Welcome to the Confessions Corner, where I share with you my dumbass secrets. Pull up a pillow, turn up the TV, and let's get cozy. It's 3AM somewhere. This was originally going to be a list on the Listfauxgraphy page, but like the Childhood Fears page, I knew it would get too long to really fit there. So, here it is. Enjoy the stupid. I recommend putting on some chill ambient night sounds while reading. And remember, confessions don't leave this page! JK, I don't really give a shit. DBZ-specific confessions will not go on this page, as I plan on making a bigger, lengthy DBZ page at some point. Stay tuned for that, haha. I'll update this as I think of other stuff to add. Symbol Key ☏ primarily more about someone else being dumb ⍟ me being a dumbass ◍ me being bad but I don't feel bad about it » crushes and other such things ⚠ warning, really fucking gross ◹ misc stuff that doesn't fit the above ◹I haven't been to a movie theater since 2016. I don't regret never bothering to go again. There hasn't been a single movie worth seeing in a theater at current prices in all that time. ◍I got into a food fight inside a small, local theater in elementary school. It was such a small location it only had two theaters, with one always geared towards adults and the other for children. The movie I was stuck there watching was so uninteresting to most kids there was a total of three groups in the theater. We couldn't talk about the food fight afterwards though, because then we'd all have to admit someone made us sit through a Winnie the Pooh movie and that was really uncool in late elementary school. ⚠There was this bitch sub teacher who always made everyone's life hell. She also happened to be the mom of a friend of mine. So, one night, two of my other friends were sleeping over at this friend's house, we'll call him K. Bitch mom and her husband went out for a long time, supposedly to a fancy restaurant but they were gone for way, way too long for that to have been it. Who knows where they went. Anyway, while they were gone, the guys were goofing off in the living room. One of them sees a rip in the sofa and something sticking out. They investigate and find a whole stack of tapes with German names piled up under there. They put one in the VCR and quickly realize the tape is scat porn. People shitting on each other, people eating their own shit, people eating each other's shit. Just a whole load of shit. They put in another one, more shit porn. And another, more shit. They're all scat porn videos. All of them. And there's just a whole mountain of them that was always there under that sofa. One in particular was especially hilarious to them that involved a man and a woman curiously finding a "small log" behind a big wooden log and having "fun" with it. It became a recurring in-joke to mimic a line from that movie, a line the woman who finds the "log" says, "What's this little log?" (Apparently, while the titles were in German, the actors spoke in English with really thick accents.) They hid all the tapes back where they found them and poor K struggled to look at his parents the same way again. The other guys told me about this and I just couldn't be intiminated by her anymore. She'd be screaming her lungs off, red in the face, calling children all sorts of words that should've gotten her banned from being within ten miles of a school, and all I could do was try not to laugh while I thought about that little log line. ⍟I want to formally apologize to all those people I called asking for Jenny under every area code ever. ⍟I'd also like to issue a formal apology to all those radio stations I regularly pranked. Especially you, Star 94. In my defense, I never pranked Delilah during Christmas. I wasn't that much of a brat. ⍟An apology for all the people I prank called in general. Sorry. ◍In middle school, this wolfaboo who was old enough to get a driver's license by the first semester of 7th grade gave me the derogatory nickname "homewrecker" for "getting between" the relationship between this girl and the wolfaboo's cousin who was several years older than the wolfaboo but still struggling to finish high school at his alternative school for delinquents he had to go to when he got expelled from the public school near his house. Me and the girl were 13 years old during this. For reference, where I live, you must be at least sixteen to get a driver's license. Yeah, you do that math. Anyway, I regret nothing. »My first crush ever was Cindy Crawford. My second crush was Geordi from ST:TNG. No, not LeVar Burton, Geordi. And I only thought he was hot when he had the visor on. Without it, he just looked like some guy who was going to read me a book. ◹I drowned once. (I got better.) ⍟I never expected to turn into the dad from The Brother's García, but here we are. ☏Thanks to one summer where my brother spent the entire summer watching the worst TV known to man, I can tell you the entire plot of Super Duper Sumos and sing the Butt-Ugly Martians theme song perfectly to this day. My brother denies watching these shows. ☏In high school, I had this history teacher. To put it bluntly, she was an idiot and very lazy. I was friends with some kids in that class. There were four of us. The other three members of this little group were a tomboy obsessed with Shrek, a guy in ROTC, and the ROTC guy's longtime buddy. Anyway, the four of us noticed some oddities with our quizzes. We always got 100s, unless we left a lot of obvious blanks on our papers. But we didn't have all the same answers on those papers! So, we