figured the best thing to do would be to have a hand in every overlapping jar. I like anime. What else do anime fans like? Alternative metal. They like to draw fanart. They like to write fanfics. They like skateboarding and other "punky" things. And goth things. And Invader Zim and Kingdom Hearts. On and on I went, compiling sort of a "hobbies" or "likes" list. But it wasn't enough to just like these things, I had to actually pursue these things. Do stuff with these things. I had to become a skateboarding guitarist fanartist who shops at Hot Topic and has a fursona, several video game achievements, and a developed server on Graal. Basically, I had to be that quintessential "emo" concept. And my image was a big part of it. Because I not only was it important to me to be a good... whatever this is, but through being the best this I can be, I might meet people in the community. As a fan of these things, I'll just go where ever other fans go. Interact with people there. Connect over our shared interests. I could have a rich social/sexual life even though I missed it in college. But what was I supposed to do with my hair? As balding as I was at this point, my hair was dead weight. I was better off without any of it. So that's what I went with. No dickin' around trying to make the impossible work. I shaved my head. I decided my image would lean towards a harder kind of "emo," or whatever it is I was being. Less sensitive guy, more headbutting skinhead guy.
The formal to-do list looked something like this:
1. Complete and maintain shrine
2. Learn how to play guitar
3. Learn how to skateboard
4. Learn to draw.
5. Draw profile cards for my OCs
6. Develop Graal content.
7. Get ROMs of all of the SNES/Sega CD and prior games, play them, write about them
8. Find the "main base" for the fandoms of the games I like and join
9. Find the "main base" for the groups on Yahoo! and join
10. Build your Pokémon team/Duel Monsters deck/Beyblade/any other toyetic stuff, run the tournament circuit
11. Use iMesh to get anime you can't watch on TV
12. Find KiSS dolls and follow their creators, collaborate with them
13. Make video game sprite flashes for Newgrounds, TX Mafia, VGDC, Razoric, etc
14. Buy clothes & accessories that fit your decided fashion style
15. Be a member on multiple MMORPGs & websites, have multiple profiles, to spread the brand
16. Set up journal/blogging accounts
For being a guitarist, I bought what guitar I could afford, and downloaded FruityLoops and Amplitube. Eventually I realized I was in over my head. I didn't "give up" per se, I told myself I would return to it when I had the means and resources to learn how to do it well. Skateboarding? I didn't have a park with a bowl, but I did have a steep highway nearby that was deserted in the early mornings and late afternoons. And I had no job, so I could just go out there and practice. Until something, I'm not sure what, happened to my right shin. Mayo Clinic calls it "Osgood-Schlatter disease," but it's been years now and it still hasn't cleared up. Whatever it is, I needed that leg to kick and flip with. And with no job I couldn't afford to go to a chiropractor, so I just let it be.
The drawing I think I was a little more successful with. I borrowed some "How To Draw Manga" books from the library and the rest was history. And me learning to draw came at a pivotal point in dubbed anime history. Dragon Ball Z had ended, and 4Kids had its own syndicated Saturday morning block with "The FoxBox." It would be here that I got most of my anime, after DBZ I kinda stopped watching Toonami. And Cartoon Network, period. As did a lot of older people, for it was around this time that the "Powerhouse Era" of Cartoon Network was drawing to a close. It wasn't officially dead yet, but with the end of Cartoon Cartoon Fridays it might as well have been. Kids' WB was only good for Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!, ABC Family was only good for Beyblade, and if there was any other dubbed anime to watch it was hidden somewhere in no-man's land on some nowhere channel like UPN. 4Kids basically had a monopoly on dub production and broadcast in the West. So these were the shows I drew fanart for and developed OCs for. Like most people, I cut my teeth on Sonic the Hedgehog. Just easier to draw, I guess. But what was key with my Sonic OCs, and all of my OCs, was that they not infringe on pre-existing characters. I couldn't take a dynamic that belonged to someone else. For instance, my OC couldn't be a super fast hedgehog. I had to come up with a role that hadn't been filled. Why? For one, it was seen as Mary Sue-ish. And it was nobler not to do that. Today "Mary Sue" is hard to define and is usually responded to with "Oh, so you don't like that she's strong because she's a girl?" But before everything got all mixed up and twisted, it was a lot simpler to not be a Mary Sue: Don't take any roles that already belong to someone else. You can't be more logical than Spock, you can't be stronger than Goku, and you can't be married to anyone who clearly already has a canon 'ship. Just have respect for the established canon. Not everyone heeded this, but those who didn't knew what they were doing. Some people just wanted to 'ship themselves with characters in shows, and the fan following that these fanartist/fanfic writers had understood it, maybe even followed them for it. For two? I guess, deep down, it was because I wanted to be able to fit into the show or game or whatever, if by some miracle I was able to be in those shows or games or whatever. There's no point in making a second fast hedgehog. They already have Sonic. Makes my OC all the more pointless. I made not one, but two Sonic OCs, "Vulcan the Ram" and "Barrel the Tortoise." I figured we had a fast guy in Sonic, but do we have a strong guy? I thought there wasn't one, because I had no knowledge of Mighty the Armadillo. And some might say that Knuckles is the strong one, but I thought about that, and I concluded that "super strength" wasn't really his thing. Punching was, climbing was, having big fists was, being tough was, but not being as strong as Sonic is fast. So that's what my two OCs would focus on.
You didn't need much to draw. Well, you did, but I didn't know that yet. I was yet unintroduced to the worlds of toner and special pencils and modeling dolls. Drawing was the simplest "productive" thing on my to-do list. Not like, for instance, Flash videos. They were fun to watch, the Mario vs. Sonic craze was at its peak in the early-to-mid 2000s, and I wanted to throw my hat into the community ring. Make something people would be excited about. And I knew about the Adobe Suite from my last job. But I didn't know enough about how to get sprites from games and animate them. Was everyone taking screenshots from emulators and cropping the assets? But mostly, it was too distracting just watching the sprite flashes.
I was able to make KiSS dolls though. I played them as well as making my own. I didn't get to collaborate with anyone, because I was still but a beginner. And these guys were producing high quality interactive erotic dolls. So I was content to just be a supportive fan for a while, as I sharpened my art skills. And promoted my brand. My brand/alter ego had gone through some retooling, and I decided peanuts were gonna be a big thing with me. So I made a Dancing Peanut KiSS doll. He was a dude. And as I was drawing his wardrobe, something occurred to me: There aren't a lot of male KiSS dolls. It's all girls. But why? Who is it for? This question bugged me. Because these dolls were way naked, so I figured they were meant to appeal to people who were attracted to women. But were they? Or if I was to say that, would the makers be like "No it's not supposed to be for that it's 'tasteful nudity' and it's actually targeted towards women?" It's essentially the Sailor Moon conundrum all over again. And so I kinda lost my taste for KiSS dolls. Unless I knew for sure that I was supposed to enjoy them for the lewd content. And it wasn't often that I could confirm that.
As far as "finding the main base" for fandoms like the games I liked, the idea was this: Where should I go if I want my fandom to be noticed by the highest of higher-ups? Where do I go if I wanna reach out and touch someone with my fandom? To someday, like, be mentioned in an interview? If I wanted Sonic Team to say "Hey, nice Sonic OC." Probably wouldn't happen if I stick to Yahoo! Groups. Or some underpopulated personal forum that no one knows exists. I didn't know where exactly I should go, but I figured it would have to be a big name in whatever industry I'm trying to make a name for myself in. So I figured, for video games, I should probably join IGN. Other Yahoo! Groups were a little harder to pinpoint. Especially as I kept finding new ones. There was a Group for the works of Blas Gallego. Where do I go if I wanna be deep into the Dolly fandom? There was a Group for the erotic writings of VC Nathan. Where do I go if I wanna submit my own Hilda Humper fanfics? There was a Group for art from Jab Comix. What about that? Or 3rd Art? Or Cherry Pop Tart? What if it wasn't 2D, but porn stars I wanted to orbit? So I made accounts where I thought I could reach the core fandom, but a lot of the time I was stuck on Yahoo! Groups.
As far as my look, it wasn't enough to just dress right. I had to express myself aesthetically through all things. How I looked, how my house looked, everything. I needed tattoos. I had seen Quan Chi from Mortal Kombat, right? And he was bald, but he had tattoos on his head. I wanted something like that. Also I was really into Oddworld games, so I wanted tattoos like Abe had. A big one on my chest, and two on each palm. I didn't even know if that was possible, let alone reasonable if I ever wanted to have a job again, but I figured other people in the community do stuff like this, why not me? Only posers cared about the consequences of getting a tattoo. I didn't wanna be like those preppies, I was gonna command attention, respect, and even admiration in the non-preppy community!
I also had to express myself through my Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and Pokémon team. On the show, one's personality was reflected in their deck. If you were a pallid, scrawny guy named Bones, you had lots of dark zombie cards. If you're a burly spearfisherman named Mako Tsunami, you had lots of fish and your flagship monster is The Legendary Fisherman. So what would my deck look like? Well, this was essentially like OC development. I'm coming up with a Pokémon for myself as if I was a Pokémon trainer. I'm coming up with a deck to run, as if I was a Duel Monsters player on Yu-Gi-Oh!. So the principle of "Don't infringe on another character" applied here. No Pikachu, no Dark Magician, etc, because those are the avatars of people already on those shows. My Pokémon was figured out pretty quickly. I needed a Pokémon that wasn't anyone's on the show, and it just so happened that Porygon was more or less banned from the show ever since "Electric Soldier Porygon." Including its evolution, Porygon2. And it was just too good an opportunity to pass up. No one had gotten in on this. If I couldn't just create my own Pokémon, like Fox Kids encouraged people to create their own Digimon, my Pokémon OC would travel around with a Porygon2. Yu-Gi-Oh! was a little tougher, because I was really into the dark Egyptian themed cards in the Pharaonic Guardian expansion. But I think that was kinda taken at the time. But eventually came the Dark Crisis booster pack, and it brought a new theme of card: The Archfiends. Chess-themed demon monsters.
And at the time, no one on the show ran a dedicated Archfiend deck. So if I couldn't make my own Duel Monsters monsters, my Yu-Gi-Oh! OC would run an Archfiend deck. But if a Porygon2 and an Archfiend deck are reflections of me, who am I? Who am I that my cards of choice would be Archfiend cards and my Pokémon of choice would be a Porygon2? While making peanut KiSS dolls? Whose animal avatars were a goat and a turtle? What "style" or "personality" does that reflect? That gave me a lot to think about.
Graal? I was pretty much ready to roll. I had levels built, I had assets drawn and coded, I just needed to get it online, however that worked. Until the following year, when I had to leave Graal. Something about it no longer being as free to play as it used to be? It was a devastating blow, it was my only community to chat with people. Besides AOL, which was becoming less of a community to me, and more of an accessory to other communities. I didn't go to AOL to find people, I found people first, and then we traded AOL screennames. I needed a new game. Preferably anime-esque, like Graal kinda is. Picture this...
2004. George H.W. Bush will almost certainly be re-elected. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the Governor of California, despite groping some women. Because he apologized and we all accepted it like adults and moved on. He remains a harmless object of fun for the late night circuit. Speaking of which, Conan is on in the background while you search for "anime style MMORPG" on Yahoo! Ragnarok Online comes up. You groan and refine your search to "free to play anime style MMORPG," lamenting your joblessness. The next sketch is starting. "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage." You haven't really seen much of this sketch, and you tend to change the channel when it's on because it's not that funny. But this time, you're hooked.
"I'm a huge fan of animation, especially Japanese anime." The anxiety is sudden and consuming. No!!! Talking about anime on mainstream normie TV??? What is he doing??? It's very important to you that the things you like not get mixed in with normie stuff. For one, it's like trying to explain Inuyasha to your dad. Just embarrassing and frustrating. For two, you don't want posers co-opting it and mixing it with the mainstream. He's RUINING IT!!! Why does everything have to be popular? Why does everything have to be twisted to appeal to a mass audience? Somebody has to take the fight to the posers and the sellouts. And you know just the people to complain about this to...
I discovered a lot of things in 2004. It was the year I discovered 4chan. My "people to complain to." I heard about it from talk on the Internet about a guy named Moot had allegedly run off with people's server donations to Mexico. It was 4chan that really affirmed my whole "Keep the normies out of my secret club" ethic. Because it was understood, people on 4chan are not normal people, and they, while not that keen to be my personal army, were keen enough that if I talk about how they mentioned anime on Conan, someone will acknowledge that that's an unusual thing. For instance, Linkin Park. For years I saw them as some kind of countercultural touchstone. It was from that music video that I connected the dots between anime and video games and butt rock and skateboarding and all the other things that people of a certain type tend to like. But then they released "Collision Course" with Jay-Z. And I was like "Jay-Z??? But that's normie music!!! This is just like with Pierre Bernard!" And I went on 4chan and talked about how weird it was. I was done with Linkin Park. It was Good Charlotte from now on for me. They certainly would never go mainstream, they more or less said so in "The Anthem." And people seemed to understand and agree. But I never really felt as much sense of community as I would've liked on 4chan. For one, the site was frequently under attack and shut down, so I didn't have a lot of opportunities to use it. For two, there are no usernames on 4chan. Just tripcodes. Because anonymity is the point. So when I went around posting with a tripcode and putting my e-mail in and signing each post, people didn't really like it, because that wasn't the point of 4chan. People would e-mail me, explicitly stating no one cared who I was. I guess signing each post was a little too far, but it was very important to me to have an identity on 4chan. As best I could. It was a shame, I had plenty of places to get Flash animations and 2D, but 4chan was a place where I could not only get it, but discuss it. And ask directly where to find more. It could've been so much more for me, if people weren't so hung up on anonymity. Fortunately, I had websites like Aeries Dies and Hongfire on the side. The imageboard/gallery format of website was really starting to snowball. Sites where you could browse hentai for free, instead of sites that tried to sell it to you. And while 4chan wanted anonymity, Hongfire had a community and forums. I had other things to join in 2004 that also had accounts. Like Albino Black Sheep and Newgrounds. Runescape and Gaia Online. Where you could customize profiles and express yourself through them. Which people mostly did through quizzes, the kind you saw on Quizilla or Quizdiva or Muted Faith, as discussed in the past. The one with the What Mage Are You quiz that I scored an Earth Mage on. Thanks to the various profile pages I was offered on various sites, I felt like I didn't need a Geocities or Angelfire or Tripod page. Because these services were so clunky and limited, I moved away from them and decided to link my Internet exploits together on the strength of my brand alone. LiquidIce and Jubei Saotome didn't have Geocities pages. You saw them on Graal, maybe on the Graal forums, saw their profiles, heard about some other things they did, or you searched their names, and you just saw other profiles for them come up on other websites.
Gaia was (and still is) a glorified chat room, I guess you could say. The real objective is to have as nice an avatar as you want, and then you mostly chat on the boards. "Community dress up" my brother called it. He didn't like it. But I did, mostly because I got to express myself/my brand through my avatar. A lot like in the next big game I spent most of my time on. 2004 was a big year for browser-based online games, but what really caught my eye was a client-based game called Endless Online.
Endless Online - Massive online RPG
Welcome back to the free classic online rpg!
It's a long and complicated story, but it's kinda dead now, as you can see by the disrepair of the site. It was kinda always dead, come to think of it, but back in 2004 it was the first thing I signed onto when starting a day of doing nothing but browsing the Internet because I didn't have a job. I loved Endless Online. Maybe I still do. Here's a video of what it was like.
This is a very recent video and it's from a fanmade server, but this is a good approximation of what Endless Online was about. This was my "anime style MMORPG." I don't know if it was how early I joined, or the relatively small size of the community, but I was somebody on Endless Online. I spent most of my game in Global Chat, just talking about what the rest of the round table was talking about. Where in other games I might've been fighting enemies or whatever. Which was just as well. In these early days of Endless Online there was no stat system. So all the enemies died in one hit and their drops were frequent. So my avatar or "paperdoll" was built to my liking pretty quickly. Bartle's Taxonomy says the four types of online gamer are the Achiever, the Explorer, the Socializer, and the Killer. Socializing was kinda everything I wanted from a game.
4 Types Of Gamers And Learner Engagement
Wondering what is the correlation between 4 Types Of Gamers And Learner Engagement? Check the correlation between 4 Types Of Gamers And Learner Engagement.
elearningindustry.com
In addition to ingame Global Chat and forums on the website, there was an IRC chat that only the most tight knit of us paid any attention to. Just something to let run in the background while we were doing other things. People like Reizoku, Kaizoku, Ruki, Kaguya, Shroud, Arashi, Monk... those are the names I can remember off the top of my head. More can be found here. If you guys are out there...
We even had a fanmade Internet radio station for a while, hosted through Winamp. The hosts played whatever music they had on their computers, and as any good radio station does, they played Christmas music around the Christmas holidays. It played well with the game, which also shifted into Christmas mode around the same time. The rest of the year was dedicated to replaying songs from The Pettit Project.
Where I wasn't so much at home was the fanarting community. Specifically a place called Fanart-Central. Like I said earlier, I watched a lot of FoxBox/4Kids produced anime. And the fashionable thing to do back then was to complain about/laugh at the edits that were made to the shows. I didn't do that. I didn't want to undermine the shows I was watching with talk like "This isn't the REAL version! They had GUNS in the REAL version!" Shaman King got this a lot. It wasn't so much that everyone was united against me, it's just I had no one to unite with, me being in the minority of people who liked what 4Kids was producing. Back then, and I stress this for a reason, back THEN, 4Kids could do no right, no matter what show they aired. Accuracy to the original was paramount. So when I realized I was alone, I didn't really do much fanarting. I drew my Sonic OCs, I drew a lot of non-4Kids stuff, but I had no people on Fanart-Central. Not like I did on Endless. One thing Fanart-Central was good for, browsing the various categories of fanart was a good way to learn about shows and games and stuff that I hadn't heard of yet. And some that I had heard of, but hadn't been inspired to check out because I didn't see much of a fandom for. Like Fire Emblem. I heard about it from Smash Bros. Melee, but I mostly knew it as a Japan-exclusive game in the vein of Shining Force. But looking at Fanart-Central and the larger fanart community, there was a pretty big following there. Mostly of 14 year old girls making gay crack 'ships of the pretty, pretty men. It was thanks to this fandom that I decided to give Fire Emblem a shot. It didn't stick. For one, I came to understand it as a game for 14 year old girls making gay crack 'ships of the pretty, pretty men. For another, my experience was with Shining Force, not Fire Emblem. So permanent death, permanent weapon loss, no area of effect spells, most of the games needing translation patches, and an overbearing bishounen appeal, it was easy to drop Fire Emblem. Also, thanks to the fanart community's penchant for original Japanese over dubs, what was popular on Fanart-Central didn't always line up with what was on Western TV. Naruto was huge. But Naruto would not air on Toonami until the following year. So I couldn't relate. I didn't "import" like that unless it was hentai, which I never watched dubbed. But I did like F-ZERO, which was very unpopular on Fanart-Central due to it being a 4Kids produced dub. And the franchise as a whole remains unpopular to this day. But me seeing the show, and being like "Hey that's where Captain Falcon comes from" I was inspired to pick up F-ZERO GX. Which was really hard, especially for me coming from Quantum Redshift. Expecting there to be weapons or something. Like with Shining Force, I was spoiled by the "rip off." But it's just the price I pay, in both anime and video games I shirk "originals only elitism." Mine was a Shining Force and Quantum Redshift household.
Endless Online was good to me where Fanart-Central was less so. But you know who else was good to me? The Mortal Kombat community. Mortal Kombat: Deception was making news, and I hadn't bought a Mortal Kombat game since Mortal Kombat 4. My only exposure to Mortal Kombat was the odd "Scorpion vs. Ryu" animation. So I decided to see what was up in the community. I found that not only did Midway have its own forums, but Ed Boon himself and other development people at Midway would regularly host something called "Fight Night" on IRC Chat, where you could talk to them. My ambition from the beginning was to join forums that would put me in the sight of people like Ed Boon, the makers of the things I liked, so I could reach out and touch them. This was exactly that. So the Midway Forums were another frequent hang of mine starting in 2004. Where we discussed our OCs and fanmade Fatalities, shared many YTMNDs, and followed the Flash animation collection of Tabmok99 at The Kombat Pavilion.
The point of getting into "toyetic" franchises like Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! and Beyblade and so on was so I could play in tournaments and make a name for myself in the tournament circuit. If that was possible. Tournaments did happen, but I didn't know anyone who was "tournament famous." But maybe I could do well enough that I could be "tournament famous." Now, the only Pokémon tournaments I knew of were TCG tournaments. And I could only pick one to be the "real" Pokémon game. I wasn't gonna play a spin-off. So I couldn't play the card game, I was playing the video games. Beyblade? I couldn't find a tournament. And what even is the metagame for Beyblade? I would love to be as talented as Tyson and Kai and Brooklyn and everyone else from the show but I don't have a Bit Beast. LARPing can only take you so far. But Yu-Gi-Oh! was not only a game I myself could play, but the Yu-Gi-Oh! website had a Tournament Store Locator, so I could actually find out how to enter regional tournaments. I never saw an official regional tournament in my city, but the one I entered was at least in my state. 320-300 miles away, according to Google Maps. Might as well have been out of state. And I traveled all that way just to lose. To a child. I remember being so upset, because he was using Chaos monsters that I wasn't too keen on the rulings for. And I could've called over a ref to weigh in, but I just... didn't, for some reason. Didn't wanna call him a liar, I guess. What I do know is, when I went home I kept real busy trying to look up the specifics of the card in various cases, so I could complain about it on Pojo. I was still pretty sure I was robbed. But what stuck with me the most was that not only did I lose to a kid, but I was surrounded by kids. And it became very apparent to me: My hobbies are probably not for grown men. Moot, the founder of 4chan, was a goddamn teenager himself. And here I was. In my 30s. With no job. Playing kids games and LOSING. How the hell did he even make it to Otakon, did he tell his parents he created 4chan??? How did it work??? But for the most part the shame I felt was "I haven't done what I should with my life" shame. Towards the end of 2004 this would become a more powerful shame with the debut of a show that would go down in infamy: To Catch A Predator. Airing the filthy laundry of grown men who have explicitly sexual chats with underage girls. It gave me pause to look at myself. All the online games and fanart circles I was interacting with? Mostly minors. I didn't know everyone's age, but when I did know someone's age, they were usually a teenager. And throughout my Internet career... I had "cybered." And here's the thing. I made certain I never asked their ages. Because I knew deep down, I didn't want to know what the truth might be. Better yet, I never gave my age. That was the truly telling part. Deep down, I wanted them to believe I was younger than I was. I played these games and interacted with these kids because I had the mind and spirit of a child. And on the Internet I basically could be a child, as far as anyone knew. You spend so much time you barely notice that you're a 31 year-old trying to fit in with teenagers, you're just one of them now. And then along comes TCaP to snap you out of your delusion.
I had to make some changes in the new year. Changes that we'll discuss in Part 2. I'll put it up later today.
Ritalincel
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My treat wasn't much better. I got ten dollars. But it came at incredible cost to someone else. I was sitting at the bus with this guy, and this other guy walks up to us both and gives us envelopes. Somber and silent. Then he walks off. We open our envelopes. Mine has 10 dollars. Pretty cool for a random find. But it came with a note explaining why he gave us the money: His mother, two years back to the day, died of breast & brain cancer. And so consumed by loss is he that he decided every year on his mother's death day he's gonna go around randomly handing out $1,000 in $10 denominations to people, in the hopes that they use it to go out for coffee with their loved ones or something. Make sure that others don't waste the precious moments.
FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
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"Founding Father" or "Milk & Cigarettes 8: The Merits of Being Emo, Part 2: Savior of the Broken"
TL;DR: I devoted a lot of time to making fan content for Endless Online, and also wishing I could help stabilize the game because the admins had their hands full. Also, this was the year I learned it was important to document the source of your lewds.
TL;DR: I devoted a lot of time to making fan content for Endless Online, and also wishing I could help stabilize the game because the admins had their hands full. Also, this was the year I learned it was important to document the source of your lewds.
I checked my old e-mail for some vestiges of the past that would help illustrate these years I'm about to illustrate. And what should I find but an e-mail with some dire news about Yahoo! Groups.
I should've read the e-mail earlier. It says that all Yahoo! Groups will no accept new content by October 28th, 2019. That's today. Okay, I can deal with that, I don't have any content to submit. But then it goes further, all Yahoo! Groups will be shut down by December 14th, 2019. The groups I'm a part of hold priceless Internet archaeological finds. I don't wanna fuck up and let this deadline pass me by like the Tumblr deadline passed me by. I'm gonna be busy saving pictures.
If only I had started saving Yahoo! Groups pictures back in the mid 2000s. It was the era when Yahoo! Groups were at their height, and it was the era when I was saving every picture I came across. Picture Part 2...
2005. News comes out that Pat O'Brien of Access Hollywood got horny and drunk dialed someone. The most controversial moment in Access Hollywood history up until now. Not only does he not get MeToo'd because it hasn't been invented yet, but people are like "He should've just been upfront. He was fuckin' horny, and he wanted that chick." You're Yahoo Voice Chatting with your friends from the Endless Online IRC while browsing /b/ during a "Furry Friday." You're talking up the voice chat about how you're deep into the furry culture and you could get a message to James Hardiman like you're best friends. Then you decide to check out one of the furry threads. Some tame, mildly lewd furry art. All of her clothes on and everything. And it's alright, but if furries are supposed to be the weirdos, even on /b/, we gotta commit to the bit. Star Fox has sexier animals, and normies are expected to play that like it's nothing. So you post "I've seen harder core. I can show you harder core." Anon bites. You pull up Yahoo! Groups and you find a picture of Ivory from "By The Tail." She's slick with sex fluids from lop top to thumpers, spreading her pink, and saying "Like, forget about 'sloppy seconds'. Howzabout 'nasty nineteenths'?"
Anon says it's upsetting, like showing a retard you put his kitten in a blender. Then, presumably another Anon, tricks me into following a link that says Snape is the Half-Blood Prince and kills Dumbledore. Anon is stupid to try that this late in the game. I read Half-Blood Prince ages ago, and at 32 years old I'm too much of a wizard to not be prepared for this anyway.
So about those changes. The thinking was this: If I wouldn't say it to a kid in person, I can't say it to a kid on the Internet. The Harry Potter craze was notable for being one of those rare mainstream things that is ostensibly for kids, but an adult following was not unheard of. So the Harry Potter fandom was one that I could follow without shame. It wasn't creepy, but encouraged, for children and adults alike to enjoy Harry Potter together. As for everything else? The goal was to try to avoid where I knew minors would be. Like Fanart-Central. My already limited socializing there was pulled back to nigh nonexistence. My Endless friends were cool, I knew all of their ages and they were all adults. The Midway/Mortal Kombat forums, you had to be at least 17 to buy a Mortal Kombat game so if you were younger than that and on the Mortal Kombat forums, it wasn't my fault for talking to you. Same with the various 4chan boards. If it's your fault for visiting, I can't be held accountable for checking the age of every person who reads my posts.
Speaking of adult content on 4chan, and across the communities I was a part of, I started noticing a lot more people showing their faces on webcam. Camgirls were starting to become a thing, especially on 4chan. Arriving to gather orbiters. And I was one of them. The orbiters, I mean. My assumption was that they were all of age? Because 4chan came down hard on pictures of minors being posted. So to violate that, odds are people wouldn't try it, right? So because of that, I was able to rationalize enjoying the content these camgirls put out. On 4chan and everywhere else. And I had a new goal. If I couldn't have sex in college, or in a swanky Manhattan apartment, or someone from Hot Or Not, it would be with a camgirl I make friends with on the Internet in one of the communities I call home. Like an orbiter, the dream was that she would notice me and we would grow closer. But to have even a chance at doing this, I felt like I would need a webcam. And my laptop didn't have one. And I had no job, so a webcam felt like a frivolous purchase. But for the time being, I could put it on a to-do list and dream. What I knew was, whenever I did get this hypothetical webcam, I needed to consider my "webcam presence." I needed to consider what my surroundings looked like. What people come to expect from a webcam presence. For instance, the room should be clean, probably? I drew primary inspiration from Gary Brolsma's "Numa Numa" video.
I think his was the first ever webcam video of someone at their computer that I had ever seen. This is the webcam presence of someone you expect to see on the Internet. Blending in, being like everyone else, was the point here. And despite being bald, I wasn't actually ashamed of my face and head back when I was in my 30s. At 30-something I wasn't that old, I was still in that "college-y" demographic, I thought. As in, the kinds of people who go on webcam and play online games and stuff like that. I was still "young." And while I was young, the hope was that I could network through a social environment and eventually have sex with one of my Internet friends. Endless Online was the closest place I was to pulling that off. I was a contributing member of the community in the game, Global Chat, IRC, and the Forums, particularly the Lounge (off topic social area). I created fanmade content, I wrote guides, I helped people, the only thing missing was I wasn't tied up in any "forum drama," which is how you really get popular in an Internet community. I followed it, I chimed in on it, but I never created any.
I wasn't on Fanart-Central much anymore, save to check in on a few notable people running fanfics and stuff on their personal pages, and to see what "forum drama" was happening there, but I didn't submit anything to them anymore. Due to both my age, and knowing when I wasn't wanted. 2005 saw the 4Kids TV premieres of "Mew Mew Power" and "Magical DoReMi" and obviously everyone hated it but me. Besides, they don't want me? I don't want them! Gwen Stefani suffered a yellowpilling around this time and her "Love. Angel. Music. Baby." album was very popular among teenage weeb chicks. Rich Girls, Hollaback Girls, Harajuku Girls, it just looked like people trying to take Japanese culture into the mainstream. "It's not good enough on its own! Let's have Eve do a rap so it's cool for the young people!" And these Fanart Centralists have the audacity to cry about "preserving the original" to me??? But the lack of Fanart-Central meant that, for most of my fandom, I was just watching and consuming. And I knew that in order to be notable like I wanted to be, I had to do more than just watch a lot of the thing I liked. I had to somehow do or be something that reaches out and affects the people who make the things I like. I had gone to Mortal Kombat Fight Night, but the place was so crowded I didn't get a question in. I posted a lot on the forums, but I needed more to my legacy as a Mortal Kombat fan than posting a lot. I needed to somehow be notable. And that followed for every community I was a part of. But how do you be notable? I looked at other notable people as an example. For instance, I watched a lot of Flash animations. Am I part of the "Flash animation community" just for watching a lot of Flash animations? Probably not. How about posting comments on people's Newgrounds submissions? Or making lots of posts on the Newgrounds forums so that people recognize me? Maybe. But who I really wanted to be like was King of the Flash Portal Matt "MajinPiccolo" Andrade. It was in 2005 that I discovered Dungeon Studios and his circle of Flash animators.
majinpiccolo.newgrounds.com
I didn't necessarily wanna join Dungeon Studios, but I wanted to be like Dungeon Studios. I wanted to make something. Specifically, Flash videos. Which I had put off for years for one excuse or another. And maybe have my own circle, like Dungeon Studios, or 1-Up Island, or so many others. I wanted to have my own non-Geocities premium website, so I could post my Flash animations to multiple sites. Newgrounds, TX Mafia, SheezyArt, and have my site be a hub for it all. Earlier I said I had fallen out of love with having a webpage, but that was a Geocities-style webpage. I wanted something like Kombat Pavilion or one of the Flash animation circles. And I wanted to make YTMNDs. I wanted a diverse portfolio of stuff made, because a good Flash animator also made YTMNDs on the side, and stuff like that. They capitalized on fads, and were measured by the quality of their contribution to the fad. Like the Brian Peppers fad on YTMND.
wiki.ytmnd.com
Some of the people who contributed to that fad also did Flash animations. To be a notable fan of video games and of Flash animations meant not just playing games and watching Flash animations, but making Flash animations of video games and also YTMNDs. And animations from Group X songs.
So, appearing on webcam, and going back to the whole webpage idea, but not with Geocities. And what would I put on that page, whenever I got it? My Flash animations, my YTMNDs... a webpage would've really come in handy for the Midway Forums. Unlike with Endless, I didn't have much to contribute as a Mortal Kombat fan. I could've been like Kombat Pavilion and put in news, reviews, guides, articles, comics, animations, pictures, MIDIs, various assorted resources, etc. But I could've also been a service to the forums themselves. Because a lot of fanmade characters and roleplay happened on those boards. And I could've served as an archive/reference material for all that stuff. Which was what I liked to imagine doing someday. I could've continued drawing by hosting fanart, I could've kept tabs on ongoing storylines... Yeah, a video games website. And I would make content for more than just Mortal Kombat. Because I was also still big into Oddworld, and Stranger's Wrath was released in 2005. I couldn't find a forum for that. So my webpage would have to be the main place where I share my fandom for it with people. I could've made sections for every game. A Mortal Kombat section, an Oddworld section, an Endless Online section, a section for every interest, like Fanart-Central.
If I wanted to achieve these goals, I was running out of time. Sweeping changes are coming to the Internet/cultural landscape that make these old dreams no longer viable, because no one cares about them and everyone moved on to the new cool things. Picture this...
2006. Norah Vincent is on The Colbert Report talking about how modern feminism dismisses important men's issues. And people are taking her seriously. But you can't watch it because at the moment you don't have cable. Instead you're watching Saturday Night Live. It's the premiere of Season 32, and Dane Cook is doing a monologue about this website called "YouTube."
Every video's on YouTube. You, singing "Time after Time" at your sixth grade elementary school recital, is on YouTube. Here’s a test. Go home, go to YouTube, go to the search engine, and punch your keyboard. Punch it twice, hit search--there’s a video for that. Type in something random. "A:F6." Hit search. There’s a fat 10-year old with A:F6 painted on his chest, and he sings the song, “A:F6, A:F6, A:F6.” And you watch all ten minutes of that crap. For some reason you have to watch the whole thing.
YouTube. You've heard of that. Saw it on the news, they were talking about some kinda "Evolution Of Dance" video.
It's no JibJab but you like how the guy was able to express the tropes and traditions of each era. Still though, this "YouTube: is just one of many places to watch videos on the Internet. Watching videos on the Internet is no novel thing. And besides, are the media and the normies thinking of trying to muscle in on your non-mainstream Internet culture? If you see "Numa Numa" on the news you're gonna be upset. But you're sure Dane Cook is just being his usual overhyped self.
2006 was still part of this "era" that I'm loosely defining, but it was the last of this era. Video games were changing. We had the Xbox 360 late last year, and with it came "My Gamer Cards" in every forum signature. 2006 brought the PlayStation 3 and its PlayStation Network, online console gaming had officially supplanted the days of split screen GoldenEye. And the Wii? Oh, the Wii might as well have been powered by magic. Even though the motion controls weren't that far removed from the Light Zapper technology of the NES. We were moving away from the technologies of old, like desktop screenmates and the America Online web portal. And TV had changed, particularly for me. Between 2003 and 2006 it was mostly 4Kids TV for me, I wasn't even aware Naruto had premiered on Toonami. But by 2006 4Kids was running out of new anime. They said One Piece was coming back, it never did. Mew Mew Power had ended its 4Kids run, Magical DoReMi had ended its 4Kids run, last they had was the final few episodes of Kirby. As far as anime. They had plenty of non-anime, they really held on to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but aside from that, I was mostly interested in the anime. So I found myself not needing to wake up as early on Saturdays. Or stay up as late on weekdays. My late night trash TV shows weren't airing on my local stations anymore. Blind Date and 5th Wheel and stuff. I was running out of TV to watch in general. I was entering a new age. An age driven by "viralness." A more "Internet social" era. I didn't know it, but I was entering the "YouTube Era." TIME Magazine's "Person Of The Year" for 2006 was "You." As in, you the Internet content creator.
At the time I saw it as a minor annoyance, normies trying to mainstreamify my Newgroundsian counterculture. Speaking of which, 2006 was the year Newgrounds changed its slogan from "The Problems Of The Future, Today" to "Everything, by Everyone."
www.newgrounds.com
I was a little peeved, I saw this as selling out. But I didn't realize that it would become so much more. I didn't realize that Newgrounds animators would start heading to YouTube, I didn't realize how the animation game as a whole would change. How incentives would change. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I had kind of an epiphany in 2006. It was a few days after Steve Irwin had died, and the news brought me to 4chan because I wanted to see everyone's reactions. I found myself going through a thread of Keroro Gunso pictures, doing my usual "tripcodes, e-mail address, signature" posting. And because I posted my e-mail address, I was contacted by a guy named Ferico001. He asked for help looking for some Honoo no Haramase CGs. I went to the various hentai sites I knew of and pulled up what Honoo no Haramase I could find. And he was like "No, this isn't the Honoo no Haramase I'm looking for." And that made me think. I've seen a lot of porn in my time. Since I could pee standing up. But what if I wanna see a specific piece of porn? A specific picture or video? How would I find it? Because I have seen individual pictures that I've never seen again. My Endless Online homie-g's would post hentai CGs and I would be like "Huh, that's hot" without a second thought as to whether or not I would ever want to see that specific picture every again. Because for the longest time I saw porn not for the individual pictures and videos, but for their sources. The porn websites. I didn't care to differentiate between a Viper GIF or a Bible Black GIF. A Midnight Games or a Comic Potpourri Club. An Umemaro or a p_arn. An Oobari Masami or a Kimura Takahiro. A Yoshizaki Mine or a Yamashita Toshinari. As long as the sites themselves were up, I just searched for whatever I was craving at the time, with no thought as to what it was from. I mean, I kinda did, if a hentai listing listed the shows that they had hentai of, I would have to make a choice about what show I wanted to look at hentai of. But whatever Final Fantasy porn I was looking at at the time, I didn't think about who made it, or whether I would ever think on it fondly and wish I could see it again. Maybe up until then I didn't feel the need. But suddenly I did. I wanted to know what Honoo no Haramase was, who made it, where to get it, where to get more content made by whoever makes Honoo no Haramase, and all of the sites where things like Honoo no Haramase are posted. Maybe it was Ferico001 who inspired this concern in me. Or maybe it was because on /r/ there was a doujin called "Double Princess" that people really wanted to find.
They called it a "Holy Grail." And I wanted to be a help to the community and find it. Imagine how happy I would make everyone! Also, this was a Smash Bros. Melee doujin. And Smash Bros. Brawl was on the way. Melee only had two girls the 2D-sphere cared about, Peach and Zelda/Sheik. Samus was there, but she didn't really come into focus until she got a bump by appearing in Brawl as "Zero Suit Samus." And so I thought, "Someone should ask the Double Princess artist if they plan on following this up with a Brawl sequel. Whatever is in the original. Because none of us know what Double Princess is about." And so began one of the few endeavors that I can say I've committed to and is still kinda going on today. For every piece of porn I found, soft or hard, my goal was to...
1. Find out who drew it/who stars in it
2. Learn what artbook or CG set or whatever it's from
3. Learn where to follow that artist and get more of their stuff
4. Learn the various imageboards and porn rehosting sites so I can keep an eye on more porn to find the source of.
Basically to create a database of all the porn that was fit to look at, with sources identified and all pieces accounted for. Double Princess would be in my database. I would have all of the pages, I would know who drew it, I would know where to contact the artist, I would know where to look at more of their stuff. The "single step" of my journey was to try and identify the source of every interesting image I found. That's why whenever I see one of you with an anime profile pic, I ask what it's from. And I saved every image I could. Flash stuff was harder to save. Because I didn't know how to extract the .SWF in most cases. Like the Brickhouse Betty cartoons. I didn't know how to download those separately at the time. So I just saved the Newgrounds links, and the links to the Betty's Crew/Rum Runners websites.
bettyscrew.newgrounds.com
In some cases I didn't need to extract the .SWF file. Like with the Dagobah Flash Gallery. Which is Dagobah.net today, but back in my day it was an open directory whose address I forget. I just downloaded all of the URLs in that index directly. I kept track of imageboards and stuff because someone might be posting porn that I hadn't heard of yet, and I didn't want anything slipping past me. I didn't stop at 4chan, or 2chan, I was on Elitepeeps.net, Shmurr.net, etc. I kept an eye open in forums and IRC chats and stuff, in case someone was posting porn. Which they often did, like I said earlier. The Endless Online community did a lot of that. Any forum where red-blooded Internet losers congregated.
Endless Online was troubled, both in the game and on the forums. By 2006 we had a stat system with classes and abilities and stuff. But also, autobotting was rampant, because Endless Online wasn't a very sophisticated MMORPG and was easily cheated. So the mods were constantly busy detecting and kicking suspicious players. On the forum end of things, people were constantly bending and breaking the rules about what pictures could be posted. No explicit porn, for instance. But there was this one girl, I forget her name, who would now and then just haul off and post shock images with her own face plastered into them. I guess she thought it was funny. So the mods were constantly busy whack-a-moling people like her. And I sympathized with the mods. I had my fan contributions here and there, but what would've bean really cool was to work some kind of miracle for the game & forum security. I wanted to help the game be more stable, less hacked. But I learned nothing about network security in college. And it wouldn't have helped either way because it was way back in the 90s. But I did what I could. As in, be a pissy little mini-mod and wag my finger at people who broke the rules. One person who I don't think broke any rules, but skirted the line a lot, was a guy named Robfox. He was the guy I got images to save from. He never shared source with me. And this was 2006, so Tineye or IQDB or Saucenao were not tools I could use. Robfox was maybe part of the "new guard" of the Endless community. The old guard was starting to fade away. They were already mostly reduced to idling in IRC and letting the new guard have run of the game. Maybe that's just the natural evolution of an Endless Online player. I think it started when Shroud had gone missing. She was popular when she was around. I think her closest replacement was Blousie, who was like queen of Lounge. What was unique about Blousie was yeah she was popular because she was a girl, but she openly admitted to depending on the attention. Most women, you're a creep for being interested in them, because you don't have their "permission" to like them. But Blousie was like "Here, please, love me, want me." So people were more attracted to her because she didn't shame them for liking her. She was basically like a camgirl. There was a big webcam economy on Lounge, you were only ever really somebody until we had seen your face. Or if you were like Robfox and known for posting porn and skirting the forum rules.
Now, the idea of growing close to someone like Blousie, a community darling, and having sex with her, that still appealed to me. That was still kinda my goal for ascension. But I wasn't interested in Blousie specifically. Maybe because I was closer to Shroud. But I think it was because my views on ascension were evolving. I was becoming weebpilled. That, combined with my honor regarding commitment to any potential relationship. With me trying to find the source of all the relevant hentai, I wanted to basically make the hentai industry my life. I was gonna be such an industry connoisseur. I wanted to be in touch with lewd artists the way I wanted to be in touch with big video game names. Make porn of my own, collaborate, be friends. And it didn't feel right to do that and have a wife/girlfriend. Yes, some wives are aware and okay that their husbands look at porn. I'm pretty sure most of them are coping with the thought that it's a relationship enhancer. "He doesn't wanna fuck those porn stars, he's just turned on by the sex acts. He's attracted to me, and he wants to do those sex acts with me. It's a couple's thing." I disagree. When it reaches the point that you wanna fuck another woman, even if she's 2D, and you find yourself online consummating that desire to fuck that 2D woman with other fans of 2D, you've breached the contract of your committed relationship. I just couldn't do it. So I had to make a choice. 3D or 2D. It just didn't make sense to me to express all this passion for other women, but it be okay because you're technically not having sex with them. I never really made that choice, I didn't have to, because I never entered a relationship. But I kept it in the back of my mind, as I wavered between heading toward a life committed to 2D and a life where I might get to be with one of those camgirls who liked haning their nudes over our heads, eventually I would have to decide. But I was also torn about another thing: What really counted as porn? I don't mean in a "Is this too tame to be porn" sort of way, but I mean, is someone's adult Fanart-Central portfolio worth saving and finding the source for? Compared to, say, a CG set? I was struggling with the nebulous definition of "real porn" vs. "fanart anyone could make." In today's industry where anyone with a Patreon can build up a consumer base, this sounds like a trivial thing. But back then, would you have saved something some drawfag randomly cobbled together on an oekaki board? It had a real illegitimacy to it back then. But "fanart" was starting to look pretty good. Pretty professional. 2006 was the year of Hentai Foundry. And there was good looking art there. Even though it was made by "amateurs" And I wanted something legitimate. But then, what was I, if not an amateur? What would I have to do to separate myself from the amateurs and become a "real hentai artist?" Publish something officially? Sell something for money?
Speaking of me creating things, my fan content for Endless made me think of the other things I was a fan of. Gaia, Runescape, Mortal Kombat, etc. And so I came up with this idea: Inspired by Osamu Tezuka's "Star System" and the British comedy-drama "Millions," I would have a collection of OCs, representing all of my fandoms and pursuits. But I would have one OC for every patron saint in Christendom. And each OC would represent whatever their equivalent patron saint did. For instance, St. Clare of Assisi is a patron saint. Patron saint of television. So I would have an OC that represented "television" somehow, as its essence. Its theme. That was the plan, anyway. But I found out that there are kind of a lot of saints, and what they represent is often up to interpretation. Another problem? My art skills were drying up, so I couldn't draw them like I wanted. I didn't have many reasons to draw. Yes I wanted to rub elbows with the hentai bigwigs, but I was preoccupied with saving the art first. Also? I needed to decide on an art style. Everyone draws different, how did I want my art to look? What I wanted to do was come up with all of the hentai/ecchi names that were most meaningful to me, and try to draw in a style that emulates them all. A versatile enough art style that I could cover all of it. That was the dream, but I never was able to pursue it because I never made a final list of all my hentai/ecchi inspirations. Pixel art I did sometimes, for the Endless Online fan content I made. But not sprite Flashes. And definitely not YTMNDs. I didn't know I was running out of time. The groundwork for the YouTube Era was fast being paved. This was the year that things we associate with YouTube were starting to be released. Like "The Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiments" or that "Evolution of Dance" video I mentioned earlier. YouTube was also finding itself a useful repository for "pirated" TV. That, I think, was what actually propelled it to prevalence. America's Got Talent premiered this year, and it was before America's Got Talent had its own official corporate YouTube channel. So if you saw some crazy shit on America's Got Talent, and a lot of people did, you went on YouTube, because that was the only place it was. Because America's Got Talent came along when it did, YouTube basically was sharing their audience of millions. Newgrounds was still technically viable though. 2006 was the year Egoraptor started his "Awesome" series of digitally drawn/semi-crude "this is explicit content but are we meant to fap to it or not" animations that Newgrounds was famous for. But the previous king of the Flash Portal, MajinPiccolo and his Dungeon Studios, was starting to go through changes. I won't say things started to "slow down," even though they did, because it was more than that. Because the game had to either evolve, or die, Dungeon Studios started trying to be more creative. Elevate the craft. For instance, instead of a Flash video, maybe make an interactive quiz game. Like these.
