1. EARLIEST YEARS (1994-1999)

Note: many place names have been redacted and all personal names are fake.

I was born in the city of [HOMETOWN] in the state of [HOME STATE] in the USA on 1994/07/18. The first of many, many things I am thankful to my parents for is one of the most important early decisions: they did not circumcise me. Childhood circumcision for both males and females is a barbaric, hideous practice and should be illegal. I am very privileged to have an intact penis and can only offer my most heartfelt sympathy for those who have not been lucky enough to avoid the mutilation. The first word I ever spoke was "light".

I have a few scattered, barely comprehensible snapshots of my first few years in [HOMETOWN], but my earliest memories of consequence are from a period of a few years when my family lived in Kansas.

Some of my earliest memories are from the dead of winter, which has been my favorite season ever since. I remember sledding down a hill at a nearby park and deliberately crashing into the nearby shrubbery for fun. I would take a moment to enjoy being in the midst of the barren bushes and marvel at the latticework of their branches before doing it all over again. I also remember waking up early in the morning with a bowl, going out into the backyard, and scooping up the freshly-fallen, clean snow to bring inside, sprinkle with sugar, and make "snow ice cream" out of. These memories are very precious to me. Seeing the value in the cold and the snow and a dedication to opposing anything that exacerbates global heating is thus part of my very being because the earliest and most central memories I have are related to the snow.

In addition to snow and cold, my other biggest memory from my time in Kansas is the time I spent with our next-door neighbor Veronica. Veronica was a few years older than me. She often played the role of something of an older-sister figure since I was and remain an only child. The most important thing she introduced me to was newspaper comics. She had a number of anthologies of Peanuts, Ziggy, Garfield, and, the ones I most grew attached to, The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes. I spent hours with these sprawled out on the floor. In fact, I owe a lot of my above-average literacy to how much time I spent reading these newspaper comics. She didn't have any capeshit "comic books" though, just anthologies of newspaper strips. Perhaps that explains why I never became interested in comic books. I would constantly ask for anthologies like these as presents from my parents on special occasions and would read the newspaper to keep up with many different strips.

2. KINDERGARTEN TO SECOND GRADE (1999-2001)

My time in Kansas was limited and when I was still very young I returned to [HOMETOWN] and entered into first grade. [HOMETOWN] is a hot city in the southern half of the US, so my beloved snow was torn away from me. I was always a bit jealous and melancholy when watching Christmas specials of any cartoon or reading comics like Calvin and Hobbes. Over the course of my life, [HOMETOWN] has only warmed more and more and the snowless winters here are much more wet and muggy than they were when I was a child. It is not a unique story and I will never forget what politicians who refused to transfer our economy away from fossil fuels, the dumbfucks who vote for them, and the lying corporate scum in the fossil fuel industry and their propagandists who are behind it all have done to this beautiful planet in the name of short-term profits. In any case though, even in the late 90s [HOMETOWN] was always a pretty ugly city. While I was fortunate enough to be part of a generation who played outside in my formative years, growing up in a big city that lacked physical attractiveness and had typically nightmarish American urban design, I always preferred indoor activities like reading comics, even from a young age.

My memories of first grade are largely pleasant but only a few are particularly distinct.

I remember working on an art project where we were gluing various things together. I don't know if it was a picture, a sculpture, or whatever else, but I had a big tub of beads. I took one of those beads, which was golden-colored, and started rolling it around my face for fun. I pretended that the bead was some kind of alien probe landing on a planet with mysterious terrain (my cheeks and face). Eventually the bead came across a "cave" which was my nostril. I started putting the bead up my nostril and got it in far enough that I couldn't get it out again. I calmly went up to a teacher and apparently said "I have a golden bead in my nose!" Then I was taken to the nurse and they pushed it out. This story makes me sound like a fucking retard when I write it out, lmao. But I was like five, what do you expect?

I took part in a school play about the story of Thanksgiving and the pilgrims, as most kids did at the time. I wanted to be the narrator and instead of acting out any particular "role". I remember greatly enjoying the feeling of being "above" and "removed from" everything and perhaps I can trace this back to a tendency I've always had towards wanting to step back and look at my existence and others from a "higher" and more reflective place (perhaps that's why I'm writing this right now, who knows?).

I had a number of friends at school who I never really saw outside. One of the ones I remember most was a ginger girl named Megan. Me and her both loved insects and would spend much of our break time out in the garden and playground digging through the dirt and looking for earthworms, pill bugs, ladybugs, or whatever else we could find. I'm not sure how much of it is just rose-tinted glasses but I remember there being many more insects in the city when I was a child than there are now. Another thing you can thank city pollution and global heating for. Anyway, Megan was a weird girl and a little manic. A friend of mine from this school who I later met again when we were teenagers confirmed that she thought Megan was "crazy". I only went to have a playdate with Megan once, and it felt a little awkward and weird to me as a kid. Her house was two stories and I remember it being very spacious and vast, but that's probably just me being a kid. When I arrived, she was busy cleaning her room or something and her mom invited me to sit on the couch and wait. I passed the time looking through a coffee table book with artsy black and white photographs of seashells. When Megan was finally ready, we went upstairs to her room. She had rented the VHS of the Rugrats in Paris: The Movie and invited me to watch it. However, she said it had an evil lady in it who abducted the main kids, skinned them, and wore their skin. That sounded creepy to me and I passed. Did she just make it up to scare me or did she have some hyperrealistic-blood-red-eyes lost-episode creepypasta version of it? We may never know.

Another kid who I had vivid memories of was named Colton. Now, Colton was a year or so younger than me at least, maybe even more. In any case, he behaved like it. I don't think Colton was quite ready for school. Nowadays, maybe he would have been put in a special ed program. Colton was a little shit, but he made me laugh and I liked playing with him. That said, he didn't treat me with the same kindness. He would get angry quickly and sometimes would bite my arm when he was frustrated. He also liked to taunt me sometimes. I remember him talking about monster trucks and saying "I'm going to ride in one and crush your mom's car!" Of course I wasn't stupid and it's not like I really believed he would, but I realized that he was saying something rude to me and that bothered me. My parents urged me to stop hanging out with him because I was becoming too upset by his mean behavior. But I've always been attracted to and interested in weirdos and outsiders, sometimes to my own detriment. Sometimes it meant I would do something very honorable, like trying to be good friends with and including the girl with a developmental disability in our class when playing (my parents tell me I did this, but I don't remember). On the other hand, sometimes it meant I would have much more patience than I should have for people like Colton. But eventually, his reckoning came. I remember one day he was out on the playground and started showing me his dick. He then said "I'm gonna pee out here in front of everyone! Let's do it together!" I tried to get him to stop and refused to join because I knew this was a bad, bad idea. So I just removed myself and stood apart, watching it unfold. The next events felt like they happened in slow motion: he pulled out his wiener and took a big piss near a bunch of kids, waving it around and laughing. Some teachers started running over in a panic and dragged him off. He would be expelled for this (apparently it was a kind of last straw as they had known he wasn't really ready to be in school yet). I just sat there thinking "I was friends with this kid? What the hell was wrong with me?" I didn't really miss him after he was gone.