started doing these little tests. We would intentionally put incorrect answers. Label Greece as Italy on a map or something like that. Then, as we kept getting 100s, we got more bold. I remember labeling a country on a map "Fish". We all put at least one country as "42". For short answer questions, we were putting in Monty Python quotes. All 100s. So long as you didn't leave the paper blank, you got a 100. Once we figured that out, we didn't sweat studying for those quizzes and tests anymore. It was pretty great, until the VCR incident. Apparently one of the other history teachers was having an affair with our history teacher and they decided to film a little sex tape. They must've watched it at school because they left it in the VCR for the TV we would always watch documentaries on. (Most of our classes were just watching documentaries. We rarely did anything with the textbook.) The teacher quickly tried to get the tape out, but it was too late. The whole class saw her and that other teacher together, fucking in his Ford F150 in what was obviously the school parking lot. Rumor has it they wanted to fire her immediately, but there was a little problem. He also got her pregnant. They let her finish out the semester to give her time to find a new job. She tried to pretend she wasn't pregnant while her sweaters got bigger and bigger. The school officially claimed she left for an "illness", but wouldn't be returning. The other teacher avoided being fired because his wife worked there and they thought making her household lose 50% of their income would be too horrible of a fate after having to deal with all that other shit too. Their kids also went to school there. I always felt bad for them. Imagine a whole classroom worth of kids on campus have seen your dad's dick, and it wasn't anywhere near your mom. ◹I haven't played a video game since late 2022. ◹I'm still afraid of whales, outer space, deep ocean, something getting me in the shower, and being in really high places. I don't know how astronauts do it, going up into outer space. That might be my biggest fear, even more than the depths of the ocean because at least you're still dying on Earth if you did die. Astronauts are much braver than I'll ever be. ☏In early elementary school, I was scheduled to get the chicken pox vaccine a little before my birthday. The same week as my appointment, some asshole parent sends their kid who has chicken pox to school but doesn't bother to inform anyone their kid has it. Most of the whole grade gets chicken pox. The school admin confronted the mom about this and the mom claimed she was "doing us all a favor" by helping us "get it over with" already. The vaccine had existed for several years by that point, which admin pointed out to her. She said she didn't trust vaccines or doctors and there was no reason to not do things "how we always did". So, come the day of the doctor visit, I go into my appointment for the chicken pox vaccine infected with chicken pox. The doc just looked at me and laughed in a sad way. "Oh. Oh no. I'll go ahead and write your note to be out for the next couple of weeks. Stay home and away from everyone." The birthday party my grandparents were throwing for me was canceled. I got to sit there on my birthday in isolation, itchy as fuck, because some dumbass anti-vaxer decided they would infect a whole chunk of an elementary school "for their own good". TBH, I'm still mad about it. ◍When I was 3, my parents took me to the movies for the first time. I was really excited, because it was a dinosaur movie! (JP) After the movie was over, all I could think about was how cool computers were. I begged my parents for a year for a computer. Christmas the following year, my parents told me they had gotten me what I had been begging for. I unwrap the box and...it's a V-Tech. One of those laptop style ones that's like purple and had the little carrying handle. Now, it makes sense to not give a four year old a computer, but little kid me was really disappointed. My parents kept bragging about how the V-Tech was going to help me study and I would be such a smart kid, ahead of my peers. They'd then demand I use the V-Tech in front of other adults and show how "smart" I was. I would always, without fail, open the animal matching game. The way the game worked is you would pick two different animals and the game would take the first two letters of animal one and the last two letters of animal two, then say the new animal "name". I always picked Turtle and Bird. Turd. Turd. Turd. The V-Tech would say it over and over. Then, my parents would get embarrassed and mad at me for not showing off how "smart" I was or whatever. I really did use it for studying though, just in secret. I actually used it all the way through to 7th grade for reviewing math concepts. But I never let them know that. A V-Tech really was a more "wise" decision than giving me a computer at that age. After all, when we did get a family computer in 1997, I didn't bother looking up math studying tips. The majority of what I did that year was search around looking for pics of Gohan from DBZ. ⍟When I was in seventh and eighth grade, I kept submitting different types of writing to a lot of teen magazines hoping to get something published. I kept failing, no matter how hard I tried. I would read through the magazines and think that what I was submitting, at least to my own mind, seemed on par or better than some of the stuff in there. About to give up, I decided as a joke I would intentionally send in something really crappy