Others in the circle started to either drop off, or spin off. Like Psycosis91. Started making solo stuff under his own brand, Psy-City.
The Mortal Kombat forums started to be at a loss for new Mortal Kombat sprite Flashes. Particularly around the time Mortal Kombat Armageddon came out. There was talk about how this would be the Mortal Kombat to end all Mortal Kombats, and I guess that kinda took some fight out of the community at large. Not just on the forums. That, and Midway Games was losing money bad. There was talk that they were gonna go bankrupt and that was the real reason they were making this final Mortal Kombat. Did this take Mortal Kombat off my big list of fandoms and pursuits to make patron saint OCs for? No, not at the time. Because Mortal Kombat Armageddon came with a Kreate A Kombatant feature. So I was more inspired than ever. I could make my OC or OCs, and I didn't need to know how to draw. I would make my OCs, and hold out hope that Mortal Kombat and its community would still be around in the future for my OCs to play around in. Runescape, however, I did lose. In 2006 my account was frozen for reasons I don't remember. Frankly, I stand by whatever I did. But I was thankful for the break. Being forced not to play Runescape freed me up to really commit to the Endless community. Maybe that would be my whole thing. Gaia was kinda idle at this point anyway, I had achieved my dream paperdoll, the one that I felt represented me/my Internet alter ego. I didn't need any new item releases. The Endless community had really captured the bulk of my efforts at the time. The seventh generation of video games was a close second, because I was taking interest, but I wasn't "making" anything. Also, I was mostly window shopping because I was broke. It was Endless Online that I was coming up with storylines/quests for, new gear, new characters, new events, new gameplay features, and actually putting those ideas to pen and type. That, and admiring the new video games of the time, was how I spent my 2006, basically.
The Emo Era suffered it's fatal nick with Mad TV's "Tickle Me Emo" parody at the end of the year.
No longer was "emo" a secret word mentioned only on MySpace pages. Emo, if not alt rock as we knew it, was suffering a fatal bleed. It had become what we might call today "normie trash." Instead of just regular trash. And that's where we'll wrap up this late installment. As with every other emo of the time, after 2006 I cleaned up my act and got a job. Again. I'll cover that era next time.
I should've read the e-mail earlier. It says that all Yahoo! Groups will no accept new content by October 28th, 2019. That's today. Okay, I can deal with that, I don't have any content to submit. But then it goes further, all Yahoo! Groups will be shut down by December 14th, 2019. The groups I'm a part of hold priceless Internet archaeological finds. I don't wanna fuck up and let this deadline pass me by like the Tumblr deadline passed me by. I'm gonna be busy saving pictures.
If only I had started saving Yahoo! Groups pictures back in the mid 2000s. It was the era when Yahoo! Groups were at their height, and it was the era when I was saving every picture I came across. Picture Part 2...
2005. News comes out that Pat O'Brien of Access Hollywood got horny and drunk dialed someone. The most controversial moment in Access Hollywood history up until now. Not only does he not get MeToo'd because it hasn't been invented yet, but people are like "He should've just been upfront. He was fuckin' horny, and he wanted that chick." You're Yahoo Voice Chatting with your friends from the Endless Online IRC while browsing /b/ during a "Furry Friday." You're talking up the voice chat about how you're deep into the furry culture and you could get a message to James Hardiman like you're best friends. Then you decide to check out one of the furry threads. Some tame, mildly lewd furry art. All of her clothes on and everything. And it's alright, but if furries are supposed to be the weirdos, even on /b/, we gotta commit to the bit. Star Fox has sexier animals, and normies are expected to play that like it's nothing. So you post "I've seen harder core. I can show you harder core." Anon bites. You pull up Yahoo! Groups and you find a picture of Ivory from "By The Tail." She's slick with sex fluids from lop top to thumpers, spreading her pink, and saying "Like, forget about 'sloppy seconds'. Howzabout 'nasty nineteenths'?"
Anon says it's upsetting, like showing a retard you put his kitten in a blender. Then, presumably another Anon, tricks me into following a link that says Snape is the Half-Blood Prince and kills Dumbledore. Anon is stupid to try that this late in the game. I read Half-Blood Prince ages ago, and at 32 years old I'm too much of a wizard to not be prepared for this anyway.
So about those changes. The thinking was this: If I wouldn't say it to a kid in person, I can't say it to a kid on the Internet. The Harry Potter craze was notable for being one of those rare mainstream things that is ostensibly for kids, but an adult following was not unheard of. So the Harry Potter fandom was one that I could follow without shame. It wasn't creepy, but encouraged, for children and adults alike to enjoy Harry Potter together. As for everything else? The goal was to try to avoid where I knew minors would be. Like Fanart-Central. My already limited socializing there was pulled back to nigh nonexistence. My Endless friends were cool, I knew all of their ages and they were all adults. The Midway/Mortal Kombat forums, you had to be at least 17 to buy a Mortal Kombat game so if you were younger than that and on the Mortal Kombat forums, it wasn't my fault for talking to you. Same with the various 4chan boards. If it's your fault for visiting, I can't be held accountable for checking the age of every person who reads my posts.
Speaking of adult content on 4chan, and across the communities I was a part of, I started noticing a lot more people showing their faces on webcam. Camgirls were starting to become a thing, especially on 4chan. Arriving to gather orbiters. And I was one of them. The orbiters, I mean. My assumption was that they were all of age? Because 4chan came down hard on pictures of minors being posted. So to violate that, odds are people wouldn't try it, right? So because of that, I was able to rationalize enjoying the content these camgirls put out. On 4chan and everywhere else. And I had a new goal. If I couldn't have sex in college, or in a swanky Manhattan apartment, or someone from Hot Or Not, it would be with a camgirl I make friends with on the Internet in one of the communities I call home. Like an orbiter, the dream was that she would notice me and we would grow closer. But to have even a chance at doing this, I felt like I would need a webcam. And my laptop didn't have one. And I had no job, so a webcam felt like a frivolous purchase. But for the time being, I could put it on a to-do list and dream. What I knew was, whenever I did get this hypothetical webcam, I needed to consider my "webcam presence." I needed to consider what my surroundings looked like. What people come to expect from a webcam presence. For instance, the room should be clean, probably? I drew primary inspiration from Gary Brolsma's "Numa Numa" video.
I think his was the first ever webcam video of someone at their computer that I had ever seen. This is the webcam presence of someone you expect to see on the Internet. Blending in, being like everyone else, was the point here. And despite being bald, I wasn't actually ashamed of my face and head back when I was in my 30s. At 30-something I wasn't that old, I was still in that "college-y" demographic, I thought. As in, the kinds of people who go on webcam and play online games and stuff like that. I was still "young." And while I was young, the hope was that I could network through a social environment and eventually have sex with one of my Internet friends. Endless Online was the closest place I was to pulling that off. I was a contributing member of the community in the game, Global Chat, IRC, and the Forums, particularly the Lounge (off topic social area). I created fanmade content, I wrote guides, I helped people, the only thing missing was I wasn't tied up in any "forum drama," which is how you really get popular in an Internet community. I followed it, I chimed in on it, but I never created any.
I wasn't on Fanart-Central much anymore, save to check in on a few notable people running fanfics and stuff on their personal pages, and to see what "forum drama" was happening there, but I didn't submit anything to them anymore. Due to both my age, and knowing when I wasn't wanted. 2005 saw the 4Kids TV premieres of "Mew Mew Power" and "Magical DoReMi" and obviously everyone hated it but me. Besides, they don't want me? I don't want them! Gwen Stefani suffered a yellowpilling around this time and her "Love. Angel. Music. Baby." album was very popular among teenage weeb chicks. Rich Girls, Hollaback Girls, Harajuku Girls, it just looked like people trying to take Japanese culture into the mainstream. "It's not good enough on its own! Let's have Eve do a rap so it's cool for the young people!" And these Fanart Centralists have the audacity to cry about "preserving the original" to me??? But the lack of Fanart-Central meant that, for most of my fandom, I was just watching and consuming. And I knew that in order to be notable like I wanted to be, I had to do more than just watch a lot of the thing I liked. I had to somehow do or be something that reaches out and affects the people who make the things I like. I had gone to Mortal Kombat Fight Night, but the place was so crowded I didn't get a question in. I posted a lot on the forums, but I needed more to my legacy as a Mortal Kombat fan than posting a lot. I needed to somehow be notable. And that followed for every community I was a part of. But how do you be notable? I looked at other notable people as an example. For instance, I watched a lot of Flash animations. Am I part of the "Flash animation community" just for watching a lot of Flash animations? Probably not. How about posting comments on people's Newgrounds submissions? Or making lots of posts on the Newgrounds forums so that people recognize me? Maybe. But who I really wanted to be like was King of the Flash Portal Matt "MajinPiccolo" Andrade. It was in 2005 that I discovered Dungeon Studios and his circle of Flash animators.
MajinPiccolo
majinpiccolo.newgrounds.com
I didn't necessarily wanna join Dungeon Studios, but I wanted to be like Dungeon Studios. I wanted to make something. Specifically, Flash videos. Which I had put off for years for one excuse or another. And maybe have my own circle, like Dungeon Studios, or 1-Up Island, or so many others. I wanted to have my own non-Geocities premium website, so I could post my Flash animations to multiple sites. Newgrounds, TX Mafia, SheezyArt, and have my site be a hub for it all. Earlier I said I had fallen out of love with having a webpage, but that was a Geocities-style webpage. I wanted something like Kombat Pavilion or one of the Flash animation circles. And I wanted to make YTMNDs. I wanted a diverse portfolio of stuff made, because a good Flash animator also made YTMNDs on the side, and stuff like that. They capitalized on fads, and were measured by the quality of their contribution to the fad. Like the Brian Peppers fad on YTMND.
Brian Peppers - YTMND
Some of the people who contributed to that fad also did Flash animations. To be a notable fan of video games and of Flash animations meant not just playing games and watching Flash animations, but making Flash animations of video games and also YTMNDs. And animations from Group X songs.
So, appearing on webcam, and going back to the whole webpage idea, but not with Geocities. And what would I put on that page, whenever I got it? My Flash animations, my YTMNDs... a webpage would've really come in handy for the Midway Forums. Unlike with Endless, I didn't have much to contribute as a Mortal Kombat fan. I could've been like Kombat Pavilion and put in news, reviews, guides, articles, comics, animations, pictures, MIDIs, various assorted resources, etc. But I could've also been a service to the forums themselves. Because a lot of fanmade characters and roleplay happened on those boards. And I could've served as an archive/reference material for all that stuff. Which was what I liked to imagine doing someday. I could've continued drawing by hosting fanart, I could've kept tabs on ongoing storylines... Yeah, a video games website. And I would make content for more than just Mortal Kombat. Because I was also still big into Oddworld, and Stranger's Wrath was released in 2005. I couldn't find a forum for that. So my webpage would have to be the main place where I share my fandom for it with people. I could've made sections for every game. A Mortal Kombat section, an Oddworld section, an Endless Online section, a section for every interest, like Fanart-Central.
If I wanted to achieve these goals, I was running out of time. Sweeping changes are coming to the Internet/cultural landscape that make these old dreams no longer viable, because no one cares about them and everyone moved on to the new cool things. Picture this...
2006. Norah Vincent is on The Colbert Report talking about how modern feminism dismisses important men's issues. And people are taking her seriously. But you can't watch it because at the moment you don't have cable. Instead you're watching Saturday Night Live. It's the premiere of Season 32, and Dane Cook is doing a monologue about this website called "YouTube."
Every video's on YouTube. You, singing "Time after Time" at your sixth grade elementary school recital, is on YouTube. Here’s a test. Go home, go to YouTube, go to the search engine, and punch your keyboard. Punch it twice, hit search--there’s a video for that. Type in something random. "A:F6." Hit search. There’s a fat 10-year old with A:F6 painted on his chest, and he sings the song, “A:F6, A:F6, A:F6.” And you watch all ten minutes of that crap. For some reason you have to watch the whole thing.
YouTube. You've heard of that. Saw it on the news, they were talking about some kinda "Evolution Of Dance" video.
It's no JibJab but you like how the guy was able to express the tropes and traditions of each era. Still though, this "YouTube: is just one of many places to watch videos on the Internet. Watching videos on the Internet is no novel thing. And besides, are the media and the normies thinking of trying to muscle in on your non-mainstream Internet culture? If you see "Numa Numa" on the news you're gonna be upset. But you're sure Dane Cook is just being his usual overhyped self.
2006 was still part of this "era" that I'm loosely defining, but it was the last of this era. Video games were changing. We had the Xbox 360 late last year, and with it came "My Gamer Cards" in every forum signature. 2006 brought the PlayStation 3 and its PlayStation Network, online console gaming had officially supplanted the days of split screen GoldenEye. And the Wii? Oh, the Wii might as well have been powered by magic. Even though the motion controls weren't that far removed from the Light Zapper technology of the NES. We were moving away from the technologies of old, like desktop screenmates and the America Online web portal. And TV had changed, particularly for me. Between 2003 and 2006 it was mostly 4Kids TV for me, I wasn't even aware Naruto had premiered on Toonami. But by 2006 4Kids was running out of new anime. They said One Piece was coming back, it never did. Mew Mew Power had ended its 4Kids run, Magical DoReMi had ended its 4Kids run, last they had was the final few episodes of Kirby. As far as anime. They had plenty of non-anime, they really held on to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but aside from that, I was mostly interested in the anime. So I found myself not needing to wake up as early on Saturdays. Or stay up as late on weekdays. My late night trash TV shows weren't airing on my local stations anymore. Blind Date and 5th Wheel and stuff. I was running out of TV to watch in general. I was entering a new age. An age driven by "viralness." A more "Internet social" era. I didn't know it, but I was entering the "YouTube Era." TIME Magazine's "Person Of The Year" for 2006 was "You." As in, you the Internet content creator.
At the time I saw it as a minor annoyance, normies trying to mainstreamify my Newgroundsian counterculture. Speaking of which, 2006 was the year Newgrounds changed its slogan from "The Problems Of The Future, Today" to "Everything, by Everyone."
Newgrounds slogan
I was just wondering about NG's current slogan "Everything, by Everyone". They changed it from "The Problems of the Future, Today!" I just wanted to know if people liked the old slogan better than new one, cause i sure do. Also, have they had any ...
www.newgrounds.com
I was a little peeved, I saw this as selling out. But I didn't realize that it would become so much more. I didn't realize that Newgrounds animators would start heading to YouTube, I didn't realize how the animation game as a whole would change. How incentives would change. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I had kind of an epiphany in 2006. It was a few days after Steve Irwin had died, and the news brought me to 4chan because I wanted to see everyone's reactions. I found myself going through a thread of Keroro Gunso pictures, doing my usual "tripcodes, e-mail address, signature" posting. And because I posted my e-mail address, I was contacted by a guy named Ferico001. He asked for help looking for some Honoo no Haramase CGs. I went to the various hentai sites I knew of and pulled up what Honoo no Haramase I could find. And he was like "No, this isn't the Honoo no Haramase I'm looking for." And that made me think. I've seen a lot of porn in my time. Since I could pee standing up. But what if I wanna see a specific piece of porn? A specific picture or video? How would I find it? Because I have seen individual pictures that I've never seen again. My Endless Online homie-g's would post hentai CGs and I would be like "Huh, that's hot" without a second thought as to whether or not I would ever want to see that specific picture every again. Because for the longest time I saw porn not for the individual pictures and videos, but for their sources. The porn websites. I didn't care to differentiate between a Viper GIF or a Bible Black GIF. A Midnight Games or a Comic Potpourri Club. An Umemaro or a p_arn. An Oobari Masami or a Kimura Takahiro. A Yoshizaki Mine or a Yamashita Toshinari. As long as the sites themselves were up, I just searched for whatever I was craving at the time, with no thought as to what it was from. I mean, I kinda did, if a hentai listing listed the shows that they had hentai of, I would have to make a choice about what show I wanted to look at hentai of. But whatever Final Fantasy porn I was looking at at the time, I didn't think about who made it, or whether I would ever think on it fondly and wish I could see it again. Maybe up until then I didn't feel the need. But suddenly I did. I wanted to know what Honoo no Haramase was, who made it, where to get it, where to get more content made by whoever makes Honoo no Haramase, and all of the sites where things like Honoo no Haramase are posted. Maybe it was Ferico001 who inspired this concern in me. Or maybe it was because on /r/ there was a doujin called "Double Princess" that people really wanted to find.
They called it a "Holy Grail." And I wanted to be a help to the community and find it. Imagine how happy I would make everyone! Also, this was a Smash Bros. Melee doujin. And Smash Bros. Brawl was on the way. Melee only had two girls the 2D-sphere cared about, Peach and Zelda/Sheik. Samus was there, but she didn't really come into focus until she got a bump by appearing in Brawl as "Zero Suit Samus." And so I thought, "Someone should ask the Double Princess artist if they plan on following this up with a Brawl sequel. Whatever is in the original. Because none of us know what Double Princess is about." And so began one of the few endeavors that I can say I've committed to and is still kinda going on today. For every piece of porn I found, soft or hard, my goal was to...
1. Find out who drew it/who stars in it
2. Learn what artbook or CG set or whatever it's from
3. Learn where to follow that artist and get more of their stuff
4. Learn the various imageboards and porn rehosting sites so I can keep an eye on more porn to find the source of.
Basically to create a database of all the porn that was fit to look at, with sources identified and all pieces accounted for. Double Princess would be in my database. I would have all of the pages, I would know who drew it, I would know where to contact the artist, I would know where to look at more of their stuff. The "single step" of my journey was to try and identify the source of every interesting image I found. That's why whenever I see one of you with an anime profile pic, I ask what it's from. And I saved every image I could. Flash stuff was harder to save. Because I didn't know how to extract the .SWF in most cases. Like the Brickhouse Betty cartoons. I didn't know how to download those separately at the time. So I just saved the Newgrounds links, and the links to the Betty's Crew/Rum Runners websites.
BettysCrew
bettyscrew.newgrounds.com
In some cases I didn't need to extract the .SWF file. Like with the Dagobah Flash Gallery. Which is Dagobah.net today, but back in my day it was an open directory whose address I forget. I just downloaded all of the URLs in that index directly. I kept track of imageboards and stuff because someone might be posting porn that I hadn't heard of yet, and I didn't want anything slipping past me. I didn't stop at 4chan, or 2chan, I was on Elitepeeps.net, Shmurr.net, etc. I kept an eye open in forums and IRC chats and stuff, in case someone was posting porn. Which they often did, like I said earlier. The Endless Online community did a lot of that. Any forum where red-blooded Internet losers congregated.
Endless Online was troubled, both in the game and on the forums. By 2006 we had a stat system with classes and abilities and stuff. But also, autobotting was rampant, because Endless Online wasn't a very sophisticated MMORPG and was easily cheated. So the mods were constantly busy detecting and kicking suspicious players. On the forum end of things, people were constantly bending and breaking the rules about what pictures could be posted. No explicit porn, for instance. But there was this one girl, I forget her name, who would now and then just haul off and post shock images with her own face plastered into them. I guess she thought it was funny. So the mods were constantly busy whack-a-moling people like her. And I sympathized with the mods. I had my fan contributions here and there, but what would've bean really cool was to work some kind of miracle for the game & forum security. I wanted to help the game be more stable, less hacked. But I learned nothing about network security in college. And it wouldn't have helped either way because it was way back in the 90s. But I did what I could. As in, be a pissy little mini-mod and wag my finger at people who broke the rules. One person who I don't think broke any rules, but skirted the line a lot, was a guy named Robfox. He was the guy I got images to save from. He never shared source with me. And this was 2006, so Tineye or IQDB or Saucenao were not tools I could use. Robfox was maybe part of the "new guard" of the Endless community. The old guard was starting to fade away. They were already mostly reduced to idling in IRC and letting the new guard have run of the game. Maybe that's just the natural evolution of an Endless Online player. I think it started when Shroud had gone missing. She was popular when she was around. I think her closest replacement was Blousie, who was like queen of Lounge. What was unique about Blousie was yeah she was popular because she was a girl, but she openly admitted to depending on the attention. Most women, you're a creep for being interested in them, because you don't have their "permission" to like them. But Blousie was like "Here, please, love me, want me." So people were more attracted to her because she didn't shame them for liking her. She was basically like a camgirl. There was a big webcam economy on Lounge, you were only ever really somebody until we had seen your face. Or if you were like Robfox and known for posting porn and skirting the forum rules.
Now, the idea of growing close to someone like Blousie, a community darling, and having sex with her, that still appealed to me. That was still kinda my goal for ascension. But I wasn't interested in Blousie specifically. Maybe because I was closer to Shroud. But I think it was because my views on ascension were evolving. I was becoming weebpilled. That, combined with my honor regarding commitment to any potential relationship. With me trying to find the source of all the relevant hentai, I wanted to basically make the hentai industry my life. I was gonna be such an industry connoisseur. I wanted to be in touch with lewd artists the way I wanted to be in touch with big video game names. Make porn of my own, collaborate, be friends. And it didn't feel right to do that and have a wife/girlfriend. Yes, some wives are aware and okay that their husbands look at porn. I'm pretty sure most of them are coping with the thought that it's a relationship enhancer. "He doesn't wanna fuck those porn stars, he's just turned on by the sex acts. He's attracted to me, and he wants to do those sex acts with me. It's a couple's thing." I disagree. When it reaches the point that you wanna fuck another woman, even if she's 2D, and you find yourself online consummating that desire to fuck that 2D woman with other fans of 2D, you've breached the contract of your committed relationship. I just couldn't do it. So I had to make a choice. 3D or 2D. It just didn't make sense to me to express all this passion for other women, but it be okay because you're technically not having sex with them. I never really made that choice, I didn't have to, because I never entered a relationship. But I kept it in the back of my mind, as I wavered between heading toward a life committed to 2D and a life where I might get to be with one of those camgirls who liked haning their nudes over our heads, eventually I would have to decide. But I was also torn about another thing: What really counted as porn? I don't mean in a "Is this too tame to be porn" sort of way, but I mean, is someone's adult Fanart-Central portfolio worth saving and finding the source for? Compared to, say, a CG set? I was struggling with the nebulous definition of "real porn" vs. "fanart anyone could make." In today's industry where anyone with a Patreon can build up a consumer base, this sounds like a trivial thing. But back then, would you have saved something some drawfag randomly cobbled together on an oekaki board? It had a real illegitimacy to it back then. But "fanart" was starting to look pretty good. Pretty professional. 2006 was the year of Hentai Foundry. And there was good looking art there. Even though it was made by "amateurs" And I wanted something legitimate. But then, what was I, if not an amateur? What would I have to do to separate myself from the amateurs and become a "real hentai artist?" Publish something officially? Sell something for money?
Speaking of me creating things, my fan content for Endless made me think of the other things I was a fan of. Gaia, Runescape, Mortal Kombat, etc. And so I came up with this idea: Inspired by Osamu Tezuka's "Star System" and the British comedy-drama "Millions," I would have a collection of OCs, representing all of my fandoms and pursuits. But I would have one OC for every patron saint in Christendom. And each OC would represent whatever their equivalent patron saint did. For instance, St. Clare of Assisi is a patron saint. Patron saint of television. So I would have an OC that represented "television" somehow, as its essence. Its theme. That was the plan, anyway. But I found out that there are kind of a lot of saints, and what they represent is often up to interpretation. Another problem? My art skills were drying up, so I couldn't draw them like I wanted. I didn't have many reasons to draw. Yes I wanted to rub elbows with the hentai bigwigs, but I was preoccupied with saving the art first. Also? I needed to decide on an art style. Everyone draws different, how did I want my art to look? What I wanted to do was come up with all of the hentai/ecchi names that were most meaningful to me, and try to draw in a style that emulates them all. A versatile enough art style that I could cover all of it. That was the dream, but I never was able to pursue it because I never made a final list of all my hentai/ecchi inspirations. Pixel art I did sometimes, for the Endless Online fan content I made. But not sprite Flashes. And definitely not YTMNDs. I didn't know I was running out of time. The groundwork for the YouTube Era was fast being paved. This was the year that things we associate with YouTube were starting to be released. Like "The Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiments" or that "Evolution of Dance" video I mentioned earlier. YouTube was also finding itself a useful repository for "pirated" TV. That, I think, was what actually propelled it to prevalence. America's Got Talent premiered this year, and it was before America's Got Talent had its own official corporate YouTube channel. So if you saw some crazy shit on America's Got Talent, and a lot of people did, you went on YouTube, because that was the only place it was. Because America's Got Talent came along when it did, YouTube basically was sharing their audience of millions. Newgrounds was still technically viable though. 2006 was the year Egoraptor started his "Awesome" series of digitally drawn/semi-crude "this is explicit content but are we meant to fap to it or not" animations that Newgrounds was famous for. But the previous king of the Flash Portal, MajinPiccolo and his Dungeon Studios, was starting to go through changes. I won't say things started to "slow down," even though they did, because it was more than that. Because the game had to either evolve, or die, Dungeon Studios started trying to be more creative. Elevate the craft. For instance, instead of a Flash video, maybe make an interactive quiz game. Like these.
Others in the circle started to either drop off, or spin off. Like Psycosis91. Started making solo stuff under his own brand, Psy-City.
Homepage - Psy-City
The fast growth of slot machine terms in recent times means there is always something new for everyone to learn. Every player should get familiar with the slot machine slang before starting the real adventure at the casinos. Below, you... Read more »
www.psy-city.co.uk
The Mortal Kombat forums started to be at a loss for new Mortal Kombat sprite Flashes. Particularly around the time Mortal Kombat Armageddon came out. There was talk about how this would be the Mortal Kombat to end all Mortal Kombats, and I guess that kinda took some fight out of the community at large. Not just on the forums. That, and Midway Games was losing money bad. There was talk that they were gonna go bankrupt and that was the real reason they were making this final Mortal Kombat. Did this take Mortal Kombat off my big list of fandoms and pursuits to make patron saint OCs for? No, not at the time. Because Mortal Kombat Armageddon came with a Kreate A Kombatant feature. So I was more inspired than ever. I could make my OC or OCs, and I didn't need to know how to draw. I would make my OCs, and hold out hope that Mortal Kombat and its community would still be around in the future for my OCs to play around in. Runescape, however, I did lose. In 2006 my account was frozen for reasons I don't remember. Frankly, I stand by whatever I did. But I was thankful for the break. Being forced not to play Runescape freed me up to really commit to the Endless community. Maybe that would be my whole thing. Gaia was kinda idle at this point anyway, I had achieved my dream paperdoll, the one that I felt represented me/my Internet alter ego. I didn't need any new item releases. The Endless community had really captured the bulk of my efforts at the time. The seventh generation of video games was a close second, because I was taking interest, but I wasn't "making" anything. Also, I was mostly window shopping because I was broke. It was Endless Online that I was coming up with storylines/quests for, new gear, new characters, new events, new gameplay features, and actually putting those ideas to pen and type. That, and admiring the new video games of the time, was how I spent my 2006, basically.
The Emo Era suffered it's fatal nick with Mad TV's "Tickle Me Emo" parody at the end of the year.
No longer was "emo" a secret word mentioned only on MySpace pages. Emo, if not alt rock as we knew it, was suffering a fatal bleed. It had become what we might call today "normie trash." Instead of just regular trash. And that's where we'll wrap up this late installment. As with every other emo of the time, after 2006 I cleaned up my act and got a job. Again. I'll cover that era next time.
FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
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"Founding Father" or "Milk & Cigarettes 9: NSFW"
TL;DR: I get a job, can afford things, and dream of running a gaming YouTube channel and a game mod workshop and a hentai artist and an anime critic.
TL;DR: I get a job, can afford things, and dream of running a gaming YouTube channel and a game mod workshop and a hentai artist and an anime critic.
Another Halloween has come and gone.
Last year for Halloween I went to a fetish party in a foolhardy gambit to ascend. That was 2018. The year of Logan Paul and Bowsette. But we'll talk about 2018 later. This year all I did was have my job's annual Halloween luncheon. Almost no one was in costume. Not even me. I did wear a Halloween-themed shirt, and what was more than most people did. Because it was still a work day and we had work to do. So only people I've never seen do actual work got to wear costumes. I saw Santa, I saw a scarecrow, I saw Gumby, I saw a Handmaid's Tale handmaid, I saw an Amish woman... I think that was it. Now, I actually started with this company in 2007, after doing whatever I could for money between 2003 and 2006. And I was real glad to be here back then. But it's been 12 years now. And I'm not as happy as I used to be. For a number of reasons. But I think what I'm most entitled to be angry about is that I haven't gotten promoted or gotten a raise in all my 12 years of being here. And why??? Why, I wonder!!! Well, I'm pretty sure it's because they think I'm genuinely autistic, and cannot handle the extra responsibility of a big boy job. Because of incidents like these...
...and incidents like what happened at the Halloween luncheon. There were two incidents. The first I don't mind so much. Might even be proud of it. I was in the elevator, and I had a plate of food from the luncheon. No one else is in the elevator. I'm eating, but then the momentum of the elevator causes me to drop my fork, right? And just as I bend over to pick it up, this woman walks into the elevator. We start making small talk. I don't eat while we're doing this because I wonder if she saw me pick this fork off of the elevator floor. I'm hoping she didn't, but fearing that she did. There's a lull in the conversation, and she interjects: "Don't eat with that fork." Now, this being a story about how I did an autistic thing, you probably guessed I ate with the fork. But let me walk you through my madness. Would I have eaten with that fork if I wasn't caught? Yes. It's not like it was down in filth. It was on top. Above the filth. If I picked it up and it had stuff on it, yeah don't eat with it. But what was I supposed to do? The forks were on another floor and I was in the middle of business. I would have to walk around with a plate of food I'm doing nothing with, and the when you're carrying food cargo the idea is to get rid of it as soon as possible. Not just haul it around. But I understand the stigma. I understand why she wouldn't eat with a floor fork. And I understand the visceral reaction to the idea that someone might eat a floor fork. But when you really think about it, she shouldn't care. My body, my choice. And so I'm intrigued, maybe even flattered at first, that she would care. What am I ruining that's so sacred to her by eating with a floor fork? How much does she really care? I don't just change who I am and how I eat for people who don't care about me. But if she does care at all, let's see how much she cares. I don't just go right back to eating, I first have to telegraph that I heard her ask me not to eat with the fork. I look at her. I hesitate. I wait it out... and slowly take up a forkful, then bring it to my mouth. And she gets off at her stop by the time my stage show is over. I did it to enforce a point. She shouldn't care what I eat, and I shouldn't care what she saw.
The second thing though, I wish I didn't do. Long story short? I lied to my co-workers about my age. Short story long? A few of us are gathered around the coffee machine bitching about the crunch. How our jobs are rough on us. And like an idiot, I say something to the effect of "Here's how rough this job is on me. Know how long I've worked here? 12 years. Look at my face. Know how old I am? I'm 31." I'm not 31. I lied about my age, both to make people think the job has aged me prematurely, and to make my career path so far seem more impressive. If I say I started here as, like, an intern at 19, my current position seems a lot more appropriate. Maybe even impressive. But it's a lie. And I was given an opportunity to back out of the lie. One of my co-workers says "No you're not!" And I could've just let it be a joke. But herein lies the mental illness. I can't let it go. I double down on the lie. "No no, I'm 31, I'm not kidding." Now they're serious. Someone asks me what year I was born. As if to trip me up. "1988" I say. They SEEM convinced. They start calling other people over and telling those people I'm 31 and that I started here at 19, younger than most people started here by a good bit. Now word has spread. Word will most likely reach my boss soon. Someone who I'm pretty sure knows my actual age. And this'll be more evidence to the idea that I have too much wrong in my head to do anything more important or paying than what I do now. I didn't brush it off as a joke, I insisted that I was serious. And what a stupid thing to lie about! That's what he's gonna think! He's either gonna ask to see my ID and I'm gonna have to fish around for it like I'm looking for it and say "Oops, I don't have it with me" which is simple-minded on its own, or he's gonna know this is a lie and think "What's wrong with him that he would lie about this so adamantly?" Can you believe the latter is the BEST I can hope for? The best I can hope for is that he just quietly laments that I'm a retard, instead of coming to confront me about it. I do things like this, and wonder why I don't get promoted. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck shit fuck shit fuckin' shit why why WHY WHY WHY
I've felt for a long time that I have to get out of here. For a number of reasons. But now? The pressure is really on. I'm just waiting to be confronted about this again. Where did things go so wrong with my job? I did like it when I started. Let's see if we can past author it, in this manic depressive phase of my life. The inspiring highs, the frustrating lows. Starting with 2007. Picture this...
Harry Potter is still the biggest thing in the world right now with the release of the final book in the (original) series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. But there looms news that might just be able to follow that act. You're on the GameFAQs Smash Bros. Brawl board, and pre-release hype from following Dojo updates has turned the place into an asylum. Things could not get crazier.
And then, after midnight on October 10th, 2007, this update is announced.
The entirety of GameFAQs literally breaks down from the traffic. A culmination of 16 years of tension, the wet dream of so many hoaxes and "Mario vs. Sonic" sprite Flashes, the most essential, most relevant, most culturally important video game rivalry in the art. Sonic the Hedgehog is in Smash Bros. And he can fight Mario. It's happening for real now, not just in someone's Newgrounds animation. The greatest showdowns in history haven't happened, until now.
Nevermind Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games.
You might've noticed I've been trying to divide this history lesson into "eras," like the "emo era." What I should've mentioned earlier was the "Harry Potter era." Which happened at the same time and had a lot of overlap. Harry Potter was influential in a lot of ways, obviously. It influenced me to sit outside my local library from dawn to dusk, a bladder full of piss, because my mom and sisters wanted me to hold our place in line when the book dropped. But what I wanna point out is how instrumental it was in creating the "snarky literature dork" culture that was so prevalent in the pre-20-teens. Why when you look at a forum thread from 2007, everyone seems to talk a certain way, different from how they talk now.
That's Harry Potter that did that to people. But I wanna talk about this new era that started around this time, and how it affected me in my life. The "YouTube era." An era where a lot of the hallmarks of the past era started to evolve. Move on to other things/platforms. If you follow "Internet genealogy" discussions like these, for instance...
...you notice that people tend to leave their early/mid-2000s hangs for the platforms that started to get released/be popular in 2007. Like YouTube. Google had bought YouTube late in the year prior. I don't know if this was a product of that purchase or vice versa, but when something was big on YouTube, it was big everywhere. "King of the Flash Portal" big wasn't as big as YouTube big. What would be trivial stuff on any other website, relegated to that website's community, was in the late night circuit and being referenced in marketable materials. 2007 gave us Chris Crocker, Tay Zonday, Charlie Davies-Carr, anything remotely popular on YouTube was for some reason a huge deal. Newgrounds and the content it was famous for wasn't entirely dead at this point, cartoons and sprite Flashes were still popular, but those started to move to YouTube instead. Super Mario Bros. Z is a good example of this. Over on incels.is someone started singing Green Day's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams." And someone said that it reminded them the type of music that "It Ends Tonight" by The All-American Rejects would fit under.
"This type of music" says iHateLife. They're talking about that era where Green Days and Rejects and bands like that were popular. When if you wanted to hear a song, you waited for it to play on the radio, or saw if it was on MySpace or Yahoo! Music. That faded away in 2007. We moved on to listening to EspioRain's Dragonforce collection.
We moved on to listening to all of our music on YouTube. No more need to search for torrents, somebody probably uploaded the song somewhere on YouTube. I'm pretty sure YouTube also killed the MIDI shrine. YouTube, and a combination of the end of support for MIDI embedding for webpages, and the end of amateur webpages in general. The end of Geocities. Tripod is still out there, hanging onto history, but by 2007, if not the latter 2000s, the writing was on the wall. Mid-2000s fanartists & Livejournal novelists started to move on from the likes of Fanart-Central and SheezyArt to Tumblr, which started to hit its stride in the spring of this year. I'm not sure what attracted them to it, maybe the "go nuts show nuts" content policy, but I'm pretty sure the fanart settlers of the early/mid-2000s are who made Tumblr the "Tumblry" place it's known for. Where did the angst go? The angst in our music, the angst in our fanart? The angst in our OCs? Did 4chan shame and satirize us all into cheering up? Speaking of which, 4chan was still kicking. This was the year they made local news as "Hackers On Steroids." But even 2007's RickRoll is just the arguably more relevant YouTube evolution of 4chan's "duckroll." Meme culture in general, I think came about because of 4chan. Some say 4chan reached out and influenced the world, others say normies stole from 4chan and infected it with their appropriation. But 2007 was the turning point, I think. Up until 2007 a "meme" was something you only talked about on 4chan. So what happened? I think the most important thing that happened was how social media changed. Social media wasn't "invented" by Facebook and Twitter and so on, because America Online was technically social media. But by 2007 America Online as a catch-all portal was old news. And MySpace was starting to fade too. Taking its place was Facebook, and Google's "OpenSocial" project. Forces combining to make everything on the Internet compatible for the "social platforms." Making everything "shareable" in ways people didn't really consider with America Online. Back then if you wanted to share something, you forwarded an e-mail. Usually something from a Joke Of The Week e-newsletter, or a link to a humor website. But by 2007, people were encouraged to make Facebook profiles where they could post all their funny Demotivationals and Cheezburger image macros. And if someone saw that and thought it was funny, it was easy to share that link not only within the platform, but across platforms. Instead of a bulky link, humor websites started to become "embeddable" on Facebook profiles.
It was certainly a new era for me. It was when I started my current job. And I was eager to start. Start having money again. Up until 2007 I was still relying on dial-up and free America Online CDs. Had to go to my local library if I wanted cable Internet. It was time to upgrade. I wonder when the proper time to ditch dial-up is? I asked everyone else when they did.
Turns out 2007 is a pretty fair time to do it. Mid-2000s on average, I think. But about my job, from my first day working there, I was confined to a cubicle. That's not good, right? I wonder if that's responsible for any detrimental effects on me today? Mentally? Socially? One thing the cubicle was good for, I could browse GameFAQs without it being a problem. This was before all the security filters were put in, by the way. I can't browse GameFAQs today, and I don't want to. But back in 2007 I had maybe the best reason in GameFAQs history to: Smash Bros. Brawl board. Ask somebody. It was a madhouse. Absolutely retarded. I loved it so much. Right down to every stupid Unexpected Jinjo/ASCII thread. I still believed in Mortal Kombat, but like I said, Midway was bleeding money and the forums were dead. I needed a new thing. So I made the jump from Midway Forums to GameFAQs and its Brawl board. It was like /b/ but everyone had a username, which I guess deep down was what I always wanted. And thanks to YouTube being the hot new thing at the time, people weren't just posting ASCII threads. They were posting videos. Videos typically intended to troll and even disgust. This was the Wild West of YouTube times, people were uploading all sorts of stuff that wasn't supposed to be on YouTube. I'm not sure where the term "Gannonbanned" comes from, but I think it comes from this time when someone claimed to have leaked Brawl footage of Ganondorf, but it turned out to be a graphic beheading by some terrorist dudes. I never saw it, but so heinous was the offense that not only was the video removed from YouTube (obviously) and not only was the thread deleted and the poster banned from GameFAQs, but allegedly if you even ask about the "Ganondorf video" you get modded. Don't ask what the "Ganondorf video" is. I didn't. There was this one video I did see, I forget what I was lured with, but it turned out to be this guy with a bag on his head talking about the end of... something. Some cryptic prophecy. Then he cut the palm of his hand. And that was the end of the video. 2007 was also the year of "2 Girls 1 Cup." Which, another sign of how the Internet was just different between 2007 and years before, was inordinately popular for a shock video. You didn't get songs and jokes on TV about Meatspin or Goatse for instance. But 2 Girls 1 Cup was on everyone's lips. And on the Brawl board not only was it posted, but people were scared into thinking links were posts to it. But it wasn't all shock content. Sometimes it was a poll tourney. Sometimes it was a forum game. Sometimes it was erotic fanfiction about how they once had a teacher who looked like Zero Suit Samus. Sometimes it was a HoodboyTails video about how Sonic can't swim. Sometimes it was a MirceaKitsune vore video because someone really liked Krystal. Anything within the periphery of Smash Bros., and a lot that wasn't, was fair game. And of course there was forum drama/politics. Notable names and their orbiters. Like Princess Peachie. How the forum fought over a whiff of femininity. And Princess Peachie was very feminine. She wasn't just a girl, but a fan of Princess Peach and all things pink and cute and nice and pleasant. There was this dude on the Brawl boards that some people 'shipped her with, and wrote at least one erotic fanfic about. I forget this name, I think it was Wave Master. This is her today.
She was one of a few, but she was maybe the most popular girl. Speaking of there being more than one orbited girl in the GameFAQs Brawl community, what some members would do is set up "secret" boards on GameFAQs. See, GameFAQs, like MobyGames is a database of just about every video game ever released. Even on super obscure one-time consoles, like the Casio Loopy. So there were games on GameFAQs most people didn't know existed. And just about every game had its own board. And so if you found a game people didn't know about, odds are it had a board no one was using. So people would "claim" these boards. And usually use them as a place for their trusted circle to hang out. And that's what people in the GameFAQs Brawl community did too. If you got an invite, the inviter usually told you it was because you were cool and they were building a secret social board for the Brawl community's best and brightest and funniest and coolest. But what they actually meant by "cool" is "Won't pick on me for orbiting." That's what these boards were really for. Boys who liked girls would invite the girls they liked, and what boys they figured were probably okay with their fawning over the girls. They were boards where orbiters could orbit in peace. And because these boards weren't actually private, invite-only boards locked to non-members (I don't think I saw any of those until maybe 2010), these "secret boards" were often raided. I wanted notoriety in the GameFAQs Brawl community, like Wave Master/whatever his name was. It was real simple, I didn't need to make fanart or anything, though being a drawfag who could make people lewds on the fly probably would've helped. All I really needed to do was make popular threads. No, all I really needed to do was postmaxx. I needed a lot of people to see my threads/my name, and I could've done that through quality or quantity. I did acquire some fame, I got an invite to one of those orbiting boards, for one.
I still held ambitions for Endless Online. Though by 2007 almost all the old names were gone. A new generation had dominated, my guess is the old names left because the game was becoming less enjoyable with all the hacking to either cheat, or take the game's servers down. On the other hand, these were some of Endless Online's most populated days. In 2007, Endless regularly had several hundred players on during regular play time. Often breaking 1000. They had to actually remake the game's maps so that they were big enough to hold the huge crowds of players. Aeven Bank, a popular location because that's where people stored their gold and items, was notable for being expanded to two floors and having backdoors and stuff added so people didn't block the entrance. So there were plenty of new players, it's just the old players weren't sticking around. The old names didn't even really play that much anyway, as I said we kinda just chilled in IRC. Speaking of which, the IRC changed hosts from irc.equalslashed.net to irc.deltaanime.net. There was the official room, #endlessonline, but we didn't use that. We called our room #cock, because that's goofy and irreverent. I managed to get ahold of Shroud, the reason she had gone missing was because she was going through troubles with her living arrangements. Sadly, 2007 was the last year I ever heard from her. I still wonder where she is today. In other "old guard replaced by the new guard" news, we lost Endless Radio in 2007. It was struggling even in 2006, but by 2007 it was gone. Replaced by a whole new management. Called itself Ice Radio. But other than that it was functionally the same. You could still make requests and it still ran on Winamp. 2007 was also a big year for the new guard Lounge. The defining moment of forum drama took place this year. A dark tale that is the stuff of RageFuel. It's long, so I'll breeze through it.
Blousie and a guy called Pgstyle were dating. However, Blousie has problems. Remember how I said she was dependent on attention? One day she goes on Lounge drumming up fake assault allegations against Pgstyle. Because she's a girl, everyone sides with her. Just to make her happy. Because Blousie is one of the few out there who might actually reward your loyalty. Despite being accused like this, Pgstyle fights to keep Blousie. And they appear to be stable. Except not, because while Blousie and Pgstyle are trading hugs and kisses, Blousie is secretly making eyes at a guy named Cazz, a notable male poster on Lounge. This upset ANOTHER person, a woman named Midori. It's not clear why. Some say she loved Cazz and didn't like him being taken from her. Especially by someone who already has a boyfriend. She and Cazz have been very close. She has Cazz's nudes. But Midori is into girls, or at least claims to be. So she cozies up to Blousie, who has problems, and relished being lavished with attention. So it was easy for Midori to get Blousie's nudes. Then, with the nudes of the both of them in her possession, she posted them on Lounge. And what most people remember of that day is not Blousie's treachery, not that Pgstyle KNEW she was flirting with Cazz because she told him and he was cool with it because according to HIM, Cazz was the cuck because Blousie REALLY loved HIM, not Cazz, but instead the fact that Cazz had... what many considered... to be a small dick. I didn't see the pictures, I was afraid of what I would learn about my own dick. But it was a brutal dick-shaming for that guy. I mean, I guess it couldn't be that brutal, Midori liked him, apparently? But the day this happened was forever known as "Small Sunday." Ask about Small Sunday. Search "Endless Online" and "Small Sunday" and see who you find.