The school was more oriented around "activities" than distinct "classes". But we did have a few special "classes" where we moved to a new area, namely PE, music, and art. I LOVED drawing as a kid (probably due to comic influence) and spent a ton of my free time doodling all kinds of stuff. So you might think that art class was my favorite, but it was actually the exact opposite. In art class, we had to have some kind of direction to our process, and that made me frustrated. I hated being constrained and just wanted to draw freely whatever I wanted. The best part of art class was the last five minutes or so where we could draw whatever we wanted. I remember that art class was on Monday and after art class we lined up to move to the next area. I looked back at the art room and thought to myself "This is the best part of my entire week, because I just finished art class, so now this moment is the furthest I am from having to go back!" Pretty harsh, lol.

Lastly, the earliest crush I remember having was in first grade as well, although it was a very superficial one. If I remember correctly, her name was Alyssa. She was in the second grade and in the classroom next to ours, which meant we saw each other sometimes but not that often. I remember she had a kind of bob-cut and had dirty blonde/brown hair (a similar shade to mine, actually). She also had glasses. I was a meganekko fan from as early on as I can remember and I thought she was very pretty. I remember giving her a card for one Valentine's, but not in person (I dropped it in her cubby/locker thing). I don't remember what happened after that.

One of the last memories I have of first grade is September 11, 2001. I was at school when it happened and there was a big panic. They sent us all home early because no one knew if there were more attacks coming in other major cities or not. I had no clue what was going on, of course. I just remember eating my packed lunch at home watching cartoon reruns while my mom was bothered in the other room. It was probably for the best that they waited to explain what was going on after the fact. One of the things I most remember being struck by was a certain dedication in a newspaper, I think from the one year anniversary on 2002/09/11, that had the names of all 2,996 victims in alphabetical order. The idea of that many people dying was hard for a small child like me to get my head around.

3. EARLY HOMESCHOOLING YEARS (2001-2003)

a. Shift to Homeschooling

You might notice I keep saying "first grade" instead of "elementary school". There's a reason for that. When I entered the second grade, I started having some serious problems. According to my parents, I had a lot of ASD-like symptoms. I was never officially diagnosed with autism or Aspergers and to be honest I'm not sure where I am on the spectrum, if anywhere. But at that age I had serious problems in large groups and switching from one activity to another. From my perspective, I remember suddenly feeling completely in over my head and unable to keep up. I remember looking at a math worksheet and realizing that I had no idea how to do anything on it. I gave up in despair and started drawing random faces after scratching out all the problems, feeling guilty but also hopeless to change my situation since I had fallen so far behind. I felt something similar for a reading exercise. We had these little workbooks divided into sections with a themed paragraph and then a few questions. I remember I had flipped ahead and saw one about a rover on the moon or Mars or somewhere. I was really curious about it and looked forward to reading it, but on the day I finally got there I felt horrible because even this one I was interested in I was unable to understand and had to give up. It was crushing.

After a discussion with the school counselors, my parents considered two options: medication or homeschooling. First we tried medication, but I had some really bad side effects and this made my parents decide to stop. I was first on Ritalin, and while it helped my attention span, it also completely killed my appetite and made me start getting way too thin. Next I went on Zoloft, and that made me unnaturally, unusually giddy and manic. I remember camping outside in the backyard in a tent when I was on Zoloft because I was too excited and wanted to try something different than sleeping in my bed. My parents were rightfully disturbed by these side effects and decided that I was too young to be on medication. This meant that they had to consider the other option, which they ultimately went with. Between 2nd grade of elementary school and 7th grade of middle school, I was homeschooled.

Being homeschooled has advantages and disadvantages. But on the whole, I think my parents made a decision which helped me in ways I can only now appreciate. First and foremost, I should make it clear that my parents are very non-religious. My father grew up going to a very fundamentalist Pentecostal church. While his family are still extremely religious, they are some of the kindest and most loving people you would ever meet. But he grew up with a lot of fear of hell because of the church they went to and therefore grew to be a skeptic with a deep dislike of organized religion. My mother went to a Catholic grade school but her family was not strongly religious and mostly only went to church on special occasions like midnight mass on the 24th, so she did not have the same strict set of beliefs to embrace or reject. The stereotype of homeschoolers is that they are all part of crazy right-wing fundamentalist Christian families who refuse to teach them modern science or stuff like that. And those certainly exist. But the other side of homeschooling families is often families of far-left granola hippie types. My family was much closer to this end and these were most of the other homeschooling families who we networked with and engaged with (homeschooled families usually join broader groups so their kids can still partake in social events).

What are the advantages of homeschooling? It depends a lot on the country you are in. Of course, for kids with conditions like autism it is often the only way to effectively have them learn. But even for neurotypical children, homeschooling has a lot of advantages. While it requires a lot of dedication, it keeps your child out of American public schools and often for less than the tuition of a fancy private school. Anything to avoid those retard spree-shooter factories is worth it. I think that kids who are homeschooled also become less easily manipulated by peer pressure and become more skeptical, shrewd thinkers as a result, often with conviction and confidence for things like group discussions and meetings in the future. And as incidents of bullying are rarer, homeschooled kids usually become kinder and gentler people. Also, for a historical perspective, it's worth remembering that for the vast majority of human history "homeschooling" has been the norm. The public school is a very recent invention. Not that the fact that it's been the norm for so long inherently means it's good, but this is evidence at least that it's not something totally out there and untested.