to go to one of the magazines I really wanted to get published in. This was a bit of a risk, because if it did get published, then I'd finally be published somewhere, but then my name would be attached to something stupid. And because I was stupid, I didn't think to use a fake name, LOL. Anyway, so I sat down and wrote the dumbest poem I could think of and sent it to them. They published it. ◍When we first got premium cable channels, my mom immediately set a parental lock on everything accept a few kid channels. She even blocked the music channels, deciding suddenly we could only watch CN, Nick, and Disney. I was a teen by this point and saw no reasonable reason I should be suddenly banned from MTV when I could watch it a week ago. As soon as she left the room, I reset up the parental lock and locked down every single channel. I told my brother the code. She freaked out when she couldn't watch anything. She eventually called Comcast for help. Then she set up a new lock, and I changed it again to lock her back out, but I made sure to put it only on her favorite channels. Another call to Comcast. After the third time of this, she finally stopped. She also tried this on the computer, and then I would lock her out of everything. I was always able to change everything because she picked the dumbest codes and passwords. ◍My mom liked to punish me for really doing nothing but existing sometimes. Once, her punishment was that she was going to "ground" me and that involved taking away the cordless phone in my room (fair...if I had actually done something wrong at the time) and shutting the power off in my room (what the fuck). She planned on me just sitting in the dark for hours for like two weeks, even at night. Well, I wasn't about to let that shit happen. I went down to the breaker and shut off everyone's power in the house, then went back to my room and moved my bed in front of my door for a few hours. She thought at first the power actually went out from an outtage or her not paying the bill on time again, because the bills were always late. Our breaker had a little lock and key on it after that to keep us children from messing around with it. The second go around where she shut my power off, she locked it, but I just picked the lock. The next time, I took the key because I knew where she hid it and locked it after I shut off the power. Eventually, she stopped trying to use this as a punishment. I will say I would accept a punishment if I thought I did do something wrong and it was fair. It's just usually I was being "punished" because my mom was angry, bored, or wanted to be entertained, not because of anything I actually did. ◍In retrospect, the grounding incidences above may have been more extreme because she was really pissed off the first time she grounded me, I didn't really care. I turned over my phone, kept my TV unplugged as demanded, didn't go play outside, didn't use the computer, and didn't try to sneak off to anywhere for a week. I just chilled in my room with my headphones in my boombox listening to the radio, doodled, read books, wrote stories, and journaled for a week. She was really pissed I wasn't suffering in my "isolation". I don't think you can really make me suffer with "isolation" of that level. I'll just chill in my head. Probably would've been worse if she took my boombox, CD player, and my CDs though. ◹During the summer between fifth and sixth grade, I would be on the family Windows ME computer, messing around with this audio recording program it had. I don't remember the name of it, but you could record short audio clips, like about maybe two-five minutes worth. I didn't need a mic to do this with either, and the sound was surprisingly pretty clear given the lack of mic and time period. I used this program to make these little "episodes" of an alien invasion story. I played the role of a news reporter reporting on the invasion and all the various aliens attacking. After I'd finish a recording, I'd then edit the audio at the alien parts to make really weird noises. The further and further into the episodes, the more the reporter became frantic and the more alien audio was present. The final episode on the series was just of the aliens, having triumphantly taken over Earth. I was so proud of this little series I actually kept it for years until it was eventually lost by my dad fucking up the computer. He had this little habit of whenever my brother or my mom would bog down the computer with viruses, he would start deleting all files he did not immediately know the purpose of. This would miss the viruses and delete all kinds of important stuff, and then the computer would really not work right and it would have to be fully restored. I lost the audio in one of these incidents, as it was on the computer at the time because I'd temporarily moved it back there to save something else. This is still his default way to attempt to fix computers if you don't stop him, BTW. ◍I have two secret usernames I always use for sites I don't want connected to me and they've been the same usernames since I was 14. I'm not telling you what they are, obviously, nor where I would use either kind of name. Except DeviantArt. One of them is definitely used at DeviantArt. One is a Spanish word, the other is a reference to a random line from a 90s manga. ⍟I used to use the audio post option on Livejournal back in the day. I think you got like five a month? I always had them set to private. My plan was I'd set it to private, then if I liked how it came out, I'd put it under lock, but