Where was I in all this? I kept a close eye on Robfox and the pictures he posted, 2007 was the year he graced Lounge with various Monster Girl comics and stuff. Still mostly just wishing I could help hold things together. But maybe less because I wanted to save the game, and more because I felt like the admins deserved a break from all their grief. People were talking about how the the admins didn't care. But these same complainers were the cheaters and server attackers who were ruining the game and making life hard for the admins. So it was tough to sympathize with that kind of community. But I still kept coming up with fan content. Mostly just to have a creative outlet. I wrote a quest storyline, shamelessly inspired by the Virginia Tech tragedy of that year. People were annoyed. Not because it was tasteless to reference the tragedy, no, back then on those forums it wasn't that big a deal. It was because, like most of my quest storylines, it was long and involved without much in the way of concrete rewards. I usually ended my quests with something purposefully crappy to be earned. It was kind of the joke that was my quests, and the punchline was that I wanted people to follow my quests for the storylines/lore, not the items/stats. So they were always impractically grandiose, because what I really wanted was to introduce characters and tell stories with them. In a game that didn't have very many characters or much lore, yet. For some reason this was less interesting than just writing my own original stories in an original world of my creating, but also less interesting than writing fanfics for, I dunno, Smash Bros. Which I also did on the GameFAQs Brawl board. Why? I guess I felt like I was helping the admins by contributing content? 2007 was Endless Online's most popular moment, but I think it was all downhill from that point on. The last year Endless Online would get any version updates. Which I guess, most MMORPGS don't go from version to version several times in a year anyway, but this was abnormal for Endless Online. It was the beginning of the end, I think. Even the phpBB package they used for the forum stopped being updated in 2007.
My mission to save as many images as I could continued. Fruitfully, thanks to images posted to the GameFAQs Brawl board. I got some good news, and some bad news. The good news is there was a "4chanarchive" filled with notable archived threads from 4chan. Not everything on 4chan is great, and everything on 4chan eventually gets deleted. But this was an archive that could stand for years, and it was filled with only the best stuff. I had to save the things that were here. Because "years" is not "forever." Bad news though? 2007 was the year Double Princess was found. It was too late for me to be the hero. I read it, and I remember it being as remarkable as the legends say. But today all people talk about is how it wasn't worth the weight. I still wanted to locate the sources of images, even if only for my own curiosity. And 4chanarchive was at least a good place to learn about new porn. And new porn stars. I'm not sure if it's thanks to 4chan or if it's thanks to how Internet porn evolved, but 2007 was the year I started looking for porn by the starlet. By 2007, names were being thrown around a lot more, names like Gianna Michaels, Brandy Talore, Abbey Brooks, Carmella Bing. And videos were a lot more available. But 4chanarchive didn't post videos. So the mission it gave me was to take their animated GIFs and figure out what videos they were from.
2007 also brought new TV to watch, thanks to me consistently having cable now. Regular non-cable was running dry. 4Kids had Dinosaur King, but outside of that and the odd episode of Ninja Turtles my interest wasn't kept. And To Catch A Predator was no longer airing. I know now that it was cancelled, after fallout from the roping of Louis Conradt. I was surprised, the world had enough of a heart for a predator NBC looks out and says "There isn't enough of an audience for this show anymore." I returned to a much changed landscape. It's not like Disney had never ever aired live action TV, but by 2007 they had entered a renaissance of "kiddy show biz" programming. Hannah Montana, Suite Life, Wizards of Waverly Place? Maybe that's where all the angst went. The culture of the day was inspired instead by these new pop starts Disney was churning out. My guess is to compete with TEENNick. Nickelodeon was also hitting the teen demographic hard around this time. But they still had cartoons in production at least. Disney had just the one, I think. Phineas & Ferb. And Phineas & Ferb, take it as a compliment or not, was not like the Disney cartoons that came before it. I can't quite put my finger on it. It was wry, I guess? Wry? Maybe this focus on teen markets is a reflection of a changing of the dominant generation? Maybe the angst went away because all the emo kids of the past years grew up and stopped being emo. And the new kids were the kids watching these live action teen shows. Decided to have a look at what then-day Cartoon Network and Toonami were up to. And I finally gave Adult Swim a try, a block I avoided on principle back when it first launched. Yu Yu Hakusho strangely aired both on Adult Swim and Toonami. And at the time I was fighting that "Edits are valid" battle. So I put my money where my mouth was. If Toonami wanted me to watch Yu Yu Hakusho their way, it must've been a valid way. And I didn't want Adult Swim undermining that. These strong feelings of mine would be tested in just the following year. Picture this...
2008. Where once you'd be watching Mario vs. Sonic on Newgrounds, you can now just do that yourself. YouTube Poops and Sparta Remixes rule the Internet instead. The hum of industry drones in the background as your Brawl sticker factory produces a plentiful supply of the last few unlockables you need before the game is 100% complete. As far as can be realistically expected of you. After taking a break to track down a working ROM of Mother 3, you return to long, rambling dissertation about how some anime are just not meant to be localized.
"Suppose there was an anime about how Japan is great and white people are The Devil. Not necessarily a bad show, it just wouldn't work for international release. It's not meany for us. But I don't think publishers understand that. Publishers today would probably go ahead trying to dub it anyway. Some things are supposed to stay over there. Just like some Western shows are meant to stay over here. There's probably Family Guy episodes that wouldn't work in Japan."
There's been a lot of panic about this Large Hadron Collider. It's supposed to open up a black hole and destroy the planet. Endless debate over anime makes you wonder, maybe the world should end? Are you really gonna miss any of this if it went away?
Like I said, "a much changed landscape." If Disney can be blamed for the end of the Emo Era thanks to its hold on the youth demographic, MTV has to be to blame too. The emo culture of the mid-2000s was inherently tied to its music, and 2008 saw the end of MTV's primary music video vehicle, Total Request Live. The end of this, coupled with the rise of YouTube, basically forced MTV and VH1 and BET to change programming strategies.
People often debate over when MTV "died." A lot of people say it was earlier, but I say it was 2008. Because while Total Request Live wasn't the exact same thing as Dial MTV, it was its natural evolution. Total Request Live wasn't subsequently updated to be something else, like Dial MTV and its successors were updated to become Total Request Live. TRL was just cancelled, because there was no more need for music videos on MTV like there used to be. Another hallmark of the mid-2000s, Myspace, was officially surpassed in 2008 by Facebook, according to Alexa ratings. More of that migration from the Internet being about expressing your personality with a page full of your likes and dislikes, to the Internet being about communicating through posts and comments.
Also changed since last I was here? I didn't get much time to enjoy Toonami, or much anime at all. Because in 2008, Toonami was cancelled. Naruto was moved to regular Cartoon Network and they started burning through their last few ready-to-air episodes in hour-long rock blocks. Anime just wasn't popular enough, ratings-wise. This didn't stop people on the Adult Swim forums from not just mourning the loss of Toonami, but demanding that Adult Swim do more to promote anime. As it grew increasingly niche. Especially dubbed anime. Subs, pirated or otherwise, were easy to get by now. And so I figured this is what people wanted, right? Who needs dubbed anime, with its edits and Americanization? It's non-originalness? That was the prevailing opinion back in the mid-2000s. But no, said people on the Adult Swim forums. They wanted cross promotion with the weekday/Sunday comedy programming. Now? Dubs were actually better than subs! And I'm like "But it's not faithful to the original! Technically any dub is inherently less faithful than the original." But they're like "You have to judge the subs and dubs as separate things, not dependent on one another. Judging the dub as its own original creation, we like it better than the sub, as its own original creation." So you can like the dub as its own thing now? That was my whole defense when 4Kids was doing it. It doesn't matter what the original characters sounded like or whose gun looked like what. I'm judging Mew Mew Power on the merits of Mew Mew Power, not Tokyo Mew Mew. But okay, okay, if you wanna say Cowboy Bebop is superior as a dub, I guess I get it. It's still a mature anime and maybe what you hate about 4Kids is that it's edited for kids. But Adult Swim was airing Bleach at the time, right? And what people were saying was "They should've aired Bleach on Toonami instead, to keep it alive. They should've edited it for kids." And I'm like, but that's the same shit people buried 4Kids over!!! And continue to bury them over to this day!!! And the hypocrisy didn't stop with Bleach. For some reason One Piece on 4Kids was abhorrent, but One Piece on Toonami was fabulous. Despite edits being made in BOTH cases. As if the edits on Toonami were fine, but the edits on 4Kids were unacceptable. But where is this arbitrary "You can edit this, but not that" line? Furthermore, 4Kids didn't invent the idea of editing anime for local/younger audiences. Even before One Piece, Funimation and Harmony Gold so many other Western houses were doing this with Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball, "disco guns" as TV Tropes calls them are not a 4Kids invention. But it's only when Lyserg gets HIS gun changed that we shit ourselves. People were getting sent to "another dimension" on Dragon Ball Z up to the Cell Saga. But if Yu-Gi-Oh! edits out mentions of death, it's unwatchable. You say you prefer the localized version of Dragon Ball Z? Don't like the original? Bruce Faulconer's soundtrack is "better" in your opinion? Well 4Kids' soundtracks to their shows are better in MY opinion. I don't know who to be mad at. I get attached to localized versions, people wanna tell me I'm wrong because it's not faithful to the original. I get attached to originals, people wanna tell me edits are valid. The whole thing was frustratingly fickle. I wished I could scream it to the world/the anime fandom at large. But I didn't have the platform or audience for that. Instead I clinged to the hope that anime will kinda just die out in the West and we won't have these discussions anymore. If it's not a kid's show like Pokémon or something, it's stuffed away on scarcely advertised graveyard slots. There was Adult Swim, there was Syfy's "Ani-Monday," and that was basically it. And both blocks didn't air much of anything. A merciful death was what this market needed. Plenty of American cartoons for those voice actors to find work in. Just not on Disney.
I didn't hate anime though, I still watched most of whatever was on. Most of whatever was on. But I didn't interact with the community so much. Except in two particular classes of anime. First, being that I was hunting pictures, I was into hentai/ecchi. Stuff that would and should never get dubbed/localized. Like Usagi-chan de Cue. There was (and still is) a principle I held onto: "Porn" and "mainstream" cannot collide. Porn is porn, and non-porn is "mainstream." Normal. For general audiences. That's why Wikipedia differentiates between Gina Rodriguez the pornographic actress, and Gina Rodriguez the "mainstream actress."
That's why Cue can never be dubbed. Because it's ecchi, which is softcore porn. And Western publishers tend to do business in non-porn productions. So to dub it or localize it would technically make you a producer of porn, of erotic materials. To voice act in it would technically make you a porn star. Which would be weird and awkward for anyone who wasn't a dedicated porn publishing/producing house to do. It would be weird and awkward for the mainstream voice talent of Viz and Funimation to try and make something that's genuinely supposed to be enjoyed sexually. This is why when studios & producers DO get into publishing porn, it's through a dedicated and separate adult content arm, like with Media Blasters/Kitty Media. When hentai/ecchi DOES get dubbed, they leave the sex scenes to pornographic voice over talent and the normal scenes to the mainstream talent. Like they did with Mezzo Forte. And they call them "love scenes." And when dubbed anime leans into the lewd, there's usually debate over whether or not it counts as ecchi. "It's not meant to be enjoyed sexually when Naruto turns into a girl. It's a joke, we're meant to laugh at it. The body is mostly covered anyway! This is a normal show with fighting and story, not an ecchi show." Genuine ecchi content isn't for mainstream talent or brands or networks. It's for buying online, and watching with subtitles. That's why it never gets dubbed. Because you gotta keep your worlds apart. Later on I would come to face some frustration over this principle, more than once. What was a lot less frustrating was the other kind of anime I watched a lot of, anime that was strictly for young audiences. Toyetic stuff. Like Bakugan, which made its Western debut in 2008. The latest battle toy game. I was kinda burned on these battle games with Yu-Gi-Oh!, but the prospect of a fandom where people weren't constantly trying to undermine the dub, or talk about how dubs are fine now, was welcome peace. There was no "dubs vs. subs" battle with the kid animes. It simply was what it was. Especially in Bakugan's case. Starting out, I didn't do any of the stuff I used to do with shows, no OCs, no merchandise, I just watched.
I was also really into video games at the time. Endless Online, that's a video game. But in 2008 I didn't have any contemporaries. I was that lone weird guy with the weird quest storylines. And I was happy to troll the forums with my content. I was one of the few people still doing fanmade content at this point. By 2008, "Ice Radio" was defunct, and no one was submitting comics to the "Endless !nteractive" section anymore. Even people's Endless blogs were closing up shop by 2008. Something I would've liked to have done, but everything I would've posted to a blog I just posted to the forums.
The game itself though, was still pulling hundreds of players at any given moment. But where updates and additions to the game used to be frequent, those were replaced with reboots and downtime and maintenance. The solution to the attacks on the servers was to simply have more resources. Be big enough that the DDoS attacks don't work. But so full were the admins' hands with this that progress with the game's development stagnated. A lot of people called the admins lazy and/or uncommitted, and for the most part I disagreed with that. But in 2008 it appeared that the Endless Online admins were diversifying their online game portfolio. I'm not exactly sure when it started, but Aengie, wife of Endless founder and head admin Vult-r, was running a Flash game website. And the both of them appeared to show stronger interest in that business than Endless. They added a "Flash Arcade" section to the Endless Online forums to discuss Flash games in general. Hopefully including the ones they were developing. This was fast becoming the new thing in 2008. Sophisticated Kongregate-style Flash games with progress you could save and everything. This is what Newgrounds Flash art had evolved to, and this was what people were ditching games like Endless for. Games like Castle Crashers and Defend Your Castle and other games involving castles. And Flash/Shockwave/Java games had always been a part of the Internet, but I think what they became in the latter 2000s was the beginning of the "addictive mobile game" era.
Speaking of games with heavy production schedules, Mortal Kombat released a new game toward the end of 2008, "Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe." I could've gone back. But I asked myself, does this game really count? Is it canon? It's raten Teen, not Mature. This seems like a game that should be skipped. Like a game they had to make, and would really rather they didn't. So I wasn't really down. Did I abandon Mortal Kombat?
Mortal Kombat and Endless Online both were running low on prospects. Inversely, Smash Bros. Brawl and its GameFAQs community invigorated me with new ambitions. A new drive to contribute to a community. I probably don't have to tell you that Brawl sparked a new wave of creativity. So much revolved around Brawl. Animations like "Brawl Taunts," webcomics like Brawl in the Family, the video game webcomic as a whole, really. Because webcomics did exist before Brawl, but they were mostly influenced by anime and the culture that surrounded that. And they were scarce. And not very popular. And video game webcomics were even scarcer. But something happened with the release of Brawl and there was an explosion. People weren't posting video game webcomics on the Mortal Kombat forums. But the GameFAQs forums had webcomics in the signatures, webcomics on the profiles, webcomics everywhere. Awkward Zombie definitely owes its popularity to the Brawl bump. Speaking of the Brawl bump, it made other games more popular. If it was featured in Smash/Brawl, it was relevant to the community. Metal Gear Solid 4 wasn't just a Metal Gear topic, it was a Smash Bros. topic. Sonic Unleashed wasn't just a Sonic topic, it was a Smash Bros. topic. The translation patch for Mother 3 wasn't just a Mother topic, it was a Smash Bros. topic. Because they were those guys from Brawl, and discussion of their source games became a discussion of Smash content. Like "Sonic's Werehog Form should've been his Final Smash" or "What do you think of Raiden as a future Smash combatant?" Without Smash, I wonder if these games would've been as popular or relevant as they were. Because Metal Gear Solid 4 was a big event. People online were talking about it. But Metal Gear Solid 3, you didn't hear much about. I don't know if that's because Snake wasn't in Smash yet, or because it was 2004 and Internet video game communities weren't yet what they were in 2008. But still, Smash wasn't just its own game, it was a crossing over of several entire game universes, as far as we saw. It was the crossing over of several entire fanbases. And that's probably what contributed to the party atmosphere of the GameFAQs Brawl board. Which continued on through 2008. It inspired this idea of Nintendo and Nintendo-adjacent games as one big... thing. And so any news about anything Nintendo or Nintendo-adjacent was all the more exciting. Mario Kart Wii is being released? On its own it might be just another quality entry in the Mario Kart franchise. But thanks to Brawl, I feel like, in buying Mario Kart Wii, I'm along for some great bandwagon ride through all things Nintendo and Nintendo-adjacent. I get Mario Kart Wii. I think of Brawl. I think of future Mario games to come. I think of future Nintendo games to come. I think of it all as an overarching empire that I am a subject in. And I'm inspired to somehow be a contributing subject. A notable subject in the community. So notable that I could be in touch with Nintendo somehow. Somehow. If only there was some forum or something where you could regularly encounter and interact with big industry names. Have them see my stuff. And be like "That's good stuff." Be within close enough reach to them that I could give feedback to them. Maybe they could put a reference to something I say or do or make into one of their games.
But how? What things should I try to accomplish toward that goal? Well, first I had to play games. I had to be good at games. I started learning about the professional Smash Bros fighting circuits. So I figured first on the agenda was "Achieve tournament level skill at games." No, first I needed a main. One's main, I felt, was representative of their identity as a Smasher. Pro or not. There was, as there always is, debate over tiers. I didn't want it to be as shallow as just picking Meta Knight, though some people will say Brawl wasn't balanced enough to prevent that kind of metagame. I wanted to be the best I could with whoever my main would be. The main that would represent me in the Smashing community. If not the gaming community as a whole. For instance, I might pick Fox or Falco or Wolf because I like them in the game, and I'm also a big fan of the Star Fox games. I do all the stuff and make all the fan content a Star Fox fan would make. The meaning of my GameFAQs username is themed around Star Fox. Or maybe I like Star Fox, Pilotwings, and flying games in general? Because I did like Pilotwings. And I did like furry stuff. See it becomes a question of personality and identity. Maybe I be the guy who likes flying games, with a side of furry stuff. Do the kinds of things that people like that do. Main Star Fox characters. Have flying be my hobby and go to pilot school or something. Know lots of technically sophisticated flight stuff. But that's just one possibility. Once I picked a main and declared myself part of the pro circuit, I should also upload videos of my skilled play on YouTube. I don't remember if the term "Let's Play" was in vogue on YouTube by 2008, but a Let's Player was basically what I wanted to be. To impress people with my video game play. Besides play games? Well, the mission kinda changed by 2008. YTMND itself wasn't defunct, but they weren't the thing to make anymore. And having Mario and Sonic fight on Newgrounds didn't seem to cut it either. Sprite animations did technically still exist, but I thought the more relevant thing to do would've been to make one of those video game webcomics. YTMNDs and sprite Flashes are on the way out. YouTube Poops? Real in right now. But the question to ask here is "What overlaps?" Not only were YouTube Poops really in right now, but because the popular Poop sources at the time were Mario & Zelda CD-i games, a lot of general Nintendo/video game fans also dabbled in Poops. Like MasterLinkX.
That's his channel today, but he's gone through many channels in the past. On all of his channels had gameplay videos, but he was also a relevant Pooper. Also he was a relevant reporter of leaks. So I had to be that too. Somebody who somehow was in the know about secret video game news. But I didn't just want my fingers in video game news, I wanted my fingers in video game lewds. I was basically inspired to follow the stuff I saw on the GameFAQs Brawl board. I was still trying to save and identify and archive as much as I could, and video game stuff was obviously a big part of the "industry." There was a lot of reposting of art by Sigurd Hosenfield. Who, like many affected by Brawl, drew from the perspective of a whole crossed over Nintendo/Nintendo-adjacent universe. A world where Mario, Peach, Zelda, Samus, Krystal, and others were interacting, even though Krystal wasn't playable. It didn't matter, anything Nintendo adjacent was part of this new wave going on. My job as a lewds archiver was to identify who was drawing this art (Sigurd Hosenfield), figure out where it was being posted so that I/we could get it from the source, and maybe someday be a collaborator or friend to Hosenfield. Do more than just look at his pictures. But was I really gonna be a creator of spank art while also making ostensibly non-spank webcomics? There's that "worlds apart" principle again. If you're looking for someone to showrun your early education cartoon, you wouldn't pick someone whose chief animation experience is drawing naked girls. Or would you? I still hold that you have to keep your worlds apart, but a good example of keeping worlds apart while still making something technically mainstream as a drawer of lewds, I thought, was "The Electric Tale of Pikachu." The work of Toshihiro Ono. He makes hentai by trade, but he drew this Pokémon manga. And the reason that worked for me is, you look at that manga, you understand that it's drawn by a guy who draws hentai for a living. The sexualized depictions are all still there, it's like it's basically still porn. So if I could be the kind of guy who drew naked girls, but whatever non-porn webcomics I made were clearly the work of a pornographer and no pretense of being "totally clean" was present, I think I could be okay with it. Like how Newgrounds animators like Spazkid make crudely sexual cartoons and you're like "Am I supposed to laugh at this or fap to this?" Those artists eventually go on to make just flat out pornographic art. Because they know their work is erotic. But then... it just didn't sit right with me. If my dream of networking the video game industry and making friends and allies was gonna come true, I didn't want to bleed my lewdness into Nintendo's family-friendliness. If it was meant to be family friendly. I mean it is, right? I mean, when I first saw this cutscene in Subspace Emissary...
I thought "I have seen a lot of hentai/ecchi, that ass closeup is a trademark of the craft. That ass closeup was on purpose. But it's Nintendo, so it's like the developers WANT to make content like this, but they can't come out and admit what this is supposed to be. Who this kind of content is for." But then people tell me "No, you're misinterpreting it." And so I think "Well I guess it wasn't really a closeup of her ass, more like her back." And so I'm torn, is Nintendo a family-friendly company and I'm just misinterpreting things due to seeing so much porn that I'm picking up on accidental porn tropes? Or do their developers secretly like tiddy and booty and are looking for ways to put it in the game? Being torn like this kept me from committing to what kind of artist I would be. Strictly non-lewd, or lewd with an option to draw mainstream art where all the women are suspiciously overdeveloped.
I also wanted to make game mods. Specifically inspired by Brawl. Like I would be on a stage, or doing Subspace Emissary, and I would think "What if you could walk into the background? The game doesn't let you do that normally, but what if I was a savvy homebrewer who made homebrew stuff for the Wii? And mods for games? What if I uploaded a mod where I enable 360 degree movement and go running through the background? Wouldn't it be cool if I uploaded a video of Marth running around the basements of Castle Siege? Showing people what's back there?" Of course I wondered how much of the background was actually explorable, and how much of it was just a 2D image. But even if it was just a 2D image, I wanted to then be some kind of level developer who creates what the backgrounds of levels might look like if you could explore them. And post videos like that. Also I was interested in the Nintendo Chronicle. A feature in Brawl that was, I naively thought at the time, a list of every game Nintendo owned the rights to. That's not what Chronicle was, but what I wanted to do was compile an ACTUAL Chronicle of every video game Nintendo owned the rights to. That way I could speculate on future Smash content/video game crossovers. But not just Nintendo. I wanted to know who owned the rights to every game. For instance, I wanted to make a Sony Chronicle. to see what games Sony owned the rights to, so that they might, in the future, make Sony Smash Bros. Hypothetically. The idea didn't really interest me, but I did at least want to know if it was possible. Because when you think Nintendo, you think several franchises that they created and own. You think Sony, Sony doesn't really own those games. Sony doesn't own Metal Gear, that's Konami. Metal Gear just plays a lot with Sony. But Snake, a Metal Gear character, did get to be in Smash Bros. So if I was to compile a Konami Khronicle, I could have a list of games that could maybe be featured in the Smash franchise, or cross over with Nintendoness somehow. That's kind of the downside of being so inspired by the Smash culture that blossomed in 2008. Other games paled in comparison. Just about all of my video game interest somehow stemmed back to being fueled by Smash. I liked Sega games, because Sonic was in Smash, so now I think of Nintendo and Sega games crossing over, like in future Smash games, or other endeavors. Can we get some kind of "Fire Emblem X Shining Force" game? This also meant that I liked other "irrelevant" games less. I spent many a nostalgic moment with the likes of Oddworld and Quantum Redshift. But they just weren't "in vogue" right now. In this world of Smash Brothersy/Nintendo-y YouTube Poops and animations and webcomics and stuff.
Except one game. One game was relevant to me and it had nothing to do with Nintendo or Smash, and I had no interest in it ever crossing over with Nintendo or Smash. One other game was getting Pooped and meme'd and had a big enough community following to attract me. The other cultural phenom of the time, Team Fortress 2. Actually, it wasn't just one game. Valve itself was big in the latter 2000s thanks to Steam and the release of the Steam Community and Steamworks. TF2 was getting videos and memes and stuff thanks to all the movies released for it, but so was Portal, thanks to the Aperture Science videos. So was Left 4 Dead, thanks to the easily accessible sound files. It was like the start of a new era of PC gaming. Before this, PC games didn't really have much relevance. Steam exposed the world to it, made it accessible. If your computer can run it, you can buy it and play it from the Internet. So in 2008 I ditched the laptop and built a PC so I could run PC games. Like Smash, I needed a TF2 main. I was tempted to go with Scout, but everyone picked Scout. So I never truly committed. Also, I wanted to make mods for TF2. Mods and maps, like Xenon. Also, my pic hunter mission came into play with TF2. Especially on Xenon's maps. His maps were often filled with images relevant to my interests, and I needed a way to somehow decompile his maps and break them down into raw assets, so I could just take out the images, save them, and look for their sources. That was a thing I wanted to do. Also, people's sprays. Those weren't part of the map, but it was important to me to figure out where people's sprays came from. I made this clear to the people I played with. And they seemed to understand! Most actually helped me, when they could.
Speaking of interesting pictures and the hunt for their sources, 2008 was a bumper crop for 3D women too. Mostly discovered through animated GIFs on 4chan and 4chanarchive. I don't know how truly part of the 4chan community I was, but 2008 was when I started actively avoiding 4chan. 2008 was the start of the controversial "Project Chanology." The Scientology protests. I didn't like them, for the same reason everyone else who didn't like them didn't like them. Here was 4chan, who just the year prior was being called the scourge of the Internet and we all just laughed, suddenly wants to represent itself as some kind of force for good. "Moralfaggotry," as it was called, had no place here. 4chan is supposed to be irreverent! It's not supposed to care about people! What was the point of all that fronting before then??? So 4chan, if not before 2008, was definitely now just for finding interesting pictures. Which was covered by 4chanarchive pretty well anyway.
Porn was getting more extreme, veering into "Did they stage that? That's gotta be illegal" territory. I had seen the Bang Bus before, and now I was seeing things like Asses In Public and Busty Loads. Public sex with strangers and things like that. And not just strangers that happened to pass by. They would take the van and look for places where bystanders were, and swing the door open to deliberately expose two people fucking. Flashing is illegal. If I show my dick to people on the street, that's illegal. So this has to be way illegal. And so my mind is just blown by the crazy shit I'm seeing. I have to know if it's real. I start researching some of the crazier claims I see in porn. Regular fans getting to fuck porn stars, like, if a sports team wins. And it turns out people have stories. This really does happen to people. But surely even publishing these videos is incriminating, right? Do they wait for the statute of limitations to run out? I wished I could ask someone about it. Like Gianna Michaels. I saw her do a "Reverse Bang Bus" where they drove around looking for random men to fuck her. She takes on 3 guys, almost takes on a 4th. A construction worker that almost gets in the bus, but decides against it for some reason. I guess he had work to do. What would I ask? Where the Bang Bus is filmed? I did want to know. But I was dissuaded from asking when I got to the part of the "Quest For Cock" where Gianna says to her latest john "You HAVE to have a big dick." Oof. If I could find the full video I'd post it, but I can't. Anyway, I know I don't have what it takes. But now I'm curious about what it does take. Because she is notorious for her sexual voracity, not just here, but in all of her videos. And these 3 guys could not slake her thirst. Not all of the combined. And so I wondered, if that wasn't staged as some sort of "Look at how these bums off the street break their swords upon the mithril hide of Gianna Michaels" fairy story, if ALL of that was real, what was it that those men lacked? What does it take? Obviously more than what I've got, but for some reason I felt like it would be valuable information to know what kind of arch-Thundercock it takes to beat back a Gianna Michaels.
I'm well over the character limit by now, so I'll end it here. A summary of my dreams and ambitions up to now...
If there was a single job, a single title, that covered all of this? And I could sign up for it in 2008? That would be all I wanted.
Last year for Halloween I went to a fetish party in a foolhardy gambit to ascend. That was 2018. The year of Logan Paul and Bowsette. But we'll talk about 2018 later. This year all I did was have my job's annual Halloween luncheon. Almost no one was in costume. Not even me. I did wear a Halloween-themed shirt, and what was more than most people did. Because it was still a work day and we had work to do. So only people I've never seen do actual work got to wear costumes. I saw Santa, I saw a scarecrow, I saw Gumby, I saw a Handmaid's Tale handmaid, I saw an Amish woman... I think that was it. Now, I actually started with this company in 2007, after doing whatever I could for money between 2003 and 2006. And I was real glad to be here back then. But it's been 12 years now. And I'm not as happy as I used to be. For a number of reasons. But I think what I'm most entitled to be angry about is that I haven't gotten promoted or gotten a raise in all my 12 years of being here. And why??? Why, I wonder!!! Well, I'm pretty sure it's because they think I'm genuinely autistic, and cannot handle the extra responsibility of a big boy job. Because of incidents like these...
https://incels.is/threads/had-an-in...picion-that-i-was-gonna-shoot-somebody.56222/
https://incels.is/threads/i-faced-a...o-myself-on-the-elevator-like-a-rarted.88651/
...and incidents like what happened at the Halloween luncheon. There were two incidents. The first I don't mind so much. Might even be proud of it. I was in the elevator, and I had a plate of food from the luncheon. No one else is in the elevator. I'm eating, but then the momentum of the elevator causes me to drop my fork, right? And just as I bend over to pick it up, this woman walks into the elevator. We start making small talk. I don't eat while we're doing this because I wonder if she saw me pick this fork off of the elevator floor. I'm hoping she didn't, but fearing that she did. There's a lull in the conversation, and she interjects: "Don't eat with that fork." Now, this being a story about how I did an autistic thing, you probably guessed I ate with the fork. But let me walk you through my madness. Would I have eaten with that fork if I wasn't caught? Yes. It's not like it was down in filth. It was on top. Above the filth. If I picked it up and it had stuff on it, yeah don't eat with it. But what was I supposed to do? The forks were on another floor and I was in the middle of business. I would have to walk around with a plate of food I'm doing nothing with, and the when you're carrying food cargo the idea is to get rid of it as soon as possible. Not just haul it around. But I understand the stigma. I understand why she wouldn't eat with a floor fork. And I understand the visceral reaction to the idea that someone might eat a floor fork. But when you really think about it, she shouldn't care. My body, my choice. And so I'm intrigued, maybe even flattered at first, that she would care. What am I ruining that's so sacred to her by eating with a floor fork? How much does she really care? I don't just change who I am and how I eat for people who don't care about me. But if she does care at all, let's see how much she cares. I don't just go right back to eating, I first have to telegraph that I heard her ask me not to eat with the fork. I look at her. I hesitate. I wait it out... and slowly take up a forkful, then bring it to my mouth. And she gets off at her stop by the time my stage show is over. I did it to enforce a point. She shouldn't care what I eat, and I shouldn't care what she saw.
The second thing though, I wish I didn't do. Long story short? I lied to my co-workers about my age. Short story long? A few of us are gathered around the coffee machine bitching about the crunch. How our jobs are rough on us. And like an idiot, I say something to the effect of "Here's how rough this job is on me. Know how long I've worked here? 12 years. Look at my face. Know how old I am? I'm 31." I'm not 31. I lied about my age, both to make people think the job has aged me prematurely, and to make my career path so far seem more impressive. If I say I started here as, like, an intern at 19, my current position seems a lot more appropriate. Maybe even impressive. But it's a lie. And I was given an opportunity to back out of the lie. One of my co-workers says "No you're not!" And I could've just let it be a joke. But herein lies the mental illness. I can't let it go. I double down on the lie. "No no, I'm 31, I'm not kidding." Now they're serious. Someone asks me what year I was born. As if to trip me up. "1988" I say. They SEEM convinced. They start calling other people over and telling those people I'm 31 and that I started here at 19, younger than most people started here by a good bit. Now word has spread. Word will most likely reach my boss soon. Someone who I'm pretty sure knows my actual age. And this'll be more evidence to the idea that I have too much wrong in my head to do anything more important or paying than what I do now. I didn't brush it off as a joke, I insisted that I was serious. And what a stupid thing to lie about! That's what he's gonna think! He's either gonna ask to see my ID and I'm gonna have to fish around for it like I'm looking for it and say "Oops, I don't have it with me" which is simple-minded on its own, or he's gonna know this is a lie and think "What's wrong with him that he would lie about this so adamantly?" Can you believe the latter is the BEST I can hope for? The best I can hope for is that he just quietly laments that I'm a retard, instead of coming to confront me about it. I do things like this, and wonder why I don't get promoted. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck shit fuck shit fuckin' shit why why WHY WHY WHY
I've felt for a long time that I have to get out of here. For a number of reasons. But now? The pressure is really on. I'm just waiting to be confronted about this again. Where did things go so wrong with my job? I did like it when I started. Let's see if we can past author it, in this manic depressive phase of my life. The inspiring highs, the frustrating lows. Starting with 2007. Picture this...
Harry Potter is still the biggest thing in the world right now with the release of the final book in the (original) series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. But there looms news that might just be able to follow that act. You're on the GameFAQs Smash Bros. Brawl board, and pre-release hype from following Dojo updates has turned the place into an asylum. Things could not get crazier.
And then, after midnight on October 10th, 2007, this update is announced.
The entirety of GameFAQs literally breaks down from the traffic. A culmination of 16 years of tension, the wet dream of so many hoaxes and "Mario vs. Sonic" sprite Flashes, the most essential, most relevant, most culturally important video game rivalry in the art. Sonic the Hedgehog is in Smash Bros. And he can fight Mario. It's happening for real now, not just in someone's Newgrounds animation. The greatest showdowns in history haven't happened, until now.
Nevermind Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games.
You might've noticed I've been trying to divide this history lesson into "eras," like the "emo era." What I should've mentioned earlier was the "Harry Potter era." Which happened at the same time and had a lot of overlap. Harry Potter was influential in a lot of ways, obviously. It influenced me to sit outside my local library from dawn to dusk, a bladder full of piss, because my mom and sisters wanted me to hold our place in line when the book dropped. But what I wanna point out is how instrumental it was in creating the "snarky literature dork" culture that was so prevalent in the pre-20-teens. Why when you look at a forum thread from 2007, everyone seems to talk a certain way, different from how they talk now.
That's Harry Potter that did that to people. But I wanna talk about this new era that started around this time, and how it affected me in my life. The "YouTube era." An era where a lot of the hallmarks of the past era started to evolve. Move on to other things/platforms. If you follow "Internet genealogy" discussions like these, for instance...
https://incels.is/threads/can-you-trace-your-internet-genealogy.156026/
...you notice that people tend to leave their early/mid-2000s hangs for the platforms that started to get released/be popular in 2007. Like YouTube. Google had bought YouTube late in the year prior. I don't know if this was a product of that purchase or vice versa, but when something was big on YouTube, it was big everywhere. "King of the Flash Portal" big wasn't as big as YouTube big. What would be trivial stuff on any other website, relegated to that website's community, was in the late night circuit and being referenced in marketable materials. 2007 gave us Chris Crocker, Tay Zonday, Charlie Davies-Carr, anything remotely popular on YouTube was for some reason a huge deal. Newgrounds and the content it was famous for wasn't entirely dead at this point, cartoons and sprite Flashes were still popular, but those started to move to YouTube instead. Super Mario Bros. Z is a good example of this. Over on incels.is someone started singing Green Day's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams." And someone said that it reminded them the type of music that "It Ends Tonight" by The All-American Rejects would fit under.
https://incels.is/threads/i-walk-a-lonely-road.154203/
"This type of music" says iHateLife. They're talking about that era where Green Days and Rejects and bands like that were popular. When if you wanted to hear a song, you waited for it to play on the radio, or saw if it was on MySpace or Yahoo! Music. That faded away in 2007. We moved on to listening to EspioRain's Dragonforce collection.
We moved on to listening to all of our music on YouTube. No more need to search for torrents, somebody probably uploaded the song somewhere on YouTube. I'm pretty sure YouTube also killed the MIDI shrine. YouTube, and a combination of the end of support for MIDI embedding for webpages, and the end of amateur webpages in general. The end of Geocities. Tripod is still out there, hanging onto history, but by 2007, if not the latter 2000s, the writing was on the wall. Mid-2000s fanartists & Livejournal novelists started to move on from the likes of Fanart-Central and SheezyArt to Tumblr, which started to hit its stride in the spring of this year. I'm not sure what attracted them to it, maybe the "go nuts show nuts" content policy, but I'm pretty sure the fanart settlers of the early/mid-2000s are who made Tumblr the "Tumblry" place it's known for. Where did the angst go? The angst in our music, the angst in our fanart? The angst in our OCs? Did 4chan shame and satirize us all into cheering up? Speaking of which, 4chan was still kicking. This was the year they made local news as "Hackers On Steroids." But even 2007's RickRoll is just the arguably more relevant YouTube evolution of 4chan's "duckroll." Meme culture in general, I think came about because of 4chan. Some say 4chan reached out and influenced the world, others say normies stole from 4chan and infected it with their appropriation. But 2007 was the turning point, I think. Up until 2007 a "meme" was something you only talked about on 4chan. So what happened? I think the most important thing that happened was how social media changed. Social media wasn't "invented" by Facebook and Twitter and so on, because America Online was technically social media. But by 2007 America Online as a catch-all portal was old news. And MySpace was starting to fade too. Taking its place was Facebook, and Google's "OpenSocial" project. Forces combining to make everything on the Internet compatible for the "social platforms." Making everything "shareable" in ways people didn't really consider with America Online. Back then if you wanted to share something, you forwarded an e-mail. Usually something from a Joke Of The Week e-newsletter, or a link to a humor website. But by 2007, people were encouraged to make Facebook profiles where they could post all their funny Demotivationals and Cheezburger image macros. And if someone saw that and thought it was funny, it was easy to share that link not only within the platform, but across platforms. Instead of a bulky link, humor websites started to become "embeddable" on Facebook profiles.
It was certainly a new era for me. It was when I started my current job. And I was eager to start. Start having money again. Up until 2007 I was still relying on dial-up and free America Online CDs. Had to go to my local library if I wanted cable Internet. It was time to upgrade. I wonder when the proper time to ditch dial-up is? I asked everyone else when they did.
https://incels.is/threads/what-year...-dial-up-internet-to-cable-high-speed.154247/
Turns out 2007 is a pretty fair time to do it. Mid-2000s on average, I think. But about my job, from my first day working there, I was confined to a cubicle. That's not good, right? I wonder if that's responsible for any detrimental effects on me today? Mentally? Socially? One thing the cubicle was good for, I could browse GameFAQs without it being a problem. This was before all the security filters were put in, by the way. I can't browse GameFAQs today, and I don't want to. But back in 2007 I had maybe the best reason in GameFAQs history to: Smash Bros. Brawl board. Ask somebody. It was a madhouse. Absolutely retarded. I loved it so much. Right down to every stupid Unexpected Jinjo/ASCII thread. I still believed in Mortal Kombat, but like I said, Midway was bleeding money and the forums were dead. I needed a new thing. So I made the jump from Midway Forums to GameFAQs and its Brawl board. It was like /b/ but everyone had a username, which I guess deep down was what I always wanted. And thanks to YouTube being the hot new thing at the time, people weren't just posting ASCII threads. They were posting videos. Videos typically intended to troll and even disgust. This was the Wild West of YouTube times, people were uploading all sorts of stuff that wasn't supposed to be on YouTube. I'm not sure where the term "Gannonbanned" comes from, but I think it comes from this time when someone claimed to have leaked Brawl footage of Ganondorf, but it turned out to be a graphic beheading by some terrorist dudes. I never saw it, but so heinous was the offense that not only was the video removed from YouTube (obviously) and not only was the thread deleted and the poster banned from GameFAQs, but allegedly if you even ask about the "Ganondorf video" you get modded. Don't ask what the "Ganondorf video" is. I didn't. There was this one video I did see, I forget what I was lured with, but it turned out to be this guy with a bag on his head talking about the end of... something. Some cryptic prophecy. Then he cut the palm of his hand. And that was the end of the video. 2007 was also the year of "2 Girls 1 Cup." Which, another sign of how the Internet was just different between 2007 and years before, was inordinately popular for a shock video. You didn't get songs and jokes on TV about Meatspin or Goatse for instance. But 2 Girls 1 Cup was on everyone's lips. And on the Brawl board not only was it posted, but people were scared into thinking links were posts to it. But it wasn't all shock content. Sometimes it was a poll tourney. Sometimes it was a forum game. Sometimes it was erotic fanfiction about how they once had a teacher who looked like Zero Suit Samus. Sometimes it was a HoodboyTails video about how Sonic can't swim. Sometimes it was a MirceaKitsune vore video because someone really liked Krystal. Anything within the periphery of Smash Bros., and a lot that wasn't, was fair game. And of course there was forum drama/politics. Notable names and their orbiters. Like Princess Peachie. How the forum fought over a whiff of femininity. And Princess Peachie was very feminine. She wasn't just a girl, but a fan of Princess Peach and all things pink and cute and nice and pleasant. There was this dude on the Brawl boards that some people 'shipped her with, and wrote at least one erotic fanfic about. I forget this name, I think it was Wave Master. This is her today.
She was one of a few, but she was maybe the most popular girl. Speaking of there being more than one orbited girl in the GameFAQs Brawl community, what some members would do is set up "secret" boards on GameFAQs. See, GameFAQs, like MobyGames is a database of just about every video game ever released. Even on super obscure one-time consoles, like the Casio Loopy. So there were games on GameFAQs most people didn't know existed. And just about every game had its own board. And so if you found a game people didn't know about, odds are it had a board no one was using. So people would "claim" these boards. And usually use them as a place for their trusted circle to hang out. And that's what people in the GameFAQs Brawl community did too. If you got an invite, the inviter usually told you it was because you were cool and they were building a secret social board for the Brawl community's best and brightest and funniest and coolest. But what they actually meant by "cool" is "Won't pick on me for orbiting." That's what these boards were really for. Boys who liked girls would invite the girls they liked, and what boys they figured were probably okay with their fawning over the girls. They were boards where orbiters could orbit in peace. And because these boards weren't actually private, invite-only boards locked to non-members (I don't think I saw any of those until maybe 2010), these "secret boards" were often raided. I wanted notoriety in the GameFAQs Brawl community, like Wave Master/whatever his name was. It was real simple, I didn't need to make fanart or anything, though being a drawfag who could make people lewds on the fly probably would've helped. All I really needed to do was make popular threads. No, all I really needed to do was postmaxx. I needed a lot of people to see my threads/my name, and I could've done that through quality or quantity. I did acquire some fame, I got an invite to one of those orbiting boards, for one.
I still held ambitions for Endless Online. Though by 2007 almost all the old names were gone. A new generation had dominated, my guess is the old names left because the game was becoming less enjoyable with all the hacking to either cheat, or take the game's servers down. On the other hand, these were some of Endless Online's most populated days. In 2007, Endless regularly had several hundred players on during regular play time. Often breaking 1000. They had to actually remake the game's maps so that they were big enough to hold the huge crowds of players. Aeven Bank, a popular location because that's where people stored their gold and items, was notable for being expanded to two floors and having backdoors and stuff added so people didn't block the entrance. So there were plenty of new players, it's just the old players weren't sticking around. The old names didn't even really play that much anyway, as I said we kinda just chilled in IRC. Speaking of which, the IRC changed hosts from irc.equalslashed.net to irc.deltaanime.net. There was the official room, #endlessonline, but we didn't use that. We called our room #cock, because that's goofy and irreverent. I managed to get ahold of Shroud, the reason she had gone missing was because she was going through troubles with her living arrangements. Sadly, 2007 was the last year I ever heard from her. I still wonder where she is today. In other "old guard replaced by the new guard" news, we lost Endless Radio in 2007. It was struggling even in 2006, but by 2007 it was gone. Replaced by a whole new management. Called itself Ice Radio. But other than that it was functionally the same. You could still make requests and it still ran on Winamp. 2007 was also a big year for the new guard Lounge. The defining moment of forum drama took place this year. A dark tale that is the stuff of RageFuel. It's long, so I'll breeze through it.