However, there are some disadvantages to homeschooling that I do want to mention in the interest of fairness. First and foremost, it is very difficult to teach a child everything at the same level as a school if you are just one person. Of course, American politicians don't give a shit about education and siphon all school funding to the already obscene military budget, so a homeschooled kid in the states is still probably better off than a lot of others. But I, for example, was very bad at math and remain so because my mother had so much trouble teaching it. You can hire tutors and hopefully rely on other external resources for that kind of thing, but there might always be pitfalls like this. From a social perspective, it can be lonely and isolating. My case was exacerbated as I was an only child. While ideally homeschoolers should be involved in groups with other homeschoolers that allow them to have some social interaction and meet more kids, it's pretty much always a much smaller pool. You don't have the larger selection of a "normal" school and thus are less likely to find someone you really click well with. And when there aren't new kids constantly entering, graduating, moving in, etc. it can leave you with only the same friends for years. Not that that's inherently bad, but I think it probably contributed to me having a harder time making new friends. Of course that's something we all struggle with as we get older, but homeschooling can add to this. Homeschooling in some sense isolates you from the broader cultural world. This is, mostly, a good thing, since mainstream culture is a cancer on society in pretty much every country. However, it can lead to some kind of traumatic transitions, as all homeschooled kids eventually have to enter a university and/or get a job. Those are probably served better by "normal" schools. Although most of that could be fixed by making our universities and jobs better, in the meantime it can leave homeschooled kids with an unfairly harder transition. Lastly, the biggest problem I had with homeschooling and why I was glad to eventually stop it is that I really found it hard to go from "parent mode" to "teacher mode" and back with my mother. I found it much more psychologically comforting and manageable to have a "teacher" who was only at school and removed from my private life. Being able to compartmentalize "school stuff" and "private stuff" made things much less stressful and much more clear to me. Children need a lot of structure like this.

With all that said, I am very thankful that I got to experience both worlds. In my earlier, more formative years, I was homeschooled. In my later, more mature years, I went to a "normal" school (it was a private school which was pretty unique in its own way, but it was indeed a school). I think this is a pretty ideal way for anyone to do it and highly recommend any potential parent to do so if they are lucky enough to be able to.

There were no "grades" in homeschooling, so the years 2001-2007 or so will be more defined by my personal interests and developments. It's often hard for me to get an accurate chronology of all the varied experiences during these years. The great advantage to my homeschooling was how much I was able to develop a genuine sense of curiosity and desire for knowledge that I could direct myself. I loved learning. I was lucky enough to live a block over from a public library in my neighborhood and spent so many days walking over with my mom and finding books on whatever grabbed my interest. In my earliest years, I was most interested in biology and anthropology, or, in kid terms, "animals" and "countries". I would rent books about animals and plants and about countries and people, the more strange and obscure the better. I had a genuine interest in most subjects with one notable exception: math. I hated it. I felt like there was no real "content" to math. And that was why I disliked it. It was unbearably dry to me. I liked to learn about things where there was a need for mystery and imagination, where I could "picture" and visualize something to myself. This is still the case, although I do have a greater respect for a lot of "abstract" things in fields like philosophy and physics. Math will never be my passion, but I am thankful for my mom being serious about me learning my times tables and any other fundamentals. It's worth knowing these things even when I do have a calculator in my pocket at all times now.

Being homeschooled gave my parents a lot of freedom to take me on trips and vacations and they held this to be very important during my developmental years. I am extremely grateful for the possibility I had to visit far-away places, especially now that I believe in limiting the amount of airplane trips we take so as to not create excess carbon emissions. One of the first I remember was New York City. I wasn't old enough to appreciate things like museums. Those would come from other times when I returned to NYC over the years, so the degree of my enjoyment as a 5/6 year old was being on the top of tall buildings like the Empire State and World Trade Center (yes, this was pre-2001) and the Central Park Zoo. We also went to Hawaii (main island) and the coral reefs were truly remarkable. I imagine they've deteriorated a lot over the years. I also got to see an active volcano.

Of course, since I love cold and snow, the two trips from this era that I am most thankful for are trips to Alaska and Colorado. I was young enough for the Alaska trip to not remember a lot in detail. It was a cruise ship that departed in Vancouver and sailed to Anchorage, stopping in Juneau along the way. I got to see some glaciers for the first time and was bewitched and enthralled. I didn't go in the absolute dead of winter which I still would like to some day. It might be the only place to get the kind of cold and snow I want eventually... Fuck Anchorage and Juneau though, too warm. I want to live in Utqiagvik! While we were on the ship, every day the person who cleaned our room had a lot of fun and gave us a little surprise: he (she?) would arrange my many stuffed animals into some scene! The one I remember most is one of the stuffed animals (of a squid, with long tentacles) setting up one holding upon a kids' book I had and opening it so all the other stuffed animals could see, like it was teaching them in front of a class. Every day had something like that. It was really wonderful. On the way back home, we stopped at a family friend's home in Seattle and also saw the Redwood Forest in Northern California. I was older when we were in Colorado, and we went with my mom's whole family. My mom's family has a long history of liking biking, skating, and other outdoor sports like that, so most of my older cousins spent their time snowboarding. I tried it and didn't like it, so I just enjoyed sledding, building snowmen, etc. It was paradise. I have to reiterate every time that I've been very privileged to have a family that could afford to take me on nice trips and I'm eternally grateful.

Though I was homeschooled, I had my share of friends as a kid. But in general I never liked large groups. Most of my friends were the kids of my mother's many friends. My mother is an artist and she had a lot of connections to other artistic people in [HOMETOWN]. These were her friends. I mentioned one already, Maxwell, who was one of my oldest and closest friends. A few other important ones will be brothers Daniel and Levi who lived within walking distance from my house, female friend Ida, and oldest kid of the bunch Riley who lived out by a big patch of woods. All of them besides Maxwell were homeschooled like I was, at least at this point in time. Besides random playdates with these friends, every Thursday I went to an art class in the neighborhood taught by a friend of the family, a lovely, lively old woman from Israel named Miriam who had lived in Paris in the 1960s and many other places over the globe. She was a woman of deep compassion, creativity, and warmth who touched the lives of everyone she came in contact with. I loved her deeply as a second grandmother and will cherish the time I spent with her as a child forever. She died a few years ago and I still miss her. Daniel and Levi went to the same classes, but I didn't make many friends there besides them. I was friendly to everyone there, but they were the only two who I actually saw outside of class.

b. Cartoons and Other "Childish" Hobbies

One thing about my time as a child set me greatly apart from other kids my same age. I was uniquely sensitive to and aware of the fact that I had "childish" interests. Perhaps it was just a side-effect of being very mature for my age. I could have conversations with adults on a level that a lot of other kids my age could not, and was often complimented for being smart and mature for my age. But I would at the same time be deathly afraid of watching cartoons in front of adults. I suppose having some awareness of what was "adult" and "mature" early on also made me aware of the cartoons I watched as the opposite of that: "childish" and "immature". And yet, I still loved them. Indeed, I spent a lot of my free time watching Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network and it was probably the closest connection I had to whatever was the "mainstream" of other kids my age. I could watch them in front of my parents, because I wasn't afraid that they would judge me negatively for it. But if an adult that wasn't one of my parents came into the room, I had to turn the TV off immediately. I just felt like they would think I was a baby and stupid if they saw it. And I understood that these cartoons were very much "not for them" so I didn't want to bother them by forcing them to be in the same room as my childish shows. I know this is very unusual so I'm not sure why it was so strong for me. Even at my friends' houses, I had to run out of the room if we were watching a cartoon and his parents came in. They thought I was very weird because of it.

