My wild vision quest from 20 years of forum going

[armadilloHD]

Hello,

You probably don't know me but I've taken on many personas throughout the years. Aoshishin7, darkversion7 (I really liked Final Fantasy 7), ArmadilloHD and more recently Captain Barky. I have been on forums since I was 10 years old, all the way back in 2003, when Finding Nemo came out.

Anyway, not that you should be interested in me, I'm just another of probably millions of kids who grew up on the internet in the '00s. But I am now 30, married with a daughter and I have been on the internet for 20 years. I've been feeling weirdly, deeply nostalgic, and have been on a sort of "vision quest", seeking out what scraps I can to piece together my online life during this time.

I started out in online forums on another Pokemon forum, pkmn.net, but pretty quickly moved onto other free forums for different fandoms. These were small communities, and the couple I can remember are a forum ran by some guy named "Fire God" and "The Factory", which were mostly roleplaying communities.

After a couple years I found my way to the Pokecommunity! My account here is 18 years old, and apparently I was a lot more prolific here than I remember, having hundreds of posts archived here, and I was a real jerk of a 12 year old! I had a real chip on my shoulder, probably because of my experience on another forum at the time.

The Fallout Shelter was an affiliate site of Fireball20xl, which was the webcomic aggregate site ran by the now infamous predator and p*** PsyGuy. It was essentially a large artist collective where the main form of art on the site was webcomics, and more specifically sprite comics, pixel art essentially.

I have to note that the fallout from this community because of the had admin's actions are...alarming. I don't want to rehash it here but I do want to raise awareness that many people my age were deeply traumatized by the actions of some of the high ups on this site. Please do your own research, I do want to raise awareness as a new father.

Sorry for the tangent, but yes, I was an asshole 12 year old, and I've worked my whole life to be less and less of an asshole over the years. The fallout shelter ran on clout, popularity, and technical skill in art. This gave me somewhat more developed pixel art skills than the average middle schooler, and so I was a very hyperactive and elitist jerk. Regardless, I do remember making some friends here but I don't know if anyone would remember me.

After this era I seem to have migrated to different roleplaying forums like Surreal Twilight, Fire Emblem Planet, and Gaia Online, where I would be active off and on until near the end of college in 2015.

This is what I've gathered so far, but I guess what I'm hoping by posting this is mostly for me, to have something out there that someone might see and remember me by? Some of the figures from The Fallout Shelter are still around as independent artists, but there's not many people I feel like I can share and reminisce in this part of my life with. Pokecommunity is the only really surviving part of this time in my life. I wonder if this might reach someone or if anyone remembers me. Either way, I hope it doesn't feel like I wasted your time. Thanks for reading.

 

[stringzzz]

As someone who also pretty much grew up on the internet, I know where you're coming from, though my early years were not always so innocent.

First message board: I was 12, deeply into skateboarding, so it made sense I joined a skateboard forum. I remember reading a lot more than posting, though.

13: Became deeply into graffiti, so I found a message board focused solely on that. My art was pretty garbage, but I still liked that place and shared some of my stuff on there. I stopped doing graffiti when I was about 20 (Slightly over a decade ago)

14: From the graffiti site, I discovered a site that I thought was purely text files, basically various how-to's and other odds and ends. This place was sketchy, to say the least, something that drew in 14 year old me, lol. It wasn't until months later that I realized it also had a message board, and joined it. I learned about it's history, it essentially started as a group of hackers who shared text files on how to do various things in the early 90s, they chose text files because the server space was so small at first. It wasn't until I discovered PC (Will get to that later) that I realized that message board and the one that tried to replace it was like night and day compared to PC. While I did have some very interesting discussions on there, most discussions turned into debates, which eventually just devolved into a s*** flinging fest. The site closed down after about 20 years because the admin felt it was time to do something else. Another site was linked to, ran by someone else, but it was very similar. Eventually I got out of it, and later I heard the admin was visited at home by just about every government agency in the US due to all the nefarious activities on there, that I thankfully didn't ever get involved with.

15 or 16: First discovered PC, as mentioned it was a way more laid back and respectful place. At some point I joined a mock 'family' on there, where I had various family members that I talked to daily. They were awesome people and were always nice to me, even though I was definitely annoying many times. Sometimes I wonder how they're doing, but I didn't stay in contact with them.

I don't remember when it was when I came back on here a 2nd time, but what started off good quickly devolved. I am very thankful that a mod from that time gave me a warning for my off-topic posting. I took a step back and realized I had been totally getting out of control and pretty much just searing out a bunch of crap in my posts, likely annoying many. I made a final decision, I generated a long, random password, changed my password to it, and deleted any copy of the password to purposefully lock myself out of my account. I'm glad I did, because I'm Bi-Polar and it turned out just a few months later I had a massive manic episode that pretty much wrecked my life. Had that mod not given that warning, I might have stayed on here and likely got myself banned during that episode, so I thank them for that.

But, now I'm back on here. I've learned to slow myself down and not post just a bunch of bulls*** everywhere all day. While I don't always follow the rule, I prefer to try and restrict myself to only come here once a day at the most. I'm no longer really worried about my Bi-Polar disorder ruining my life for me, because I'd say it's like 95% under control. I will say that in the future, if at any point I actually do look like I'm getting out of hand, someone please warn me so I can avoid any problems.

Anyway, this is a great community and I'm glad to be a member. It should be pretty obvious by what I've said that when I was younger, I definitely was no saint, I got involved with some pretty shady stuff. I guess that's part of growing up, though, because I've learned a lot since then. Like the OP, I'm now in my early 30s, though my life isn't quite together enough to have started a family. It was interesting to read your story, and yeah, you really need to be careful with who you get involved with online at a young age (or any age for that matter), because the internet has it's fair share of shady people with malicious intents of various kinds. It would have been nice to know that when I first came online, but I guess it's part of our duty as adults to warn about all that for future generations.

Anyway, OP, hope you decide to stick around for a while and have some other good discussions with people on here, it's a nice community with good people.

 

[armadilloHD]

Thanks for sharing your story stranger, this is exactly what I was hoping to read after posting this. I hope getting up to shady stuff isn't a requirement for growing up though, I definitely don't want other young folks growing up on the internet growing up with the crap we dealt with. Going through my history made me realize that I had some pretty rose tinted glasses on for most of this history, and people I hung out with were probably big jerks like I was. We were all just kids though, a lot of us were just looking for approval and community we really didn't have in the real world.

But at least we made something of it, it looks like you got into coding and I never stopped drawing and made that a career too. Not sure if I'll be on here regularly since my schedule is pretty packed and, well, I haven't even been a pokemon fan since HG/SS! But you're spot on that this is a good community, it's a testament that it's still standing with relatively no controversy unlike a lot of the other communities I was part of.