Sunday, April 4, 2004

It's like German Chocolate, only better!
Finally! It's about time I made a non-crappy myOtaku post. It's been a while.

Today, I feel like looking back a year and seeing exactly how I became the Sennen that I am today. I want to pinpoint where it all started going downhill. Heh..

In 1996 my parents bought their very first computer. It was a Windows 95, with some unknown brand name, and so little memory that if I used this computer today I would stab the monitor repeatedly out of frustration. However, when all you ever do with a computer is play some Disney games and occasionally do some Solitaire time, and you're only six years old, these things aren't very important.

By 1999, however, I started to notice this stuff. I had decided that I wanted the internet, because of all of the cool online games I had heard about (Updated Pong on the Nickelodeon website.. Yeah.), and our pathetic little 95 was far too weak to support even a dialup connection. I ended up just giving up on begging my parents. Instead, I tried to go to my dad's workplace as much as possible to play games on his computer.

But then a light made itself be known. My father's workplace was planning on establishing an internet car dealership thing (I'm at a loss for a better description), and they had nobody to start the department. My dad decided to go ahead and take initiative. He would also have to check up on his work from home, though. That's when we got a shiny new Windows 98.

We were blown away by the immense power of this amazing machine- We could install any PC Game within a matter of minutes. It was so fast. And it was cool-looking. Ohh, how it was cool-looking. The Hewlett Packard logo was so edgy, right next to the casually scribbled word "Pavilion".. And the CD burner! We could finally burn CDs (Though we never had a desire to until about 6 months ago)!

And so began my journey into antisocial internet addict-ness. I spent two or three hours a day just surfing around Nick.com, Cartoonnetwork.com, and occasionally ZoogDisney.com. The games, no matter how crappy they are in my eyes today, were amazingly addictive back then. It was not long at all before Cartoon Orbit came around, and I had an extremely large repitoire of pointless little sprites filling up a little window that everybody loved to see.

This continued for quite a while. For a while I became more absorbed in video games (I finally developed a taste for games, and I didn't just listen to the hype), and my computer time lessened every day.

Then I met a girl, who ended up convincing me to download AIM singlehandedly, solidifying my perpetual online-ness. I won't go into details, because a lot of you people who read this already know how the story goes.

During sixth grade my teacher had me run the class website- It was nothing major, though. I just had to get on the computer every day and put up the day's homework, and weekly put up the new spelling words. Stuff like that. It became such a mundane and quick job, however, that I started to sneak onto the world wide web when I was done every day. That's when I came across the very first message board I frequented- GameTalk. It was and still is a very, very spammy place, where the threads were ordered by when they were created and faded away, even if it was a popular thread. There were plenty of "[person's name] SUCKS!!1111!!" threads, and I can't remember a post that consisted of more than three sentences.

The girl and I tended to email each other a lot as well, but I didn't have my own e-mail address. I shared it with my parents, who knew nothing about this girl. It became a neverending mission to intercept every message from her address in our inbox before anybody else could see it. So, logically, I routinely checked the inbox at school one day.

Something about the Yahoo page was different, though I couldn't quite tell what. Everything was more.. Blue, and stylish. Upon closer inspection, I noticed a difference in the Yahoo logo itself. It had "DSL" written below it.

At first, I couldn't believe it. I checked several times, just to be sure, and everything stayed the same. Needless to say, I rushed home very quickly and turned on the computer immediately. Lo and behold, the internet was moving about ten times faster.

I got on to Kazaa.com and started downloading immediately.

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This is a two-part thing. Come back next time for the exciting conclusion to this myOtaku post!
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