Around my parents, I could watch cartoons. And they often enjoyed watching them with me, so I'm not sure why I thought other adults would be any different. But during the theme songs or any other musical number, I had to turn it off. I was very very strongly embarrassed by listening to music, dancing, etc. around adults or even other kids my own age. I never allowed myself to listen to any music around other people besides very obviously "adult" things like classical symphonies etc. until I was in high school. I suppose I saw it as an extension of the "childish" phenomenon and didn't want to appear immature, so I had to take on a very somber and serious comportment around everyone who was an adult so they would keep respecting me for my maturity. This was also part of the reason I never played any video games as a child and we never had a game console in the house until I bought a PS3 in college. The other reason was that my mother was very overly paranoid of violence in video games and didn't want to have them in her house. Later on, she would explain that she regrets being this strict and that she cut me off from the defining hobby of my generation in my younger years because of it. I am thankful for her feelings, but I don't have any memories of wanting to play a game and being kept from it at any point, so it's not quite the right picture. For me video games were just as embarrassing as pop music or cartoons, so I didn't want to have anything to do with them. She also wasn't all that strict in some ways. I could play anything at a friend's house, for example. In general, she didn't believe in enforcing rules that kept everything secret from me. She knew how kids were and how they could keep secrets. She told me that even if she banned something from the home, I could just do it at a friends' house. So she explained that it was ultimately up to me, but that she didn't want games in her house. Regardless, I never wanted to play them that much at friends' houses either. I never knew how to use a controller and was too self-conscious, and kind of "looked down on" them anyway. So I relegated myself to the role of watching them play, and found that fun in its own right.

Of course, this whole ideology was ridden with weird exceptions and contradictions, as any child's worldview would be. Why, for example, was I never embarrassed dressing up and trick or treating on Halloween? Quite to the contrary. It was my favorite holiday. Why was I not embarrassed at reading comic strips? I suppose I thought if I was "reading" them, then that was more "mature" than just watching a cartoon, but it's not like I was reading Charles Dickens. Why was not I not embarrassed at playing computer games, which we had a few of? I suppose I thought it was because computers were more like an "adult" thing and less like a "toy", but for that matter I was actually not embarrassed playing with toys like stuffed animals at all! And I'm not sure why this developed around the time I was six or seven, already far past watching the most "childish" shows of all, which I never had this self-consciousness about. I can't answer any of these questions now, because I can no longer understand that mindset. In any case, it is unfortunate that I thought this way as a kid. In a lot of ways, I missed out on a lot of childhood because of it. It's one reason I am so anxious to make up for it by indulging in manga and video games today.

While living this sort of double-life, I never really deprived myself of watching cartoons. I watched them for hours and hours and don't regret it at all. I had typical taste. Besides older stuff like Wallace and Gromit, Tom and Jerry, and Looney Tunes, I liked pretty much all the standards on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network: Rugrats, Rocko's Modern Life, The Angry Beavers, The Amanda Show, All That!, Hey Arnold!, Johnny Bravo, Dexter's Laboratory, Cow and Chicken, The PowerPuff Girls, Ed, Edd, and Eddy, and so on. I was never that big a fan of Disney as a kid and never wanted to go to Disneyland or anything like that (I would die of embarrassment even if I did like Disney things). I liked Winnie the Pooh and that was about it. I was never into superheroes or capeshit like that though, and never liked a lot of the early Toonami anime stuff either. I liked shows that were funny more than anything, and I didn't have the patience for continuing storylines like that.

I felt less embarrassed watching cartoons with my cousins. While I'm an only child, I have a lot of cousins because my mother has five siblings and my father has two. My father's family lived further away but my mother's family were all pretty close, so I saw them more and was close to them. In particular I watched a lot of cartoons with my two older male cousins Kevin and Tanner. I have a lot of memories of watching with them, but one in particular sticks out: the first time I ever saw what would soon become my all-time favorite cartoon, Courage the Cowardly Dog.

Me, Kevin, and Tanner were sprawled around my family's chaise lounge watching Cartoon Network. It was late at night and I remember being bewitched and a bit creeped out by how weird and different the show was. It was the King Ramsey episode and the one after that where Eustace's foot grows into a big purple fungal monstrosity with talking toes. A lot of kids say that Courage scared them, but it never scared me. I recognized the weird, creepy feeling but that was precisely what was so enticing about it. Courage was never a particularly funny show, even as a kid. If I wanted to laugh, I knew that I was much better off with SpongeBob or Ed, Edd, and Eddy for example. But I loved how imaginative and creative every episode was and the often eerie, surreal, and mysterious mood the whole show was steeped in. I can watch it today and of course it looks a bit less impressive, but I still attach a great degree of nostalgia to it for that reason. I even remember watching the final episode of the series, "Perfect", and somehow knew it was the final one. I think they might have announced it as such. Or maybe it just felt so final that I somehow intuited that it was. Ordinarily a kid would be sad his favorite show was ending, but for me I felt weirdly at peace with it. I felt like it was a perfect ending and gave it a great amount of finality and closure. And that is one other reason that Courage remains so good I think. It didn't overstay its welcome like other cartoons from the time. Courage the Cowardly Dog never scared me. The show that I found uncomfortable as a kid was Invader Zim. But when I was a bit older I started to remember that show with more fondness as I went through my goth/chuuni phase that that show was made to appeal to. But this was after it had already finished airing so I was rarely able to catch it, unfortunately.

I never watched a lot of Japanese anime back then, despite my current love for it. I watched Pokémon and liked the cards and toys (never learned to play the card game and never had any of the vidya though). But I got over it pretty quickly. I was just one of many kids who caught the Poke-fever and had it pass just as quickly. I also remember sometimes watching Sailor Moon and probably having some of my first 2-D crushes. But I never got to watch it too often, unfortunately. The only other early 2-D character I remember having a crush on was Phoebe from Hey Arnold! (canonically cucked by Gerald's BBC... the eternal American). I always liked nerdy Asian girls, in real life and in cartoons. Thankfully I didn't get funneled into the furry pipeline like so many other American mongrels forced to grow up on cucked shows with no sexy girls. Thank god.