Blousie and a guy called Pgstyle were dating. However, Blousie has problems. Remember how I said she was dependent on attention? One day she goes on Lounge drumming up fake assault allegations against Pgstyle. Because she's a girl, everyone sides with her. Just to make her happy. Because Blousie is one of the few out there who might actually reward your loyalty. Despite being accused like this, Pgstyle fights to keep Blousie. And they appear to be stable. Except not, because while Blousie and Pgstyle are trading hugs and kisses, Blousie is secretly making eyes at a guy named Cazz, a notable male poster on Lounge. This upset ANOTHER person, a woman named Midori. It's not clear why. Some say she loved Cazz and didn't like him being taken from her. Especially by someone who already has a boyfriend. She and Cazz have been very close. She has Cazz's nudes. But Midori is into girls, or at least claims to be. So she cozies up to Blousie, who has problems, and relished being lavished with attention. So it was easy for Midori to get Blousie's nudes. Then, with the nudes of the both of them in her possession, she posted them on Lounge. And what most people remember of that day is not Blousie's treachery, not that Pgstyle KNEW she was flirting with Cazz because she told him and he was cool with it because according to HIM, Cazz was the cuck because Blousie REALLY loved HIM, not Cazz, but instead the fact that Cazz had... what many considered... to be a small dick. I didn't see the pictures, I was afraid of what I would learn about my own dick. But it was a brutal dick-shaming for that guy. I mean, I guess it couldn't be that brutal, Midori liked him, apparently? But the day this happened was forever known as "Small Sunday." Ask about Small Sunday. Search "Endless Online" and "Small Sunday" and see who you find.
Where was I in all this? I kept a close eye on Robfox and the pictures he posted, 2007 was the year he graced Lounge with various Monster Girl comics and stuff. Still mostly just wishing I could help hold things together. But maybe less because I wanted to save the game, and more because I felt like the admins deserved a break from all their grief. People were talking about how the the admins didn't care. But these same complainers were the cheaters and server attackers who were ruining the game and making life hard for the admins. So it was tough to sympathize with that kind of community. But I still kept coming up with fan content. Mostly just to have a creative outlet. I wrote a quest storyline, shamelessly inspired by the Virginia Tech tragedy of that year. People were annoyed. Not because it was tasteless to reference the tragedy, no, back then on those forums it wasn't that big a deal. It was because, like most of my quest storylines, it was long and involved without much in the way of concrete rewards. I usually ended my quests with something purposefully crappy to be earned. It was kind of the joke that was my quests, and the punchline was that I wanted people to follow my quests for the storylines/lore, not the items/stats. So they were always impractically grandiose, because what I really wanted was to introduce characters and tell stories with them. In a game that didn't have very many characters or much lore, yet. For some reason this was less interesting than just writing my own original stories in an original world of my creating, but also less interesting than writing fanfics for, I dunno, Smash Bros. Which I also did on the GameFAQs Brawl board. Why? I guess I felt like I was helping the admins by contributing content? 2007 was Endless Online's most popular moment, but I think it was all downhill from that point on. The last year Endless Online would get any version updates. Which I guess, most MMORPGS don't go from version to version several times in a year anyway, but this was abnormal for Endless Online. It was the beginning of the end, I think. Even the phpBB package they used for the forum stopped being updated in 2007.
My mission to save as many images as I could continued. Fruitfully, thanks to images posted to the GameFAQs Brawl board. I got some good news, and some bad news. The good news is there was a "4chanarchive" filled with notable archived threads from 4chan. Not everything on 4chan is great, and everything on 4chan eventually gets deleted. But this was an archive that could stand for years, and it was filled with only the best stuff. I had to save the things that were here. Because "years" is not "forever." Bad news though? 2007 was the year Double Princess was found. It was too late for me to be the hero. I read it, and I remember it being as remarkable as the legends say. But today all people talk about is how it wasn't worth the weight. I still wanted to locate the sources of images, even if only for my own curiosity. And 4chanarchive was at least a good place to learn about new porn. And new porn stars. I'm not sure if it's thanks to 4chan or if it's thanks to how Internet porn evolved, but 2007 was the year I started looking for porn by the starlet. By 2007, names were being thrown around a lot more, names like Gianna Michaels, Brandy Talore, Abbey Brooks, Carmella Bing. And videos were a lot more available. But 4chanarchive didn't post videos. So the mission it gave me was to take their animated GIFs and figure out what videos they were from.
2007 also brought new TV to watch, thanks to me consistently having cable now. Regular non-cable was running dry. 4Kids had Dinosaur King, but outside of that and the odd episode of Ninja Turtles my interest wasn't kept. And To Catch A Predator was no longer airing. I know now that it was cancelled, after fallout from the roping of Louis Conradt. I was surprised, the world had enough of a heart for a predator NBC looks out and says "There isn't enough of an audience for this show anymore." I returned to a much changed landscape. It's not like Disney had never ever aired live action TV, but by 2007 they had entered a renaissance of "kiddy show biz" programming. Hannah Montana, Suite Life, Wizards of Waverly Place? Maybe that's where all the angst went. The culture of the day was inspired instead by these new pop starts Disney was churning out. My guess is to compete with TEENNick. Nickelodeon was also hitting the teen demographic hard around this time. But they still had cartoons in production at least. Disney had just the one, I think. Phineas & Ferb. And Phineas & Ferb, take it as a compliment or not, was not like the Disney cartoons that came before it. I can't quite put my finger on it. It was wry, I guess? Wry? Maybe this focus on teen markets is a reflection of a changing of the dominant generation? Maybe the angst went away because all the emo kids of the past years grew up and stopped being emo. And the new kids were the kids watching these live action teen shows. Decided to have a look at what then-day Cartoon Network and Toonami were up to. And I finally gave Adult Swim a try, a block I avoided on principle back when it first launched. Yu Yu Hakusho strangely aired both on Adult Swim and Toonami. And at the time I was fighting that "Edits are valid" battle. So I put my money where my mouth was. If Toonami wanted me to watch Yu Yu Hakusho their way, it must've been a valid way. And I didn't want Adult Swim undermining that. These strong feelings of mine would be tested in just the following year. Picture this...
2008. Where once you'd be watching Mario vs. Sonic on Newgrounds, you can now just do that yourself. YouTube Poops and Sparta Remixes rule the Internet instead. The hum of industry drones in the background as your Brawl sticker factory produces a plentiful supply of the last few unlockables you need before the game is 100% complete. As far as can be realistically expected of you. After taking a break to track down a working ROM of Mother 3, you return to long, rambling dissertation about how some anime are just not meant to be localized.
"Suppose there was an anime about how Japan is great and white people are The Devil. Not necessarily a bad show, it just wouldn't work for international release. It's not meany for us. But I don't think publishers understand that. Publishers today would probably go ahead trying to dub it anyway. Some things are supposed to stay over there. Just like some Western shows are meant to stay over here. There's probably Family Guy episodes that wouldn't work in Japan."
There's been a lot of panic about this Large Hadron Collider. It's supposed to open up a black hole and destroy the planet. Endless debate over anime makes you wonder, maybe the world should end? Are you really gonna miss any of this if it went away?
Like I said, "a much changed landscape." If Disney can be blamed for the end of the Emo Era thanks to its hold on the youth demographic, MTV has to be to blame too. The emo culture of the mid-2000s was inherently tied to its music, and 2008 saw the end of MTV's primary music video vehicle, Total Request Live. The end of this, coupled with the rise of YouTube, basically forced MTV and VH1 and BET to change programming strategies.
People often debate over when MTV "died." A lot of people say it was earlier, but I say it was 2008. Because while Total Request Live wasn't the exact same thing as Dial MTV, it was its natural evolution. Total Request Live wasn't subsequently updated to be something else, like Dial MTV and its successors were updated to become Total Request Live. TRL was just cancelled, because there was no more need for music videos on MTV like there used to be. Another hallmark of the mid-2000s, Myspace, was officially surpassed in 2008 by Facebook, according to Alexa ratings. More of that migration from the Internet being about expressing your personality with a page full of your likes and dislikes, to the Internet being about communicating through posts and comments.
Also changed since last I was here? I didn't get much time to enjoy Toonami, or much anime at all. Because in 2008, Toonami was cancelled. Naruto was moved to regular Cartoon Network and they started burning through their last few ready-to-air episodes in hour-long rock blocks. Anime just wasn't popular enough, ratings-wise. This didn't stop people on the Adult Swim forums from not just mourning the loss of Toonami, but demanding that Adult Swim do more to promote anime. As it grew increasingly niche. Especially dubbed anime. Subs, pirated or otherwise, were easy to get by now. And so I figured this is what people wanted, right? Who needs dubbed anime, with its edits and Americanization? It's non-originalness? That was the prevailing opinion back in the mid-2000s. But no, said people on the Adult Swim forums. They wanted cross promotion with the weekday/Sunday comedy programming. Now? Dubs were actually better than subs! And I'm like "But it's not faithful to the original! Technically any dub is inherently less faithful than the original." But they're like "You have to judge the subs and dubs as separate things, not dependent on one another. Judging the dub as its own original creation, we like it better than the sub, as its own original creation." So you can like the dub as its own thing now? That was my whole defense when 4Kids was doing it. It doesn't matter what the original characters sounded like or whose gun looked like what. I'm judging Mew Mew Power on the merits of Mew Mew Power, not Tokyo Mew Mew. But okay, okay, if you wanna say Cowboy Bebop is superior as a dub, I guess I get it. It's still a mature anime and maybe what you hate about 4Kids is that it's edited for kids. But Adult Swim was airing Bleach at the time, right? And what people were saying was "They should've aired Bleach on Toonami instead, to keep it alive. They should've edited it for kids." And I'm like, but that's the same shit people buried 4Kids over!!! And continue to bury them over to this day!!! And the hypocrisy didn't stop with Bleach. For some reason One Piece on 4Kids was abhorrent, but One Piece on Toonami was fabulous. Despite edits being made in BOTH cases. As if the edits on Toonami were fine, but the edits on 4Kids were unacceptable. But where is this arbitrary "You can edit this, but not that" line? Furthermore, 4Kids didn't invent the idea of editing anime for local/younger audiences. Even before One Piece, Funimation and Harmony Gold so many other Western houses were doing this with Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball, "disco guns" as TV Tropes calls them are not a 4Kids invention. But it's only when Lyserg gets HIS gun changed that we shit ourselves. People were getting sent to "another dimension" on Dragon Ball Z up to the Cell Saga. But if Yu-Gi-Oh! edits out mentions of death, it's unwatchable. You say you prefer the localized version of Dragon Ball Z? Don't like the original? Bruce Faulconer's soundtrack is "better" in your opinion? Well 4Kids' soundtracks to their shows are better in MY opinion. I don't know who to be mad at. I get attached to localized versions, people wanna tell me I'm wrong because it's not faithful to the original. I get attached to originals, people wanna tell me edits are valid. The whole thing was frustratingly fickle. I wished I could scream it to the world/the anime fandom at large. But I didn't have the platform or audience for that. Instead I clinged to the hope that anime will kinda just die out in the West and we won't have these discussions anymore. If it's not a kid's show like Pokémon or something, it's stuffed away on scarcely advertised graveyard slots. There was Adult Swim, there was Syfy's "Ani-Monday," and that was basically it. And both blocks didn't air much of anything. A merciful death was what this market needed. Plenty of American cartoons for those voice actors to find work in. Just not on Disney.
I didn't hate anime though, I still watched most of whatever was on. Most of whatever was on. But I didn't interact with the community so much. Except in two particular classes of anime. First, being that I was hunting pictures, I was into hentai/ecchi. Stuff that would and should never get dubbed/localized. Like Usagi-chan de Cue. There was (and still is) a principle I held onto: "Porn" and "mainstream" cannot collide. Porn is porn, and non-porn is "mainstream." Normal. For general audiences. That's why Wikipedia differentiates between Gina Rodriguez the pornographic actress, and Gina Rodriguez the "mainstream actress."
That's why Cue can never be dubbed. Because it's ecchi, which is softcore porn. And Western publishers tend to do business in non-porn productions. So to dub it or localize it would technically make you a producer of porn, of erotic materials. To voice act in it would technically make you a porn star. Which would be weird and awkward for anyone who wasn't a dedicated porn publishing/producing house to do. It would be weird and awkward for the mainstream voice talent of Viz and Funimation to try and make something that's genuinely supposed to be enjoyed sexually. This is why when studios & producers DO get into publishing porn, it's through a dedicated and separate adult content arm, like with Media Blasters/Kitty Media. When hentai/ecchi DOES get dubbed, they leave the sex scenes to pornographic voice over talent and the normal scenes to the mainstream talent. Like they did with Mezzo Forte. And they call them "love scenes." And when dubbed anime leans into the lewd, there's usually debate over whether or not it counts as ecchi. "It's not meant to be enjoyed sexually when Naruto turns into a girl. It's a joke, we're meant to laugh at it. The body is mostly covered anyway! This is a normal show with fighting and story, not an ecchi show." Genuine ecchi content isn't for mainstream talent or brands or networks. It's for buying online, and watching with subtitles. That's why it never gets dubbed. Because you gotta keep your worlds apart. Later on I would come to face some frustration over this principle, more than once. What was a lot less frustrating was the other kind of anime I watched a lot of, anime that was strictly for young audiences. Toyetic stuff. Like Bakugan, which made its Western debut in 2008. The latest battle toy game. I was kinda burned on these battle games with Yu-Gi-Oh!, but the prospect of a fandom where people weren't constantly trying to undermine the dub, or talk about how dubs are fine now, was welcome peace. There was no "dubs vs. subs" battle with the kid animes. It simply was what it was. Especially in Bakugan's case. Starting out, I didn't do any of the stuff I used to do with shows, no OCs, no merchandise, I just watched.
I was also really into video games at the time. Endless Online, that's a video game. But in 2008 I didn't have any contemporaries. I was that lone weird guy with the weird quest storylines. And I was happy to troll the forums with my content. I was one of the few people still doing fanmade content at this point. By 2008, "Ice Radio" was defunct, and no one was submitting comics to the "Endless !nteractive" section anymore. Even people's Endless blogs were closing up shop by 2008. Something I would've liked to have done, but everything I would've posted to a blog I just posted to the forums.
The game itself though, was still pulling hundreds of players at any given moment. But where updates and additions to the game used to be frequent, those were replaced with reboots and downtime and maintenance. The solution to the attacks on the servers was to simply have more resources. Be big enough that the DDoS attacks don't work. But so full were the admins' hands with this that progress with the game's development stagnated. A lot of people called the admins lazy and/or uncommitted, and for the most part I disagreed with that. But in 2008 it appeared that the Endless Online admins were diversifying their online game portfolio. I'm not exactly sure when it started, but Aengie, wife of Endless founder and head admin Vult-r, was running a Flash game website. And the both of them appeared to show stronger interest in that business than Endless. They added a "Flash Arcade" section to the Endless Online forums to discuss Flash games in general. Hopefully including the ones they were developing. This was fast becoming the new thing in 2008. Sophisticated Kongregate-style Flash games with progress you could save and everything. This is what Newgrounds Flash art had evolved to, and this was what people were ditching games like Endless for. Games like Castle Crashers and Defend Your Castle and other games involving castles. And Flash/Shockwave/Java games had always been a part of the Internet, but I think what they became in the latter 2000s was the beginning of the "addictive mobile game" era.
Speaking of games with heavy production schedules, Mortal Kombat released a new game toward the end of 2008, "Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe." I could've gone back. But I asked myself, does this game really count? Is it canon? It's raten Teen, not Mature. This seems like a game that should be skipped. Like a game they had to make, and would really rather they didn't. So I wasn't really down. Did I abandon Mortal Kombat?
Mortal Kombat and Endless Online both were running low on prospects. Inversely, Smash Bros. Brawl and its GameFAQs community invigorated me with new ambitions. A new drive to contribute to a community. I probably don't have to tell you that Brawl sparked a new wave of creativity. So much revolved around Brawl. Animations like "Brawl Taunts," webcomics like Brawl in the Family, the video game webcomic as a whole, really. Because webcomics did exist before Brawl, but they were mostly influenced by anime and the culture that surrounded that. And they were scarce. And not very popular. And video game webcomics were even scarcer. But something happened with the release of Brawl and there was an explosion. People weren't posting video game webcomics on the Mortal Kombat forums. But the GameFAQs forums had webcomics in the signatures, webcomics on the profiles, webcomics everywhere. Awkward Zombie definitely owes its popularity to the Brawl bump. Speaking of the Brawl bump, it made other games more popular. If it was featured in Smash/Brawl, it was relevant to the community. Metal Gear Solid 4 wasn't just a Metal Gear topic, it was a Smash Bros. topic. Sonic Unleashed wasn't just a Sonic topic, it was a Smash Bros. topic. The translation patch for Mother 3 wasn't just a Mother topic, it was a Smash Bros. topic. Because they were those guys from Brawl, and discussion of their source games became a discussion of Smash content. Like "Sonic's Werehog Form should've been his Final Smash" or "What do you think of Raiden as a future Smash combatant?" Without Smash, I wonder if these games would've been as popular or relevant as they were. Because Metal Gear Solid 4 was a big event. People online were talking about it. But Metal Gear Solid 3, you didn't hear much about. I don't know if that's because Snake wasn't in Smash yet, or because it was 2004 and Internet video game communities weren't yet what they were in 2008. But still, Smash wasn't just its own game, it was a crossing over of several entire game universes, as far as we saw. It was the crossing over of several entire fanbases. And that's probably what contributed to the party atmosphere of the GameFAQs Brawl board. Which continued on through 2008. It inspired this idea of Nintendo and Nintendo-adjacent games as one big... thing. And so any news about anything Nintendo or Nintendo-adjacent was all the more exciting. Mario Kart Wii is being released? On its own it might be just another quality entry in the Mario Kart franchise. But thanks to Brawl, I feel like, in buying Mario Kart Wii, I'm along for some great bandwagon ride through all things Nintendo and Nintendo-adjacent. I get Mario Kart Wii. I think of Brawl. I think of future Mario games to come. I think of future Nintendo games to come. I think of it all as an overarching empire that I am a subject in. And I'm inspired to somehow be a contributing subject. A notable subject in the community. So notable that I could be in touch with Nintendo somehow. Somehow. If only there was some forum or something where you could regularly encounter and interact with big industry names. Have them see my stuff. And be like "That's good stuff." Be within close enough reach to them that I could give feedback to them. Maybe they could put a reference to something I say or do or make into one of their games.
But how? What things should I try to accomplish toward that goal? Well, first I had to play games. I had to be good at games. I started learning about the professional Smash Bros fighting circuits. So I figured first on the agenda was "Achieve tournament level skill at games." No, first I needed a main. One's main, I felt, was representative of their identity as a Smasher. Pro or not. There was, as there always is, debate over tiers. I didn't want it to be as shallow as just picking Meta Knight, though some people will say Brawl wasn't balanced enough to prevent that kind of metagame. I wanted to be the best I could with whoever my main would be. The main that would represent me in the Smashing community. If not the gaming community as a whole. For instance, I might pick Fox or Falco or Wolf because I like them in the game, and I'm also a big fan of the Star Fox games. I do all the stuff and make all the fan content a Star Fox fan would make. The meaning of my GameFAQs username is themed around Star Fox. Or maybe I like Star Fox, Pilotwings, and flying games in general? Because I did like Pilotwings. And I did like furry stuff. See it becomes a question of personality and identity. Maybe I be the guy who likes flying games, with a side of furry stuff. Do the kinds of things that people like that do. Main Star Fox characters. Have flying be my hobby and go to pilot school or something. Know lots of technically sophisticated flight stuff. But that's just one possibility. Once I picked a main and declared myself part of the pro circuit, I should also upload videos of my skilled play on YouTube. I don't remember if the term "Let's Play" was in vogue on YouTube by 2008, but a Let's Player was basically what I wanted to be. To impress people with my video game play. Besides play games? Well, the mission kinda changed by 2008. YTMND itself wasn't defunct, but they weren't the thing to make anymore. And having Mario and Sonic fight on Newgrounds didn't seem to cut it either. Sprite animations did technically still exist, but I thought the more relevant thing to do would've been to make one of those video game webcomics. YTMNDs and sprite Flashes are on the way out. YouTube Poops? Real in right now. But the question to ask here is "What overlaps?" Not only were YouTube Poops really in right now, but because the popular Poop sources at the time were Mario & Zelda CD-i games, a lot of general Nintendo/video game fans also dabbled in Poops. Like MasterLinkX.
That's his channel today, but he's gone through many channels in the past. On all of his channels had gameplay videos, but he was also a relevant Pooper. Also he was a relevant reporter of leaks. So I had to be that too. Somebody who somehow was in the know about secret video game news. But I didn't just want my fingers in video game news, I wanted my fingers in video game lewds. I was basically inspired to follow the stuff I saw on the GameFAQs Brawl board. I was still trying to save and identify and archive as much as I could, and video game stuff was obviously a big part of the "industry." There was a lot of reposting of art by Sigurd Hosenfield. Who, like many affected by Brawl, drew from the perspective of a whole crossed over Nintendo/Nintendo-adjacent universe. A world where Mario, Peach, Zelda, Samus, Krystal, and others were interacting, even though Krystal wasn't playable. It didn't matter, anything Nintendo adjacent was part of this new wave going on. My job as a lewds archiver was to identify who was drawing this art (Sigurd Hosenfield), figure out where it was being posted so that I/we could get it from the source, and maybe someday be a collaborator or friend to Hosenfield. Do more than just look at his pictures. But was I really gonna be a creator of spank art while also making ostensibly non-spank webcomics? There's that "worlds apart" principle again. If you're looking for someone to showrun your early education cartoon, you wouldn't pick someone whose chief animation experience is drawing naked girls. Or would you? I still hold that you have to keep your worlds apart, but a good example of keeping worlds apart while still making something technically mainstream as a drawer of lewds, I thought, was "The Electric Tale of Pikachu." The work of Toshihiro Ono. He makes hentai by trade, but he drew this Pokémon manga. And the reason that worked for me is, you look at that manga, you understand that it's drawn by a guy who draws hentai for a living. The sexualized depictions are all still there, it's like it's basically still porn. So if I could be the kind of guy who drew naked girls, but whatever non-porn webcomics I made were clearly the work of a pornographer and no pretense of being "totally clean" was present, I think I could be okay with it. Like how Newgrounds animators like Spazkid make crudely sexual cartoons and you're like "Am I supposed to laugh at this or fap to this?" Those artists eventually go on to make just flat out pornographic art. Because they know their work is erotic. But then... it just didn't sit right with me. If my dream of networking the video game industry and making friends and allies was gonna come true, I didn't want to bleed my lewdness into Nintendo's family-friendliness. If it was meant to be family friendly. I mean it is, right? I mean, when I first saw this cutscene in Subspace Emissary...
I thought "I have seen a lot of hentai/ecchi, that ass closeup is a trademark of the craft. That ass closeup was on purpose. But it's Nintendo, so it's like the developers WANT to make content like this, but they can't come out and admit what this is supposed to be. Who this kind of content is for." But then people tell me "No, you're misinterpreting it." And so I think "Well I guess it wasn't really a closeup of her ass, more like her back." And so I'm torn, is Nintendo a family-friendly company and I'm just misinterpreting things due to seeing so much porn that I'm picking up on accidental porn tropes? Or do their developers secretly like tiddy and booty and are looking for ways to put it in the game? Being torn like this kept me from committing to what kind of artist I would be. Strictly non-lewd, or lewd with an option to draw mainstream art where all the women are suspiciously overdeveloped.
I also wanted to make game mods. Specifically inspired by Brawl. Like I would be on a stage, or doing Subspace Emissary, and I would think "What if you could walk into the background? The game doesn't let you do that normally, but what if I was a savvy homebrewer who made homebrew stuff for the Wii? And mods for games? What if I uploaded a mod where I enable 360 degree movement and go running through the background? Wouldn't it be cool if I uploaded a video of Marth running around the basements of Castle Siege? Showing people what's back there?" Of course I wondered how much of the background was actually explorable, and how much of it was just a 2D image. But even if it was just a 2D image, I wanted to then be some kind of level developer who creates what the backgrounds of levels might look like if you could explore them. And post videos like that. Also I was interested in the Nintendo Chronicle. A feature in Brawl that was, I naively thought at the time, a list of every game Nintendo owned the rights to. That's not what Chronicle was, but what I wanted to do was compile an ACTUAL Chronicle of every video game Nintendo owned the rights to. That way I could speculate on future Smash content/video game crossovers. But not just Nintendo. I wanted to know who owned the rights to every game. For instance, I wanted to make a Sony Chronicle. to see what games Sony owned the rights to, so that they might, in the future, make Sony Smash Bros. Hypothetically. The idea didn't really interest me, but I did at least want to know if it was possible. Because when you think Nintendo, you think several franchises that they created and own. You think Sony, Sony doesn't really own those games. Sony doesn't own Metal Gear, that's Konami. Metal Gear just plays a lot with Sony. But Snake, a Metal Gear character, did get to be in Smash Bros. So if I was to compile a Konami Khronicle, I could have a list of games that could maybe be featured in the Smash franchise, or cross over with Nintendoness somehow. That's kind of the downside of being so inspired by the Smash culture that blossomed in 2008. Other games paled in comparison. Just about all of my video game interest somehow stemmed back to being fueled by Smash. I liked Sega games, because Sonic was in Smash, so now I think of Nintendo and Sega games crossing over, like in future Smash games, or other endeavors. Can we get some kind of "Fire Emblem X Shining Force" game? This also meant that I liked other "irrelevant" games less. I spent many a nostalgic moment with the likes of Oddworld and Quantum Redshift. But they just weren't "in vogue" right now. In this world of Smash Brothersy/Nintendo-y YouTube Poops and animations and webcomics and stuff.
Except one game. One game was relevant to me and it had nothing to do with Nintendo or Smash, and I had no interest in it ever crossing over with Nintendo or Smash. One other game was getting Pooped and meme'd and had a big enough community following to attract me. The other cultural phenom of the time, Team Fortress 2. Actually, it wasn't just one game. Valve itself was big in the latter 2000s thanks to Steam and the release of the Steam Community and Steamworks. TF2 was getting videos and memes and stuff thanks to all the movies released for it, but so was Portal, thanks to the Aperture Science videos. So was Left 4 Dead, thanks to the easily accessible sound files. It was like the start of a new era of PC gaming. Before this, PC games didn't really have much relevance. Steam exposed the world to it, made it accessible. If your computer can run it, you can buy it and play it from the Internet. So in 2008 I ditched the laptop and built a PC so I could run PC games. Like Smash, I needed a TF2 main. I was tempted to go with Scout, but everyone picked Scout. So I never truly committed. Also, I wanted to make mods for TF2. Mods and maps, like Xenon. Also, my pic hunter mission came into play with TF2. Especially on Xenon's maps. His maps were often filled with images relevant to my interests, and I needed a way to somehow decompile his maps and break them down into raw assets, so I could just take out the images, save them, and look for their sources. That was a thing I wanted to do. Also, people's sprays. Those weren't part of the map, but it was important to me to figure out where people's sprays came from. I made this clear to the people I played with. And they seemed to understand! Most actually helped me, when they could.
Speaking of interesting pictures and the hunt for their sources, 2008 was a bumper crop for 3D women too. Mostly discovered through animated GIFs on 4chan and 4chanarchive. I don't know how truly part of the 4chan community I was, but 2008 was when I started actively avoiding 4chan. 2008 was the start of the controversial "Project Chanology." The Scientology protests. I didn't like them, for the same reason everyone else who didn't like them didn't like them. Here was 4chan, who just the year prior was being called the scourge of the Internet and we all just laughed, suddenly wants to represent itself as some kind of force for good. "Moralfaggotry," as it was called, had no place here. 4chan is supposed to be irreverent! It's not supposed to care about people! What was the point of all that fronting before then??? So 4chan, if not before 2008, was definitely now just for finding interesting pictures. Which was covered by 4chanarchive pretty well anyway.
Porn was getting more extreme, veering into "Did they stage that? That's gotta be illegal" territory. I had seen the Bang Bus before, and now I was seeing things like Asses In Public and Busty Loads. Public sex with strangers and things like that. And not just strangers that happened to pass by. They would take the van and look for places where bystanders were, and swing the door open to deliberately expose two people fucking. Flashing is illegal. If I show my dick to people on the street, that's illegal. So this has to be way illegal. And so my mind is just blown by the crazy shit I'm seeing. I have to know if it's real. I start researching some of the crazier claims I see in porn. Regular fans getting to fuck porn stars, like, if a sports team wins. And it turns out people have stories. This really does happen to people. But surely even publishing these videos is incriminating, right? Do they wait for the statute of limitations to run out? I wished I could ask someone about it. Like Gianna Michaels. I saw her do a "Reverse Bang Bus" where they drove around looking for random men to fuck her. She takes on 3 guys, almost takes on a 4th. A construction worker that almost gets in the bus, but decides against it for some reason. I guess he had work to do. What would I ask? Where the Bang Bus is filmed? I did want to know. But I was dissuaded from asking when I got to the part of the "Quest For Cock" where Gianna says to her latest john "You HAVE to have a big dick." Oof. If I could find the full video I'd post it, but I can't. Anyway, I know I don't have what it takes. But now I'm curious about what it does take. Because she is notorious for her sexual voracity, not just here, but in all of her videos. And these 3 guys could not slake her thirst. Not all of the combined. And so I wondered, if that wasn't staged as some sort of "Look at how these bums off the street break their swords upon the mithril hide of Gianna Michaels" fairy story, if ALL of that was real, what was it that those men lacked? What does it take? Obviously more than what I've got, but for some reason I felt like it would be valuable information to know what kind of arch-Thundercock it takes to beat back a Gianna Michaels.
I'm well over the character limit by now, so I'll end it here. A summary of my dreams and ambitions up to now...
- Be a notable contributor on GameFAQs.
- Be a notable contributor in Endless Online.
- Start dialogues in the anime fandom about your gripes with anime.
- Report on video game news/leaks.
- Run an Endless blog.
- Run a popular Endless !nteractive storyline series through comics and other content.
- Draw a video game webcomic.
- Produce erotic video game works.
- Identify the source of as much hentai/ecchi as you can.
- Find the creators of that hentai/ecchi, make friends and co-collaborators of them.
- Come up with tools/solutions for Endless Online security.
- Statusmax in Endless Online so that I can interact with the mods.
- Find and maintain contact with the old Endless guard.
- Pick a Smash main that represents my identity.
- Pick a TF2 main that represents my identity.
- Git gud at games.
- Join the fighting game circuit.
- Make gameplay videos/Let's Plays.
- Make YTPs.
- Make video game mods.
- Make homebrew on Wii
- Walk into the foreground in Smash Bros.
- Make TF2 maps.
- Extract resources from TF2 maps and identify the sources of the pictures.
- Make a Chronicle of every game and who owns the rights to it.
- Statusmax on GameFAQs/the gaming community at large so I can hook up with women in it.
- Reach out to/interact with notable game industry names. Have someone listen to my idea about "Fire Emblem X Shining Force."
- Go to where the Bang Buses are.
- Find out how much dick it takes to satisfy Gianna Michaels.
- Wait for Mortal Kombat to return for real.
If there was a single job, a single title, that covered all of this? And I could sign up for it in 2008? That would be all I wanted.
FatJattMofo
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what the fuck is this?
FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
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Ritalincel
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19 minutes ago thx bro
FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
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You're a good man, @Ritalincel.
"Founding Father" or "Milk & Cigarettes 10: Games For Children"
TL;DR: I cope with the turn of the decade by dicking around on Omegle, orbiting camgirls on IMLive, trying to learn Japanese, trying to get an indie video game studio off the ground, coming up with a plan to solve my locationceldom, playing games for kids, watching shows for kids, and ranting about things that bother me regarding vidya and 2D.
Maybe it's how short I am, maybe it's how childlike my mind is, but I'm not always aware of just how old I really am. But this "No Nut November?" Really puts things into perspective. There's a subreddit for it, so I thought I'd give it a try. It's a waste of time doing it alone, but I like the idea of doing this with a community. Problem is, a fat majority of the people there are teenagers. And so you run into the same issue I was talking about in "The Merits of Being Emo, Part 2" when you're on, say 4chan. If you wouldn't say it to a kid in real life, you shouldn't say it to a kid on the Internet. However, if the sign on the door says "Adult Content Inside," I can't be blamed for happening to be there at the same time as a kid is. If you don't want your kid to see adult stuff, don't let him see R-rated movies. My responsibility ends at that point. Now, no study or poll is gonna account for every participant in the known universe. But last year's count on the subreddit clocked 3,051 participants. So I think a safe estimate is about a few thousand, on the subreddit anyway. This poll's count currently stands at 767.
It's not everyone, but with random sampling I'm willing to wager it's proportionate with the group as a whole. If we did get all something-thousand Reddit participants, 70% of the polled would still be 20 and under. And there'd still be a small single digit sliver of us that are my age. I've always said that NoFap or No Nut November or whatever name you wanna give it is a "game for children." It's only a challenge for the very young and pubescent, whose hormones are at their peak. And it only pays off if your hormones are at their peak. And the game primarily attracts those whose hormones are at their peak.
No Nut November, by virtue of it (ostensibly) being about self-improvement, attracts some real down and out people. Especially the ones my age. Look at all the 20 and unders. Now, look at the 40 and ups. Now, look at the extra tiny sliver of 35-39. This suggests to me that NoFap and No Nut November and things like it attract 2 major groups: Kids who wanna improve their lives by getting their addictions under control, and old men like me, who are deeply unhappy with their lives and are trying to find happiness. You meet someone, they seem pretty normal at face value, but then you check their post history and then oh no, r/DeadBedrooms. Oh no, r/TrueSPH. Oh no, r/CuckoldPsychology. And then there's the women who show up. Yes, women show up. And while many are there to participate, some are there to just be like "Teehee I'm a girl oh you boys I wonder if you would jack off to me because you know I'm a girl." But in both cases, they also appear to be deeply unhappy. Check the post history. Eating disorders. Self harm. Weird fetishes. It's hard to feel bad about myself when I'm surrounded by so many others who also suffer. But somehow I pull it off. Case in point, people are always telling me get my test tested. So I say "Sure, I'm gonna actually make some moves on that." Step one is enrolling in insurance. But when I went to enroll in my employer's healthcare plan, I found that, while it covers women's issues plentifully, it covers ZERO men's issues. Zero. I can't even get boner pills, let alone get my blood tested for man hormones. And I think "Yes, yes my life does suck." Look, being perfectly technical, sex is a want, not a need. You need a bone mended. You need to not have cancer. You don't "need" to have sex any more than you need breast implants or a genioplasty. But between contraception and erectile dysfunction treatment, contraception does not treat anything. Sex is supposed to result in pregnancy. If you want sex to not result in pregnancy, that's recreation. You pay for your own fun. You pay for your own wants. But erectile dysfunction? That's a dysfunction. Something is physically wrong with me. Might not be the most crucial body part, but there's technically more to be said there than "I wanna have sex, and I can, but just for fun I'd like it to be unprotected." But when a man gets his and a woman doesn't get hers, society is so ready to stump for how disadvantaged the woman is and how men are objectively the winners everywhere and always. Here I am a man not getting his, while my female co-workers get theirs. And society will not admit my disadvantage here. Society will not hang anybody out for caring about women disproportionately to men.
What am I supposed to do now? Am I just stuck with this old, failing body? This unfeeling husk that's just barely worth using because it's too much work to lay down and die? I remember facing the anguish of my old age like this before. Around the turn of the decade. Picture this...
2009. Barack Obama is President, and for some reason none of the anti-drug PSAs air on TV anymore. You're killing boredom with another night on Omegle.
You: Hello!
Stranger: Michael Jackson was murdered.
You're not sure if you buy it. 2009 was just a bad year for celebrity deaths, that's all. But if MTV wasn't dead before, it's certainly dead now. Your generation is coming to an end. Your old road is rapidly aging.
When last we checked, my list of ambitions was as follows...
Let's go over 2009's news regarding those ambitions, broken down by category.
[Gaming]
I wanted to be tourney level good at video games. Specifically, Smash Bros. And go through the Smash tourney circuit. And have a crew, and make videos with sick combos, like this.
But tourney level skills didn't seem like a likely dream anymore. My nephew was 9 years old at the time, and he was well beyond my abilities in Smash. I just couldn't catch up to him. I tried to tell myself it's because I wasn't trying hard enough and if I was serious, I could beat him. Part of me wanted to blame him for being so good. Like it's a bad thing. Because he would spend hours just grinding away in Training Mode, or fighting CPUs. And I'm like "Why are you doing that? Aren't you bored? Why don't you do something else??? Level 9 CPUs are too tough for you. Well, I mean unless you try... that thing you just tried..." Truth is though, I'd read the articles and interviews and testimonials. Kids are better at video games than old adults. They simply have better reflexes. This is why in the fighting game community, the pros take caffeine for their matches and are even sponsored by caffeine companies. And while most pro Smashers are adults, they were all mostly younger than me. Even the ones who took caffeine. I couldn't keep up in Smash, I couldn't keep up in TF2, except for in Prop Hunt. But dreams don't have to be likely, you just have to want them. And besides, there were "age appropriate" ways to be active in the gaming community. I thought about the kinds of things you see people my age doing. Things like webcomics, guides, articles, reviews, leaks, video game journalists were mostly about my age. Modders and homebrewers were about my age. One thing I wanted to do was come up with mods for online Smash Bros. I saw other people had done this, taking people to fan made stages that shouldn't be possible to start matches on. But what I wanted to do specifically was bring people together. I had played many a match on "With Anyone." Paired up with a random person that you really hit it off with, only to maybe never see them again. Or worse yet, you DO see them again and are desperate to hold onto this moment somehow. For if you part again, it might be the last time. I thought I was the only person who felt like this. Until I found my nephew crying one day because he made something like a new friend on With Anyone, and it broke his heart that he couldn't trade Friend Codes or something. I knew something had to be done, I knew there was a demand. But I never did figure out how to fill that demand. I wanted to make a mod where you can display your Friend Code via taunt, which I think was impossible. Or at the very least not common. If it was possible, I wanted to get a social movement going where people did that. Or reach the ears of Nintendo and let them know how bad we're all hurting to link up with our With Anyone friends in passing.
That's another thing. I wanted my commentary and rants about video game stuff to reach the ears of industry names. For instance, by 2009 Sonic Unleashed was released. And it was my favorite Sonic game in some years. But people still didn't like it. Certainly not as much as they liked Super Mario Galaxy. And perhaps because of this, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 was announced. A "back to basics" approach. And people were excited for it. But I wasn't. Because I didn't want 2D Sonic and I definitely didn't want 2D Sonic to be a gesture of Sonic giving up trying new things and just sticking to the old. You didn't see Mario doing this. I wanted Sonic to be a worthy rival/companion to Mario. And that HAD to be possible in 3D. But I did notice a problem. Sonic can't be exactly like Mario, because what makes Mario platformers great is the variety of platforming and puzzle challenges the games have. Mario games can be about anything. Include any challenge. Sonic games though, they can only be about so much. Because they can't include platforming or puzzles or other challenges at the expense of speed. Sonic has to be fast. That's why people laud 2D Sonic so much. 2D games are good for buttery smooth races from start to finish. In 3D that becomes harder without either becoming plodding (like the Werehog levels of Unleashed), or being too easy because there isn't much in the way of obstacles. And I'm thinking maybe that's why Mario is more popular than Sonic. Sonic has to be fast, even if being fast all the time, even if the level design is flawless, isn't as fun as a Mario game with all its variety. Sonic might be more fun if he got to slow down and try something else besides running, but people would complain because then it wouldn't really be a Sonic game. I would talk a lot about this on GameFAQs, and based on my conversations there it felt like I was the only one who was thinking about this. But then I saw this video by Moviebob.
So now I'm like "So people besides me see this. I would like to have this question presented and debated by the industry at large. Like if there were a forum this could be posted on, and then, I dunno, Sonic Team was on that forum, and they weighed in. Or showed some sign that they read the posts themselves." And then I thought, "But what if it can't be done? Frankly, if Sonic has to be fast, I would include more characters in the games and give them levels/Stars to win that didn't involve speed. Like my OCs Vulcan and Barrel.
Or maybe... I should just make my own game." And so was born another ambition: Make video games. Which I technically considered way back with the VIC-20, but in 2009 it felt like something that could seriously be done. You heard about "indie devs." You heard about video games that weren't even on home consoles. I didn't need to be AAA with commercials on TV and a conference at E3, I just wanted to make a quality platformer. Did I think I was gonna make the Mario killer? No. But I went into it thinking I should at least shoot for Mario's star. And in order to do that I needed to learn level design. How do you make "good" levels? Why is a good level good? I had to learn how to break down examples of good levels and isolate the individual parts that made up their challenges. But also? I needed to learn character design. Mario was a mascot, Sonic was a mascot, I wanted my platformer's hero to be a mascot. A brand that people would recognize. My brand. And here I was back to trying to promote my own brand. Which meant I needed to figure out what my brand was, and how to make it Mario/Sonic-esque. And as I was thinking this over, ideas kept piling on, until I had ideas for other games. Now I really needed a recognizable brand, because now I didn't wanna just make one game, I wanted to make several games, and have my platformer mascot/alter ego be the face of my "company." Fortunately for me, 2009 brought us this thing called "Kickstarter." Unfortunately for me, I didn't know how to use it, nor did I want to. If I had a prototype and some concept art, I could've maybe been the first "Pictures for Sad Children." But it was specifically because of possibilities like that that I didn't want to do Kickstarter. It felt like cheating. The idea that someone should give someone else money for something that isn't here yet sounds like a scam already, but if you wanna be a game studio, you should have to do it the way everyone before you did it. Not begging your way to it. You make do with what you have, and me, not knowing much of anything about video game development, figured it couldn't be that hard. I wasn't looking to make the Mario killer. Just what was possible for me to do. Whatever that was, I was eager to make it. Game development was definitely an "age appropriate" way to still be a "gamer." I could be 50 and still making games. Throw a blazer on over a video game t-shirt and suddenly I'm not some weird man-child. I'm stage-ready for conference speeches.
Speaking of which, after discovering GameFAQs, I made it a point to watch every E3 starting from 2009. On GameTrailers. I liked watching it live with the community, discussing announcements in the talkback threads as they happened. In the GameTrailers live chat and on the GameFAQs Brawl boards. And I also branched out to the the GameFAQs board "Poll of the Day." A social board like Lounge was for Endless Online. And like Endless Online, there was a "sidebar" or an "afterparty" lounge for PotDers to go to. Endless Online had its IRC, and PotD had Tinychat, because IRC was fast fading away as a relevant platform. Tinychat wasn't just a chatroom like IRC basically is. Tinychat supported webcam. 2009 would be the year I finally was able to get some real use out of my webcam.
Meanwhile, over on Endless, the game was technically still alive and pulling steady figures. However, the boards were near about dead, and the community then started to branch off to new Endless spots like EOServ and Rakuhana. Endless Online "fan servers." But the official Endless Online server, despite it being targeted with hacks and autobots on a constant basis, was still where most people played. The other servers just didn't have enough content or players to keep people occupied for a long enough time. I think the main Lounge body went to Rakuhana. So, Endless Online was a game a lot of people played, but the sense of community, at least the one I remembered, was gone. I could've continued making my Endless fan stuff, but there was no audience for it. Not on the main Endless forums because they were dead, despite the game attracting many players. Not on the fan server forums, because they were dead both ingame and on forum. I kept my Endless account around, and still have access to it, but I was pretty much retired from the Endless fan content game. However, while I might've lost the Endless I knew and loved, there were other MMORPGs out there. 2009 I started noticing lots of ads for MMORPGs. I think this was the beginning of the "Save the queen, my lord" fad. What I do know is that in 2009 I got to work on a list of MMORPGs and other communities that I would join to spread my brand. If I was gonna make indie games, and have a brand worth promoting, I should do like I planned on doing originally and joining lots of MMORPGs, so my name and brand can spread. Like LiquidIce and Jubei Saotome. So, I started keeping track of every MMORPG ad I saw and making a note to join it. And design my characters in those MMORPGs to basically match. My character would basically represent my mascot/alter ego, as best as can be represented in the game. Mario is a man of many hats, so it's like my alter ego is also a man of many hats. He stars in his game, but he also can be found in Champions Online or City of Heroes, for instance.
[Weebshit]
I still had the dilemma though. I couldn't be a respectable indie dev with lewds in my portfolio. I couldn't live with myself. So I had to pick one. In the meantime, I moonlighted with both. Hunting pictures and videos and shows and OVAs and doujins & et cetera where ever I found them. You might've seen this greentext about Akinator, where it suggests using it as a reverse search engine.
I was well aware of that trick by now, but I didn't use it for 3D women. I used it to discover ecchi anime. It's how I learned about shows like Kanokon. GameFAQs and PotD was also a frequent source for this, there would be constant testing of the mods with threads made to compile pictures that risked breaking Terms and Conditions of Service. The drive to find sources was particularly frustrating when I would, say, see an interesting avatar in GameTrailers chat. GameTrailers chat during E3 was never good for actual discussion, it went too fast. So it's not like I could ask. It was hard enough just catching these avatars, how fast the chat was going. Fortunately, I had Tineye by now. And though its resources were still lean, it came through more than I thought it would. Source hunts as a whole though were fast becoming unnecessary. In 2009 I didn't just have Tineye, I had the various "boorus." Danbooru, Gelbooru. And they were basically what I set out to make in the first place, databases of 2D, with sources tagged. To this day, the boorus aren't perfect with that, but I really feel like in the world of 2D, there was a clear difference between pre-booru times and post-booru times. Pre-booru everything was mysterious. Post-booru, the answers are a click away, and soon out of thought. Unless they're a particularly challenging source hunt. Speaking of challenging source hunts, I should've explained earlier, 2008 was the year the West really got its first taste of Touhou. Because of McRoll'd.