I was always too embarrassed to ever unprivate them. So all the audio posts I made on the phone were never heard by anyone but me. »First cartoon crushes were Speed and Trixie from Speed Racer. ⍟In high school, I wore a Yu-Gi-Oh digital watch to school every day. I had more than one. »For a weirdly long part of my elementary school years, I was obsessed with the song "Kissed From a Rose" by Seal. To a really annoying degree. There I'd be, in a mall somewhere, loudly, "Baby, I compare you to a kiss from a rose on the grey..." I don't even know why I liked the song that much. Maybe it was just Seal's voice. This leveled off around the time I started having a crush on Sisqo when the "Thong Song" hit US music TV channels and had fully faded out by the time I heard the remix with Foxy Brown. »Speaking of crushes, some other big ones. Alicia Keys. Damn, that one was a strong one. Aaliyah. Mariah Carey. Kelis during the early orange hair look. Jennifer Connelly. Sam Neill for a while in high school. JMac, briefly but for way too long. Robin Shou, that's an early childhood one there, LOL. Usher. Hayden Christensen in Episode II, then again in Episode III. Hyde, quickly followed by Gackt. Hannah Spearritt when she was in S Club 7, then again when she was on Primeval. She was actually the last person I ever had a crush on. Once I was an adult, I found people hot and all, but never had a "crush" ever again. »In middle school, my school was still doing the handing out Valentine's Day cards to call the kids in class thing. I think we did it in homeroom only though? Something like that. Anyway, one of the cards I got was of Anakin in Episode II. I sometimes kept my little cards for a while because I'd like the designs. There were a lot with holographic effects and stuff or because I wanted to keep the art of a character. I'd usually toss them in less than a year though. I kept that one of Anakin for a few years. Cringe. But it was a secret. I kept it in my closet in a hidden location. LOL. ◹My boombox was purple and grey, just like my V-Tech. I didn't ask for these color combos. I just kept getting them. The boombox was bought for one of my birthdays by my grandparents. It had a CD and cassette player plus radio. I rarely used either player. I had my dad's old cassette player already and I got a CD player around this time anyway, so I'd just use those instead. I listened to the radio a lot back then, especially on the weekends when one of the local stations would sometimes play music live from local clubs late into the night. Sometimes, I wouldn't be a brat and actually called the local stations up for real requests. Looking back, I'm kind of surprised so many DJs were willing to take calls from obvious kids on the air live, cause a lot of kids did this even at ages like seven or eight. ◹Most of my CD players also had radio and sometimes I listened to the radio that way when I was out on car trips and didn't want to listen to whatever my parents had on, which was probably fucking Friday Night 80s again. Where they played the same like 20 singles over and over, ugh. I hated that. I had a couple of CD players over my childhood of different colors, but the best one I had was also the heaviest. You could drop that thing from anywhere and it wouldn't break. It was silver and had the best audio quality out of them and picked up radio stations really good. It was the most expensive one I had. I bought it with birthday money from my grandparents for $20. My favorite headphones to pair with that were white and blue, really flexible and adjustable. They cost me $15. My mom thought it was ridiculous because I could just spend $1 at the Dollar Store for a pair, but those were always ass and uncomfortable. I was really sad when my favorite headphones died. ◹There used to be this music channel called The Box. You could request songs (for a small fee) via this phone number. It eventually got bought out and became like MTV2 or something. Anyway, my parents actually let me request songs, pretty regularly in fact. I'd request a few a week. A lot of my friends at the time were allowed to do that. Everyone thought it was really neat. Like a radio request, but even cooler because you got a video with it too. The fee was around $1 or so. Might've been less earlier on. I never requested without permission. They probably wouldn't have noticed an extra few dollars here and there, but I was honest about it. Most kids I knew were, because they knew they wouldn't be able to keep up with how many they really requested and they didn't want to lose the "privilege" of it either. Crazy to think some little kids these days will steal their parents CCs and blow like $500 on in-game shit. I would never! I hope most kids, like back then, would be honest about such things though, right? ⍟A couple pages of one of the Xanga accounts I had is up on the archive. No, you will never learn of its name. We don't speak of it. ◹In the 90s, my dad taught me how to record movies and shows off TV, and how to use a cassette player to record songs off the radio. When we got our second computer, my dad made sure it had a CD burner in it and then promptly taught me how to rip music off CDs and burn songs to CDs. He showed me how to download a song off the internet when I couldn't get 200 km/h in the Wrong Lane anywhere locally at the time. Somehow, we ended up with the Russian version of the album, but I kept it anyway. He also showed me how to torrent, but then my brother got us banned from torrenting for a while because he'd seed like 