I was mature for my age so my parents also let me watch The Simpsons with them sometimes. Of course I could only understand the simplest slapstick humor from it, but I was a fan. But I had to stop watching when we saw some episode with Sideshow Bob and I got really scared by it. This left me with a kind of trauma about anything Simpsons-related. Any time I saw anything Simpsons-related, I had to leave the room or otherwise try to excuse myself. I started to dread watching TV when Burger King or McDonald's had Simpsons toys because I risked seeing a commercial for them. I had a friend with some Simpsons memorabilia in his house and made all the excuses I could to not visit his house. And of course if I ever saw the show on TV, it freaked me out. I never brought this up to anyone, because I had some fear of acknowledging it at the same time. I felt like if I expressed it in language, it would make it too "real". It felt like a negative force I didn't want to draw out and encourage. Of course, this was hard because I did realize that The Simpsons was really really funny! I wanted to watch it and acknowledge the humor of it while also being afraid of it. It was strange, because in a way I began perpetuating my fear of this show simply for its own sake. I was beyond the point of finding Sideshow Bob particularly frightening. There was stuff on Courage the Cowardly Dog that was way scarier, after all. It all came to a head one day when I was at my friend Maxwell's house and he was about to start watching The Simpsons. I started to excuse myself to wait it out in another room, but suddenly had a revelation: "You know what? I'm tired of running. This is a cartoon and it can't hurt me. If Maxwell can watch it and not be hurt, then so can I. I'm going to watch it and see if it actually is as terrifying as I've been telling myself it is." Of course, it wasn't. It was hilarious! This was a very instructive experience for me. It made me realize that the terror is all in me and how I choose to respond to something. A 2-D drawing can't do anything to me. I think this explains the way I've come to view fiction as such a freeing and liberating medium where anything is allowed. It's why I never made the mistake of being afraid of something like lolicon. And I owe it to this early education. A lot of people never have it.

Most of my friends and cousins had video games, so I absorbed a lot second hand even if I wasn't the one playing. One of the people who also played games, interestingly, was my grandmother. Besides having a lot of computer games like Myst, she also had a Super Nintendo Entertainment System for her grandkids to play and played some games on it herself too. The one I remember seeing her play was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. She had a few save files, all named after her male grandkids, which was wholesome. I was absolutely mesmerized watching her play and explore that world. There were other games I remember that are standards. My friends were mostly Nintendobabies and had Nintendo 64s and Gamecubes. The one I remember thinking looked the most fun was Super Mario Sunshine. But one of the most formative memories I had was spending the night at my friend Maxwell's house playing games. That night we played some console port of Lemmings, which I thought was really fun and entertaining in its own right, but it was the next game we tried that really left an impression on me. Maxwell's stepfather was an artsy guy from Turkey and he had a game of his own that he allowed us to borrow. What was that game? Megami Ibunroku: Persona! Of course, it was the horribly butchered American version, but it was still incredible to us. Neither of us had ever played a game similar to it and we really had no clue what to make of it. We kept playing, somehow fascinated and curious despite the fact that we were impatient babbies. I remembered the opening line from that game for years, which is Zhuangzi's quote about the butterfly. It was the first place I ever heard that quote and my memory of it far outlived the game for years.

c. Reading, Painting, and Other "Mature" Hobbies

At the same time that I enjoyed cartoons and toys and all that stuff that kids my age do, my pretending to be "mature" and "serious" and "adult" about everything was far from just a LARP. I did have a lot of legitimate interests in things like art and painting. [HOMETOWN], for all its faults, has some great art museums, and my parents took my aesthetic education seriously, which meant I spent a lot of time in them. My favorite pieces of art that I experienced sometimes in museums but mostly in books were the paintings of surrealists like Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and, my favorite of all even today, Yves Tanguy. I spent hours trying to draw these paintings and similar stuff like that. There is a term in Japanese aesthetics called yuugen which is perhaps best translated as "mysterious profundity". It calls attention to things that are mysterious and impossible to fully comprehend but hint at something larger than ourselves. I became convinced, as I am today, that all great art must do this and chased after anything that gave me this feeling. Of course, as a child, I would simply sum this up in the word "weird". From a young age I had no interest in fully understanding or "comprehending" something. Something you can fully understand is something you can throw out because you don't need it anymore, and I wanted to experience great art that would last a long time.

One interest came from a pretty weird place and it's kind of humorous in retrospect. My friend Maxwell had me watch a very stupid movie called Ace Ventura 2: When Nature Calls which basically features Jim Carrey acting like a complete goofball for 90 minutes. We watched this movie and adored it. Maxwell dressed up as Ace Ventura for Halloween one year, in fact. Honestly, some parts of the movie still make me laugh really hard (the infamous rhino scene) even if I admit that the movie is shit. The movie is set in Africa and features scenes of Carrey doing undercover work in some remote tribes. Nowadays it could never be made because the SJW freaks would scream about how politically incorrect it is. But the effect it had on me was actually the complete opposite. I became deeply interested in tribes like those depicted in the film. I started reading National Geographic and researching various tribes in the library to see if there were any that were similar to what I saw in the film. This interest soon outpaced that film and I became very interested in traditional tribal customs and cultures all over Africa, but in Kenya and Ethiopia especially. It was my dream to go visit and become part of the Maasai tribe.

I'm not sure what drew me to these tribes in particular. I suppose part of it was a natural curiosity at just how different a way of life could be from everything I was used to. I was especially struck by and interested in the way that nudity was so casual and accepted among them. Perhaps part of it was the natural curiosity of any American kid who sneaks a National Geographic to see some tribal booba. But I feel like it went deeper than that. I found something very refreshing and interesting about just how different a way of life seemed possible in these tribes. I fantasized about joining them. I even tried to make some of my own chalk paint to decorate my body a few times out of curiosity and imitation. But in the back of my mind I realized that I was a slave to my surroundings in many ways. If I lived like this, I would miss going to museums, I would miss going to the movie theater, I would miss watching TV, and so on. It was a difficult balance and I felt torn about it. Maybe I would have been more interested to learn about tribes in the US and Canada who grapple with the same struggle of the appeal of the modern world versus the deep sense of meaning and belonging of living in a communal, tribal structure. But I seemed to require some degree of nudity as a prerequisite to be interested. Of course, I eventually abandoned this because I realized that I liked the cold too much to want to live somewhere where you could be naked all the time.