To quote minigunexo, we used to call these things fads damn it. We had fads like YTPMVs made from Touhou songs. Fads like re-remixed of McRoll'd. But the fad that caught my eye in 2009 was a mysterious cropping up of videos from Nicovideo where girls appeared to be riding something. Ostensibly some kind of riding machine, but the suggestion, or implication, was that it was sexual. I wanted to try and find one to post here, but they all seem to be gone. But these "bull riding machine" videos or whatever they were officially called, they were especially mysterious. Because everywhere you found them, their titles were in Japanese. I didn't know who made them, who the girls in them were, barely could grasp what the premise of the videos were. Also at this point, I had saved several doujins that were untranslated. Couldn't understand them, but I desperately wanted to. And the bull riding machine videos were the wake up call: I should just learn to read/interpret Japanese. Instead of waiting for someone else to scanlate my doujins? I could learn what these videos are about. I could navigate Nicovideo and find more content. Sispuri still had yet to be fully translated at this point, which was incredible. I could make up for not finding Double Princess by providing the full translation for Sispuri. But learning Japanese came with a caveat: If I can read untranslated doujins and stuff, wouldn't that ruin the "sanctity" of pre-translated doujins I find? If I don't know Japanese, the translated versions of things, as far as I'm concerned, are 100% accurate. This is what the characters are saying, I don't even concern myself with whatever the "original" text/words said. But if I can read Japanese myself, and then I find a doujin scanlated by some other Internet fanlation scanlation ring, maybe I'm gonna question the accuracy of their work. It's no longer sacred. It's all up to interpretation anyway, maybe I believe the character should've said "Crap" instead of "Shit." And there not being a definite single right answer makes it so that I can't enjoy translated works anymore. The immersion will be ruined. Because I'll constantly be questioning them. Like a subs fan criticizing a dub. But if I wanted to achieve the heights of my dreams, I kinda needed to know Japanese. Because like with video games I wanted to somehow statusmax in the community/industry/whatever so that I could be in with the artists who make that stuff. Call them friends and colleagues. I wanted to be in with people in such a way that, for instance, maybe I had an Internet persona or something. Like my hypothetical platformer mascot. And he was known for some kind of trademark. Like maybe he wore a scarf or something. And maybe there's an artist somewhere with an original character in a web doujin or something. And I really like this character. Like, as a waifu. Maybe the artist of that original character draws my waifu wearing my scarf. Because I'm a friend and colleague of that artist. I wanted to be able to do stuff like that. Often I would read doujins about school, and put myself in the social situations. "If I was at this school, I wonder how I would fit in?" Pitiful, yeah. But less pitiful if I'm rubbing elbows with the artist and they put me in. So the goal was not just to discover shows like Kanokon, and not just to find out where to watch full episodes of Kanokon. Just watching wasn't enough. I needed to somehow be close to Akio Takami himself. Before he retired or something. It just didn't feel like enough to watch the shows and be done.
[Sexy Beautiful Women]
So, it had been 2 years at my job. By 2009 they started to come down on "leisurely browsing." This was the start of the content filtering and stuff. Blocking websites. Which in turn had me checking over my shoulder, dreading the tremor of approaching footsteps. In case they saw me and got ideas for new sites to block. So I started to resent my job because I couldn't browse as freely as I used to. And being bored at work leads to re-evaluating your quality of life, and whether your job is helping you or hindering you. Because the PotD community was a social one, a lot of posts were about people's day to day experiences. And if you were a popular/relevant/interesting PotDer, more of us were interested in your life. "BlogFAQs" or "BlogFAQs posts" we called them. A lot of people found them self-important. But me? It made me question the quality of my life. These were people who had had sex and stuff. They were hooking up with people. I wanna hook up with someone. But how would I do it? Ideally? Fantasies drift to meeting a woman at some kind of bar or nightclub and taking her to my place. But, ohhhhhh... I can't do that. I need a respectable car and respectable apartment for that. Wouldn't that be sweet? To take a woman in my magnificently appointed car to my magnificently appointed apartment? A place that really sets the mood for having sex with me. A place that looks nice in the background of my webcam. What kind of cars and apartments impress people? Namely female people? I went asking around. On Yahoo! Answers. Because AskReddit was still in its infancy. Yahoo! Answers was the place to go. From the answers I got I began crafting my dream life. Problem is not only was my job not paying for my dream life, but my city wasn't selling my dream life. I was enamored with a very specific piece of property, "1600 Broadway on The Square." Specifically one of the G units.
I saw that picture and was like "Yeah, if I bring friends and/or hookups back to a place like that? If I have that floor to ceiling window view in the background of my webcam? That's the kind of foot I wanna put forward." Last I checked the kind of unit I wanted to rent was $6000 a month and they were being snapped up fast. It wasn't likely. But I told myself "Someday." I just gotta climb the ladder, right? But maybe don't shoot for Manhattan. Most people don't. Is there a more "realistic" goal? Maybe. If I'm willing to give up snow, I could live in Spring Break territory. I had admired the hedonism of warm weather areas since Spring Break on MTV. Since Wild On on E!, and so mant late night TV informercials. My exposure to just how crazy it gets down there continued in 2009 when I got my hands on this DVD whose name I forget. Something about "bareknuckle catfights" or something? I'm not into catfights, but I really would like to find it again someday. Because in the special features there were trailers for other DVDs by the same production company. And one of them was this Spring Break one. And there throngs of people just grinding naked on each other on the beach, bare breasts bouncing, and they talked to cops and the cops were talking about how things were so crazy that they couldn't hope to contain it and they were begging people to stop doing this. The very cops were desperate. No posturing about how they were gonna come down on people, they flat out admitted they wanted to stop it but couldn't. I need to find that DVD again because I need to know what city that was where the party was so hard, the cops couldn't stop it. I bet it was Panama City Beach. But I'll never know for sure, until I find that DVD. But wait, you might wonder. How do you know it's real? How do you know it wasn't staged? A question I ask myself a lot when it comes to porn. One good way to know? When people get arrested. The major argument for something being fake/staged is "It can't be real, they would get arrested for it." So when people do get arrested for it, you know they didn't fake it. Like how in 2009 Claire Dames and Natasha Nice were arrested for a public nudity during a porn shoot.
You can't do that for real! Public nudity is illegal! And yet, it happened. We have the story of how and everything. As for this DVD? Also in the special features was a trailer for some kind of Steve Irwin inspired bum hunting/bum fighting DVD. And the producers were arrested and charged with multiple offenses because of it. I can't find the article because I don't remember the name of the DVD or the production house, but I remember reading it and realizing "So they're willing to break the law. Why would they lie when it's clear they're telling the truth about this?"
Regular scripted porn was available to me, but the "real stuff" was what I wanted to see. Amateur stuff. The appeal is it makes you think "I could do that." For instance, a dorm party. Maybe it is scripted. But if everyone in the video is an amateur, that means one day you might be asked to be part of someone's amateur porn shoot. But in order to do that, I would have to go back to college. Which I probably could've done back in 2009. But instead I focused on another kind of "amateur." The webcam personality. 2009 was a big year for camgirls. 2009 was the year of Boxxy. But I didn't have eyes for Boxxy. Like in the opening example, I spent my nights looking for hookups on Omegle/Chatroulette. Didn't really work out. Particularly because I wanted to see these potential women, but Omegle and Chatroulette were still new and didn't have webcam functionality. I know Omegle didn't. I don't know about Chatroulette. But what definitely did? Camgirl performer sites like ImLive.com. I was initially drawn to the site after seeing a performer who went by "sexxbooomb." Real name, Gya Roberts.
ImLive performers had this kinda annoying habit where they all put the same "clever" form text on their bios. Things like "I am a real B.I.T.C.H. (Beautiful, Intelligent, Totally Charming, Hot)" or "May cause heart attacks, premature ejaculation, insomnia and divorce!" And in the "I love ImLive Video Chat because" section, they all put some semblance of "It gives me a chance to express myself." The fact that they were all copying each other and not coming up with their own bios was clear evidence of just how much of an impersonal business this was. Like these kids nowadays who wanna be Pewdiepie or something, so they just copy the broad YouTuber tropes they know to work. The things that successful YouTubers seem to always do. And so it was for these performers. Just putting in what they see works, purely for views, not the love of the craft. But I didn't let that dissuade me. I was rife with expendable income and ready to orbit. Way I figured it, if I'm loyal, if I commit, I'll stand out amongst the other johns. The performer I chose to commit to was Fire34DFoxy.
Loyalty to people is like loyalty to a bar. You gotta be there even on off days. And that's what I did. I was a regular, showing up every time she was live. And she didn't always "perform" when she was live. Impersonal business that this was. But that was fine. I was happy to give her money just for being live. Other men left, but not me. I was loyal. More time for she and I to talk. And we did talk a lot. About non-sexual things. She liked to draw, sometimes she would just stream her drawing. We talked about the drawings. She drew a lot of Nintendo stuff so there was a common interest there. And so we grew closer. Or at least I felt like we were. But the double edge to this sword is, all the talking she and I did, and the non-performing she would do, I eventually became the guy that just didn't get to see performances. Other men wanted performances, they didn't settle for drawing, and so when they demanded performances they got performances. I was open to talking, so when it was just us, all I got was talking. Like I didn't wanna see a performance or something. And yet? I tipped her just for the opportunity to chat. Like the saddest possible strip club patron. That's cucked. But to quote Charlie Rose, I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings, even though I now realize I was mistaken.
So, Manhattan? Panama City Beach? Where ever the Bang Bus drives around? With Fire34DFoxy? Where ever I was to go, if I was to commit to a woman that meant giving up 2D. And vice versa. It was a battle that raged on in my conscience. But come the next decade, 2D, as well as most of my copes, would suffer some catastrophic blows. Picture this...
2010. YouTube just launched a brand new layout, courtesy of its Google overlords. Out with the star rating system, in with the thumbs rating system. And there's a World Cup 2010 Vuvuzela button on every video, for some reason. Dailymotion and Vimeo are still relevant, especially for finding videos that YouTube won't host due to copyright conflict. But it's that attention to detail that's putting YouTube ahead of the pack. No longer the dominion of amateurs, YouTube is now legitimate enough a platform for media corporations to have channels on it. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, Crackle, FUNimation, Gillette, and every music video ever. MTV, VH1, BET, they're airing reality shows now. Not that it matters to you. You blinked, and next thing you knew the musical landscape was covered in Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga. But most important, YouTube equipped for "mobile browsing." Which you think is a good idea and all, but mobile devices will never replace the power of a computer. Yep, that's what the Internet was made for and will always be for. Computers. Mobile apps are for Farmville, you say. You're committed to real gaming. And you always will be.
So began the 2010s. Everything moved to Facebook and Twitter. Weird image macros moved from 4chan to meme generator websites & forum weapon armories like MyFaceWhen. And Incels finally moved from niche Internet forums to slightly less niche subreddits like r/incel and r/foreveralone. The word "incel" means very little in 2010, and the most controversial opinion in the community is that Erik von Markovik is a jackass. And everyone thought Erik von Markovik was a jackass. Eduard Khil and Rage Comics are the counterculture symbols du now, but the Internet has never been more corporate friendly. As the Internet and data get bigger and bigger, out go the star ratings and in go the "likes/dislikes" system. Young adult novels were still the biggest box office draws and Disney was kinda on the backpedal from Warner Bros. and Lionsgate. But they saw this decade's future in their new animation renaissance, starting with Tangled, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They snatched up Marvel right as Paramount was getting comfortable with it. But I wasn't really watching capeshit at the time. I was watching...
[Weebshit]
I mentioned in "Milk & Cigarettes 9: NSFW" how I get triggered (or get my jimmies rustled as people said in 2010) by certain issues in the anime industry. Specifically the separation of ecchi/hentai and "mainstream anime." Something I hold sacred, and up until 2010 was more or less unthreatened. But then along came a show called "Highschool of the Dead." Gaining fame on the Internet for a bullet time GIF from the show. And I was listening to chatter about it by people who watched it, and it had all this notoriety for how "fanservicey" it was. All the pantyshots and bouncing breasts. That's the first sign that something's wrong. When people, usually the kind of people who wouldn't watch a show with this kind of content, are like "Highschool of the Dead has a lot of fanservice." That's like saying "Resort Boin has a lot of titfucking." But nobody says that. Why do you think that is? Because it's normal for Resort Boin to have titfucking. It's "supposed to." We just accept that Resort Boin is porn meant for our sexual enjoyment. People call out the lewd content in Highschool of the Dead on the pretense that it's somehow not supposed to have it. That it's somehow not porn meant for our sexual enjoyment, despite having the same kind of content we call other shows "ecchi" for. Basically, Highschool of the Dead should by all rights be an ecchi show and held to the same standard as other ecchi, but for some reason we don't. For some reason we see it as a "mainstream anime," and are therefore shocked at all of the fanservice. I don't like that. I stand firmly in the camp that we should just let porn be porn, but shows like Highschool of the Dead come along and try to be for everyone, despite having the kind of content that isn't for general audiences. Hentai/ecchi is not for general audiences, it's specifically for people who want to see hentai/ecchi. Which is why fans and reviewers and even the showrunners downplay it. "It's not ecchi! It has story! It has character development! It has non-lewd things to enjoy!" Basically if it has plot, it somehow doesn't count as porn. But here's my gripe. Absence of plot or character development or whatever the hell doesn't make a thing porn. Presence of explicit enough sexual content is what makes a thing porn. Yes, porn is known for not being Oscar caliber. But that's not why we hold porn in the regard that we do. That's not why we put porn on the porn shelf. Not for its lack of writing, but for its presence of sex. So I don't care how gripping your zombie story is, if your content is lewd enough, it's ecchi. But that's just my opinion, and my opinion is outnumbered by reviewers asking people to "look past" the fanservice to the story underneath. Producers trying to package the show as something more mainstream. Fans who claim to watch it for the plot. And so, I have to accept defeat. Who is Highschool of the Dead for? If it's not ecchi, I guess I can't enjoy it like ecchi. So I won't stay where I'm wanted.
It's a hard gripe to explain, but you can see me in action arguing about it in this thread.
I get real mad about a show called Kodomo no Jikan. It's a fight I've had before. Take it back to GameFAQs and Poll of the Day. There was a guy on Poll of the Day, a "man of culture" as Napoleon de Geso might say. And he was out and proud about it. Back then he was, anyway. I remember one time in Tinychat he posted Magical DoReMi loli porn. And everyone was shocked at him. And his feelings seemed to be genuinely hurt. He apologized like crazy. Also, he ran a forum game where he was the star, and he was banned from GameFAQs for being a lolicon. So he spiraled into depression and killed himself. And went to heaven. And I'm like, look man. I get it, alright? I see the appeal. Is that what you want me to say? But what did you think was gonna happen, you waving your weird fetish around on the boards? This is not a normal thing to like. Which is why you keep it to yourself. I won't reveal his name because I think he's trying to escape his lolicon past. I've been trying and trying to reach him about loli stuff, but he doesn't wanna talk to me about it. I will say this though. Today he's a pretty successful YouTuber about 43.6% of the way to a Gold Play Button. More than I thought he'd ever earn back when we were bros. But anyway, he liked Kodomo no Jikan. And I was one of the few who complained about this, but didn't see him as some kind of monster. Kodomo no Jikan was one of those shows like Highschool of the Dead where people were like "This show isn't ecchi, it just has a lot of fanservice." Like Mainländer basically said in that thread. The GameFAQs Loli basically said this too, even though he enjoyed it for its lewd content, as a lolicon. And so I says to him I says "How the hell is this not ecchi? If this isn't ecchi, then nothing short of actual hardcore sex is ecchi and that just doesn't work." And the GameFAQs Loli said "Well it was made by a woman." A common, but very strong argument. Creators typically create what they're into. That's why when cameras linger on a woman's ass, we call it "male gaze." Men like women's asses. As do lesbians. But by 2010 I realized there was also a difference between porn made for lesbians, and porn made for men who were attracted to women. It all comes back to the question of who is this for? Who is supposed to enjoy this, and for what reasons? If a work is, first and foremost, for its creator, but the creator is a woman who isn't attracted to little girls, the possibility arises that maybe I'm misinterpreting the depictions. Maybe I'm the creep for thinking that Kuro talking about being fucked with a dildo is a sexual thing. Or maybe, if I had, say, a portfolio full of homoerotic pictures, the fair assumption is that I'm into homoerotic stuff. Because why else would I have it? Why else would I draw it, if I had the choice? I would have a hard time explaining how those pictures should be interpreted, if I'm into what I draw but they're also not meant to be sexual.
I had gripes with mainstream anime because of dub debates. I had gripes with ecchi/hentai because of "who is this for" debates. But kids' anime was still holding up, pretty much. More on that later. Pokémon was still going strong with Sinnoh League Victors, and 4Kids was back on the scene with a block called "Toonzai." Bringing with it Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's. I had been wanting to get back into that now that I had consistent cable. But while I can collect Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and train a Pokémon team, there's no point to that unless I have access to a community I can battle and interact with. And I'm not doing the tourney circuit again. But Bakugan came through with a solution: An online game called Bakugan Dimensions.
The Bakugan franchise was really doing it for me. It was a kids' anime and not produced by 4Kids, so its dub accuracy wasn't really questioned anyway. But unlike most anime, Bakugan aired in the West first, and Western producers were heavily involved. So really, it's the dub that's more original than the Japanese. And then along comes Bakugan Dimensions, a game where you can explore the Bakugan world and battle Dan and all his friends and various side characters and other players. This was the dream. To finally get to make an OC and do more than write fanfics with it. To have my character recognized in an official part of the franchise. You bought the toys in stores, and you registered their codes on the website. Building your team. And I remember thinking, Yu-Gi-Oh! should do that with the serial numbers on their cards. I wanna play Yu-Gi-Oh! Dimensions. But anyway, the Bakugan Dimensions community was welcome peace from the headaches of grownup anime. However, just about everyone on the forums and in the game was a kid. And it's not like I was gonna try anything untoward anyway, but I kinda still had that rule. Stay away from places for kids, you're too old. But... Dimensions was so perfect. A game and community that the official Bakugan people were watching. This is the kind of community I wanted to statusmax in. Not for sex, obviously. But because I wanted to be a notable name in the Bakugan community. Notable enough to be on the radar of the Bakugan management. To reach out, touch, and affect something. Also? What are you supposed to go back to if you leave here? Weebs arguing about how their tiddy anime is actually a serious action show to be taken seriously and dubbed and aired on Toonami? You clearly don't fit over there. But you do fit here. There's nothing wrong with it. You fit in here. And so, I let myself enjoy Bakugan Dimensions. Got to work on my character to represent my brand, as I was doing with all the MMORPGs I was joining. Speaking of which...
[Gaming]
Endless Online. For some time now the mods/admins had earned a reputation of not caring about the game. I think I mentioned that a couple times so far? But also, sometimes we would go long stretches of time without seeing them or hearing from them. No updates on the front page or anything. Maybe an unannounced server reboot here and there. But as I said, real updates slowed down, as did word from the admins, period. And then came 2010. For the whole of 2010 we heard nothing. The game just went unwatched. People still played, though. And that's the beauty of online games. They don't have to "die" per se. If the servers can stay up, the game can just continue on indefinitely. Like a zombie. It might not be good, it might as well be dead, but provided everyone agrees to show up every day, you at least have a community. And that's what Endless Online is/was really, "community dress up." Speaking of failing MMORPGs, at this point I had been playing a game called AdventureQuest Worlds, an MMORPG spinoff of the AdventureQuest Flash games of old. And in 2010 the parent company, Artix Entertainment, added another MMORPG to its library of properties: HeroSmash. And there was so much hype surrounding it and we were all encouraged to get real creative with our original characters... but then the wheels fell off almost immediately. Why? Because Artix Entertainment had too many irons in the fire and couldn't afford to pay attention to unpopular things that weren't worth their time.
www.artix.com
They could've just not overextended themselves with more projects than they could handle. They could've made HeroSmash a game worth playing. But instead they said "We can't make HeroSmash good because you won't play it." When the truth was probably that we can't play it because they won't make HeroSmash good. Maybe I should've learned a lesson from HeroSmash's failure. I too was overextending myself, joining more MMORPGs than I could devote any meaningful time to. Other games, whenever they gave me a reason, would have to fall by the wayside. Like Endless Online. It wasn't an "MMORPG," but I think the online game that usurped most of my time in 2010 was Team Fortress 2. Which I think is reflective of the online game industry as a whole. At some point around the turn of the 2010s, the MMORPG went the way of emo. It was replaced by games like TF2. "Hero-based" games. A shooter or a brawler or a MOBA where you don't make your own character and instead play as a premade one. And for a time in 2010, Valve was on top of the online gaming world. I daresay they were bigger than Blizzard. By 2010, YouTube Poops as we knew them were starting to fall out of style. The "SpaDinner" tropes were old. Billy Mays was the closest thing we had to a fresh Pooping source, and he died. So what started to be popular instead were GMOD videos, usually involving models from Valve games. The "Food Debate" fad and stuff like that. I wanted to make GMOD videos, but like the YTPs, and the
Newgrounds sprite Flashes before them, I never really got around to it. Speaking of things I never got around to, E3 2010 featured the return of an old touchstone. Mortal Kombat was back. It had returned from bankruptcy to be bought by WB Games. Fitting, considering WB owns DC Comics, and the last Mortal Kombat game was Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. So I guess that game is canon, despite my excuses when it first released. And so with Mortal Kombat coming back, I wondered, could I go home again? Could I return to the Mortal Kombat community? I spent most of my time on GameFAQs, so I checked out the GameFAQs board for the new Mortal Kombat game. And it just... didn't have the magic of the old Midway forums. Maybe they weren't active enough? There's only 6 years between 2004 and 2010, nostalgia couldn't have been that much of a factor. Maybe I needed to go back to the actual Midway forums, that's why. But when I went, I saw that they were being shut down and shipped over to the NEW home for Mortal Kombat on the Internet, TheMortalKombat.com. I checked it out, and... the spark, it just wasn't there anymore. Maybe the spark left with the people. They probably went on to different things. Or maybe the spark left with the times. Maybe the Midway forums were the way they were because it was the mid-2000s, and no place is gonna be like the mid-2000s after 2010. Maybe I wasn't who I was in the mid-2000s anymore. It looked like a good game. Maybe I would've enjoyed it on its merits as a good game. But I was put off by how un-mid-2000s it all felt.
But it did help with the Chronicles I was trying to build. Because of this I knew, Mortal Kombat and "Netherrealm Studios" is owned by WB Games. So it goes under the "WB Games Chronicle." And if there was ever a "Smash Bros" of WB Games, Mortal Kombat would be in it. As well as DC heroes, probably. I was still working on compiling "Chronicles" of video game properties. For some reason I felt like this was an important video game article to write. To illustrate the video game industry in sets of "universes." To see what properties go with which. And I tried to do this for every game. Even indie stuff. Games like ROM Check Fail and SMB Crossover and I Wanna Be The Guy and Yume Nikki and Eversion, I wanted to look at these as games in the library of a publisher, not one-offs to be forgotten. I wanted to know what "publishers" they belonged to. And then play every game in that publisher's library, even though it was most often just the one game. That way I could be in the know as a fan if the makers of Eversion make another game, and there's an Eversion cameo in it. Also? I was inspired to do this with my games, whenever I got around to making them. By 2010 I had come up with ideas, no prototypes, but ideas/concept art for more games than I ever would've realistically ever made. And like with Artix Entertainment, some games got more attention than others. The ones I still have notes on...
1. Mascot platfomer. A priority with this was coming up with a variety of power-ups. For one, a variety of power-ups meant a variety of level designs/objective to engage the player. For two, I was concerned with my mascot's brand. As an icon. Mario is remembered for his powerups. For instance, if you were to make Mario in an RPG, his weapon of choice would probably be a hammer, because he's remembered for a hammers in the many games he's been in. His armor might be some kind of turtle shell. And so on. So I wanted my character to be remembered for the powerups and tropes to be featured in his game. And because this mascot was the face of my "company," I had to choose everything carefully. It would all represent the company. It would all represent me. The characters, the aesthetic, everything. Koopa Shells are a memorable Mario trope, so I guess the "trademark animal" of the Mario franchise would be a turtle/Koopa. That's the way I saw it. So if the villain of my platformer had to be an animal, it would have to be an animal that I wanted to represent my brand, represent me. And Mario had already taken "turtle."
2. A game about the world of bugs. But bugs in military service. Soldier ants and stuff. Mostly inspired by looking at the world around me and thinking "What would it be like to explore this world, but really small?" I envisioned missions like fighting humans with some kind of bug minigun from a bug military aircraft. And it would be open world and doing certain things early on would affect other things later. Like, if you do something early on, I dunno... the cat won't be around to terrorize you in the kitchen. But if you don't "skip" the cat battle, you play for a different incentive.
3. Y'know how in RPGs your attacks sometimes miss? But no explanation is given other than the game's RNG? I thought it would be cool to have a turn-based RPG where instead of the fighters standing in a row hitting a static target, you would see each turn play out. A semi-real time RPG. The battle starts. You pick "Attack." But you don't just pick attack, you aim your attack, and do other things to your attack to ensure that it hits. The enemy maybe tries to dodge. Maybe the enemy has a really high Agility stat. Once the "Picking The Moves Phase" is over, you see the decisions of player and enemy resolve, as if in real time. Maybe the swing doesn't connect because the enemy strafed to the left. Then the action slows down and stops. Now it's another turn. Time to pick the next move, but with the positions of the players and the enemies as a factor. The enemy has strafed to the left, so now your attack should maybe try to swipe at him because maybe he's quickly falling back. Maybe the enemy is so fast that the player will have a tough time catching them. Resulting in a lot of misses. Which would've happened in a normal turn-based RPG, but you'll be seeing it happen. You'll be seeing why you missed, in the world of the game. I wasn't too hot for this idea because I wondered if I wasn't just making a real time RPG but extra slowed down. But then again, I could see it as a good turn-based RPG with added visuals and strategy. Plus, I wanted to open it up so that players could make their own levels and campaigns. Basically a tabletop RPG kit video game.
4. A battle RPG like Pokémon or Digimon or Medabots or whatever, but not strictly about battling. A machine/robot building game where you can take various small elements and build complex machines, including robot companions that will fight for you. What I envisioned was a sandboxy sort of game, kinda like The Sims maybe, where you can build something as simple as a toaster, or as complex as a... robot companion that will fight for you. And you can put it in your house. And you can battle other players, as you would in Pokémon or Digimon or Medabots or whatever. Battle in real time, not turn based. Real time Pokémon was what I wanted. With a deeper combat system. For instance, Pokémon has the move "Water Pulse." In the games, you select it and that's it. But in my Pokémon, you would be able to curve its trajectory in real time, and stuff like that. Like on the show. I wanted Pokémon combat, but like on the show. And I wanted it to be robots you built.
5. What Harry Potter did for wizards, what Naruto did for ninjas, what One Piece did for pirates, this game I wanted to do for knights and fairy tales. Ninjas on Naruto, they don't look like "regular" ninjas. Most of them have a SWAT-teamy aesthetic. It's very very loosely inspired by various traditional Japanese style, so that each ninja branches out and does their own thing. Some sandals, a bandage or two, and the rest you can just be creative with. I wanted to do that for fairy tales and knights and dragons and giants and wizards. My game was gonna star a young man from a working-class peasant family who does what most working-class peasants do, join the military. He joins as one of the mages and is caught up in his country's ongoing foreign policy boondoggle, a war with a dark wizard. There would be various missions and side quests as the war with the dark wizard progressed. And he would unlock spell elements. I'm bad at explaining the way I wanted it to work, but picture a pentagram.
You cast a spell by combining 3 of the elements on the pentagram. So if you have 5 "spell elements," you can cast as many spells as you can make combinations of 3 our of those elements. Or, "5C3." Which is 10 spells. Spell #123, Spell #124, Spell #125, Spell #134, Spell #135, Spell #145, Spell #234, Spell #235, Spell #245, and Spell #345. The plan was to start him out with 5 runes or elements or whatever. Then later in the game it would become 6 elements with 20 possible spells, and the spell menu would be a hexagram/hex mark. Then towards the finale it would become 7 elements with 35 possible spells, and the spell menu would be a heptagram. And the spells would be versatile, like the moves in my robot Pokémon game, to make for a hero who fought with a series of punches, kicks, wizardly lightning bolts, and the odd weapon here and there. Genre-wise I guess you could've called the concept a "brawler" or "beat 'em up," but I didn't want an HP system. Instead of HP, I wanted combat to work like real life. Instead you and/or enemies would sustain trauma depending on how hard the blow vs. how vulnerable the area stricken was, and the screen display would change depending on what happened to you. For instance, say you get stabbed somewhere. A new meter comes up. A "Bleed Meter." Depending on where you were stabbed, a countdown begins to how long you have until you bleed out. You as it counts down, you start to show the symptoms of a guy who's losing a lot of blood.
If my platformer was my Mario, and my robot game was my Pokémon, this wizard game was my Zelda. If I wanted to make a Kickstarter for it, I had plenty of promo/concept art to show. Everything but a prototype. Of all my game ideas, this one probably got the most attention. And thus suffered the most from feature creep. I had designs not just for the wizard hero and the dark wizard villain, but the mom, the absent father stranded on an Avalonian island of illusions, a sister, a warrior king, his menagerie of royal gryphons, a queen, a team of handmaidens for the queen to attend her and carry her big sword, silver and white, studded with diamonds and pearls, a crown prince, a princess, giants, dragonmen, a variety of knights & military units in the royal armed forces with a variety of loadouts (Heavy Mail units, Dragon Response units in, like, big bomb suit looking gear), light and airy fairy tale building designs inspired by chess pieces, a legendary sword, a legendary weaponsmith that recrafts the sword into something like a track suit that the hero can wear, because the hero isn't good with swords so he uses his body as the weapon, various exploration tools on top of the unlockable spells, wands for storing spells for quick fire, a food mechanic where certain foods prepared a certain way provide benefits, a chef medium that lets you talk tot he ghosts of animals you hunt, the ability to make friends with various characters in the kingdom and expand your social circle, and regularly hang out together at a tavern in the kingdom, and your talks would inform you of developments in the realm, and unlock new side quests and after game content, or be the king and/or queen's favorite jester, I was even planning future games even before this one was a prototype. Because I had too much story on my hands. If future games starred the wizard hero, he would get to learn knew magic disciplines (because playing the same set of abilities over and over again would be boring). I had different spell mechanics planned out, like maybe you can learn the dark magic of the villain from the first game. And eventually I wanted to feature other kingdoms. I had concepts for a kingdom ruled by a child tyrant queen and her loyal regent. My dragon men would be particularly tough, but in future games I wanted to introduce a kind of Sub-Saharan Africa inspired fairy tale kingdom with agile, leaping chimera men with big antelope horns. To give them an equal in battle. And a sunny Greece inspired kingdom with sporty, muscular brawlers. And a prequel game about the king, before he was king. See, this king didn't inherit the kingdom, he declared himself king. And I wanted to tell the story of that. And if not a whole game, some kind of side quest storyline with the wizard hero's sister. I had a toy battle sword storyline in the works I was trying to shoehorn in. Future games would eventually have to star new heroes. And in these new games with new heroes, you might run into old heroes, like the wizard from the first game in the series. Or you might run into his dad on the Avalonian island, as a teaser for a future game in the series where our wizard hero finally rescues his dad from the island. Oh, if only these games could've been real.
Because I wanted to turn my hand to all things game design/theory, I also did a lot of forum games on GameFAQs. RPGs and stuff, I ran a series of Choose Your Own Adventure games in what I called "Liberty Spire City," I did a pretty popular CYOA called "Ye Have 1 Gold..." but there was a unique kind of forum game to GameFAQs called a "seconds game." Based around trying to post so that the timestamp of your post ends on a certain amount of seconds. You saw a lot of this on the Brawl boards. Like they'd post a list of 60 potential Smashers and say "Seconds determines who gets into Brawl" or something like that. Anyway, I made a couple of seconds games. A kart racing seconds game, a platformer seconds game where the seconds of the next person to post determined which platform you landed on, they weren't much, and probably not much fun either, but what I can say about these is, at least I made them. Unlike the video game concepts above.
Fun and games weren't all fun and games though. I had gripes with things that were happening in the industry at the time. Sonic Colors was being released, and while it was a good game, I was upset at the voice recasting. Because people were always talkin' shit about the old cast and I never thought it was warranted. Especially as people had a lot of good things to say about Jason Griffith's Sonic in Unleashed. I refused to believe the 4Kids cast was worse than the Dreamcast Era cast, and don't think they got a fair shot. And so I kinda lost my motivation to play future Sonic games. They weren't bad games, it was just the fanbase. I needed some way to voice my concerns about Griffith and 4Kids. But I didn't have a wide enough audience, so I just kinda gave up on Sonic after Unleashed. I also gave up on Pokémon in 2010. I wasn't really that mad, I just kinda lost interest. And I still watched the show. It's like this. Word of a new Pokémon was on the way, so I figured I should get two things done before then: Play every Pokémon game, build up my team, and store them for use in the game, and finish an "article" I was working on for Pokémon Emerald. The Battle Tents and Battle Frontier have these challengers whose dialogue is made up of words from the Easy Chat System, and I wanted to record every challenger and each of their 3 pieces of dialogue: The intro, the lose dialogue, and the win dialogue. I saw this as keeping track of the larger Pokémon universe. And we were gonna get to see it in the next Pokémon games to come, Pokémon Black & White. But what I noticed first and foremost about Black & White was that the protagonists, breaking from tradition, appeared to be older teenagers. Not the younger tweenagers that prior games did. And that's not world-ending, but it's a noticeable change, and it bugged me that no one was talking about that. Not a huge deal, but a bigger deal than people were making. Which I kinda understood because most people don't play Pokémon for the story or characters. They play it for the Pokémon, and they would play it for the battling if it was feasible to meet players. But I wasn't in love with the idea of our usual Pokémon heroes growing up. I guess I was spoiled by Ash not aging, the idea of being a certain age became sacred to me? I just wanted it to be acknowledged as a notable change. If I had the community clout to reach out and say to Nintendo "So I noticed the protagonists are older teenagers now. How conscious a decision was that?" I wouldn't have had a problem. That was still the dream, to be able to reach out to industry names. Especially because I had things that were bugging me that I needed to bring up. That I needed to be heard about.
But what I can unashamedly say definitely did bother me? My issue with Highschool of the Dead came up again. It's a common issue with pretty much anything sexual, movies, TV shows, and probably more than anything, video games. The Dead or Alive game series had been around for some years, and I liked it. For reasons I thought I was supposed to like it. But in 2010 we got Dead or Alive: Paradise. And as usual there were some harsh words for it, like there usually are for games in this series. But what got my goat was how Tecmo came to the defense of the game with the same "Don't call this porn" routine that people do for shows like Highschool of the Dead. Yoshinori Ueda came out swinging about how we were misinterpreting the content. "DOA Paradise goal was not soft porn" he said. Critics pressed "Oh come on. You're telling me that's not sexual? What is this supposed to be, then?" Art director Yasushi Nakamura said "If fans masturbate to Dead or Alive, that's a success. But Paradise was meant to restart the franchise as well as broaden its appeal." Basically, you can jack off to whatever you want, there's technically no rule that says you can't. But he's not admitting to anything. Other than that Paradise was meant to broaden the appeal of the franchise. I wasn't that bothered by Tecmo's defense because most people called bullshit on their alleged intentions. But here was, not fans or critics trying to convince me that it's not what I think and I should try and look past the "problematic aspects" because I'm totally missing out on a great game, but the actual producers of that game saying that. Let porn be porn. That's the bare summary of my position here. Stop trying to downplay it or twist it into something for general audiences because that's not what porn is. They know that. They know porn puts off general audiences, that's why they come out and defend it/apologize for it, saying it's not porn, or that while they understand how people might be put off by the content, there's "so much more" to the product than its sexual side. But who am I to argue with the actual producers? So that was it for me and the Dead or Alive series. I liked it because I thought it was porn. But they said it wasn't. I was definitely allowed to like it as porn if I wanted to, but no. I'm not gonna be patronized by Yasushi Nakamura. So that's Highschool of the Dead ruined for me, and Dead or Alive ruined for me. Any time something like this happens, any time I see a non-porn audience or non-porn critics start to gravitate towards a certain show or game or whatever, I start wondering. What is this supposed to be? Who is this for? If it's not for me, I don't wanna waste my time on it. And these two things wouldn't be the only things ruined for me in this way.
[Soy]
When it came to fandoms to be part of, Japan was letting me down. So I started looking to Western shows. Mostly cartoons. Cartoon Network was coming up with a lot of new stuff and I wanted to get in on the ground floor of a new fandom. LOST ended in 2010, and I was late to the bandwagon. I only started watching after it had become really popular. Seeing all the fan tributes during the finale, I wished I could've been part of this for real somehow. Something was missing, starting late and watching it alone. So I thought maybe the answer was starting a show and reaching out to fans as early as possible. I wanted to discover some kind of "diamond in the rough" cartoon. A cartoon that appears pretty run of the mill at first, but later starts to get really engaging. And so I made a bet on this new show, Adventure Time. It seemed right up the alley of this fairy tale knights game I wanted to make. This was a short while before you could just live Tweet any showrunner, but we were approaching that time. I think Adventure Time was one of the shows that popularized it. You could talk to show staff back then, but you did it on an old platform called Formspring. Here's a list of staffers who had Formsprings.
adventuretime.fandom.com
This spread out to other Cartoon Network shows. The Regular Show staff got in on this too. And this was my main method of "participation" in the fandom. Online discussion of the shows, submitting questions via Formspring, and discussing the results of Formspring responses. Back in 2010 it was huge that you could talk to the actual artists and writers like this. It fed into my dream of reaching the ears of the creators of the things I enjoy. But... the novelty wore off. Especially as it started to spread to Regular Show. These showrunners, once put up on pedestals, started to look like regular people. Before 2010, it was an unheard of fantasy to, for instance, have someone as famous as a show artist have a personal opinion of you. And then it happened to me. Natasha Allegri called me out on her Formspring for being annoying. Because of the length and frequency of my questions. And my first thought was "Wow! Someone famous hates me!" But then, as time rolled on, I realized she was just a regular 20-something year old woman who doesn't like too many Formspring messages.
I know today that Adventure Time didn't turn out to be the show I had hoped. Instead attracting the kind of fanbase that wastes Twitter characters on repeating "It's okay to be BLANK" over and over again. A gateway drug to Steven Universe. But I look back on this time and wonder if it was the origin of "soyness." When did "soyness" really get started? When did the tropes we associate with it take shape? Sometimes I think it was Homestuck that started it on Tumblr. But then I remember how big Adventure Time was, and how it ushered in this new renaissance of adults unironically enjoying cartoons that are, ostensibly, for children. And demanding more envelope-pushing content like soft swears and same-sex relationships. I balk at it, but, for one, I tried to be a part of this community at one point, and for two, it's really kind of a modern reimagining of the mid-2000s deviantArt/Fanart-Central era. But then AGAIN, maybe the newness is what made it bad. And furthermore, I kinda hated that community anyway. But grownups liking kid's cartoons was really taking off in the 2010s, and I believe it started with Adventure Time. Or? Maybe soyness started earlier, with LOST. Because LOST was big in that was the first nerdy Internet fandom show to get real response from the mainstream media. Before LOST, you didn't see such synergy of Internet fandom and people trying to profit off of it. But that might be because, before LOST, the Internet was too new.
[Sexy Beautiful Women]
The sad reality of the porn industry is, there is a very high turnover rate. You either expand your "business," retire of your own volition, or age yourself out of the game. It's a lot like the computer science industry. By 2010 I started to notice my usual performers were showing up less and less. Until they just stopped showing up. Without warning. Sexxbooomb for instance, expanded her business. She moved up from takin' it off on webcam to professionally filmed porn. Look her up. As for Fire34DFoxy? I don't know where she went. And I didn't feel like spending more money on so fleeting a thing. Fortunateishly, Omegle had webcam now. The caveat being that Omegle and every site like it has been and probably always will be a terrible place to connect with people. But since the day I discovered it, I continued to waste time on it. Just out of intrigue. Maybe a miracle would happen. I wasn't in much of a hurry. In fact, I was downright complacent. Omegle wasn't working out, obviously. But what about my other ideas? Moving to where the pussy is easier? I would definitely do that... as soon as I figured out a way to move my family with me. What little family was still close to me, still depended on me. Couldn't just leave my parents, they're gonna wanna see me over the holidays. And I'm not gonna travel very far to see them. So they need to live in the same city as me. And to do that, I'm gonna need more money than I have right now. Especially if I wanna make this "1600 Broadway" dream come true, or something like it. If I wanna hook up with someone I wanna take my hookup back to an apartment with charm. And those cost more money than I'm spending right now. And I was often complacent about what to do about money. Because if money woes could be solved so easily, everyone would be rich, and therefore no one would be rich. So I wasn't rushing myself.
But what probably motivated me a little more was my current job. Whether you love or hate your job depends on one simple thing: Is it a worthwhile investment? Does the drudgery pay off? Does the reward make it worth it? My job has always been rough. But I didn't even notice it because of the perk of being able to browse leisurely. The reward made the soul crushing monotony of my job worth it. Take that away, and I start to hate everything about my job. The work, the low pay, I start to notice it all. So for that reason I started to look for other opportunities. Was 3 years of experience here worth a better paying job somewhere else? I found this freelancing platform called oDesk, I managed to pick up some extra scratch through that. What I really wanted was to maybe network my way through it and find someone to hire me on full time. That didn't happen. And my oDesk money was strictly supplementary. I couldn't have quit my job to be a freelancer. But it was enough supplementary money that I couldn't just turn it down. Again it comes down to worthwhile investment. Was oDesk worth the extra work on top of my day job? My day job that I already hate? Yes. But just barely. And what was extra troublesome was that my workload was so heavy, oftentimes I had to do oDesk at work. And it would be REALLY bad to be caught on oDesk at work. It was enough extra money that I was placated by the thought that I might, someday, have enough money to really impress a woman with something.
[Misc.]
The last thing I can think of in my 2010 pursuits was the picture hunting. I was still looking for porn, but the advent of social media like Facebook and Twitter, and convenient image hosting services like Tinypic, fostered the proliferation of the "funny/weird/cool viral image."
They had always existed on the Internet, but 2010s social media had images like these popping up in forum signatures everywhere. And so I started collecting those images too, to figure out where they came from, who made them, if the things in them were real and what the story behind them was, etc. I was still keeping an eye on Dagobah, that was a good source for interesting animations. As was TheBest404PageEver.com (Now at TheBest404PageEverRedux.com). But the one I wanna talk about is Fatpita.net, because it stands as a good example of the evolution of the Internet pre and post "social media renaissance." Today it's an image and video repository where every page has a Facebook embed, so you can comment on it while you're logged into Facebook. Post it on Facebook, or retweet it. But before 2010 it was your typical mid-2000s humor site.
There was no Facebook or Twitter functionality. Instead you could send it via AIM, or e-mail. A good way of pinpointing when exactly the end of the old era was. When GEICO and Mastercard jokes were the "memes" we all laughed at. Before users and their content dominated the Internet. When was the last time we laughed at a TV commercial? Can you even remember the last time you saw a TV commercial? It wasn't quite over yet, but the writing was appearing on the wall in 2010.
I've done a lot of griping about 2010, but this was still a pretty good year. Not the best year, but I would count it among the "good years." A summary of my ambitions up to this point...
It's not everyone, but with random sampling I'm willing to wager it's proportionate with the group as a whole. If we did get all something-thousand Reddit participants, 70% of the polled would still be 20 and under. And there'd still be a small single digit sliver of us that are my age. I've always said that NoFap or No Nut November or whatever name you wanna give it is a "game for children." It's only a challenge for the very young and pubescent, whose hormones are at their peak. And it only pays off if your hormones are at their peak. And the game primarily attracts those whose hormones are at their peak.
No Nut November, by virtue of it (ostensibly) being about self-improvement, attracts some real down and out people. Especially the ones my age. Look at all the 20 and unders. Now, look at the 40 and ups. Now, look at the extra tiny sliver of 35-39. This suggests to me that NoFap and No Nut November and things like it attract 2 major groups: Kids who wanna improve their lives by getting their addictions under control, and old men like me, who are deeply unhappy with their lives and are trying to find happiness. You meet someone, they seem pretty normal at face value, but then you check their post history and then oh no, r/DeadBedrooms. Oh no, r/TrueSPH. Oh no, r/CuckoldPsychology. And then there's the women who show up. Yes, women show up. And while many are there to participate, some are there to just be like "Teehee I'm a girl oh you boys I wonder if you would jack off to me because you know I'm a girl." But in both cases, they also appear to be deeply unhappy. Check the post history. Eating disorders. Self harm. Weird fetishes. It's hard to feel bad about myself when I'm surrounded by so many others who also suffer. But somehow I pull it off. Case in point, people are always telling me get my test tested. So I say "Sure, I'm gonna actually make some moves on that." Step one is enrolling in insurance. But when I went to enroll in my employer's healthcare plan, I found that, while it covers women's issues plentifully, it covers ZERO men's issues. Zero. I can't even get boner pills, let alone get my blood tested for man hormones. And I think "Yes, yes my life does suck." Look, being perfectly technical, sex is a want, not a need. You need a bone mended. You need to not have cancer. You don't "need" to have sex any more than you need breast implants or a genioplasty. But between contraception and erectile dysfunction treatment, contraception does not treat anything. Sex is supposed to result in pregnancy. If you want sex to not result in pregnancy, that's recreation. You pay for your own fun. You pay for your own wants. But erectile dysfunction? That's a dysfunction. Something is physically wrong with me. Might not be the most crucial body part, but there's technically more to be said there than "I wanna have sex, and I can, but just for fun I'd like it to be unprotected." But when a man gets his and a woman doesn't get hers, society is so ready to stump for how disadvantaged the woman is and how men are objectively the winners everywhere and always. Here I am a man not getting his, while my female co-workers get theirs. And society will not admit my disadvantage here. Society will not hang anybody out for caring about women disproportionately to men.
What am I supposed to do now? Am I just stuck with this old, failing body? This unfeeling husk that's just barely worth using because it's too much work to lay down and die? I remember facing the anguish of my old age like this before. Around the turn of the decade. Picture this...
2009. Barack Obama is President, and for some reason none of the anti-drug PSAs air on TV anymore. You're killing boredom with another night on Omegle.
You: Hello!
Stranger: Michael Jackson was murdered.
You're not sure if you buy it. 2009 was just a bad year for celebrity deaths, that's all. But if MTV wasn't dead before, it's certainly dead now. Your generation is coming to an end. Your old road is rapidly aging.
When last we checked, my list of ambitions was as follows...
- Be a notable contributor on GameFAQs.
- Be a notable contributor in Endless Online.
- Start dialogues in the anime fandom about your gripes with anime.
- Report on video game news/leaks.
- Run an Endless blog.
- Run a popular Endless !nteractive storyline series through comics and other content.
- Draw a video game webcomic.
- Produce erotic video game works.
- Identify the source of as much hentai/ecchi as you can.
- Find the creators of that hentai/ecchi, make friends and co-collaborators of them.
- Come up with tools/solutions for Endless Online security.
- Statusmax in Endless Online so that I can interact with the mods.
- Find and maintain contact with the old Endless guard.
- Pick a Smash main that represents my identity.
- Pick a TF2 main that represents my identity.
- Git gud at games.
- Join the fighting game circuit.
- Make gameplay videos/Let's Plays.
- Make YTPs.
- Make video game mods.
- Make homebrew on Wii
- Walk into the foreground in Smash Bros.
- Make TF2 maps.
- Extract resources from TF2 maps and identify the sources of the pictures.
- Make a Chronicle of every game and who owns the rights to it.
- Statusmax on GameFAQs/the gaming community at large so I can hook up with women in it.
- Reach out to/interact with notable game industry names. Have someone listen to my idea about "Fire Emblem X Shining Force."
- Go to where the Bang Buses are.
- Find out how much dick it takes to satisfy Gianna Michaels.
- Wait for Mortal Kombat to return for real.
Let's go over 2009's news regarding those ambitions, broken down by category.
[Gaming]
I wanted to be tourney level good at video games. Specifically, Smash Bros. And go through the Smash tourney circuit. And have a crew, and make videos with sick combos, like this.
But tourney level skills didn't seem like a likely dream anymore. My nephew was 9 years old at the time, and he was well beyond my abilities in Smash. I just couldn't catch up to him. I tried to tell myself it's because I wasn't trying hard enough and if I was serious, I could beat him. Part of me wanted to blame him for being so good. Like it's a bad thing. Because he would spend hours just grinding away in Training Mode, or fighting CPUs. And I'm like "Why are you doing that? Aren't you bored? Why don't you do something else??? Level 9 CPUs are too tough for you. Well, I mean unless you try... that thing you just tried..." Truth is though, I'd read the articles and interviews and testimonials. Kids are better at video games than old adults. They simply have better reflexes. This is why in the fighting game community, the pros take caffeine for their matches and are even sponsored by caffeine companies. And while most pro Smashers are adults, they were all mostly younger than me. Even the ones who took caffeine. I couldn't keep up in Smash, I couldn't keep up in TF2, except for in Prop Hunt. But dreams don't have to be likely, you just have to want them. And besides, there were "age appropriate" ways to be active in the gaming community. I thought about the kinds of things you see people my age doing. Things like webcomics, guides, articles, reviews, leaks, video game journalists were mostly about my age. Modders and homebrewers were about my age. One thing I wanted to do was come up with mods for online Smash Bros. I saw other people had done this, taking people to fan made stages that shouldn't be possible to start matches on. But what I wanted to do specifically was bring people together. I had played many a match on "With Anyone." Paired up with a random person that you really hit it off with, only to maybe never see them again. Or worse yet, you DO see them again and are desperate to hold onto this moment somehow. For if you part again, it might be the last time. I thought I was the only person who felt like this. Until I found my nephew crying one day because he made something like a new friend on With Anyone, and it broke his heart that he couldn't trade Friend Codes or something. I knew something had to be done, I knew there was a demand. But I never did figure out how to fill that demand. I wanted to make a mod where you can display your Friend Code via taunt, which I think was impossible. Or at the very least not common. If it was possible, I wanted to get a social movement going where people did that. Or reach the ears of Nintendo and let them know how bad we're all hurting to link up with our With Anyone friends in passing.
That's another thing. I wanted my commentary and rants about video game stuff to reach the ears of industry names. For instance, by 2009 Sonic Unleashed was released. And it was my favorite Sonic game in some years. But people still didn't like it. Certainly not as much as they liked Super Mario Galaxy. And perhaps because of this, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 was announced. A "back to basics" approach. And people were excited for it. But I wasn't. Because I didn't want 2D Sonic and I definitely didn't want 2D Sonic to be a gesture of Sonic giving up trying new things and just sticking to the old. You didn't see Mario doing this. I wanted Sonic to be a worthy rival/companion to Mario. And that HAD to be possible in 3D. But I did notice a problem. Sonic can't be exactly like Mario, because what makes Mario platformers great is the variety of platforming and puzzle challenges the games have. Mario games can be about anything. Include any challenge. Sonic games though, they can only be about so much. Because they can't include platforming or puzzles or other challenges at the expense of speed. Sonic has to be fast. That's why people laud 2D Sonic so much. 2D games are good for buttery smooth races from start to finish. In 3D that becomes harder without either becoming plodding (like the Werehog levels of Unleashed), or being too easy because there isn't much in the way of obstacles. And I'm thinking maybe that's why Mario is more popular than Sonic. Sonic has to be fast, even if being fast all the time, even if the level design is flawless, isn't as fun as a Mario game with all its variety. Sonic might be more fun if he got to slow down and try something else besides running, but people would complain because then it wouldn't really be a Sonic game. I would talk a lot about this on GameFAQs, and based on my conversations there it felt like I was the only one who was thinking about this. But then I saw this video by Moviebob.
So now I'm like "So people besides me see this. I would like to have this question presented and debated by the industry at large. Like if there were a forum this could be posted on, and then, I dunno, Sonic Team was on that forum, and they weighed in. Or showed some sign that they read the posts themselves." And then I thought, "But what if it can't be done? Frankly, if Sonic has to be fast, I would include more characters in the games and give them levels/Stars to win that didn't involve speed. Like my OCs Vulcan and Barrel.
Or maybe... I should just make my own game." And so was born another ambition: Make video games. Which I technically considered way back with the VIC-20, but in 2009 it felt like something that could seriously be done. You heard about "indie devs." You heard about video games that weren't even on home consoles. I didn't need to be AAA with commercials on TV and a conference at E3, I just wanted to make a quality platformer. Did I think I was gonna make the Mario killer? No. But I went into it thinking I should at least shoot for Mario's star. And in order to do that I needed to learn level design. How do you make "good" levels? Why is a good level good? I had to learn how to break down examples of good levels and isolate the individual parts that made up their challenges. But also? I needed to learn character design. Mario was a mascot, Sonic was a mascot, I wanted my platformer's hero to be a mascot. A brand that people would recognize. My brand. And here I was back to trying to promote my own brand. Which meant I needed to figure out what my brand was, and how to make it Mario/Sonic-esque. And as I was thinking this over, ideas kept piling on, until I had ideas for other games. Now I really needed a recognizable brand, because now I didn't wanna just make one game, I wanted to make several games, and have my platformer mascot/alter ego be the face of my "company." Fortunately for me, 2009 brought us this thing called "Kickstarter." Unfortunately for me, I didn't know how to use it, nor did I want to. If I had a prototype and some concept art, I could've maybe been the first "Pictures for Sad Children." But it was specifically because of possibilities like that that I didn't want to do Kickstarter. It felt like cheating. The idea that someone should give someone else money for something that isn't here yet sounds like a scam already, but if you wanna be a game studio, you should have to do it the way everyone before you did it. Not begging your way to it. You make do with what you have, and me, not knowing much of anything about video game development, figured it couldn't be that hard. I wasn't looking to make the Mario killer. Just what was possible for me to do. Whatever that was, I was eager to make it. Game development was definitely an "age appropriate" way to still be a "gamer." I could be 50 and still making games. Throw a blazer on over a video game t-shirt and suddenly I'm not some weird man-child. I'm stage-ready for conference speeches.
Speaking of which, after discovering GameFAQs, I made it a point to watch every E3 starting from 2009. On GameTrailers. I liked watching it live with the community, discussing announcements in the talkback threads as they happened. In the GameTrailers live chat and on the GameFAQs Brawl boards. And I also branched out to the the GameFAQs board "Poll of the Day." A social board like Lounge was for Endless Online. And like Endless Online, there was a "sidebar" or an "afterparty" lounge for PotDers to go to. Endless Online had its IRC, and PotD had Tinychat, because IRC was fast fading away as a relevant platform. Tinychat wasn't just a chatroom like IRC basically is. Tinychat supported webcam. 2009 would be the year I finally was able to get some real use out of my webcam.
Meanwhile, over on Endless, the game was technically still alive and pulling steady figures. However, the boards were near about dead, and the community then started to branch off to new Endless spots like EOServ and Rakuhana. Endless Online "fan servers." But the official Endless Online server, despite it being targeted with hacks and autobots on a constant basis, was still where most people played. The other servers just didn't have enough content or players to keep people occupied for a long enough time. I think the main Lounge body went to Rakuhana. So, Endless Online was a game a lot of people played, but the sense of community, at least the one I remembered, was gone. I could've continued making my Endless fan stuff, but there was no audience for it. Not on the main Endless forums because they were dead, despite the game attracting many players. Not on the fan server forums, because they were dead both ingame and on forum. I kept my Endless account around, and still have access to it, but I was pretty much retired from the Endless fan content game. However, while I might've lost the Endless I knew and loved, there were other MMORPGs out there. 2009 I started noticing lots of ads for MMORPGs. I think this was the beginning of the "Save the queen, my lord" fad. What I do know is that in 2009 I got to work on a list of MMORPGs and other communities that I would join to spread my brand. If I was gonna make indie games, and have a brand worth promoting, I should do like I planned on doing originally and joining lots of MMORPGs, so my name and brand can spread. Like LiquidIce and Jubei Saotome. So, I started keeping track of every MMORPG ad I saw and making a note to join it. And design my characters in those MMORPGs to basically match. My character would basically represent my mascot/alter ego, as best as can be represented in the game. Mario is a man of many hats, so it's like my alter ego is also a man of many hats. He stars in his game, but he also can be found in Champions Online or City of Heroes, for instance.
[Weebshit]
I still had the dilemma though. I couldn't be a respectable indie dev with lewds in my portfolio. I couldn't live with myself. So I had to pick one. In the meantime, I moonlighted with both. Hunting pictures and videos and shows and OVAs and doujins & et cetera where ever I found them. You might've seen this greentext about Akinator, where it suggests using it as a reverse search engine.
I was well aware of that trick by now, but I didn't use it for 3D women. I used it to discover ecchi anime. It's how I learned about shows like Kanokon. GameFAQs and PotD was also a frequent source for this, there would be constant testing of the mods with threads made to compile pictures that risked breaking Terms and Conditions of Service. The drive to find sources was particularly frustrating when I would, say, see an interesting avatar in GameTrailers chat. GameTrailers chat during E3 was never good for actual discussion, it went too fast. So it's not like I could ask. It was hard enough just catching these avatars, how fast the chat was going. Fortunately, I had Tineye by now. And though its resources were still lean, it came through more than I thought it would. Source hunts as a whole though were fast becoming unnecessary. In 2009 I didn't just have Tineye, I had the various "boorus." Danbooru, Gelbooru. And they were basically what I set out to make in the first place, databases of 2D, with sources tagged. To this day, the boorus aren't perfect with that, but I really feel like in the world of 2D, there was a clear difference between pre-booru times and post-booru times. Pre-booru everything was mysterious. Post-booru, the answers are a click away, and soon out of thought. Unless they're a particularly challenging source hunt. Speaking of challenging source hunts, I should've explained earlier, 2008 was the year the West really got its first taste of Touhou. Because of McRoll'd.
To quote minigunexo, we used to call these things fads damn it. We had fads like YTPMVs made from Touhou songs. Fads like re-remixed of McRoll'd. But the fad that caught my eye in 2009 was a mysterious cropping up of videos from Nicovideo where girls appeared to be riding something. Ostensibly some kind of riding machine, but the suggestion, or implication, was that it was sexual. I wanted to try and find one to post here, but they all seem to be gone. But these "bull riding machine" videos or whatever they were officially called, they were especially mysterious. Because everywhere you found them, their titles were in Japanese. I didn't know who made them, who the girls in them were, barely could grasp what the premise of the videos were. Also at this point, I had saved several doujins that were untranslated. Couldn't understand them, but I desperately wanted to. And the bull riding machine videos were the wake up call: I should just learn to read/interpret Japanese. Instead of waiting for someone else to scanlate my doujins? I could learn what these videos are about. I could navigate Nicovideo and find more content. Sispuri still had yet to be fully translated at this point, which was incredible. I could make up for not finding Double Princess by providing the full translation for Sispuri. But learning Japanese came with a caveat: If I can read untranslated doujins and stuff, wouldn't that ruin the "sanctity" of pre-translated doujins I find? If I don't know Japanese, the translated versions of things, as far as I'm concerned, are 100% accurate. This is what the characters are saying, I don't even concern myself with whatever the "original" text/words said. But if I can read Japanese myself, and then I find a doujin scanlated by some other Internet fanlation scanlation ring, maybe I'm gonna question the accuracy of their work. It's no longer sacred. It's all up to interpretation anyway, maybe I believe the character should've said "Crap" instead of "Shit." And there not being a definite single right answer makes it so that I can't enjoy translated works anymore. The immersion will be ruined. Because I'll constantly be questioning them. Like a subs fan criticizing a dub. But if I wanted to achieve the heights of my dreams, I kinda needed to know Japanese. Because like with video games I wanted to somehow statusmax in the community/industry/whatever so that I could be in with the artists who make that stuff. Call them friends and colleagues. I wanted to be in with people in such a way that, for instance, maybe I had an Internet persona or something. Like my hypothetical platformer mascot. And he was known for some kind of trademark. Like maybe he wore a scarf or something. And maybe there's an artist somewhere with an original character in a web doujin or something. And I really like this character. Like, as a waifu. Maybe the artist of that original character draws my waifu wearing my scarf. Because I'm a friend and colleague of that artist. I wanted to be able to do stuff like that. Often I would read doujins about school, and put myself in the social situations. "If I was at this school, I wonder how I would fit in?" Pitiful, yeah. But less pitiful if I'm rubbing elbows with the artist and they put me in. So the goal was not just to discover shows like Kanokon, and not just to find out where to watch full episodes of Kanokon. Just watching wasn't enough. I needed to somehow be close to Akio Takami himself. Before he retired or something. It just didn't feel like enough to watch the shows and be done.
[Sexy Beautiful Women]
So, it had been 2 years at my job. By 2009 they started to come down on "leisurely browsing." This was the start of the content filtering and stuff. Blocking websites. Which in turn had me checking over my shoulder, dreading the tremor of approaching footsteps. In case they saw me and got ideas for new sites to block. So I started to resent my job because I couldn't browse as freely as I used to. And being bored at work leads to re-evaluating your quality of life, and whether your job is helping you or hindering you. Because the PotD community was a social one, a lot of posts were about people's day to day experiences. And if you were a popular/relevant/interesting PotDer, more of us were interested in your life. "BlogFAQs" or "BlogFAQs posts" we called them. A lot of people found them self-important. But me? It made me question the quality of my life. These were people who had had sex and stuff. They were hooking up with people. I wanna hook up with someone. But how would I do it? Ideally? Fantasies drift to meeting a woman at some kind of bar or nightclub and taking her to my place. But, ohhhhhh... I can't do that. I need a respectable car and respectable apartment for that. Wouldn't that be sweet? To take a woman in my magnificently appointed car to my magnificently appointed apartment? A place that really sets the mood for having sex with me. A place that looks nice in the background of my webcam. What kind of cars and apartments impress people? Namely female people? I went asking around. On Yahoo! Answers. Because AskReddit was still in its infancy. Yahoo! Answers was the place to go. From the answers I got I began crafting my dream life. Problem is not only was my job not paying for my dream life, but my city wasn't selling my dream life. I was enamored with a very specific piece of property, "1600 Broadway on The Square." Specifically one of the G units.
I saw that picture and was like "Yeah, if I bring friends and/or hookups back to a place like that? If I have that floor to ceiling window view in the background of my webcam? That's the kind of foot I wanna put forward." Last I checked the kind of unit I wanted to rent was $6000 a month and they were being snapped up fast. It wasn't likely. But I told myself "Someday." I just gotta climb the ladder, right? But maybe don't shoot for Manhattan. Most people don't. Is there a more "realistic" goal? Maybe. If I'm willing to give up snow, I could live in Spring Break territory. I had admired the hedonism of warm weather areas since Spring Break on MTV. Since Wild On on E!, and so mant late night TV informercials. My exposure to just how crazy it gets down there continued in 2009 when I got my hands on this DVD whose name I forget. Something about "bareknuckle catfights" or something? I'm not into catfights, but I really would like to find it again someday. Because in the special features there were trailers for other DVDs by the same production company. And one of them was this Spring Break one. And there throngs of people just grinding naked on each other on the beach, bare breasts bouncing, and they talked to cops and the cops were talking about how things were so crazy that they couldn't hope to contain it and they were begging people to stop doing this. The very cops were desperate. No posturing about how they were gonna come down on people, they flat out admitted they wanted to stop it but couldn't. I need to find that DVD again because I need to know what city that was where the party was so hard, the cops couldn't stop it. I bet it was Panama City Beach. But I'll never know for sure, until I find that DVD. But wait, you might wonder. How do you know it's real? How do you know it wasn't staged? A question I ask myself a lot when it comes to porn. One good way to know? When people get arrested. The major argument for something being fake/staged is "It can't be real, they would get arrested for it." So when people do get arrested for it, you know they didn't fake it. Like how in 2009 Claire Dames and Natasha Nice were arrested for a public nudity during a porn shoot.
You can't do that for real! Public nudity is illegal! And yet, it happened. We have the story of how and everything. As for this DVD? Also in the special features was a trailer for some kind of Steve Irwin inspired bum hunting/bum fighting DVD. And the producers were arrested and charged with multiple offenses because of it. I can't find the article because I don't remember the name of the DVD or the production house, but I remember reading it and realizing "So they're willing to break the law. Why would they lie when it's clear they're telling the truth about this?"
Regular scripted porn was available to me, but the "real stuff" was what I wanted to see. Amateur stuff. The appeal is it makes you think "I could do that." For instance, a dorm party. Maybe it is scripted. But if everyone in the video is an amateur, that means one day you might be asked to be part of someone's amateur porn shoot. But in order to do that, I would have to go back to college. Which I probably could've done back in 2009. But instead I focused on another kind of "amateur." The webcam personality. 2009 was a big year for camgirls. 2009 was the year of Boxxy. But I didn't have eyes for Boxxy. Like in the opening example, I spent my nights looking for hookups on Omegle/Chatroulette. Didn't really work out. Particularly because I wanted to see these potential women, but Omegle and Chatroulette were still new and didn't have webcam functionality. I know Omegle didn't. I don't know about Chatroulette. But what definitely did? Camgirl performer sites like ImLive.com. I was initially drawn to the site after seeing a performer who went by "sexxbooomb." Real name, Gya Roberts.
ImLive performers had this kinda annoying habit where they all put the same "clever" form text on their bios. Things like "I am a real B.I.T.C.H. (Beautiful, Intelligent, Totally Charming, Hot)" or "May cause heart attacks, premature ejaculation, insomnia and divorce!" And in the "I love ImLive Video Chat because" section, they all put some semblance of "It gives me a chance to express myself." The fact that they were all copying each other and not coming up with their own bios was clear evidence of just how much of an impersonal business this was. Like these kids nowadays who wanna be Pewdiepie or something, so they just copy the broad YouTuber tropes they know to work. The things that successful YouTubers seem to always do. And so it was for these performers. Just putting in what they see works, purely for views, not the love of the craft. But I didn't let that dissuade me. I was rife with expendable income and ready to orbit. Way I figured it, if I'm loyal, if I commit, I'll stand out amongst the other johns. The performer I chose to commit to was Fire34DFoxy.
Loyalty to people is like loyalty to a bar. You gotta be there even on off days. And that's what I did. I was a regular, showing up every time she was live. And she didn't always "perform" when she was live. Impersonal business that this was. But that was fine. I was happy to give her money just for being live. Other men left, but not me. I was loyal. More time for she and I to talk. And we did talk a lot. About non-sexual things. She liked to draw, sometimes she would just stream her drawing. We talked about the drawings. She drew a lot of Nintendo stuff so there was a common interest there. And so we grew closer. Or at least I felt like we were. But the double edge to this sword is, all the talking she and I did, and the non-performing she would do, I eventually became the guy that just didn't get to see performances. Other men wanted performances, they didn't settle for drawing, and so when they demanded performances they got performances. I was open to talking, so when it was just us, all I got was talking. Like I didn't wanna see a performance or something. And yet? I tipped her just for the opportunity to chat. Like the saddest possible strip club patron. That's cucked. But to quote Charlie Rose, I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings, even though I now realize I was mistaken.
So, Manhattan? Panama City Beach? Where ever the Bang Bus drives around? With Fire34DFoxy? Where ever I was to go, if I was to commit to a woman that meant giving up 2D. And vice versa. It was a battle that raged on in my conscience. But come the next decade, 2D, as well as most of my copes, would suffer some catastrophic blows. Picture this...
2010. YouTube just launched a brand new layout, courtesy of its Google overlords. Out with the star rating system, in with the thumbs rating system. And there's a World Cup 2010 Vuvuzela button on every video, for some reason. Dailymotion and Vimeo are still relevant, especially for finding videos that YouTube won't host due to copyright conflict. But it's that attention to detail that's putting YouTube ahead of the pack. No longer the dominion of amateurs, YouTube is now legitimate enough a platform for media corporations to have channels on it. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, Crackle, FUNimation, Gillette, and every music video ever. MTV, VH1, BET, they're airing reality shows now. Not that it matters to you. You blinked, and next thing you knew the musical landscape was covered in Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga. But most important, YouTube equipped for "mobile browsing." Which you think is a good idea and all, but mobile devices will never replace the power of a computer. Yep, that's what the Internet was made for and will always be for. Computers. Mobile apps are for Farmville, you say. You're committed to real gaming. And you always will be.
So began the 2010s. Everything moved to Facebook and Twitter. Weird image macros moved from 4chan to meme generator websites & forum weapon armories like MyFaceWhen. And Incels finally moved from niche Internet forums to slightly less niche subreddits like r/incel and r/foreveralone. The word "incel" means very little in 2010, and the most controversial opinion in the community is that Erik von Markovik is a jackass. And everyone thought Erik von Markovik was a jackass. Eduard Khil and Rage Comics are the counterculture symbols du now, but the Internet has never been more corporate friendly. As the Internet and data get bigger and bigger, out go the star ratings and in go the "likes/dislikes" system. Young adult novels were still the biggest box office draws and Disney was kinda on the backpedal from Warner Bros. and Lionsgate. But they saw this decade's future in their new animation renaissance, starting with Tangled, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They snatched up Marvel right as Paramount was getting comfortable with it. But I wasn't really watching capeshit at the time. I was watching...
[Weebshit]
I mentioned in "Milk & Cigarettes 9: NSFW" how I get triggered (or get my jimmies rustled as people said in 2010) by certain issues in the anime industry. Specifically the separation of ecchi/hentai and "mainstream anime." Something I hold sacred, and up until 2010 was more or less unthreatened. But then along came a show called "Highschool of the Dead." Gaining fame on the Internet for a bullet time GIF from the show. And I was listening to chatter about it by people who watched it, and it had all this notoriety for how "fanservicey" it was. All the pantyshots and bouncing breasts. That's the first sign that something's wrong. When people, usually the kind of people who wouldn't watch a show with this kind of content, are like "Highschool of the Dead has a lot of fanservice." That's like saying "Resort Boin has a lot of titfucking." But nobody says that. Why do you think that is? Because it's normal for Resort Boin to have titfucking. It's "supposed to." We just accept that Resort Boin is porn meant for our sexual enjoyment. People call out the lewd content in Highschool of the Dead on the pretense that it's somehow not supposed to have it. That it's somehow not porn meant for our sexual enjoyment, despite having the same kind of content we call other shows "ecchi" for. Basically, Highschool of the Dead should by all rights be an ecchi show and held to the same standard as other ecchi, but for some reason we don't. For some reason we see it as a "mainstream anime," and are therefore shocked at all of the fanservice. I don't like that. I stand firmly in the camp that we should just let porn be porn, but shows like Highschool of the Dead come along and try to be for everyone, despite having the kind of content that isn't for general audiences. Hentai/ecchi is not for general audiences, it's specifically for people who want to see hentai/ecchi. Which is why fans and reviewers and even the showrunners downplay it. "It's not ecchi! It has story! It has character development! It has non-lewd things to enjoy!" Basically if it has plot, it somehow doesn't count as porn. But here's my gripe. Absence of plot or character development or whatever the hell doesn't make a thing porn. Presence of explicit enough sexual content is what makes a thing porn. Yes, porn is known for not being Oscar caliber. But that's not why we hold porn in the regard that we do. That's not why we put porn on the porn shelf. Not for its lack of writing, but for its presence of sex. So I don't care how gripping your zombie story is, if your content is lewd enough, it's ecchi. But that's just my opinion, and my opinion is outnumbered by reviewers asking people to "look past" the fanservice to the story underneath. Producers trying to package the show as something more mainstream. Fans who claim to watch it for the plot. And so, I have to accept defeat. Who is Highschool of the Dead for? If it's not ecchi, I guess I can't enjoy it like ecchi. So I won't stay where I'm wanted.
It's a hard gripe to explain, but you can see me in action arguing about it in this thread.
https://incels.is/threads/post-2010...ble-in-all-ways-possible-reason-women.153781/
I get real mad about a show called Kodomo no Jikan. It's a fight I've had before. Take it back to GameFAQs and Poll of the Day. There was a guy on Poll of the Day, a "man of culture" as Napoleon de Geso might say. And he was out and proud about it. Back then he was, anyway. I remember one time in Tinychat he posted Magical DoReMi loli porn. And everyone was shocked at him. And his feelings seemed to be genuinely hurt. He apologized like crazy. Also, he ran a forum game where he was the star, and he was banned from GameFAQs for being a lolicon. So he spiraled into depression and killed himself. And went to heaven. And I'm like, look man. I get it, alright? I see the appeal. Is that what you want me to say? But what did you think was gonna happen, you waving your weird fetish around on the boards? This is not a normal thing to like. Which is why you keep it to yourself. I won't reveal his name because I think he's trying to escape his lolicon past. I've been trying and trying to reach him about loli stuff, but he doesn't wanna talk to me about it. I will say this though. Today he's a pretty successful YouTuber about 43.6% of the way to a Gold Play Button. More than I thought he'd ever earn back when we were bros. But anyway, he liked Kodomo no Jikan. And I was one of the few who complained about this, but didn't see him as some kind of monster. Kodomo no Jikan was one of those shows like Highschool of the Dead where people were like "This show isn't ecchi, it just has a lot of fanservice." Like Mainländer basically said in that thread. The GameFAQs Loli basically said this too, even though he enjoyed it for its lewd content, as a lolicon. And so I says to him I says "How the hell is this not ecchi? If this isn't ecchi, then nothing short of actual hardcore sex is ecchi and that just doesn't work." And the GameFAQs Loli said "Well it was made by a woman." A common, but very strong argument. Creators typically create what they're into. That's why when cameras linger on a woman's ass, we call it "male gaze." Men like women's asses. As do lesbians. But by 2010 I realized there was also a difference between porn made for lesbians, and porn made for men who were attracted to women. It all comes back to the question of who is this for? Who is supposed to enjoy this, and for what reasons? If a work is, first and foremost, for its creator, but the creator is a woman who isn't attracted to little girls, the possibility arises that maybe I'm misinterpreting the depictions. Maybe I'm the creep for thinking that Kuro talking about being fucked with a dildo is a sexual thing. Or maybe, if I had, say, a portfolio full of homoerotic pictures, the fair assumption is that I'm into homoerotic stuff. Because why else would I have it? Why else would I draw it, if I had the choice? I would have a hard time explaining how those pictures should be interpreted, if I'm into what I draw but they're also not meant to be sexual.
I had gripes with mainstream anime because of dub debates. I had gripes with ecchi/hentai because of "who is this for" debates. But kids' anime was still holding up, pretty much. More on that later. Pokémon was still going strong with Sinnoh League Victors, and 4Kids was back on the scene with a block called "Toonzai." Bringing with it Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's. I had been wanting to get back into that now that I had consistent cable. But while I can collect Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and train a Pokémon team, there's no point to that unless I have access to a community I can battle and interact with. And I'm not doing the tourney circuit again. But Bakugan came through with a solution: An online game called Bakugan Dimensions.
The Bakugan franchise was really doing it for me. It was a kids' anime and not produced by 4Kids, so its dub accuracy wasn't really questioned anyway. But unlike most anime, Bakugan aired in the West first, and Western producers were heavily involved. So really, it's the dub that's more original than the Japanese. And then along comes Bakugan Dimensions, a game where you can explore the Bakugan world and battle Dan and all his friends and various side characters and other players. This was the dream. To finally get to make an OC and do more than write fanfics with it. To have my character recognized in an official part of the franchise. You bought the toys in stores, and you registered their codes on the website. Building your team. And I remember thinking, Yu-Gi-Oh! should do that with the serial numbers on their cards. I wanna play Yu-Gi-Oh! Dimensions. But anyway, the Bakugan Dimensions community was welcome peace from the headaches of grownup anime. However, just about everyone on the forums and in the game was a kid. And it's not like I was gonna try anything untoward anyway, but I kinda still had that rule. Stay away from places for kids, you're too old. But... Dimensions was so perfect. A game and community that the official Bakugan people were watching. This is the kind of community I wanted to statusmax in. Not for sex, obviously. But because I wanted to be a notable name in the Bakugan community. Notable enough to be on the radar of the Bakugan management. To reach out, touch, and affect something. Also? What are you supposed to go back to if you leave here? Weebs arguing about how their tiddy anime is actually a serious action show to be taken seriously and dubbed and aired on Toonami? You clearly don't fit over there. But you do fit here. There's nothing wrong with it. You fit in here. And so, I let myself enjoy Bakugan Dimensions. Got to work on my character to represent my brand, as I was doing with all the MMORPGs I was joining. Speaking of which...
[Gaming]
Endless Online. For some time now the mods/admins had earned a reputation of not caring about the game. I think I mentioned that a couple times so far? But also, sometimes we would go long stretches of time without seeing them or hearing from them. No updates on the front page or anything. Maybe an unannounced server reboot here and there. But as I said, real updates slowed down, as did word from the admins, period. And then came 2010. For the whole of 2010 we heard nothing. The game just went unwatched. People still played, though. And that's the beauty of online games. They don't have to "die" per se. If the servers can stay up, the game can just continue on indefinitely. Like a zombie. It might not be good, it might as well be dead, but provided everyone agrees to show up every day, you at least have a community. And that's what Endless Online is/was really, "community dress up." Speaking of failing MMORPGs, at this point I had been playing a game called AdventureQuest Worlds, an MMORPG spinoff of the AdventureQuest Flash games of old. And in 2010 the parent company, Artix Entertainment, added another MMORPG to its library of properties: HeroSmash. And there was so much hype surrounding it and we were all encouraged to get real creative with our original characters... but then the wheels fell off almost immediately. Why? Because Artix Entertainment had too many irons in the fire and couldn't afford to pay attention to unpopular things that weren't worth their time.
LIFE'S BLOOD
They could've just not overextended themselves with more projects than they could handle. They could've made HeroSmash a game worth playing. But instead they said "We can't make HeroSmash good because you won't play it." When the truth was probably that we can't play it because they won't make HeroSmash good. Maybe I should've learned a lesson from HeroSmash's failure. I too was overextending myself, joining more MMORPGs than I could devote any meaningful time to. Other games, whenever they gave me a reason, would have to fall by the wayside. Like Endless Online. It wasn't an "MMORPG," but I think the online game that usurped most of my time in 2010 was Team Fortress 2. Which I think is reflective of the online game industry as a whole. At some point around the turn of the 2010s, the MMORPG went the way of emo. It was replaced by games like TF2. "Hero-based" games. A shooter or a brawler or a MOBA where you don't make your own character and instead play as a premade one. And for a time in 2010, Valve was on top of the online gaming world. I daresay they were bigger than Blizzard. By 2010, YouTube Poops as we knew them were starting to fall out of style. The "SpaDinner" tropes were old. Billy Mays was the closest thing we had to a fresh Pooping source, and he died. So what started to be popular instead were GMOD videos, usually involving models from Valve games. The "Food Debate" fad and stuff like that. I wanted to make GMOD videos, but like the YTPs, and the
Newgrounds sprite Flashes before them, I never really got around to it. Speaking of things I never got around to, E3 2010 featured the return of an old touchstone. Mortal Kombat was back. It had returned from bankruptcy to be bought by WB Games. Fitting, considering WB owns DC Comics, and the last Mortal Kombat game was Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. So I guess that game is canon, despite my excuses when it first released. And so with Mortal Kombat coming back, I wondered, could I go home again? Could I return to the Mortal Kombat community? I spent most of my time on GameFAQs, so I checked out the GameFAQs board for the new Mortal Kombat game. And it just... didn't have the magic of the old Midway forums. Maybe they weren't active enough? There's only 6 years between 2004 and 2010, nostalgia couldn't have been that much of a factor. Maybe I needed to go back to the actual Midway forums, that's why. But when I went, I saw that they were being shut down and shipped over to the NEW home for Mortal Kombat on the Internet, TheMortalKombat.com. I checked it out, and... the spark, it just wasn't there anymore. Maybe the spark left with the people. They probably went on to different things. Or maybe the spark left with the times. Maybe the Midway forums were the way they were because it was the mid-2000s, and no place is gonna be like the mid-2000s after 2010. Maybe I wasn't who I was in the mid-2000s anymore. It looked like a good game. Maybe I would've enjoyed it on its merits as a good game. But I was put off by how un-mid-2000s it all felt.
But it did help with the Chronicles I was trying to build. Because of this I knew, Mortal Kombat and "Netherrealm Studios" is owned by WB Games. So it goes under the "WB Games Chronicle." And if there was ever a "Smash Bros" of WB Games, Mortal Kombat would be in it. As well as DC heroes, probably. I was still working on compiling "Chronicles" of video game properties. For some reason I felt like this was an important video game article to write. To illustrate the video game industry in sets of "universes." To see what properties go with which. And I tried to do this for every game. Even indie stuff. Games like ROM Check Fail and SMB Crossover and I Wanna Be The Guy and Yume Nikki and Eversion, I wanted to look at these as games in the library of a publisher, not one-offs to be forgotten. I wanted to know what "publishers" they belonged to. And then play every game in that publisher's library, even though it was most often just the one game. That way I could be in the know as a fan if the makers of Eversion make another game, and there's an Eversion cameo in it. Also? I was inspired to do this with my games, whenever I got around to making them. By 2010 I had come up with ideas, no prototypes, but ideas/concept art for more games than I ever would've realistically ever made. And like with Artix Entertainment, some games got more attention than others. The ones I still have notes on...
1. Mascot platfomer. A priority with this was coming up with a variety of power-ups. For one, a variety of power-ups meant a variety of level designs/objective to engage the player. For two, I was concerned with my mascot's brand. As an icon. Mario is remembered for his powerups. For instance, if you were to make Mario in an RPG, his weapon of choice would probably be a hammer, because he's remembered for a hammers in the many games he's been in. His armor might be some kind of turtle shell. And so on. So I wanted my character to be remembered for the powerups and tropes to be featured in his game. And because this mascot was the face of my "company," I had to choose everything carefully. It would all represent the company. It would all represent me. The characters, the aesthetic, everything. Koopa Shells are a memorable Mario trope, so I guess the "trademark animal" of the Mario franchise would be a turtle/Koopa. That's the way I saw it. So if the villain of my platformer had to be an animal, it would have to be an animal that I wanted to represent my brand, represent me. And Mario had already taken "turtle."
2. A game about the world of bugs. But bugs in military service. Soldier ants and stuff. Mostly inspired by looking at the world around me and thinking "What would it be like to explore this world, but really small?" I envisioned missions like fighting humans with some kind of bug minigun from a bug military aircraft. And it would be open world and doing certain things early on would affect other things later. Like, if you do something early on, I dunno... the cat won't be around to terrorize you in the kitchen. But if you don't "skip" the cat battle, you play for a different incentive.
3. Y'know how in RPGs your attacks sometimes miss? But no explanation is given other than the game's RNG? I thought it would be cool to have a turn-based RPG where instead of the fighters standing in a row hitting a static target, you would see each turn play out. A semi-real time RPG. The battle starts. You pick "Attack." But you don't just pick attack, you aim your attack, and do other things to your attack to ensure that it hits. The enemy maybe tries to dodge. Maybe the enemy has a really high Agility stat. Once the "Picking The Moves Phase" is over, you see the decisions of player and enemy resolve, as if in real time. Maybe the swing doesn't connect because the enemy strafed to the left. Then the action slows down and stops. Now it's another turn. Time to pick the next move, but with the positions of the players and the enemies as a factor. The enemy has strafed to the left, so now your attack should maybe try to swipe at him because maybe he's quickly falling back. Maybe the enemy is so fast that the player will have a tough time catching them. Resulting in a lot of misses. Which would've happened in a normal turn-based RPG, but you'll be seeing it happen. You'll be seeing why you missed, in the world of the game. I wasn't too hot for this idea because I wondered if I wasn't just making a real time RPG but extra slowed down. But then again, I could see it as a good turn-based RPG with added visuals and strategy. Plus, I wanted to open it up so that players could make their own levels and campaigns. Basically a tabletop RPG kit video game.
4. A battle RPG like Pokémon or Digimon or Medabots or whatever, but not strictly about battling. A machine/robot building game where you can take various small elements and build complex machines, including robot companions that will fight for you. What I envisioned was a sandboxy sort of game, kinda like The Sims maybe, where you can build something as simple as a toaster, or as complex as a... robot companion that will fight for you. And you can put it in your house. And you can battle other players, as you would in Pokémon or Digimon or Medabots or whatever. Battle in real time, not turn based. Real time Pokémon was what I wanted. With a deeper combat system. For instance, Pokémon has the move "Water Pulse." In the games, you select it and that's it. But in my Pokémon, you would be able to curve its trajectory in real time, and stuff like that. Like on the show. I wanted Pokémon combat, but like on the show. And I wanted it to be robots you built.
5. What Harry Potter did for wizards, what Naruto did for ninjas, what One Piece did for pirates, this game I wanted to do for knights and fairy tales. Ninjas on Naruto, they don't look like "regular" ninjas. Most of them have a SWAT-teamy aesthetic. It's very very loosely inspired by various traditional Japanese style, so that each ninja branches out and does their own thing. Some sandals, a bandage or two, and the rest you can just be creative with. I wanted to do that for fairy tales and knights and dragons and giants and wizards. My game was gonna star a young man from a working-class peasant family who does what most working-class peasants do, join the military. He joins as one of the mages and is caught up in his country's ongoing foreign policy boondoggle, a war with a dark wizard. There would be various missions and side quests as the war with the dark wizard progressed. And he would unlock spell elements. I'm bad at explaining the way I wanted it to work, but picture a pentagram.
You cast a spell by combining 3 of the elements on the pentagram. So if you have 5 "spell elements," you can cast as many spells as you can make combinations of 3 our of those elements. Or, "5C3." Which is 10 spells. Spell #123, Spell #124, Spell #125, Spell #134, Spell #135, Spell #145, Spell #234, Spell #235, Spell #245, and Spell #345. The plan was to start him out with 5 runes or elements or whatever. Then later in the game it would become 6 elements with 20 possible spells, and the spell menu would be a hexagram/hex mark. Then towards the finale it would become 7 elements with 35 possible spells, and the spell menu would be a heptagram. And the spells would be versatile, like the moves in my robot Pokémon game, to make for a hero who fought with a series of punches, kicks, wizardly lightning bolts, and the odd weapon here and there. Genre-wise I guess you could've called the concept a "brawler" or "beat 'em up," but I didn't want an HP system. Instead of HP, I wanted combat to work like real life. Instead you and/or enemies would sustain trauma depending on how hard the blow vs. how vulnerable the area stricken was, and the screen display would change depending on what happened to you. For instance, say you get stabbed somewhere. A new meter comes up. A "Bleed Meter." Depending on where you were stabbed, a countdown begins to how long you have until you bleed out. You as it counts down, you start to show the symptoms of a guy who's losing a lot of blood.
If my platformer was my Mario, and my robot game was my Pokémon, this wizard game was my Zelda. If I wanted to make a Kickstarter for it, I had plenty of promo/concept art to show. Everything but a prototype. Of all my game ideas, this one probably got the most attention. And thus suffered the most from feature creep. I had designs not just for the wizard hero and the dark wizard villain, but the mom, the absent father stranded on an Avalonian island of illusions, a sister, a warrior king, his menagerie of royal gryphons, a queen, a team of handmaidens for the queen to attend her and carry her big sword, silver and white, studded with diamonds and pearls, a crown prince, a princess, giants, dragonmen, a variety of knights & military units in the royal armed forces with a variety of loadouts (Heavy Mail units, Dragon Response units in, like, big bomb suit looking gear), light and airy fairy tale building designs inspired by chess pieces, a legendary sword, a legendary weaponsmith that recrafts the sword into something like a track suit that the hero can wear, because the hero isn't good with swords so he uses his body as the weapon, various exploration tools on top of the unlockable spells, wands for storing spells for quick fire, a food mechanic where certain foods prepared a certain way provide benefits, a chef medium that lets you talk tot he ghosts of animals you hunt, the ability to make friends with various characters in the kingdom and expand your social circle, and regularly hang out together at a tavern in the kingdom, and your talks would inform you of developments in the realm, and unlock new side quests and after game content, or be the king and/or queen's favorite jester, I was even planning future games even before this one was a prototype. Because I had too much story on my hands. If future games starred the wizard hero, he would get to learn knew magic disciplines (because playing the same set of abilities over and over again would be boring). I had different spell mechanics planned out, like maybe you can learn the dark magic of the villain from the first game. And eventually I wanted to feature other kingdoms. I had concepts for a kingdom ruled by a child tyrant queen and her loyal regent. My dragon men would be particularly tough, but in future games I wanted to introduce a kind of Sub-Saharan Africa inspired fairy tale kingdom with agile, leaping chimera men with big antelope horns. To give them an equal in battle. And a sunny Greece inspired kingdom with sporty, muscular brawlers. And a prequel game about the king, before he was king. See, this king didn't inherit the kingdom, he declared himself king. And I wanted to tell the story of that. And if not a whole game, some kind of side quest storyline with the wizard hero's sister. I had a toy battle sword storyline in the works I was trying to shoehorn in. Future games would eventually have to star new heroes. And in these new games with new heroes, you might run into old heroes, like the wizard from the first game in the series. Or you might run into his dad on the Avalonian island, as a teaser for a future game in the series where our wizard hero finally rescues his dad from the island. Oh, if only these games could've been real.
Because I wanted to turn my hand to all things game design/theory, I also did a lot of forum games on GameFAQs. RPGs and stuff, I ran a series of Choose Your Own Adventure games in what I called "Liberty Spire City," I did a pretty popular CYOA called "Ye Have 1 Gold..." but there was a unique kind of forum game to GameFAQs called a "seconds game." Based around trying to post so that the timestamp of your post ends on a certain amount of seconds. You saw a lot of this on the Brawl boards. Like they'd post a list of 60 potential Smashers and say "Seconds determines who gets into Brawl" or something like that. Anyway, I made a couple of seconds games. A kart racing seconds game, a platformer seconds game where the seconds of the next person to post determined which platform you landed on, they weren't much, and probably not much fun either, but what I can say about these is, at least I made them. Unlike the video game concepts above.
Fun and games weren't all fun and games though. I had gripes with things that were happening in the industry at the time. Sonic Colors was being released, and while it was a good game, I was upset at the voice recasting. Because people were always talkin' shit about the old cast and I never thought it was warranted. Especially as people had a lot of good things to say about Jason Griffith's Sonic in Unleashed. I refused to believe the 4Kids cast was worse than the Dreamcast Era cast, and don't think they got a fair shot. And so I kinda lost my motivation to play future Sonic games. They weren't bad games, it was just the fanbase. I needed some way to voice my concerns about Griffith and 4Kids. But I didn't have a wide enough audience, so I just kinda gave up on Sonic after Unleashed. I also gave up on Pokémon in 2010. I wasn't really that mad, I just kinda lost interest. And I still watched the show. It's like this. Word of a new Pokémon was on the way, so I figured I should get two things done before then: Play every Pokémon game, build up my team, and store them for use in the game, and finish an "article" I was working on for Pokémon Emerald. The Battle Tents and Battle Frontier have these challengers whose dialogue is made up of words from the Easy Chat System, and I wanted to record every challenger and each of their 3 pieces of dialogue: The intro, the lose dialogue, and the win dialogue. I saw this as keeping track of the larger Pokémon universe. And we were gonna get to see it in the next Pokémon games to come, Pokémon Black & White. But what I noticed first and foremost about Black & White was that the protagonists, breaking from tradition, appeared to be older teenagers. Not the younger tweenagers that prior games did. And that's not world-ending, but it's a noticeable change, and it bugged me that no one was talking about that. Not a huge deal, but a bigger deal than people were making. Which I kinda understood because most people don't play Pokémon for the story or characters. They play it for the Pokémon, and they would play it for the battling if it was feasible to meet players. But I wasn't in love with the idea of our usual Pokémon heroes growing up. I guess I was spoiled by Ash not aging, the idea of being a certain age became sacred to me? I just wanted it to be acknowledged as a notable change. If I had the community clout to reach out and say to Nintendo "So I noticed the protagonists are older teenagers now. How conscious a decision was that?" I wouldn't have had a problem. That was still the dream, to be able to reach out to industry names. Especially because I had things that were bugging me that I needed to bring up. That I needed to be heard about.