As I said before, I deprived myself of listening to a lot of poppy and "fun" music because I was afraid of how it would make me look in front of others. This was before smartphones and before I was using the internet freely, so I had no way to sneak a listen in private. I was mostly dependent on family or friends playing music that I liked and secretly enjoying it while pretending to be indifferent. My mom is a bohemian artsy type and has many friends who are similar, so one of my particular formative experiences was in the car with my mom listening to what was certainly some of the wildest music I had ever heard: Diamanda Galás. Of course, I didn't know that's who it was, but now when I remember what it sounded like I'm pretty sure it has to have been. I remember this deeply because I closed my eyes and imagined a whole little scene around the piece: It was a desolate wasteland of sorts with an oppressive, black sky. The landscape was rubble and broken buildings with wires and poles jutting out everywhere. There was a lone man walking through it, but the whole time these strange voices were calling out and he could hear them. The voices (Galás's voice and all the echoes/doubling effects) were a sort of magical ritual chant from these blue female imp creatures who lived underground. If I had to say what they looked like, they were somewhat like Midna from Twilight Princess (not exactly though, this was before that game came out so I'm just using it as an approximation). But they were more simplistic and angular with big thick outlines like characters from The PowerPuff Girls or Dexter's Laboratory. There was a whole colony of these female imps underground in a cavern, huddled together where their leader was calling into a sort of microphone and transmitting her voice to the man above the surface. The rest were swelling and raising their arms, summoning some god or creature or something. It was a powerful vision and was one of the first experiences I had with listening to "unusual" music and seeing where my imagination took me while doing so. This is something I still do to this day.

d. Edward Gorey, Chuunibyou Phase, and the Beginnings of a Worldview

I never stopped being interested in comics and illustrations, but I became interested in the real patrician stuff besides just whatever was in the newspaper at the moment. A lot of it was helped by my aunt Rachel, the oldest of my mother's five siblings and a very well-read woman who I've always been closer to than any other family member besides my parents. I found out a lot of great older illustrators just by looking through her library. Two particular ones I remember well are Gahan Wilson and Charles Addams. There was something more strange, out-there, and less suitable for the mainstream about their works and I felt something distinctive in the sense of time about reading older comics like those. But the most important older illustrator would be one I found not at aunt Rachel's house, but on my mother's own bookshelf...

I remember the night very clearly. It was a night like any other, and I was looking through a bunch of books I had never opened or even noticed before in a humble bookcase in the corner of the living room. On the bottom shelf, I found Amphigorey, an anthology of short illustrated books by Edward Gorey. I was captivated and bewitched. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. I sat there on the floor, so enthralled that I didn't even have a moment to carry the book off to the couch. For those who don't know, Edward Gorey was an illustrator and writer who worked in the second half or so of the 20th century, most prolifically during the 1960s and 1970s. Many people mistakenly think he was British because of a certain Victorian/Edwardian gothic tone that a lot of his works have, but he was 100% American. He provided illustrations for many other authors, but is most famous for his own works. They essentially take the form of children's picture books, being short stories that often rhyme with large illustrations, but the content is generally macabre, surreal, and gothic in tone, though often with a sort of Lewis Carroll-inspired sense of nonsense and whimsy. But you can't really understand what they're like until you read them yourself. I highly encourage anyone to.

The first story in this anthology I read was actually the last one in it, called The Remembered Visit. Why did I start at the end? Well, from a young age I was always fascinated with the "last" or "second to last" etc. in big collections like this. I suppose I became aware of the fact that people often have a tendency to overlook these at first glance because we become fatigued by the end. So I started here to avoid passing over the ending story and not giving it its full due. The story was one of Gorey's more "normal" stories. It had nothing surreal, nonsensical, or fantastic in it. It was a largely straightforward story about a young girl named Drusilla who is brought along on international cruises with her family and finds herself bored, listless, and lost in this world of adults and "sophisticated" things like museums and fine art. I always thought that "relating" to any character in a work of art is a deeply overrated and really pretty unsophisticated way of appreciating art. But on a personal level, the degree of connection I felt to this character is hard to explain. I too was a young kid trapped in an adult world for various reasons but unable to really find my place in either world. Skip to the next paragraph if you don't want to be spoiled, but Drusilla eventually meets a mysterious old man who gives her some beautiful pieces of rare paper and promises to someday in the future show her even finer specimens from his personal collection. Years later, she finds out the old man has died and takes out the pieces of paper he gave her. But the window is open and the wind blows them all away.

It was a simple, tragic little story but something about it moved me so deeply. I felt that in opening up this book of Gorey stories I had found something ancient and precious, a sort of repository of forgotten memories and dreams. I was absolutely hooked. I can't explain how much of an influence Edward Gorey had on my sense of art, of beauty, of drawing, and so on. Maybe more than anything it was the "tragic sense of life" that I first felt so clearly in these works. For the first time I had a great awareness of the beauty of sadness, melancholy, tragedy, and so on. Many of these stories were tragic and dark, but they never depressed me. They were stunningly moving, beautiful, and mysterious. These were more mature and deep than anything I had experienced until then, and everything before them felt immaterial and simple in comparison.

I can't think of a way to put this without it sounding like bragging, but over the course of my life I've noticed a lot of cases where in retrospect I see myself as being 3-5 years ahead of most other kids my age in terms of mental development. Of course that only goes for some things. In a lot of things I was very far behind. But one of the first ones I noticed was that I basically went through my "chuunibyou" or "goth" phase around the age of 8-10 rather than in my tween years like most others. Of course, if I was really to nail down what motivated me, it was a search for "weird" and "unusual" things more than "dark" or "edgy" things. But in a lot of cases those tended to overlap. It was strange because I was actually still rather easily afraid of scary movies at that time. I still closed my eyes whenever trailers came on for horror films. But I loved all sorts of dark, macabre, unusual things in the medium of literature or 2-D comics/illustrations. I suppose it was being able to hold it in my hands and have some degree of leverage and control over it that changed everything. Of course nowadays I'm the opposite and love horror films to death and am actually very hard to scare with them.

One of the first experiences I had with "horror" that I can trace back is reading a classic library book that tons of American kids my age have fond memories of: the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series with their distinctive, incredible illustrations. Many of the illustrations were creepy as hell, but I loved them. I read these over and over again, renting them from the local library until my parents finally bought me the physical editions. They never really scared me, interestingly. But I loved the eerie atmosphere and sense of strangeness. And it was a lot of fun to read those stories to my parents or other friends. I had a similar interest in reading things like anthologies of alleged stories of UFO encounters, cryptids, and so on. I deeply wanted to have a paranormal encounter but never was able to, so would read these fascinated at the possibility of something out of the realms of the easily comprehensible. Of course, the Edward Gorey books I loved fit in well with the more macabre atmosphere I was searching out.