But what I can unashamedly say definitely did bother me? My issue with Highschool of the Dead came up again. It's a common issue with pretty much anything sexual, movies, TV shows, and probably more than anything, video games. The Dead or Alive game series had been around for some years, and I liked it. For reasons I thought I was supposed to like it. But in 2010 we got Dead or Alive: Paradise. And as usual there were some harsh words for it, like there usually are for games in this series. But what got my goat was how Tecmo came to the defense of the game with the same "Don't call this porn" routine that people do for shows like Highschool of the Dead. Yoshinori Ueda came out swinging about how we were misinterpreting the content. "DOA Paradise goal was not soft porn" he said. Critics pressed "Oh come on. You're telling me that's not sexual? What is this supposed to be, then?" Art director Yasushi Nakamura said "If fans masturbate to Dead or Alive, that's a success. But Paradise was meant to restart the franchise as well as broaden its appeal." Basically, you can jack off to whatever you want, there's technically no rule that says you can't. But he's not admitting to anything. Other than that Paradise was meant to broaden the appeal of the franchise. I wasn't that bothered by Tecmo's defense because most people called bullshit on their alleged intentions. But here was, not fans or critics trying to convince me that it's not what I think and I should try and look past the "problematic aspects" because I'm totally missing out on a great game, but the actual producers of that game saying that. Let porn be porn. That's the bare summary of my position here. Stop trying to downplay it or twist it into something for general audiences because that's not what porn is. They know that. They know porn puts off general audiences, that's why they come out and defend it/apologize for it, saying it's not porn, or that while they understand how people might be put off by the content, there's "so much more" to the product than its sexual side. But who am I to argue with the actual producers? So that was it for me and the Dead or Alive series. I liked it because I thought it was porn. But they said it wasn't. I was definitely allowed to like it as porn if I wanted to, but no. I'm not gonna be patronized by Yasushi Nakamura. So that's Highschool of the Dead ruined for me, and Dead or Alive ruined for me. Any time something like this happens, any time I see a non-porn audience or non-porn critics start to gravitate towards a certain show or game or whatever, I start wondering. What is this supposed to be? Who is this for? If it's not for me, I don't wanna waste my time on it. And these two things wouldn't be the only things ruined for me in this way.
[Soy]
When it came to fandoms to be part of, Japan was letting me down. So I started looking to Western shows. Mostly cartoons. Cartoon Network was coming up with a lot of new stuff and I wanted to get in on the ground floor of a new fandom. LOST ended in 2010, and I was late to the bandwagon. I only started watching after it had become really popular. Seeing all the fan tributes during the finale, I wished I could've been part of this for real somehow. Something was missing, starting late and watching it alone. So I thought maybe the answer was starting a show and reaching out to fans as early as possible. I wanted to discover some kind of "diamond in the rough" cartoon. A cartoon that appears pretty run of the mill at first, but later starts to get really engaging. And so I made a bet on this new show, Adventure Time. It seemed right up the alley of this fairy tale knights game I wanted to make. This was a short while before you could just live Tweet any showrunner, but we were approaching that time. I think Adventure Time was one of the shows that popularized it. You could talk to show staff back then, but you did it on an old platform called Formspring. Here's a list of staffers who had Formsprings.
Spring.me
Spring.me (formerly Formspring) was a website where users and the general public could submit questions to other users. Many members of the Adventure Time staff had Spring accounts where they answered questions about the series, among other things, although they generally refrained from...
This spread out to other Cartoon Network shows. The Regular Show staff got in on this too. And this was my main method of "participation" in the fandom. Online discussion of the shows, submitting questions via Formspring, and discussing the results of Formspring responses. Back in 2010 it was huge that you could talk to the actual artists and writers like this. It fed into my dream of reaching the ears of the creators of the things I enjoy. But... the novelty wore off. Especially as it started to spread to Regular Show. These showrunners, once put up on pedestals, started to look like regular people. Before 2010, it was an unheard of fantasy to, for instance, have someone as famous as a show artist have a personal opinion of you. And then it happened to me. Natasha Allegri called me out on her Formspring for being annoying. Because of the length and frequency of my questions. And my first thought was "Wow! Someone famous hates me!" But then, as time rolled on, I realized she was just a regular 20-something year old woman who doesn't like too many Formspring messages.
I know today that Adventure Time didn't turn out to be the show I had hoped. Instead attracting the kind of fanbase that wastes Twitter characters on repeating "It's okay to be BLANK" over and over again. A gateway drug to Steven Universe. But I look back on this time and wonder if it was the origin of "soyness." When did "soyness" really get started? When did the tropes we associate with it take shape? Sometimes I think it was Homestuck that started it on Tumblr. But then I remember how big Adventure Time was, and how it ushered in this new renaissance of adults unironically enjoying cartoons that are, ostensibly, for children. And demanding more envelope-pushing content like soft swears and same-sex relationships. I balk at it, but, for one, I tried to be a part of this community at one point, and for two, it's really kind of a modern reimagining of the mid-2000s deviantArt/Fanart-Central era. But then AGAIN, maybe the newness is what made it bad. And furthermore, I kinda hated that community anyway. But grownups liking kid's cartoons was really taking off in the 2010s, and I believe it started with Adventure Time. Or? Maybe soyness started earlier, with LOST. Because LOST was big in that was the first nerdy Internet fandom show to get real response from the mainstream media. Before LOST, you didn't see such synergy of Internet fandom and people trying to profit off of it. But that might be because, before LOST, the Internet was too new.
[Sexy Beautiful Women]
The sad reality of the porn industry is, there is a very high turnover rate. You either expand your "business," retire of your own volition, or age yourself out of the game. It's a lot like the computer science industry. By 2010 I started to notice my usual performers were showing up less and less. Until they just stopped showing up. Without warning. Sexxbooomb for instance, expanded her business. She moved up from takin' it off on webcam to professionally filmed porn. Look her up. As for Fire34DFoxy? I don't know where she went. And I didn't feel like spending more money on so fleeting a thing. Fortunateishly, Omegle had webcam now. The caveat being that Omegle and every site like it has been and probably always will be a terrible place to connect with people. But since the day I discovered it, I continued to waste time on it. Just out of intrigue. Maybe a miracle would happen. I wasn't in much of a hurry. In fact, I was downright complacent. Omegle wasn't working out, obviously. But what about my other ideas? Moving to where the pussy is easier? I would definitely do that... as soon as I figured out a way to move my family with me. What little family was still close to me, still depended on me. Couldn't just leave my parents, they're gonna wanna see me over the holidays. And I'm not gonna travel very far to see them. So they need to live in the same city as me. And to do that, I'm gonna need more money than I have right now. Especially if I wanna make this "1600 Broadway" dream come true, or something like it. If I wanna hook up with someone I wanna take my hookup back to an apartment with charm. And those cost more money than I'm spending right now. And I was often complacent about what to do about money. Because if money woes could be solved so easily, everyone would be rich, and therefore no one would be rich. So I wasn't rushing myself.
But what probably motivated me a little more was my current job. Whether you love or hate your job depends on one simple thing: Is it a worthwhile investment? Does the drudgery pay off? Does the reward make it worth it? My job has always been rough. But I didn't even notice it because of the perk of being able to browse leisurely. The reward made the soul crushing monotony of my job worth it. Take that away, and I start to hate everything about my job. The work, the low pay, I start to notice it all. So for that reason I started to look for other opportunities. Was 3 years of experience here worth a better paying job somewhere else? I found this freelancing platform called oDesk, I managed to pick up some extra scratch through that. What I really wanted was to maybe network my way through it and find someone to hire me on full time. That didn't happen. And my oDesk money was strictly supplementary. I couldn't have quit my job to be a freelancer. But it was enough supplementary money that I couldn't just turn it down. Again it comes down to worthwhile investment. Was oDesk worth the extra work on top of my day job? My day job that I already hate? Yes. But just barely. And what was extra troublesome was that my workload was so heavy, oftentimes I had to do oDesk at work. And it would be REALLY bad to be caught on oDesk at work. It was enough extra money that I was placated by the thought that I might, someday, have enough money to really impress a woman with something.
[Misc.]
The last thing I can think of in my 2010 pursuits was the picture hunting. I was still looking for porn, but the advent of social media like Facebook and Twitter, and convenient image hosting services like Tinypic, fostered the proliferation of the "funny/weird/cool viral image."
They had always existed on the Internet, but 2010s social media had images like these popping up in forum signatures everywhere. And so I started collecting those images too, to figure out where they came from, who made them, if the things in them were real and what the story behind them was, etc. I was still keeping an eye on Dagobah, that was a good source for interesting animations. As was TheBest404PageEver.com (Now at TheBest404PageEverRedux.com). But the one I wanna talk about is Fatpita.net, because it stands as a good example of the evolution of the Internet pre and post "social media renaissance." Today it's an image and video repository where every page has a Facebook embed, so you can comment on it while you're logged into Facebook. Post it on Facebook, or retweet it. But before 2010 it was your typical mid-2000s humor site.
There was no Facebook or Twitter functionality. Instead you could send it via AIM, or e-mail. A good way of pinpointing when exactly the end of the old era was. When GEICO and Mastercard jokes were the "memes" we all laughed at. Before users and their content dominated the Internet. When was the last time we laughed at a TV commercial? Can you even remember the last time you saw a TV commercial? It wasn't quite over yet, but the writing was appearing on the wall in 2010.
I've done a lot of griping about 2010, but this was still a pretty good year. Not the best year, but I would count it among the "good years." A summary of my ambitions up to this point...
- Learn Japanese so I can understand doujins & hentai & ecchi on my own.
- Make indie video games.
- Join as many MMOs as possible and make my character reflective of my brand.
- Be a notable contributor on GameFAQs.
- Start dialogues in the anime fandom about your gripes with anime.
- Start dialogues in the video game fandom about your gripes with video games.
- Report on video game news/leaks.
- Draw a video game webcomic.
- Produce erotic video game works.
- Identify the source of as much hentai/ecchi as you can.
- Find the creators of that hentai/ecchi, make friends and co-collaborators of them.
- Pick a Smash main that represents my identity.
- Pick a TF2 main that represents my identity.
- Git gud at games.
- Join the fighting game circuit.
- Make gameplay videos/Let's Plays.
- Make YTPs.
- Make video game mods.
- Make homebrew on Wii
- Walk into the foreground in Smash Bros.
- Make TF2 maps.
- Extract resources from TF2 maps and identify the sources of the pictures.
- Make a Chronicle of every game and who owns the rights to it.
- Compile list of all of the Battle Tent/Frontier trainers in Pokémon Emerald.
- Statusmax on GameFAQs/the gaming community at large so I can hook up with women in it.
- Reach out to/interact with notable game industry names. Have someone listen to my idea about "Fire Emblem X Shining Force."
- Have an apartment worth taking hookups back to.
- Connect with someone on webcam.
- Go to where the Bang Buses are.
- Find out how much dick it takes to satisfy Gianna Michaels.
KEy21
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I read so much of this that it’s sickening. I had to stop myself halfway through the first page even though I enjoyed these.
FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
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I don't think you'll be able to finish it before the year ends.
Ritalincel
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FrothySolutions
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Will Ferrell didn't touch me or anything, otherwise I would post it here.
Ritalincel
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Today at 4:34 PM thx bro
Alexanderr
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Ritalincel
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FrothySolutions
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"Founding Father" or "Milk & Cigarettes 11: Home for the Holidays"
TL;DR: I spend 2011 and 2012 ranting about my hangups regarding tiddy and booty in the shows I watch and games I play.
Thanksgiving 
recently passed, but Thanksgiving is just the start of my holiday schedule. This time of year it's time to start hanging out with my family more. What family of mine still hangs out together. Which means my mom, my dad, my brother, my clinically depressed sister, her girlfriend, another sister of mine who lives with my parents, and my nephew who would rather spend the holidays with us/his grandparents. Do you ever wonder why the holiday gatherings are synonymous with "dysfunction?" When we thinking "holiday dinner" we think "arguments?" Why can't there be peace instead? I'll tell you why. Because the holidays are about bringing together people who don't see each other very often. At best, that's people who don't know each other well enough to spend extended periods of time together. At worst, it's people who forgot, they're supposed to stay separate for a reason. Lemme tell you how my Thanksgiving/last couple of days have gone...
Things kicked off "officially" when my nephew came over from college. On Wednesday we saw "Knives Out" together, closest thing to a Thanksgiving movie. Then on Thanksgiving itself, we watched "The Irishman." Like most families in America, my mom is the only one who knows how to cook. And for that, she didn't want our help in the kitchen. However, she got drunk while cooking and went to bed before finishing everything. Which most of us didn't mind. We weren't that hard up about a "formal" or "traditional" Thanksgiving dinner. Plus I had to leave later anyway because I was volunteering somewhere. But my sister, the one who lives with my parents, wanted us to step up and cook the food in our mother's stead. And by "want," I mean "demanded." Some of us tried to explain how that's not wise, because none of us know how to cook like Mom. But she insisted that it would be easy. But what this was really about was that she thought we were lazy and demanded that we contribute to the meal in some way. These accusations resulted in fighting, as well as my sister trying to get our mom to tell us to cook in her place. Being drunk and half-asleep, the idea was that my mom was suggestible enough that she could be convinced to say anything. And she was. For both my sister and everyone else. So she went back and forth between saying "Do what my sister says" and "Do whatever you want." Anything to get people to stop bothering her. And though the hour was running late and I would have to go volunteer soon, I couldn't leave my family to fight like this because it would eventually come to physical blows. My sister has been known to pull kitchen knives on people when she gets mad enough. Fortunately, she stormed off to God knows where for a while. I took this as an opportunity to go out and volunteer.
Now, why go volunteer? Because I care about people? Yes, I care about people, and I've volunteered before so I'm accustomed to it. But mostly, I did it because people insist that it's a good place to meet people and have sex with those people. Go out and socialize, they say. Pick up a hobby and interact with people. I've tried many a scene, and will continue to try many a scene. One that was specifically suggested to me was "church or volunteer work." Sounds completely retarded, but the thing about retarded advice is, you take it just so that, when the time comes for it to be given to you again, you can say "No thanks, I've tried it, it's retarded, any other ideas?" I served food and booked rooms for shelter. I prayed with my fellow volunteers, we talked about how often we do this volunteer thing, we were all very friendly. Later I was running to catch the bus home, and this woman named Tanya offered me a ride. We talked about how she lived in Seattle as a caretaker for a while. I like to think I was pretty warm toward her, but I had watched The Irishman that day and I was afraid this was some kind of trap. I didn't recognize the route she was taking, and she was talking about she always carries a piece. In summary, I didn't get laid. See, this advice people give me, it's great for making friends, but I'm trying to have sex. This advice doesn't work for that. Something's missing. I need to somehow not make friends and instead make sexual partners. I'm pretty sure I have to, at some point, say "Hey let's have sex." But that's not part of anyone's advice. And I don't know anything so how can I protest? I do this as protest. I take the bad advice as protest, so I can say "This is only good for making friends. You didn't include any advice about getting them to have sex with me."
I came home later that night and my mom had woken up to finish cooking. We ate, and at the end of the week my nephew went back to school. After finals, he'll be back for Christmas break. In the meantime, the fighting from Thanksgiving has refreshed the rift between us. We remember just how crazy my sister still is. Also, my mom has been getting drunk and sitting around the house bare-ass naked. Also, my dad had a dream where he was visited by some old friends, and he looked up those friends, and learned that they had all died recently. So he's pretty sure his time is coming soon. My dad is spiritual like that.
I don't wanna think every time you go back home it's like this. But it reminds me of times when I've gone back to old Internet haunts I could've called "home." Everything is strange and unfamiliar, and there's lots of things to fight about. Picture this...
2011. May 1st, Sunday night. You're at your parents' house playing Steel Diver while The Apprentice drones in the background. When suddenly, the NBC News Special Report "Chimes of Death."
There was a solid hour between the first breaking news and Obama's actual address, we didn't know what the news was, but we were on the edge of our seats, like with every other NBC News Special Report. And when the announcement was finally made, you knew what you had to do: Go on 4chan and see people's reactions. While the UK plans weddings, America plans funerals.
There's also this alternative slice from 2011 that happened a little earlier.
This was actually the year this No Nut November thing got its "formal" start, thanks to Urbandictionary and Twitter.
Like YouTube, Twitter was relevant enough for corporate media to set up brand accounts on them. FOX had set up several for their 2011-2012 schedule.
tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com
However, Twitter was still small enough that The Rock's early leak of the death of Bin Laden, after 8 years, still has only 2.4k retweets and less than 100 comments.
And Reddit? Still only just barely relevant enough for a pretentious minority to consider it a "thinking man's" alternative to the still dominant Yahoo! Answers.
Reddit was such a secret club, its members identified one another in public with a pass phrase: "The Narwhal Bacons at Midnight." And if Reddit as a whole has a culture, I can't think of a better phrase to reflect it. Boxxy's time came to an end, and Jessi Slaughter's moment was just beginning. Instead of Trans-Siberian Orchestra light shows, we had Skrillex for Christmas. And LMFAO for New Year's Eve. While Rebecca Black released a song so bad it made Nyan Cat into a masterpiece. Earthquakes and nuclear disaster terrorized Japan, LulzSec terrorized the Internet, and Uber terrorized the taxi industry. Oprah bowed out with the series finale of her talk show, leaving Ellen as the new Oprah. Harry Potter bowed out with Deathly Hallows: Part 2, leaving Hunger Games and one more Twilight movie, the last lights of the "young adult novel" era, to stand alone against the coming superhero renaissance/monopoly. In fact, it was the last year (so far) that Disney wouldn't have a superhero or Star Wars movie in the top 10 grossing films of a year.
GameFAQs was still my primary hangout, but I made a mistake in posting a link to a ROM site and got my account banned. So I had to make a new one, and new GameFAQs accounts have to age a little first before you can post without restriction. So I was spending a little less time on GameFAQs. And Bin Laden's death was the perfect opportunity to check out old haunts like 4chan, to see how people were taking the news that the Hide & Seek World Champion had finally been bested. You might've seen this picture illustrating various eras of 4chan.
People have said 4chan can't be invaded. But 4chan's change in style from era to era is what happens when people try. So is it really true that 4chan can't be invaded? Dominated by a new userbase? The middle 4chan was the one I was met with when I came back in 2011. And to be fair, I don't know how much right I have to say 4chan was once my "home," but in 2011 I felt a lot less at home there than I did in, say, 2006. Don't get me wrong, I'm not that beat up about the n-word, Chris Rock said I could say it. But the 4chan I came back to in 2011 was the 4chan that started being paranoid about blacks and Jews and socialism and globalism. I guess it was a product of the times, the political lines in the sand really started to be defined after Obama became President. And I imagine most 4chan people are either from the United States or are privy to issues that face it, hence them blowing their load over Bin Laden dying. But that aside, I think Obama being elected and the various lefty changes in the country/the world started raising concerns. And the right started to rise. And then the left started to rise. And then the right rose again. And then the left rose again. It was only after this time that we saw things like Occupy Wall Street or the Arab Spring or the Tea Party. It was only by 2011 that Richard Spencer and his alt-right movement was able to gain any real traction. That's where I think the attitudes that formed /pol/ in 2011 came from. The global political turbulence of the turn of the decade. See, it used to be /new/, for news. But towards the turn of the decade things started to get racist. A "change" I can't really speak on the specifics of because last I checked, much of 4chan was already racist, and lots of other bad things. I wasn't around to watch /new/ change from whatever it used to be to what it became at the turn of the decade. But what people tell me is that it was less of a "Happy Negro memes" kind of "racism" and more of a "Certain people are legitimately inferior, I'm not joking, and the inferiors are taking over the world" kind of racism. You didn't see this before the turn of the decade. Again, probably a product of the times we were living in. When issues like immigration and how we feel about brown people now that Bin Laden is dead came to be a factor. And so /new/ was deleted at the top of 2011. A widely critiqued move, because 4chan was supposed to be about free speech. Moot came clean and admitted he fucked up. And /new/ was reborn as /pol/ later that year.
Also, kind of a notable moment in incel history I guess, /r9k/ was reborn this year. It had been around since 2008, but like "nu-racism 4chan," it only really came into its greentexting tendy-loving spaghetti-spilling Pepe-posting no-GF-having identity at the turn of the decade. Around the time it was deleted and then reborn. Now, /r9k/ is claimed as an important touchstone for inceldom. In a time when the sparsely popular r/incel, and a peppering of redpill forums, were all the incel culture that was, aside from /r9k/. But we decry soyness in the incel community. So it comes as a hard pill to swallow to understand that /r9k/ and the prevailing 4chan userbase were the primary driving force behind the popularity of one of the soyest media franchises, if not the one true beginning of the kind of people incels war with. My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic had its start at the turn of the decade, and had it not been for 4chan it would've been one of the many otherwise unremarkable 2010s cartoon reinventions. An ordinary kid show of ordinary kid show quality. But 4chan saw one bad review and decided it was war. And the "brony" was born. I was an outspoken critic of this. And I didn't even hate the show. I get it, alright? I see the appeal. They want to fuck the horses. You're talkin' to a guy who was furrying it up back when 4chan was the wet dream of a high school nobody. But like with lots of interests that are partly sexual, I just didn't want the bullshit. Stop pretending like your mania is because this show is some kind of groundbreaking. Stop pretending like you're not gathering every week to jack off to these horses. This show is passable, and that's it. The only reason this is making news at all is because people are going "Look at us! We're grown men who like a show SOME people might say is for little girls! Doesn't that speak to the quality of the show? Aren't we brave for challenging age and gender norms?" A bigger deal was made of this than it needed to be. And if there was anything that drove me away from 4chan, it was this. But I found no shelter, bronyism spread across the Netscape like Christianity in the days of Constantine. It became one of my new ambitions. To speak loudly enough that the world could hear me say "Friendship Is Magic is a show for children, not adults, and an average show at that. The fact that people care that grown men watch it is proof it's a show for kids, and if it wasn't for these grown men watching this show no one would care. And the only reason those grown men are making as big a deal out of this show as they are is to make a journalist mad. And because they want to fuck the horses."
Being pissy and wanting my piss to be heard would continue to be a theme in my ambitions.
[Gaming]
Endless Online. Always kept it in my back pocket. By 2011 the forums were taken down entirely, though the IRC room still stands. It's barely used though. Members are still at a couple hundred at any given time, but 2011 sees one news update. One. And no word is heard from the mods or anything for years. We're left to the autobots and DDoSers. I check in now and then to see what the community looks like.
Speaking of free games, by 2011 the idea of making people pay for game subscriptions was starting to fade. The "free to play" model started to take off, as producers tried to come up with ways to still, somehow, make money off of it. While class warfare raged between new players attracted by games being free, and veterans who had been paying and playing for a while and didn't like all these newbies for one reason or another. Team Fortress 2 became free to play in 2011, with the release of the "Meet the Medic" trailer. And the Ghastly Gibus became like badge of shame. You saw one of those, it was one of those damn "free-to-play" newbies. God help you if one of them is on your team. What happened to the days when everyone was good? I had no right to complain, in all my years of playing TF2 I was never good. I wanted to be good. But I also wanted to be a voice for the free player. Which meant I needed to be important int he TF2 community. But this wasn't the Fortnite era, TF2 didn't really have a "Ninja." It had notable players, but they weren't notable for play, really. They were people like Xenon, who made maps. Or Pelo, who made funny "TF2 Shellnut" videos. Those are the guys I had to be like. But I didn't make maps or videos either. Or run servers. If I didn't do it for TF2, maybe I could've done it for Minecraft. Which, some people forget, went public AFTER its 2D "clone," Terraria. I didn't touch Minecraft. Because not only did it not look interesting, but my nephew played Minecraft. So I figured "Okay so this is definitely a simple game for children. Well, he can enjoy that. I don't expect to be hearing much about Minecraft after a couple of years." Skyrim showed up towards the end of the year, and with it came two things: "Arrow to the knee" jokes, and Skyrim mods. I wanted to make both, but didn't. Didn't know how. Didn't know what tools you needed. What I did do though was post about stuff. Usually when I felt like there was something to complain about. 2011 was the year Nintendo started its YouTube presence. If you look at Nintendo's "About" page on YouTube, it'll say they joined in 2005.
www.youtube.com
That's inaccurate. The Nintendo account was made in 2005, but it wasn't made or managed by Nintendo. It was just some guy who liked Nintendo. In 2011 the channel went dead and Nintendo was able to just take it. Like how Reggie Fils-Aimé was able to just take the @reggie account on Twitter.
twitter.com
They started the channel mostly with videos about the 3DS. Coming into heavy use around E3, where Iwata announced new Smash games. As in, plural. Hype? Well, I had mixed feelings. Iwata wanted a Smash game on the 3DS, and a Smash game on their upcoming home console, the Wii U. And I found that absolutely redundant. Two Smash games? I can only play one Smash game at a time! Smash is supposed to be one game leading into another. A home console game, packed with content, and all its resources dedicated to it, that's what I want. I'm not gonna complete two Smashes, I'm not gonna play some lesser handheld version, and I especially don't want that lesser handheld version to come at the expense of what the home console version could be. If there's gonna be two Smash games, there needs to NEED to be two Smash games. They should at least connect, or something. I don't wanna have to unlock people twice. And I had to know if Nintendo was aware that people felt this way. Again, to be heard was my main concern, even if I couldn't stop two Smash games from being made.
I also knew how to come up with concepts for games. Not make games, just dream up ideas for characters and stuff. On GameFAQs there was a guy, AwesomeTurtwig, he made a game. Rotter Road. And we got to be his test audience.
www.kongregate.com
Say what you want, we believed in AwesomeTurtwig. And I still do, just like I believe in that lolicon with the YouTube success who I won't name. This was the small start to a career of creating games he was passionate about. If I could start like he started, I would be happy and motivated. But oooooh, I couldn't get past the ideas phase. I mentioned feature creep, the killer of most Kickstarter projects. But there was also hindrances like "I have to get this concept right." Like my mascot platformer. I had to get the character and aesthetic right. I had been playing a lot of NES ROMs at the time, for inspiration. I figured if I wanted to make games, I had to start from the early concepts and learn how pure game design theory evolves over time. But also, I have a theory that the times you identify with most are the times when you're about 16. That's "your time." And when I was 16 I was not only playing NES games, but trying to make them. I remember how "alive" an NES game with full color felt. Vibrant. Happy. I wanted to capture that essence. Maybe it should be a game about a guy who delivers soda. Platforming levels and driving levels. I figured early on that the character's job would be important to who that character was. Like Mario & Luigi were. Mario & Luigi are plumbers, construction workers, blue collar guys. So that informs their character design. What's my mascot gonna be? I considered a sailor. Because I knew Donkey Kong was originally gonna be a Popeye game, so I thought it would be a touch of savvy if my platformer character was a sailor like Nintendo almost had Mario be. Whatever it was, it had to be whimsical and "toony." Maybe some kind of animal. Tooniness and furriness went hand in hand. And it had to be "me." I still hadn't settled on my signature animal. Now I also needed to know my "signature job." Which would've also been good to know considering I hated my real one. I set about figuring this out by trying to build a "personality profile." Basically, if someone was to play me, how should they act? That's tough to figure out, but my plan to do it was to watch shows I liked and read stories I liked, and insert myself into the scenarios. See what dynamic I bring compared to the other characters. To know what I would do if I was put into the situations I see on TV was the REAL way to learn what mage I was. Which I think is a good opportunity to lean into...
[Weebshit]
I'm not sure if it counts as [Weebshit] or [Gaming], but I had been having fun with Bakugan Dimensions. A simple game for children. But 2011 was a dark time for Bakugan Dimensions. 2011 was the year it shut down. Another MMORPG that didn't last. The game itself shut down in June. But what cut was shutting down the community forums by the end of the year. And I will remind, this was a kids' game. And a kids' community. And to see all those kids heartbroken that they would lose their community, valiantly raging against circumstance to keep their Internet friendships alive... this couple with them being really the only anime community that didn't wave their sub superiority in my face, I didn't like to see these kids be sad. Problem is, it's hard to profit off of kids. And even though maintaining a forum shouldn't be that expensive (How much are incels.is & Looksmax mods paid?), any expense at all that doesn't serve a worthy purpose is wasted money. You can't advertise to kids like you want because of COPPA. Or something. So it became an ambition of mine to help the community stick together, through all of the fan forums that were being made for the refugees. Many of us stayed together... but it was never really the same. And most of these forums gathered a handful of members each before grinding to a halt. Without enough people, all the new Bakugan episodes in the world can't keep a forum alive. It's moments like these, and missing people on With Anyone that drives my ambition to keep people connected on the Internet.
What I also lost with the demise of the Bakugan forums was several pictures I meant to save and find the sources of. The forums allowed you to keep a picture album, and a lot of the pictures people kept were relevant to my interests. Not THAT "relevant," this was still a kid-friendly forum. But lots of pictures where I was like "I think I've seen that picture before. What show is that from?" In fact, I was losing a lot of picture resources that I should've been on top of. Whether because I was too busy, or too complacent, or both. Sites I should've been casing like Shmurr and Elitepeeps were long gone by now, but this was also the year we first lost Encyclopedia Dramatica. And all its vintage "Dragonmoon Era" product. This is why you always make sure to come back home and check on things. I believe it was shut down for being too objectionable? Shut down by the webmistress herself, Sherrod "Girlvinyl" DeGrippo. Her words: "Shock for shock's sake is old at this point." And so it became "Oh, Internet!" Steeped in trollfacey rage-comicky datedness. A mistake Moot compares to his own. But unlike Moot, Girlvinyl didn't give Encyclopedia Dramatica back. I was also losing those ads from ROM sites. I guess as the nature of Internet advertisement changed. In fact, my posting ROM sites to GameFAQs was because I was trying to hurriedly salvage what few ROM sites I could find that still ran ads I could save pictures from. See, I was at work at the time, and I couldn't visit AngelRoms or anything like that, even if it was unblocked it would be foolish to do at work. But GameFAQs is just a game website. A waste of time, maybe, but not objectionable like what you might find on AngelRoms. So I didn't visit AngelRoms, instead I made a thread on an abandoned board and posted the links there for visiting at home later. And not only did I get banned for my trouble, but the sites didn't have ads anymore anyway. AngelRoms was replaced entirely.
In other bad news, 4Kids, the hill I was committed to die on, was facing some trouble. Things seemed pretty okay on their Toonzai block, some new shows even. But beyond the eyes of what few actually enjoyed watching their programming, raged a legal battle against their long time partner in ratings, Yu-Gi-Oh! Some kinda licensing thing, I forget the specifics, but the usual peanut gallery used it as an excuse to criticize the Yu-Gi-Oh! dubs, as if that was the reason they were being sued. And due to the outcome, 4Kids had to file for Chapter 11 protection. Now 4Kids, like their own boy Jason Griffith, I felt was being cancelled without getting their due respect. I didn't know what the future held for my Saturday mornings, a man can't live on Cartoon Network alone.
[Sexy, Beautiful Women]
40 was fast approaching. And here I was an absolute virgin. Was I bothered? Not really. For one, adherence to 2D was an option, instead of being with a flesh and blood woman. Attracting the attention and colleagueship of artists I liked. For two, 2011 was notable as the year Charlie Sheen went crazy. And we learned that Charlie Harper was no work of mere fiction. Charlie Sheen really lives like that in real life. At the time, he was 46. And he was living a life I could see myself living. Basically I was like "40 isn't too late to have fun. Charlie Sheen is having fun. So I don't need to hurry." In fact, I saw me being a virgin to be a bonus. Suppose I had any potential at all to playboy like Charlie Sheen. Take that potential, and add on top of it "I'm a virgin." Maybe the woman will find the idea of testing my reaction to sex exciting? It was definitely what I hoped. But how to pull it off was still the question. Whether I have potential or not, where I lived didn't seem to have any. I was still pondering the idea of moving to where the culture was better or something. At the start of 2011 I still had my eyes squarely set on 1600 Broadway. But the end of 2011, in December, we had the first winter I can remember where it was warm enough to make me worried about global warming. It wasn't just that there was no snow, it was t-shirt weather very often. One of the main things keeping me where I am, or at least north of the Mason-Dixon line, was that I liked snow. But here, climate change had taken it from me. Maybe I just move even further north, but missing out on this snow was sobering enough. My need for snow might as well have been over. And so I figured "This climate change thing is real, might as well embrace the sun." So by the end of 2011 I was ready to give up snow and live somewhere warm. I certainly wasn't held back by my job. I became quiet and distant at work. When people were near my desk I was paranoid because I didn't want anyone seeing my screen. The constant need to keep my screen private took its toll on me. Why couldn't everyone just leave me alone??? And then my supervisor, he takes notice of how I don't talk to anyone at work as often anymore. The real truth of the matter was that I became wary of people in general because I don't want attention drawn to my screen. But also, how did he expect me to take time to talk to people when he doesn't want me taking time to browse? When it's "leisurely browsing" he prefers me busy. But when it's talking to people he's like "Why are you so quiet?" Are you saying you want me to not be working??? But I still needed to figure something out about my family. I didn't want to leave them. And because I couldn't figure out how to move and put up my family in a whole different state, it was easy to cling to the plan of just sticking to 2D. Despite it being soured a little by certain shows and games.
And it would continue to sour into the next year. Picture this...
2012. December. Mayan Apocalypse fever has gripped the planet. There've been scares before, the Large Hadron Collider really had us for a while, but this is the first one of its kind where "respected authorities" are like "Well we should at least consider that the calendar does end around this time."
You're watching countdown videos on SUPERMARIOGALAXY13's channel.
You find it a little twisted that this is the most excited you've been in a while. Should the world end? Probably not, but you kinda hope it does. You definitely hope something happens. It doesn't have to be the end of the world, there've been all kinds of theories, like grand cosmic incursions where beings of light usher humanity into a new era. That sounds cool, right? Something, anything, some exciting thing. Let the prophets be right just this once. Even if the world did end, from where you're sitting it wouldn't be that bad. It's not like you're suicidal or anything, but... the way the world is changing, you don't have much love for it. Things happening that you'd like to rant about, but there are no ears to hear you. And there are a lot of things you'd like to talk about. Like how Chick-fil-A went from respected Christian food purveyor to controversial Christian food purveyor because of their views on gayness. Even though thay had ALWAYS felt that way about gay people, because they are a Christian food purveyor. So why are people only getting mad now? Or how people want contraceptive coverage to be mandated by the government as part of health care. Even though contraceptives are not medicine, they treat no illness, dysfunction, or disorder, because pregnancy is not an illness and recreational sex is a want, not a need. But no one cares to have that discussion because Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a slut. Or SOPA/PIPA. So much virtue signaling from Wikipedia and Reddit about Internet freedom, but offering no solutions on how to protect product from piracy. Because they don't care about that, they don't even care about your freedom. What they care about is not getting fined if one of their members fucks up and posts something copyrighted. And you've found a few people here and there who get what you're saying about these things, but the issue people just aren't understanding you on? Spike TV. All the good shows are getting cancelled. And sure, that's not the end of the world, but it's the reason why they're getting cancelled that you wanna talk about. The executives said that it was a deliberate effort to, as Tecmo might say, "broaden the appeal" of the network. Their exact words were "Esquire rather than Maxim." Frankly you saw the writing on the wall during the final season of MANswers, what they don't like is that the channel is too "for men." Being too for men is somehow not respectable. But they can't just make the leap entirely. They'll take baby steps. So they'll try to be a network for the refined gentleman. Cerebral, hard working. Not some layabout Maxim-reading frat boy. And at least Spike walks the "This is actually a serious and respectable thing" walk, instead of selling you bullshit like Tecmo or 4chan. But what if you wanna be a layabout frat boy? You never got to be! Ever! And so your mind is still arrested in that stage of development. You're not asking for Esquire-level respect. In fact, you're refusing it. People cast you as some lowbrow dick-beating juvenile? Yeah! Yes, that's what you're trying to be. If you were to take Maxim, keep all of it Maximness, but call it "Esquire," that would ruin it for you. That's what you'd like to say, if anyone was listening.
You post a thread about it on Poll of the Day, but it gains no traction. Hopefully the madmen are right. Obama is the foretold Anti-Christ, and his 2012 victory means the coming of Jesus and the battles of Armageddon. Or even one little alien visitation. You and the world are watching. One of these predictions has to come true.
Here's some trufax: The end of the "baktun" when the "cataclysmic or transformative events" were supposed to happen was December 21st, 2012. On that day, Gangnam Style reached its billionth view. The first YouTube video to reach a billion views. And so it launched a myriad of "The Mayans were right" takes. Because it said a lot about society, maaaaaaaaaan. Like "Gangnam Style" is our new God. YouTube didn't just have Gangnam Style, it had Red Bull Stratos, it was the home of planking videos, Tebowing videos, Cinnamon Challenge videos, meanwhile Reddit was still in that meaty spot between small and big where they can get an interview with Woody Harrelson, or make a single video go viral, but when it does go viral people are like "Oh, it must be because of Le Reddit Armie." Implying Reddit to be a niche interest of Internet nerds. Obama's administration was marked with dramatic liberal policy changes, but one of the biggest turning points came in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. I think back to past shootings and bombings and plane crashings, and we thought "What a tortured individual." Sandy Hook, because very small children were murdered, changed the thinking, I guess. It became "To call these shooters 'monsters' is the most compassion they deserve." This, and I think the Trayvon Martin shooting, reignited the gun debate. It's not like there wasn't a gun debate before this, but this was the start of the current gun debate we're having now.
We saw the birth of Snapchat and Whisper.sh and technically Vine although it wouldn't actually be released until January of 2013. Oh, and Tinder. September of 2012. The purported spark of the hypergamy bomb. Which sounds ridiculous because Tinder didn't even get that big until 2014. Plus, Tinder didn't invent hookups, hookups and even incel subreddits existed before Tinder. Technically. So how did people hook up before Tinder? Through OKCupid, Match.com, Plenty Of Fish, and if you were brave, Craigslist. Even Facebook was an option. Basically, desktop-based social media. And maybe that's the takeaway here. What changed was that the Internet was fast being taken over by the mobile device, and culture changed thanks to that. Where AIM, MSN, and Yahoo! Messenger used to be the Big Three that the Internet revolved around, by 2012 they had fallen off the table entirely.
Disney bought Lucasfilm, and released "The Avengers," kicking off the first of many Marvel vs. DC memes. The Avengers made 1.5 billion. The most of any movie in 2012. Meanwhile, DC's offering of The Dark Knight Rises made a paltry 1.084 billion. Which is like moist dog shit. So the argument/meme on Imgur and the like was "The Avengers made more money. And this gives them power over DC? 'It's not about moneeeeeeey, it's about sending a message.'" Basically, DC's movies make less money because they're for the thinking fan who appreciates art. And DC fans will accept being less profitable if it means being the thinking fan's movie. I hadn't seen either yet. I was still committed to...
[Gaming]
The Wii was coming to an end. The Wii U had been announced so it was time to do away with Wii hallmarks. For instance, Nintendo Week with Alison Whitney and that other guy. I don't know how many people watched it, but I did. February of 2012, Whitney left the show. Maybe because the other guy was the real star of the show and, because Nintendo Week was eventually coming to an end, they wanted to cut the show down to essentials. Or maybe because Whitney was the only one with any star clout and was given permission to leave a sinking ship. But I loved them both, and I'll never forget how I was hit when the final episode was sprung on me. No prior announcement (that I know of), just "Thanks for watching Nintendo Week!"
Frankly they didn't need Nintendo Week anymore. The marketing strategy was changing. Nintendo had a YouTube channel now, and were switching to the "Nintendo Direct" format. And Nintendo Directs were hype, I enjoyed watching them with the GameFAQs community. But they could've at least kept Alison and the other guy on as some kind of... unpaid Nintendo authorities. In the new social network: Miiverse. I was losing a lot with the death of the Wii, but Miiverse was something I was excited to gain. Because it seemed like what I had been hoping for: A forum or community where I could reach out to people in the industry. Developers and producers and executives had accounts on Miiverse. If I wanted, say, Sakurai to notice me, this was the community that Nintendo would be noticing. At least I hoped. Despite my hopes though, there were some things up front that bugged me about Miiverse. It was very, very, very strict. To keep with Nintendo's family friendly image. That doesn't just mean "no swearing" or clear cut stuff like that. It meant, for instance, nothing suggestive. No screenshots where you're trying to see a character's panties or something. No talking about how attractive you find a character. Which I understand and would hope for from Nintendo. But it didn't gel with the fact that many Nintendo games, most of them 3rd party, were suggestive themselves. And so that ties into my "don't say our game/show/book is porn" hangup. How can Nintendo pretend to be anti-tiddy, when they have tiddy games on their consoles? And you can't even talk about the tiddy on those games' Miiverse boards. Don't sell me a game where the point is to enjoy tiddy, and then be like "No, we're an upstanding company." Because it seems like what you wanna say is "These tiddy games aren't tiddy games, so don't talk about them like they're tiddy games." And that's my gripe with DOA Paradise. But I could forgive 3rd party titles. It's business, not much Nintendo can do, they gotta stay afloat. But we also got Fire Emblem Awakening and Kid Icarus Uprising in 2012. Uprising, I didn't like the animated shorts. They weren't the kind of content I came to associate with Nintendo. Sauna scenes are not for Nintendo. They're for fanartists to make. I do wanna see Palutena in a sauna. But I don't wanna see Nintendo do it. Unless they can, at the very least, be honest about it and say "Yeah we used to be family friendly but we really want you to see Palutena in a sauna." But the animated shorts were tie-in promos. You could argue that Nintendo didn't make them, just commissioned them. Which is a cold comfort at best. Fire Emblem Awakening, however, is not comfortable at all. I could go through that game piece by piece but if I can only pick one sin, it's the "beach episode" DLC. A god damn beach OVA. From Nintendo. Not some guy on Pixiv, but Nintendo. And they still wanna pretend like Awakening "isn't that kind of game." Beach OVAs are specifically for those kinds of games and those kinds of shows. If Awakening is not that kind of game, then you rob so many other games and shows of the right to call themselves "ecchi." And I would hit Nintendo with all my rage over this through Miiverse, but it was against the rules to talk about it. So I did what I did with every other show or game who let me down like this: I called it quits. The Kid Icarus franchise was only just starting up again, and I was already gonna have to bow out. Fire Emblem, on the other hand, last I checked that was for yaoi fangirls. I guess filling it with Tharja's "boingy bits" was Nintendo's way of "broadening the appeal."
In a similar story, 2012 was the year of 4chan cripple fetish VN "Katawa Shoujo." I was like "This is cripple fetish." But fans, like with My Little Pony, were like "No this is a serious thing." So I was like "Fuck this one game, then."
I was not opposed to tiddy and booty, I just didn't like being lied to. That's why games like Brawl Busters and Rusty Hearts saw a lot of play from me in 2012. I could've been playing Mass Effect 3 and joining in the bashwagon over its notoriously crappy ending, but I made a point to avoid Mass Effect a long time ago. I heard something about the game having sex scenes, and it sat poorly with me in a kind of "DOA Paradise" way. But my quest to join as many games as possible and spread my name/brand continued. These weren't MMOs, but they were games on Steam. Which meant being part of the Steam communities those games belonged to. However, I still played a lot of Team Fortress 2 and just playing Team Fortress 2 and posting on Steam about it won't make you notable. Like I said earlier, you have to make content. And Valve would hand content creators a new and powerful tool in 2012. In addition to releasing the final "Meet The" video in "Meet The Pyro," they also released Source Filmmaker. 2012 was a game changer for a lot of things, particularly the mobile Internet and social media. But Source Filmmaker has since launched so many 3D CG porn careers. And in the beginning I was really wary of releasing Source Filmmaker. I felt like it made it too easy for amateurs to make professional looking CGI videos. That the Internet would become oversaturated with them. And I was kinda right. GMOD videos stopped being the thing to make. YTPs stopped being the thing to make. I watched SFM kill one of my favorite Poopers, Waxonator. SFM videos took up all of his new work. And I couldn't deny that the quality was better with SFM, but the selfish reason I was so wary of SFM was, now that professional level 3D animation was made this cheap and easy, it seemed like anyone could do it and it was therefore not special anymore. GMOD videos, for some reason, I had more respect for. They felt like they took more skill. Probably because I saw more SFM videos than I ever saw GMOD videos. SFM, coupled with Valve game sound clips being available. That fostered a new trend on YouTube. Also coming up on YouTube? Montage parodies, or "MLG videos" as described in this thread.
Like Tinder, it started in 2012 but would only really come into its own by 2014. If SFM didn't kill YTP, MLG definitely did. It's an ironic take on the corporate Mountain Dewy FPS-centric culture of league gaming, but I think what set a fire under it was the interview Geoff Keighley did with LevelSave.com.
This picture is what gaming had become, somewhere along the line between now and the release of Xbox Live. This is what made him "Dorito Pope." Living proof that the industry, reviewers, fans, were pretty much beholden to corporate sponsors. Throw in some of this new "dubstep" craze and some hit markers, and you've got yourself a parody video. If I wasn't gonna make SFM videos, I could've made MLG videos. And I wanted to. I wanted to make both, I wanted to make edits of TF2 videos and import game models and make edits of game models, but I never did.
[Weebshit]
2012 was another year of loss for me here. The big one you might remember: Megaupload was taken down in 2012. The Internet might've won the SOPA/PIPA war, but they lost the Megaupload battle.
This picture was passed around a lot to represent the loss. Like with the ROM sites and old imageboards and Encyclopedia Dramatica, I had earmarked some Megaupload stuff to be downloaded later. But time would not wait for me. Megaupload would kinda sorta be reborn, but it would never be the haven of filesharing that it was. I guess that can be blamed on how filesharing changed on the Internet. Speaking of legal battles, the effects of 4Kids restructuring for bankruptcy came through. Their Toonzai block? No more in 2012. It was replaced by Vortexx, which was managed by Saban. Which sounded promising, a block run by the old Fox Kids people? But no matter how good it was, I was still angry to see 4Kids go. And angrier still to hear people issue 4Kids late praise. Back in the day 4Kids could do no right with anything. But suddenly people wanna talk about how great Dan Green as Yugi is. How good their Kirby dub was. Debating over whether or not the 2012 CGI Ninja Turtles can compare to the 4Kids Ninja Turtles. I remember fresh the pain I felt when I learned 4Kids was giving up the rights to Ninja Turtles to Nickelodeon. How I knew they couldn't stay afloat without this, one of if not THE flagship franchise of their brand. 4Kids needed that appreciation back in 2006. If I had to come up with a reason for it, it was because people didn't feel "threatened" by 4Kids anymore. There was unprecedented access to raws and subs now, so there was no need to be on the defensive about 4Kids. Despite having no block, 4Kids would continue to produce dubs for Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL. Or at least the voice actors would. It continued to air on Vortexx. Speaking of my love for heavily edited dubs, 2012 had another surprise in the return of Toonami. At first just as an April Fool's joke. But with Adult Swim's less than enthusiastic promotion of anime on its "ACTN" block, people were really in favor of Toonami returning, along with some passion and dedication to anime programming. But I wasn't. I'm just angry about everything in 2012. I was not gonna watch "Toonami for grownups" because I was raised on "Toonami for kids." They aired those dubs and asked me to regard those dubs as valid. Not to undermine them with "Yeah, this is an inferior product. This isn't how it really is." And here they were in 2012, pointing out their old handling of Tenchi and Yu Yu Hakusho and Blue Submarine and so on, saying "Yeah, that was an inferior product. That wasn't how it really was." I did not die in WWII defending the validity of after-school dubs for all that to be given lie. Toonami maybe didn't get it as hard as 4Kids did, but the point remains the same. You asked me to believe in disco guns and digikinis. If you wanted me not to, you shouldn't have aired it that way in the first place. So no new Toonami for me.
[Sexy, Beautiful Women]
In the decision of "Will I ever be with a real woman, or commit myself to 2D," 2D was losing badly. There were too many headaches to debate. Meanwhile, 3D was looking good. I was watching a lot of Art Mann, some of which I posted here. If I had to describe the dream now, it was to "go where the sluts are." Some people say "Meet a girl who likes you and she'll do slutty things for you." I wasn't interested in that. I was interested in meeting women who were already sluts, so that I could be headhunted by them as a worthy specimen, and invited into their slutty world. I didn't wanna take the lead in "convincing" a woman to be a slut. I was a virgin. I wanted her to be like "Wow, a virgin? Come meet my friends" or something like that. I watched Art Mann to figure out where all of the trashy festivals are. Where my highest odds of finding sluts are. And then someday, maybe, I would go live there and just be amongst the sluts all the time. But whether it be 2D or 3D, neither one was gonna win if I didn't have enough of a sex drive. Up until now I had a pretty healthy sex drive. But come 2012 I started to worry. It wasn't just that my erections weren't as long or hard as they used to be, but I just didn't get excited like I used to. My mind used to be rapt with fantasies. I once nutted hands free, just from watching porn. But I wasn't feeling that anymore. Was I desensitized from years of jacking off and hunting sauce? Potentially. But I had another idea to try. Something I had never tried before. Male enhancement pills. Like the ZMAs I take today, there was no shortage of praise for these. Makes your dick bigger! Makes your orgasms more powerful! Et cetera, et cetera. If I was serious about this, couldn't I have ordered some Enzyte or Extenze? Maybe I was more curious than serious. Because what I did was buy some bootleg pills from my local liquor store. Something called "STREE OVERLORD." Maybe you've heard of it.
Took the recommended dosage. I swear to God, I'm pretty sure I actually did damage to my dick. I didn't experience an erection, but from that point on I think my dick just worked less. And so my eye for beauty worked less. It wasn't just that my dick didn't work. There's plenty of old men whose spirits are willing but their flesh is poorly vascularized. There are old men who are rapists and sexual assailants. And they have to take Viagra to get it up. But the drive to be a rapist, that still lives in them. Now, I'm against rape, frankly. If I can put that controversial opinion out there. But I can't help but admire that these rapists can look at someone and be like "I wanna have sex with them so badly, I'd violate their consent to do it." I don't feel anything like that. Isn't that a shame? Was it the pills? Or was it placebo + just becoming a grumpy old man? It was true, I was getting older, and I had no shortage of things to be angry about.
Two more years down, 6 more to go. And after 2014 they kinda get real empty. 2013-2014 were probably the last two years I had real dreams. Talk about those later. Maybe I'll finish this before the year ends.
TL;DR: I spend 2011 and 2012 ranting about my hangups regarding tiddy and booty in the shows I watch and games I play.
Thanksgiving recently passed, but Thanksgiving is just the start of my holiday schedule. This time of year it's time to start hanging out with my family more. What family of mine still hangs out together. Which means my mom, my dad, my brother, my clinically depressed sister, her girlfriend, another sister of mine who lives with my parents, and my nephew who would rather spend the holidays with us/his grandparents. Do you ever wonder why the holiday gatherings are synonymous with "dysfunction?" When we thinking "holiday dinner" we think "arguments?" Why can't there be peace instead? I'll tell you why. Because the holidays are about bringing together people who don't see each other very often. At best, that's people who don't know each other well enough to spend extended periods of time together. At worst, it's people who forgot, they're supposed to stay separate for a reason. Lemme tell you how my Thanksgiving/last couple of days have gone...Things kicked off "officially" when my nephew came over from college. On Wednesday we saw "Knives Out" together, closest thing to a Thanksgiving movie. Then on Thanksgiving itself, we watched "The Irishman." Like most families in America, my mom is the only one who knows how to cook. And for that, she didn't want our help in the kitchen. However, she got drunk while cooking and went to bed before finishing everything. Which most of us didn't mind. We weren't that hard up about a "formal" or "traditional" Thanksgiving dinner. Plus I had to leave later anyway because I was volunteering somewhere. But my sister, the one who lives with my parents, wanted us to step up and cook the food in our mother's stead. And by "want," I mean "demanded." Some of us tried to explain how that's not wise, because none of us know how to cook like Mom. But she insisted that it would be easy. But what this was really about was that she thought we were lazy and demanded that we contribute to the meal in some way. These accusations resulted in fighting, as well as my sister trying to get our mom to tell us to cook in her place. Being drunk and half-asleep, the idea was that my mom was suggestible enough that she could be convinced to say anything. And she was. For both my sister and everyone else. So she went back and forth between saying "Do what my sister says" and "Do whatever you want." Anything to get people to stop bothering her. And though the hour was running late and I would have to go volunteer soon, I couldn't leave my family to fight like this because it would eventually come to physical blows. My sister has been known to pull kitchen knives on people when she gets mad enough. Fortunately, she stormed off to God knows where for a while. I took this as an opportunity to go out and volunteer.
Now, why go volunteer? Because I care about people? Yes, I care about people, and I've volunteered before so I'm accustomed to it. But mostly, I did it because people insist that it's a good place to meet people and have sex with those people. Go out and socialize, they say. Pick up a hobby and interact with people. I've tried many a scene, and will continue to try many a scene. One that was specifically suggested to me was "church or volunteer work." Sounds completely retarded, but the thing about retarded advice is, you take it just so that, when the time comes for it to be given to you again, you can say "No thanks, I've tried it, it's retarded, any other ideas?" I served food and booked rooms for shelter. I prayed with my fellow volunteers, we talked about how often we do this volunteer thing, we were all very friendly. Later I was running to catch the bus home, and this woman named Tanya offered me a ride. We talked about how she lived in Seattle as a caretaker for a while. I like to think I was pretty warm toward her, but I had watched The Irishman that day and I was afraid this was some kind of trap. I didn't recognize the route she was taking, and she was talking about she always carries a piece. In summary, I didn't get laid. See, this advice people give me, it's great for making friends, but I'm trying to have sex. This advice doesn't work for that. Something's missing. I need to somehow not make friends and instead make sexual partners. I'm pretty sure I have to, at some point, say "Hey let's have sex." But that's not part of anyone's advice. And I don't know anything so how can I protest? I do this as protest. I take the bad advice as protest, so I can say "This is only good for making friends. You didn't include any advice about getting them to have sex with me."
I came home later that night and my mom had woken up to finish cooking. We ate, and at the end of the week my nephew went back to school. After finals, he'll be back for Christmas break. In the meantime, the fighting from Thanksgiving has refreshed the rift between us. We remember just how crazy my sister still is. Also, my mom has been getting drunk and sitting around the house bare-ass naked. Also, my dad had a dream where he was visited by some old friends, and he looked up those friends, and learned that they had all died recently. So he's pretty sure his time is coming soon. My dad is spiritual like that.
I don't wanna think every time you go back home it's like this. But it reminds me of times when I've gone back to old Internet haunts I could've called "home." Everything is strange and unfamiliar, and there's lots of things to fight about. Picture this...
2011. May 1st, Sunday night. You're at your parents' house playing Steel Diver while The Apprentice drones in the background. When suddenly, the NBC News Special Report "Chimes of Death."
There was a solid hour between the first breaking news and Obama's actual address, we didn't know what the news was, but we were on the edge of our seats, like with every other NBC News Special Report. And when the announcement was finally made, you knew what you had to do: Go on 4chan and see people's reactions. While the UK plans weddings, America plans funerals.
There's also this alternative slice from 2011 that happened a little earlier.
https://incels.is/threads/what-do-y...-youre-not-afraid-ashamed-to-share-it.123641/
This was actually the year this No Nut November thing got its "formal" start, thanks to Urbandictionary and Twitter.
Like YouTube, Twitter was relevant enough for corporate media to set up brand accounts on them. FOX had set up several for their 2011-2012 schedule.
Fox 2011-12 Primetime Schedule Announced
Four New Comedies, Three New Dramas And One New Unscripted Series Join Schedule
tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com
However, Twitter was still small enough that The Rock's early leak of the death of Bin Laden, after 8 years, still has only 2.4k retweets and less than 100 comments.
And Reddit? Still only just barely relevant enough for a pretentious minority to consider it a "thinking man's" alternative to the still dominant Yahoo! Answers.
Reddit was such a secret club, its members identified one another in public with a pass phrase: "The Narwhal Bacons at Midnight." And if Reddit as a whole has a culture, I can't think of a better phrase to reflect it. Boxxy's time came to an end, and Jessi Slaughter's moment was just beginning. Instead of Trans-Siberian Orchestra light shows, we had Skrillex for Christmas. And LMFAO for New Year's Eve. While Rebecca Black released a song so bad it made Nyan Cat into a masterpiece. Earthquakes and nuclear disaster terrorized Japan, LulzSec terrorized the Internet, and Uber terrorized the taxi industry. Oprah bowed out with the series finale of her talk show, leaving Ellen as the new Oprah. Harry Potter bowed out with Deathly Hallows: Part 2, leaving Hunger Games and one more Twilight movie, the last lights of the "young adult novel" era, to stand alone against the coming superhero renaissance/monopoly. In fact, it was the last year (so far) that Disney wouldn't have a superhero or Star Wars movie in the top 10 grossing films of a year.
GameFAQs was still my primary hangout, but I made a mistake in posting a link to a ROM site and got my account banned. So I had to make a new one, and new GameFAQs accounts have to age a little first before you can post without restriction. So I was spending a little less time on GameFAQs. And Bin Laden's death was the perfect opportunity to check out old haunts like 4chan, to see how people were taking the news that the Hide & Seek World Champion had finally been bested. You might've seen this picture illustrating various eras of 4chan.
People have said 4chan can't be invaded. But 4chan's change in style from era to era is what happens when people try. So is it really true that 4chan can't be invaded? Dominated by a new userbase? The middle 4chan was the one I was met with when I came back in 2011. And to be fair, I don't know how much right I have to say 4chan was once my "home," but in 2011 I felt a lot less at home there than I did in, say, 2006. Don't get me wrong, I'm not that beat up about the n-word, Chris Rock said I could say it. But the 4chan I came back to in 2011 was the 4chan that started being paranoid about blacks and Jews and socialism and globalism. I guess it was a product of the times, the political lines in the sand really started to be defined after Obama became President. And I imagine most 4chan people are either from the United States or are privy to issues that face it, hence them blowing their load over Bin Laden dying. But that aside, I think Obama being elected and the various lefty changes in the country/the world started raising concerns. And the right started to rise. And then the left started to rise. And then the right rose again. And then the left rose again. It was only after this time that we saw things like Occupy Wall Street or the Arab Spring or the Tea Party. It was only by 2011 that Richard Spencer and his alt-right movement was able to gain any real traction. That's where I think the attitudes that formed /pol/ in 2011 came from. The global political turbulence of the turn of the decade. See, it used to be /new/, for news. But towards the turn of the decade things started to get racist. A "change" I can't really speak on the specifics of because last I checked, much of 4chan was already racist, and lots of other bad things. I wasn't around to watch /new/ change from whatever it used to be to what it became at the turn of the decade. But what people tell me is that it was less of a "Happy Negro memes" kind of "racism" and more of a "Certain people are legitimately inferior, I'm not joking, and the inferiors are taking over the world" kind of racism. You didn't see this before the turn of the decade. Again, probably a product of the times we were living in. When issues like immigration and how we feel about brown people now that Bin Laden is dead came to be a factor. And so /new/ was deleted at the top of 2011. A widely critiqued move, because 4chan was supposed to be about free speech. Moot came clean and admitted he fucked up. And /new/ was reborn as /pol/ later that year.
Also, kind of a notable moment in incel history I guess, /r9k/ was reborn this year. It had been around since 2008, but like "nu-racism 4chan," it only really came into its greentexting tendy-loving spaghetti-spilling Pepe-posting no-GF-having identity at the turn of the decade. Around the time it was deleted and then reborn. Now, /r9k/ is claimed as an important touchstone for inceldom. In a time when the sparsely popular r/incel, and a peppering of redpill forums, were all the incel culture that was, aside from /r9k/. But we decry soyness in the incel community. So it comes as a hard pill to swallow to understand that /r9k/ and the prevailing 4chan userbase were the primary driving force behind the popularity of one of the soyest media franchises, if not the one true beginning of the kind of people incels war with. My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic had its start at the turn of the decade, and had it not been for 4chan it would've been one of the many otherwise unremarkable 2010s cartoon reinventions. An ordinary kid show of ordinary kid show quality. But 4chan saw one bad review and decided it was war. And the "brony" was born. I was an outspoken critic of this. And I didn't even hate the show. I get it, alright? I see the appeal. They want to fuck the horses. You're talkin' to a guy who was furrying it up back when 4chan was the wet dream of a high school nobody. But like with lots of interests that are partly sexual, I just didn't want the bullshit. Stop pretending like your mania is because this show is some kind of groundbreaking. Stop pretending like you're not gathering every week to jack off to these horses. This show is passable, and that's it. The only reason this is making news at all is because people are going "Look at us! We're grown men who like a show SOME people might say is for little girls! Doesn't that speak to the quality of the show? Aren't we brave for challenging age and gender norms?" A bigger deal was made of this than it needed to be. And if there was anything that drove me away from 4chan, it was this. But I found no shelter, bronyism spread across the Netscape like Christianity in the days of Constantine. It became one of my new ambitions. To speak loudly enough that the world could hear me say "Friendship Is Magic is a show for children, not adults, and an average show at that. The fact that people care that grown men watch it is proof it's a show for kids, and if it wasn't for these grown men watching this show no one would care. And the only reason those grown men are making as big a deal out of this show as they are is to make a journalist mad. And because they want to fuck the horses."
Being pissy and wanting my piss to be heard would continue to be a theme in my ambitions.
[Gaming]
Endless Online. Always kept it in my back pocket. By 2011 the forums were taken down entirely, though the IRC room still stands. It's barely used though. Members are still at a couple hundred at any given time, but 2011 sees one news update. One. And no word is heard from the mods or anything for years. We're left to the autobots and DDoSers. I check in now and then to see what the community looks like.
Speaking of free games, by 2011 the idea of making people pay for game subscriptions was starting to fade. The "free to play" model started to take off, as producers tried to come up with ways to still, somehow, make money off of it. While class warfare raged between new players attracted by games being free, and veterans who had been paying and playing for a while and didn't like all these newbies for one reason or another. Team Fortress 2 became free to play in 2011, with the release of the "Meet the Medic" trailer. And the Ghastly Gibus became like badge of shame. You saw one of those, it was one of those damn "free-to-play" newbies. God help you if one of them is on your team. What happened to the days when everyone was good? I had no right to complain, in all my years of playing TF2 I was never good. I wanted to be good. But I also wanted to be a voice for the free player. Which meant I needed to be important int he TF2 community. But this wasn't the Fortnite era, TF2 didn't really have a "Ninja." It had notable players, but they weren't notable for play, really. They were people like Xenon, who made maps. Or Pelo, who made funny "TF2 Shellnut" videos. Those are the guys I had to be like. But I didn't make maps or videos either. Or run servers. If I didn't do it for TF2, maybe I could've done it for Minecraft. Which, some people forget, went public AFTER its 2D "clone," Terraria. I didn't touch Minecraft. Because not only did it not look interesting, but my nephew played Minecraft. So I figured "Okay so this is definitely a simple game for children. Well, he can enjoy that. I don't expect to be hearing much about Minecraft after a couple of years." Skyrim showed up towards the end of the year, and with it came two things: "Arrow to the knee" jokes, and Skyrim mods. I wanted to make both, but didn't. Didn't know how. Didn't know what tools you needed. What I did do though was post about stuff. Usually when I felt like there was something to complain about. 2011 was the year Nintendo started its YouTube presence. If you look at Nintendo's "About" page on YouTube, it'll say they joined in 2005.
Nintendo
Welcome to the official Nintendo YouTube channel where you'll find all the latest videos, news and content from Nintendo including Nintendo Switch, Wii U and...
That's inaccurate. The Nintendo account was made in 2005, but it wasn't made or managed by Nintendo. It was just some guy who liked Nintendo. In 2011 the channel went dead and Nintendo was able to just take it. Like how Reggie Fils-Aimé was able to just take the @reggie account on Twitter.
Reggie Fils-Aime (@Reggie) | Twitter
The latest Tweets from Reggie Fils-Aime (@Reggie). Retired President/COO @NintendoAmerica. Inaugural Leader in Residence for @CornellDyson. Represented by @LAIspeakers. Board member. Business provocateur
twitter.com
They started the channel mostly with videos about the 3DS. Coming into heavy use around E3, where Iwata announced new Smash games. As in, plural. Hype? Well, I had mixed feelings. Iwata wanted a Smash game on the 3DS, and a Smash game on their upcoming home console, the Wii U. And I found that absolutely redundant. Two Smash games? I can only play one Smash game at a time! Smash is supposed to be one game leading into another. A home console game, packed with content, and all its resources dedicated to it, that's what I want. I'm not gonna complete two Smashes, I'm not gonna play some lesser handheld version, and I especially don't want that lesser handheld version to come at the expense of what the home console version could be. If there's gonna be two Smash games, there needs to NEED to be two Smash games. They should at least connect, or something. I don't wanna have to unlock people twice. And I had to know if Nintendo was aware that people felt this way. Again, to be heard was my main concern, even if I couldn't stop two Smash games from being made.
I also knew how to come up with concepts for games. Not make games, just dream up ideas for characters and stuff. On GameFAQs there was a guy, AwesomeTurtwig, he made a game. Rotter Road. And we got to be his test audience.
Play Rotter Road on Kongregate
You#39re alive in a pixelated zombie apocalypse! Use your weapons to kill all the zombies, super zombies, and boss zombies. Collect the dropped coins and buy new...
Say what you want, we believed in AwesomeTurtwig. And I still do, just like I believe in that lolicon with the YouTube success who I won't name. This was the small start to a career of creating games he was passionate about. If I could start like he started, I would be happy and motivated. But oooooh, I couldn't get past the ideas phase. I mentioned feature creep, the killer of most Kickstarter projects. But there was also hindrances like "I have to get this concept right." Like my mascot platformer. I had to get the character and aesthetic right. I had been playing a lot of NES ROMs at the time, for inspiration. I figured if I wanted to make games, I had to start from the early concepts and learn how pure game design theory evolves over time. But also, I have a theory that the times you identify with most are the times when you're about 16. That's "your time." And when I was 16 I was not only playing NES games, but trying to make them. I remember how "alive" an NES game with full color felt. Vibrant. Happy. I wanted to capture that essence. Maybe it should be a game about a guy who delivers soda. Platforming levels and driving levels. I figured early on that the character's job would be important to who that character was. Like Mario & Luigi were. Mario & Luigi are plumbers, construction workers, blue collar guys. So that informs their character design. What's my mascot gonna be? I considered a sailor. Because I knew Donkey Kong was originally gonna be a Popeye game, so I thought it would be a touch of savvy if my platformer character was a sailor like Nintendo almost had Mario be. Whatever it was, it had to be whimsical and "toony." Maybe some kind of animal. Tooniness and furriness went hand in hand. And it had to be "me." I still hadn't settled on my signature animal. Now I also needed to know my "signature job." Which would've also been good to know considering I hated my real one. I set about figuring this out by trying to build a "personality profile." Basically, if someone was to play me, how should they act? That's tough to figure out, but my plan to do it was to watch shows I liked and read stories I liked, and insert myself into the scenarios. See what dynamic I bring compared to the other characters. To know what I would do if I was put into the situations I see on TV was the REAL way to learn what mage I was. Which I think is a good opportunity to lean into...
[Weebshit]
I'm not sure if it counts as [Weebshit] or [Gaming], but I had been having fun with Bakugan Dimensions. A simple game for children. But 2011 was a dark time for Bakugan Dimensions. 2011 was the year it shut down. Another MMORPG that didn't last. The game itself shut down in June. But what cut was shutting down the community forums by the end of the year. And I will remind, this was a kids' game. And a kids' community. And to see all those kids heartbroken that they would lose their community, valiantly raging against circumstance to keep their Internet friendships alive... this couple with them being really the only anime community that didn't wave their sub superiority in my face, I didn't like to see these kids be sad. Problem is, it's hard to profit off of kids. And even though maintaining a forum shouldn't be that expensive (How much are incels.is & Looksmax mods paid?), any expense at all that doesn't serve a worthy purpose is wasted money. You can't advertise to kids like you want because of COPPA. Or something. So it became an ambition of mine to help the community stick together, through all of the fan forums that were being made for the refugees. Many of us stayed together... but it was never really the same. And most of these forums gathered a handful of members each before grinding to a halt. Without enough people, all the new Bakugan episodes in the world can't keep a forum alive. It's moments like these, and missing people on With Anyone that drives my ambition to keep people connected on the Internet.
What I also lost with the demise of the Bakugan forums was several pictures I meant to save and find the sources of. The forums allowed you to keep a picture album, and a lot of the pictures people kept were relevant to my interests. Not THAT "relevant," this was still a kid-friendly forum. But lots of pictures where I was like "I think I've seen that picture before. What show is that from?" In fact, I was losing a lot of picture resources that I should've been on top of. Whether because I was too busy, or too complacent, or both. Sites I should've been casing like Shmurr and Elitepeeps were long gone by now, but this was also the year we first lost Encyclopedia Dramatica. And all its vintage "Dragonmoon Era" product. This is why you always make sure to come back home and check on things. I believe it was shut down for being too objectionable? Shut down by the webmistress herself, Sherrod "Girlvinyl" DeGrippo. Her words: "Shock for shock's sake is old at this point." And so it became "Oh, Internet!" Steeped in trollfacey rage-comicky datedness. A mistake Moot compares to his own. But unlike Moot, Girlvinyl didn't give Encyclopedia Dramatica back. I was also losing those ads from ROM sites. I guess as the nature of Internet advertisement changed. In fact, my posting ROM sites to GameFAQs was because I was trying to hurriedly salvage what few ROM sites I could find that still ran ads I could save pictures from. See, I was at work at the time, and I couldn't visit AngelRoms or anything like that, even if it was unblocked it would be foolish to do at work. But GameFAQs is just a game website. A waste of time, maybe, but not objectionable like what you might find on AngelRoms. So I didn't visit AngelRoms, instead I made a thread on an abandoned board and posted the links there for visiting at home later. And not only did I get banned for my trouble, but the sites didn't have ads anymore anyway. AngelRoms was replaced entirely.
In other bad news, 4Kids, the hill I was committed to die on, was facing some trouble. Things seemed pretty okay on their Toonzai block, some new shows even. But beyond the eyes of what few actually enjoyed watching their programming, raged a legal battle against their long time partner in ratings, Yu-Gi-Oh! Some kinda licensing thing, I forget the specifics, but the usual peanut gallery used it as an excuse to criticize the Yu-Gi-Oh! dubs, as if that was the reason they were being sued. And due to the outcome, 4Kids had to file for Chapter 11 protection. Now 4Kids, like their own boy Jason Griffith, I felt was being cancelled without getting their due respect. I didn't know what the future held for my Saturday mornings, a man can't live on Cartoon Network alone.
[Sexy, Beautiful Women]
40 was fast approaching. And here I was an absolute virgin. Was I bothered? Not really. For one, adherence to 2D was an option, instead of being with a flesh and blood woman. Attracting the attention and colleagueship of artists I liked. For two, 2011 was notable as the year Charlie Sheen went crazy. And we learned that Charlie Harper was no work of mere fiction. Charlie Sheen really lives like that in real life. At the time, he was 46. And he was living a life I could see myself living. Basically I was like "40 isn't too late to have fun. Charlie Sheen is having fun. So I don't need to hurry." In fact, I saw me being a virgin to be a bonus. Suppose I had any potential at all to playboy like Charlie Sheen. Take that potential, and add on top of it "I'm a virgin." Maybe the woman will find the idea of testing my reaction to sex exciting? It was definitely what I hoped. But how to pull it off was still the question. Whether I have potential or not, where I lived didn't seem to have any. I was still pondering the idea of moving to where the culture was better or something. At the start of 2011 I still had my eyes squarely set on 1600 Broadway. But the end of 2011, in December, we had the first winter I can remember where it was warm enough to make me worried about global warming. It wasn't just that there was no snow, it was t-shirt weather very often. One of the main things keeping me where I am, or at least north of the Mason-Dixon line, was that I liked snow. But here, climate change had taken it from me. Maybe I just move even further north, but missing out on this snow was sobering enough. My need for snow might as well have been over. And so I figured "This climate change thing is real, might as well embrace the sun." So by the end of 2011 I was ready to give up snow and live somewhere warm. I certainly wasn't held back by my job. I became quiet and distant at work. When people were near my desk I was paranoid because I didn't want anyone seeing my screen. The constant need to keep my screen private took its toll on me. Why couldn't everyone just leave me alone??? And then my supervisor, he takes notice of how I don't talk to anyone at work as often anymore. The real truth of the matter was that I became wary of people in general because I don't want attention drawn to my screen. But also, how did he expect me to take time to talk to people when he doesn't want me taking time to browse? When it's "leisurely browsing" he prefers me busy. But when it's talking to people he's like "Why are you so quiet?" Are you saying you want me to not be working??? But I still needed to figure something out about my family. I didn't want to leave them. And because I couldn't figure out how to move and put up my family in a whole different state, it was easy to cling to the plan of just sticking to 2D. Despite it being soured a little by certain shows and games.
And it would continue to sour into the next year. Picture this...
2012. December. Mayan Apocalypse fever has gripped the planet. There've been scares before, the Large Hadron Collider really had us for a while, but this is the first one of its kind where "respected authorities" are like "Well we should at least consider that the calendar does end around this time."
You're watching countdown videos on SUPERMARIOGALAXY13's channel.
You find it a little twisted that this is the most excited you've been in a while. Should the world end? Probably not, but you kinda hope it does. You definitely hope something happens. It doesn't have to be the end of the world, there've been all kinds of theories, like grand cosmic incursions where beings of light usher humanity into a new era. That sounds cool, right? Something, anything, some exciting thing. Let the prophets be right just this once. Even if the world did end, from where you're sitting it wouldn't be that bad. It's not like you're suicidal or anything, but... the way the world is changing, you don't have much love for it. Things happening that you'd like to rant about, but there are no ears to hear you. And there are a lot of things you'd like to talk about. Like how Chick-fil-A went from respected Christian food purveyor to controversial Christian food purveyor because of their views on gayness. Even though thay had ALWAYS felt that way about gay people, because they are a Christian food purveyor. So why are people only getting mad now? Or how people want contraceptive coverage to be mandated by the government as part of health care. Even though contraceptives are not medicine, they treat no illness, dysfunction, or disorder, because pregnancy is not an illness and recreational sex is a want, not a need. But no one cares to have that discussion because Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a slut. Or SOPA/PIPA. So much virtue signaling from Wikipedia and Reddit about Internet freedom, but offering no solutions on how to protect product from piracy. Because they don't care about that, they don't even care about your freedom. What they care about is not getting fined if one of their members fucks up and posts something copyrighted. And you've found a few people here and there who get what you're saying about these things, but the issue people just aren't understanding you on? Spike TV. All the good shows are getting cancelled. And sure, that's not the end of the world, but it's the reason why they're getting cancelled that you wanna talk about. The executives said that it was a deliberate effort to, as Tecmo might say, "broaden the appeal" of the network. Their exact words were "Esquire rather than Maxim." Frankly you saw the writing on the wall during the final season of MANswers, what they don't like is that the channel is too "for men." Being too for men is somehow not respectable. But they can't just make the leap entirely. They'll take baby steps. So they'll try to be a network for the refined gentleman. Cerebral, hard working. Not some layabout Maxim-reading frat boy. And at least Spike walks the "This is actually a serious and respectable thing" walk, instead of selling you bullshit like Tecmo or 4chan. But what if you wanna be a layabout frat boy? You never got to be! Ever! And so your mind is still arrested in that stage of development. You're not asking for Esquire-level respect. In fact, you're refusing it. People cast you as some lowbrow dick-beating juvenile? Yeah! Yes, that's what you're trying to be. If you were to take Maxim, keep all of it Maximness, but call it "Esquire," that would ruin it for you. That's what you'd like to say, if anyone was listening.
You post a thread about it on Poll of the Day, but it gains no traction. Hopefully the madmen are right. Obama is the foretold Anti-Christ, and his 2012 victory means the coming of Jesus and the battles of Armageddon. Or even one little alien visitation. You and the world are watching. One of these predictions has to come true.
Here's some trufax: The end of the "baktun" when the "cataclysmic or transformative events" were supposed to happen was December 21st, 2012. On that day, Gangnam Style reached its billionth view. The first YouTube video to reach a billion views. And so it launched a myriad of "The Mayans were right" takes. Because it said a lot about society, maaaaaaaaaan. Like "Gangnam Style" is our new God. YouTube didn't just have Gangnam Style, it had Red Bull Stratos, it was the home of planking videos, Tebowing videos, Cinnamon Challenge videos, meanwhile Reddit was still in that meaty spot between small and big where they can get an interview with Woody Harrelson, or make a single video go viral, but when it does go viral people are like "Oh, it must be because of Le Reddit Armie." Implying Reddit to be a niche interest of Internet nerds. Obama's administration was marked with dramatic liberal policy changes, but one of the biggest turning points came in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. I think back to past shootings and bombings and plane crashings, and we thought "What a tortured individual." Sandy Hook, because very small children were murdered, changed the thinking, I guess. It became "To call these shooters 'monsters' is the most compassion they deserve." This, and I think the Trayvon Martin shooting, reignited the gun debate. It's not like there wasn't a gun debate before this, but this was the start of the current gun debate we're having now.
We saw the birth of Snapchat and Whisper.sh and technically Vine although it wouldn't actually be released until January of 2013. Oh, and Tinder. September of 2012. The purported spark of the hypergamy bomb. Which sounds ridiculous because Tinder didn't even get that big until 2014. Plus, Tinder didn't invent hookups, hookups and even incel subreddits existed before Tinder. Technically. So how did people hook up before Tinder? Through OKCupid, Match.com, Plenty Of Fish, and if you were brave, Craigslist. Even Facebook was an option. Basically, desktop-based social media. And maybe that's the takeaway here. What changed was that the Internet was fast being taken over by the mobile device, and culture changed thanks to that. Where AIM, MSN, and Yahoo! Messenger used to be the Big Three that the Internet revolved around, by 2012 they had fallen off the table entirely.
Disney bought Lucasfilm, and released "The Avengers," kicking off the first of many Marvel vs. DC memes. The Avengers made 1.5 billion. The most of any movie in 2012. Meanwhile, DC's offering of The Dark Knight Rises made a paltry 1.084 billion. Which is like moist dog shit. So the argument/meme on Imgur and the like was "The Avengers made more money. And this gives them power over DC? 'It's not about moneeeeeeey, it's about sending a message.'" Basically, DC's movies make less money because they're for the thinking fan who appreciates art. And DC fans will accept being less profitable if it means being the thinking fan's movie. I hadn't seen either yet. I was still committed to...
[Gaming]
The Wii was coming to an end. The Wii U had been announced so it was time to do away with Wii hallmarks. For instance, Nintendo Week with Alison Whitney and that other guy. I don't know how many people watched it, but I did. February of 2012, Whitney left the show. Maybe because the other guy was the real star of the show and, because Nintendo Week was eventually coming to an end, they wanted to cut the show down to essentials. Or maybe because Whitney was the only one with any star clout and was given permission to leave a sinking ship. But I loved them both, and I'll never forget how I was hit when the final episode was sprung on me. No prior announcement (that I know of), just "Thanks for watching Nintendo Week!"
Frankly they didn't need Nintendo Week anymore. The marketing strategy was changing. Nintendo had a YouTube channel now, and were switching to the "Nintendo Direct" format. And Nintendo Directs were hype, I enjoyed watching them with the GameFAQs community. But they could've at least kept Alison and the other guy on as some kind of... unpaid Nintendo authorities. In the new social network: Miiverse. I was losing a lot with the death of the Wii, but Miiverse was something I was excited to gain. Because it seemed like what I had been hoping for: A forum or community where I could reach out to people in the industry. Developers and producers and executives had accounts on Miiverse. If I wanted, say, Sakurai to notice me, this was the community that Nintendo would be noticing. At least I hoped. Despite my hopes though, there were some things up front that bugged me about Miiverse. It was very, very, very strict. To keep with Nintendo's family friendly image. That doesn't just mean "no swearing" or clear cut stuff like that. It meant, for instance, nothing suggestive. No screenshots where you're trying to see a character's panties or something. No talking about how attractive you find a character. Which I understand and would hope for from Nintendo. But it didn't gel with the fact that many Nintendo games, most of them 3rd party, were suggestive themselves. And so that ties into my "don't say our game/show/book is porn" hangup. How can Nintendo pretend to be anti-tiddy, when they have tiddy games on their consoles? And you can't even talk about the tiddy on those games' Miiverse boards. Don't sell me a game where the point is to enjoy tiddy, and then be like "No, we're an upstanding company." Because it seems like what you wanna say is "These tiddy games aren't tiddy games, so don't talk about them like they're tiddy games." And that's my gripe with DOA Paradise. But I could forgive 3rd party titles. It's business, not much Nintendo can do, they gotta stay afloat. But we also got Fire Emblem Awakening and Kid Icarus Uprising in 2012. Uprising, I didn't like the animated shorts. They weren't the kind of content I came to associate with Nintendo. Sauna scenes are not for Nintendo. They're for fanartists to make. I do wanna see Palutena in a sauna. But I don't wanna see Nintendo do it. Unless they can, at the very least, be honest about it and say "Yeah we used to be family friendly but we really want you to see Palutena in a sauna." But the animated shorts were tie-in promos. You could argue that Nintendo didn't make them, just commissioned them. Which is a cold comfort at best. Fire Emblem Awakening, however, is not comfortable at all. I could go through that game piece by piece but if I can only pick one sin, it's the "beach episode" DLC. A god damn beach OVA. From Nintendo. Not some guy on Pixiv, but Nintendo. And they still wanna pretend like Awakening "isn't that kind of game." Beach OVAs are specifically for those kinds of games and those kinds of shows. If Awakening is not that kind of game, then you rob so many other games and shows of the right to call themselves "ecchi." And I would hit Nintendo with all my rage over this through Miiverse, but it was against the rules to talk about it. So I did what I did with every other show or game who let me down like this: I called it quits. The Kid Icarus franchise was only just starting up again, and I was already gonna have to bow out. Fire Emblem, on the other hand, last I checked that was for yaoi fangirls. I guess filling it with Tharja's "boingy bits" was Nintendo's way of "broadening the appeal."
In a similar story, 2012 was the year of 4chan cripple fetish VN "Katawa Shoujo." I was like "This is cripple fetish." But fans, like with My Little Pony, were like "No this is a serious thing." So I was like "Fuck this one game, then."
I was not opposed to tiddy and booty, I just didn't like being lied to. That's why games like Brawl Busters and Rusty Hearts saw a lot of play from me in 2012. I could've been playing Mass Effect 3 and joining in the bashwagon over its notoriously crappy ending, but I made a point to avoid Mass Effect a long time ago. I heard something about the game having sex scenes, and it sat poorly with me in a kind of "DOA Paradise" way. But my quest to join as many games as possible and spread my name/brand continued. These weren't MMOs, but they were games on Steam. Which meant being part of the Steam communities those games belonged to. However, I still played a lot of Team Fortress 2 and just playing Team Fortress 2 and posting on Steam about it won't make you notable. Like I said earlier, you have to make content. And Valve would hand content creators a new and powerful tool in 2012. In addition to releasing the final "Meet The" video in "Meet The Pyro," they also released Source Filmmaker. 2012 was a game changer for a lot of things, particularly the mobile Internet and social media. But Source Filmmaker has since launched so many 3D CG porn careers. And in the beginning I was really wary of releasing Source Filmmaker. I felt like it made it too easy for amateurs to make professional looking CGI videos. That the Internet would become oversaturated with them. And I was kinda right. GMOD videos stopped being the thing to make. YTPs stopped being the thing to make. I watched SFM kill one of my favorite Poopers, Waxonator. SFM videos took up all of his new work. And I couldn't deny that the quality was better with SFM, but the selfish reason I was so wary of SFM was, now that professional level 3D animation was made this cheap and easy, it seemed like anyone could do it and it was therefore not special anymore. GMOD videos, for some reason, I had more respect for. They felt like they took more skill. Probably because I saw more SFM videos than I ever saw GMOD videos. SFM, coupled with Valve game sound clips being available. That fostered a new trend on YouTube. Also coming up on YouTube? Montage parodies, or "MLG videos" as described in this thread.
https://incels.is/threads/anyone-remembers-mlg-videos.160681/
Like Tinder, it started in 2012 but would only really come into its own by 2014. If SFM didn't kill YTP, MLG definitely did. It's an ironic take on the corporate Mountain Dewy FPS-centric culture of league gaming, but I think what set a fire under it was the interview Geoff Keighley did with LevelSave.com.
This picture is what gaming had become, somewhere along the line between now and the release of Xbox Live. This is what made him "Dorito Pope." Living proof that the industry, reviewers, fans, were pretty much beholden to corporate sponsors. Throw in some of this new "dubstep" craze and some hit markers, and you've got yourself a parody video. If I wasn't gonna make SFM videos, I could've made MLG videos. And I wanted to. I wanted to make both, I wanted to make edits of TF2 videos and import game models and make edits of game models, but I never did.
[Weebshit]
2012 was another year of loss for me here. The big one you might remember: Megaupload was taken down in 2012. The Internet might've won the SOPA/PIPA war, but they lost the Megaupload battle.
This picture was passed around a lot to represent the loss. Like with the ROM sites and old imageboards and Encyclopedia Dramatica, I had earmarked some Megaupload stuff to be downloaded later. But time would not wait for me. Megaupload would kinda sorta be reborn, but it would never be the haven of filesharing that it was. I guess that can be blamed on how filesharing changed on the Internet. Speaking of legal battles, the effects of 4Kids restructuring for bankruptcy came through. Their Toonzai block? No more in 2012. It was replaced by Vortexx, which was managed by Saban. Which sounded promising, a block run by the old Fox Kids people? But no matter how good it was, I was still angry to see 4Kids go. And angrier still to hear people issue 4Kids late praise. Back in the day 4Kids could do no right with anything. But suddenly people wanna talk about how great Dan Green as Yugi is. How good their Kirby dub was. Debating over whether or not the 2012 CGI Ninja Turtles can compare to the 4Kids Ninja Turtles. I remember fresh the pain I felt when I learned 4Kids was giving up the rights to Ninja Turtles to Nickelodeon. How I knew they couldn't stay afloat without this, one of if not THE flagship franchise of their brand. 4Kids needed that appreciation back in 2006. If I had to come up with a reason for it, it was because people didn't feel "threatened" by 4Kids anymore. There was unprecedented access to raws and subs now, so there was no need to be on the defensive about 4Kids. Despite having no block, 4Kids would continue to produce dubs for Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL. Or at least the voice actors would. It continued to air on Vortexx. Speaking of my love for heavily edited dubs, 2012 had another surprise in the return of Toonami. At first just as an April Fool's joke. But with Adult Swim's less than enthusiastic promotion of anime on its "ACTN" block, people were really in favor of Toonami returning, along with some passion and dedication to anime programming. But I wasn't. I'm just angry about everything in 2012. I was not gonna watch "Toonami for grownups" because I was raised on "Toonami for kids." They aired those dubs and asked me to regard those dubs as valid. Not to undermine them with "Yeah, this is an inferior product. This isn't how it really is." And here they were in 2012, pointing out their old handling of Tenchi and Yu Yu Hakusho and Blue Submarine and so on, saying "Yeah, that was an inferior product. That wasn't how it really was." I did not die in WWII defending the validity of after-school dubs for all that to be given lie. Toonami maybe didn't get it as hard as 4Kids did, but the point remains the same. You asked me to believe in disco guns and digikinis. If you wanted me not to, you shouldn't have aired it that way in the first place. So no new Toonami for me.
[Sexy, Beautiful Women]
In the decision of "Will I ever be with a real woman, or commit myself to 2D," 2D was losing badly. There were too many headaches to debate. Meanwhile, 3D was looking good. I was watching a lot of Art Mann, some of which I posted here. If I had to describe the dream now, it was to "go where the sluts are." Some people say "Meet a girl who likes you and she'll do slutty things for you." I wasn't interested in that. I was interested in meeting women who were already sluts, so that I could be headhunted by them as a worthy specimen, and invited into their slutty world. I didn't wanna take the lead in "convincing" a woman to be a slut. I was a virgin. I wanted her to be like "Wow, a virgin? Come meet my friends" or something like that. I watched Art Mann to figure out where all of the trashy festivals are. Where my highest odds of finding sluts are. And then someday, maybe, I would go live there and just be amongst the sluts all the time. But whether it be 2D or 3D, neither one was gonna win if I didn't have enough of a sex drive. Up until now I had a pretty healthy sex drive. But come 2012 I started to worry. It wasn't just that my erections weren't as long or hard as they used to be, but I just didn't get excited like I used to. My mind used to be rapt with fantasies. I once nutted hands free, just from watching porn. But I wasn't feeling that anymore. Was I desensitized from years of jacking off and hunting sauce? Potentially. But I had another idea to try. Something I had never tried before. Male enhancement pills. Like the ZMAs I take today, there was no shortage of praise for these. Makes your dick bigger! Makes your orgasms more powerful! Et cetera, et cetera. If I was serious about this, couldn't I have ordered some Enzyte or Extenze? Maybe I was more curious than serious. Because what I did was buy some bootleg pills from my local liquor store. Something called "STREE OVERLORD." Maybe you've heard of it.
Took the recommended dosage. I swear to God, I'm pretty sure I actually did damage to my dick. I didn't experience an erection, but from that point on I think my dick just worked less. And so my eye for beauty worked less. It wasn't just that my dick didn't work. There's plenty of old men whose spirits are willing but their flesh is poorly vascularized. There are old men who are rapists and sexual assailants. And they have to take Viagra to get it up. But the drive to be a rapist, that still lives in them. Now, I'm against rape, frankly. If I can put that controversial opinion out there. But I can't help but admire that these rapists can look at someone and be like "I wanna have sex with them so badly, I'd violate their consent to do it." I don't feel anything like that. Isn't that a shame? Was it the pills? Or was it placebo + just becoming a grumpy old man? It was true, I was getting older, and I had no shortage of things to be angry about.
Two more years down, 6 more to go. And after 2014 they kinda get real empty. 2013-2014 were probably the last two years I had real dreams. Talk about those later. Maybe I'll finish this before the year ends.
BigChinHispanic
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wtf is all this
FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
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The journal of my life, nearing its end.
BigChinHispanic
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Damn you wrote here the whole 2019?
FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
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I tried to?
KlutchPurpp
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Jfl if someone read all this
FatJattMofo
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sub6manletnozygos
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agepill is very depressing
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