I even had something of a "Wiccan phase". The first thing I remember related to this was a series of graphic novels about a character called Emily the Strange. I ate those up. They were the most goth thing you could imagine... perfect encapsulation of 2000s porto-Hot Topic edgy goth girl shit. It worked on me like a charm. I went through a whole phase of trying to be like her. I tried to become telepathic and read minds and stuff like that and had my parents take me to new age bookstores to get books about that stuff. My mom in fact went through something similar back in the 1970s and still had some old books about white magic and witchcraft and I eagerly read them. Eventually this all got a little scary to me. I remember having a bad dream where I had some magical die where if you rolled a "4" it would cause a gate to hell to open and for the earth to be flooded with zombies (the remake of Dawn of the Dead was coming out soon and I was very scared of the trailers). Of course, someone rolled a 4 with it and the rest played out as expected. I was scared of dealing with dark, demonic energies after that and abandoned trying to learn witchcraft. But I did continue to be interested in paranormal things like UFOs and desperately wanted to believe in something more than I could find in science.

Eventually this would have a downside. My parents were not religious at all, but I was never pushed towards being an "atheist" either. I had my fair degree of superstitious beliefs, even if just because I wanted to believe in something to discover something magical and unusual. I eventually found out about the Christian conception of heaven and hell at this age, largely when I spent time with my grandparents and other Christian cousins on my dad's side of the family over a few weeks one summer. They didn't force their beliefs on me, of course. I was always warned by my more hippie parents to avoid bad language and vulgar movies/etc. around my grandparents though because they were more conservative, but other than that things were normal and we didn't bring up religion. But I found out about everything just because I was curious and asked them a lot of questions.

I've always had a curious nature, but never a naturally skeptical one. Curiosity is natural to me, but skepticism is something I have to exercise. This can be a great asset or a great danger. This was especially true as a child. I was quick to believe things I heard. Of course, that didn't mean I always took it on exactly as it was said. The way I saw it was that there was always some level of truth in what I heard. Instead of hearing contrasting opinions and views and picking up some as "true" and leaving others behind as "false", my instinct has always been to assume that every view is somehow true and that seemingly opposed views have to be harmonized by looking at it from a "higher" perspective. There's an old legend about a number of blind men and an elephant. One touches the trunk and says that an elephant is long and thin like a snake, another touches the ear and says that an elephant is broad and flat like a palm leaf, another touches the tusk and says that it is sharp and pointy like a knife, and so on. All of them are "correct", but none of them have the full picture. My instinct has always been to do try do do this synthesis when I had contradictory information. As such, it made me very open to consider things I had no direct proof of. But the idea of hell was obviously terrifying to me. When I was petrified by it, my father had "the talk" with me and explained that he went through the same thing I did when he was a child. But he grew up to realize that there was no particular proof to that worldview. It was one thing that could happen to us when we died, but, in his words, "we could also all just drop out of some giant's butt!" That made me laugh and broke the tension. He explained his skeptical, rationalist, scientific worldview. I found it very refreshing that there was no proof of something like hell and found myself following in his footsteps. But a part of me also felt sad that, by the same logic, I had to reject believing in things like UFOs, cryptids, ghosts, and the like. But it was probably for the better that I was able to become rational early on. Later on, I would become introduced to Buddhist and Shintou thought and gain a greater awareness of how positive a force spirituality can really be if not constrained by an Abrahamic metaphysical picture.

e. Yellow Fever and Japanophilia: Early Symptoms

It was at the same center that Miriam held art classes at that I eventually went to a kind of summer camp centered around arts and creativity. I went a total of two years and then stopped, because it felt kind of overwhelming and strange being around all these children and doing so much in such a structured way when my homeschooling background hadn't really prepared me for it. But there was one thing that was most interesting about this and it was that it gave me access to a larger range of kids than I was ever around before. Most notably, it introduced me to the next major crush I can remember having (although my mom tells me there were others beforehand). Her name was Lindsey Wu. She was a Chinese-American girl with round glasses and long, straight black hair. My taste hasn't changed much over the years as those are still the kind of girls I like! I thought she was cute as could be. I had quite the crush on her and she consumed my thoughts ever since I saw her. I remember writing her a note saying "do you want to be friends?", with a choice for yes, no, or maybe. I gave it to her and sat back on the other side of the table. I remember her smiling and waving to me and giving me back the paper, and I don't remember being crushed, so I think the answer must have been good. However, she wasn't homeschooled so there wasn't any way to continue seeing her. She wasn't at the camp the next year. But I did end up seeing her again in an extracurricular acting class I took where we put on a play of Peter Pan together. I was very shy and not sure how to initiate things. I remember trying to write her a very mushy love poem and having my cousin Caroline look it over and help. Caroline was very pushy and assertive (in less polite language, she was a bitch... I never got along with her too well). I think she ended up re-writing most of it for me, haha. But I don't think I ever was able to give that poem to Lindsey. I still wonder what happened to her some days.

I didn't have a lot of close relations with girls in my early days. My parents weren't prudish about it or anything. I was just shy and embarrassed about having crushes, especially around my parents and other family. Maybe it was because I wasn't around girls too often as a homeschooler. The one exception was Ida. Ida was the only child of my mother's close friend Susan and we grew up together. Ida's mother Susan wasn't a bad mother by any means, but was often something of a "tiger mom" who pushed her daughter in her field of excellence. That field of exellence was ballet. Ida was a ballerina and had been performing since we were little kids. Ida was not Asian (her and her mother both had blonde hair and I believe Nordic ancestry), but there were a TON of Chinese and Japanese girls were in her ballet classes and I was often desperate to have her introduce me to them, but it never really worked out. She had this connection to so many other girls that I would get very flustered and shy when I went to one of her recitals or our family picked her up from class to play. However she was a pretty introverted girl in her own right and she never was able to play matchmaker for me. I'll talk more about that later on.

My whole life, I've always had some degree of Japanophilia. It's just been stronger and weaker at certain times. I'm not sure what the earliest exposure to Japanese things in my life was. Of course I watched Pokémon and Sailor Moon as a kid (shounen series like Dragon Ball Z weren't really for me back then), but my understanding of them as "Japanese" was dim. Now, my dad has always loved seafood, and that included sushi. He absolutely loved the stuff. So we grew up going to local sushi restaurants for special occasions. It always made it feel like entering a magical world. The mystical orient! Of course, I guarantee you most of the staff at those places were Chinese, Vietnamese, or Filipino, but as a kid I couldn't tell. What was authentic was the food. I at first only had the courage for tamago, ikura, and tobiko, just as any Japanese kid starts with. But I grew to love all sushi from my father's influence. My favorite of them all today is uni, which I picked up from him.

But there were things besides food which really helped me become a weeaboo. One extraordinary memory I had was seeing a museum exhibition of Japanese "pop" artists (meaning illustrators, not musicians). This included famous painters Murakami Takashi and Nara Yoshitomo before the former became really famous abroad. I was in awe of this exhibition and wanted it to last forever. I think part of it was repression from not being able to publicly acknowledge my love of cartoons and mascots. Here I could see incredibly expressive, cute, cartoony 2-D characters but it was in a museum so it was "sophisticated" or whatever. I loved this exhibit and started becoming interested in Japanese toys and plushes and stuff like that. Of course, I still felt constrained because things like Sanrio characters were only "for girls". But my parents got me a book of illustrations from the artists in this exhibit and I became obsessed with it. So now I had cute girls, great food, and amazing pop artists/illustrators to love from Japan. My interest in the country was growing.

4. LATER HOMESCHOOLING YEARS (2004-2007)

a. The "Old" Internet (Saith the Newfag)

When I divide my homeschooling years into "early" and "late", what I primarily use as a divider is when the computer and internet became the primary place I spent all my free time. But it's hard to find an exact date when this occurred. It was a gradual process between 2002 and 2003 when I began using the internet alone and more intensely than before, and by 2004 I was thoroughly spending all my time online.

Of course, I had used the computer in some way or another since I was a kid. My earliest memories of the computer are watching screensavers and being entertained for way longer than I should have been by the classics: "After Dark" (the flying toasters), the Microsoft 3D Maze, and, the king of them all, the 3D Pipes. After that, I remember playing computer games like Pajama Sam and Freddi Fish. My friend had RollerCoaster Tycoon and eventually my parents got me that one as well as Zoo Tycoon. I was introduced to a lot of classic internet stuff, probably way earlier than I should have been. But I am deeply grateful for my parents being lenient in letting me use the internet a lot early on because I got to experience the internet at its very best in the early 2000s. Early on I would just look up information about animals, countries, etc. like I did at the library. A kid using the internet to research, imagine that! Soon my friends introduced me to Neopets and I spent a lot of time there. And we all played the classic games eventually: Elasto Mania, N, The Impossible Quiz, Interactive Buddy, that one where you drag a rubber George W. Bush around a bunch of obstacles, and a million others too crappy to remember in detail. But the real breakout for me came when I discovered that there weren't just Flash games, but Flash animations as well.

The earliest I remember was the infamous "WE LIKE THE MOOOOOON" Quiznos commercial. Only true oldfags remember this one. I saw it on the TV with my dad and had complex emotions. It creeped me out but also made me laugh. We both remembered it and my dad soon showed me a newspaper article about it! Apparently the commercial was equally perplexing to the rest of the American public and this little human interest bit of the newspaper talked about what people thought of it. It also revealed the creator of the strange creatures: Joel Veitch, whose animations could be seen at rathergood.com (except it looked COMPLETELY different back then, of course... namely it actually looked good and had all the content reasonably close together and well-organized instead of being a gay and soulless array of white squares). Well, we all know what the next step was. I went to the site and started watching all the animations. Of course I adored them. I ended up sharing it with my friends but they didn't become as obsessed as I did. But eventually we would bond more because my friends Riley and Daniel as well as my cousin Tanner soon introduced me to some other classic Flash animations that were even better.

Daniel, Riley, and Tanner went on all the classic sites. Maxwell only went on the most friendly of them, Flashplayer.com. But the other three got to find the good shit on edgier sites like Newgrounds and AlbinoBlackSheep. I saw so many classics. "All Your Base Are Belong to Us", "It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time!!!", Madness Combat, "The 5th Avocado", "Mashed Taters", Star Wars Kid, "The Demented Cartoon Movie", "Bill Cosby Gangsta Rap", Numa Numa Yeah, and so on (who can remember the chronology of all of these?). If you were there for it, you know what it was like waiting 3+ minutes for one of these stupid little things to load. If you are a zoomie and you weren't, I can only convey it to a certain degree, but rest assured that it was the hottest shit. As a kid I wasn't really used to thinking in terms of these "accumulation" sites. I had the mentality of "you want to check out X, you go to X website". Ah, that's how it should always be! What a difference from the modern era. So I didn't browse Newgrounds or AlbinoBlackSheep that much on my own YET (eventually I would). Instead I spent more time with a few Flash creators who had their own websites.

The first one I remember Daniel and Riley introducing to me was Legendary Frog, which I watched a few times and liked at the time but didn't get too attached to for long. But the other ones would be defining for a long time to come: Weebl's Stuff, David Firth, and, especially, Homestar Runner. I loved the "Weebl and Bob" and "Salad Fingers" series (although the one with the nettles really fucked me up for a while), but Homestar Runner soon consumed my soul and I forgot about everything else on the internet. It massively influenced my sense of humor and I still find myself sometimes referencing it unconsciously. The games section of their site also made me more interested in gaming for the first time in my life, and I for once found myself playing games on my own initiative instead of just at friends' houses. Not that most of the games on that site were really that great, but still...

Besides Homestar Runner, there were so many other sites I browsed back then that it's hard to get an accurate chronology. And when I do, it feels way too short. There's no way I experienced all those sites in only a few years… and yet, it seems I must have. That's what being a kid is like I suppose. Time seems to move slower and things are more rich. A few months can become a massive, defining epoch of your life. And using the internet back in those days absolutely was for me. Besides Flash cartoons, I mostly found interesting sites from a certain book that I stumbled across in the "humor" section of our local big chain bookstore and had my parents buy me. That book was called 505 Unbelievably Stupid Web Pages. I have to admit that even as a kid, I absolutely hated the author's comments on each site. Whoever wrote this was the most painfully unfunny and annoying faggot I'd ever read anything by. But I learned to put up with it in order to find interesting new websites. Each website was ranked from 1-10 on the scales of "Abnormality", "Stupidity", and "Entertainment". Obviously, the high "Abnormality" websites were the ones I was most after, but there were a lot of interesting websites in this book, many of which you could tell weren't really that "stupid" or "weird" but were just there to fill up space. But they were cool, so who cares?

Internet history and archaeology is fickle and transient and always has been. I probably picked up this book around 2003-2004 and a great number of these sites, many of which were just random Geocities and Tripod vanity pages, were already dead and gone. The descriptions were only more tantalizing than ever because of it! I have several of the most influential sites I found from this book (that are still online) linked in the links section of my site, but there are a few of particular importance I should note here. One is called "Vector Park" and had some extremely relaxing, atmospheric, interesting little games that were more like widgets. It was another step closer to discovering the joy of video games, which I had constantly deprived myself from. The other great ones were two huge, sprawling, HTML maze art projects called "SuperBad" and "The Bad Scary Place". You have to really look at them to understand what they're all about. “” = " ’ = '

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