100s of files at once and we got a warning. ◹My favorite arcade game is skee-ball. I'm really good at it. ◹My dad was a little extreme in regards to tech I was allowed to use. I didn't just need to be able to set-up a VCR, I was required to disassemble and reassemble it first before we even got to that part. He had me put our family computer together part by part too for the first one. How he was so tech smart with some things, but a moron with other things, like computer viruses, I'll never know. He's not very good at using any tech these days. He has to be walked through setting up a phone or making an online account. ☏In the 90s, my aunt got a computer. One day, my dad gets a call from my grandparents' number and it's my aunt sobbing on the phone uncontrollably about how she destroyed her new computer. We go over there and my aunt's computer is sitting in their living room. My grandparents know nothing about computers, so they can't help. My dad asks what happened and my aunt keeps saying she "deleted the computer" and can't undelete it because she "deleted the trash". Eventually, we sort out she deleted all the desktop shortcuts and thought that meant she deleted the OS somehow. My dad put the shortcuts back on the desktop. They thought he did magic. I learned, once again, adults could sometimes know less than children about some topics. I always thought that was so amazing as a kid, because a lot of adults would say adults knew better than kids about everything because of their age, and on average that is usually true, but when it came to things like computer and other more specialized topics, I saw time and time again many children could in fact know a whole lot more about something than an adult. ☏Shortly after my aunt got her computer, my grandparents bought a CD-ROM for studying middle and high school topics for one of my cousins Christmas that year. She thought it was a regular CD that you'd listen to the audio of to learn and immediately put it in her CD player, then started crying because she thought she somehow "broke" it immediately or her CD player died. They explained to her it was supposed to go into the computer. I stared in amazement at the whole thing. As a kid, I was thinking, you didn't even think to read the packaging? But most people didn't have computers yet in our area. We were pretty early adapters, all things considered. When I was in HS in the late 00s, a large portion of my graduating class still didn't have computers (but most had a cell phone). When I worked in education for a few years some years back, most kids in rural areas here still don't have computers, not even tablets. Most just have a really old Android, and if their parents have more money, an old iPhone. There are places in the rural areas around here where they never ran internet out to them. To get internet access, they have to use their phones. I don't think most kids are any more tech savvy than my cousin was in the 90s. I think about this stuff a lot whenever I have to remind myself what little tech stuff I know still puts me far outside the "basic user". It's hard for me to grasp that. There's so much I don't know, but the average person somehow knows so much less. ⍟I have a terrible memory when it comes to plot details of my own stuff. So to avoid plot holes, I have to regularly reread any material I've written that's related. I could probably, you know, make some kind of set-up to keep the most important details easily searchable for myself, but I'm really lazy and I read really fast. I'm always worried about accidentally creating some kind of plothole or stupidly saying a character has green eyes when they're supposed to be brown. Still too lazy to do anything meaningful about that though. ⍟Since I relatively regularly archive my main site, I have preserved many of my stupid typos. ◍Some people were harassing me on a school bus. I went to the principal over it, but nothing happened because the driver never bothered to keep the camera on inside the bus. Anyway, so not long after that, the inside of that bus got vandalized. They weren't able to catch who did it because she still didn't bother turning the camera on inside the bus like she was told to do after that. Who knows who did it. Who knows. ◍I never got suspended at school. Not because I didn't do anything that could get me suspended, but because they knew I'd cause them more trouble if they did than if they left me alone. ◍I never seriously used MySpace. The only time I used it was to troll a guy at school one day. It was either gonna be him that day, or prank Vic Mignogna's phone. One of the two. Figured pranking a classmate had the higher chance of a funnier payoff. If you're like, how did you have Vic's phone number? Bro, who didn't have Vic's number in the mid-00s that was into FMA or going to cons? Dude gave it out like candy and told everyone to spread it around. You can probably still find his old number on some FMA or CLAMP LJ comms, if they haven't been deleted or totally locked down. By the time I had his number, I had a pretty low opinion of the guy. People talked all kinds of shit about how much of a con diva he was on non-public parts of forums back in the day. I'm amazed anyone thought highly of the dude after "I know this is true. I heard from CLAMP and he told me so." LOL. ◍I don't understand how people have nostalgia for MySpace, because to me that was already the "normie" shit part of the internet and everything started getting worse from there. SpaceHey? Hey, get that shit away from me, thanks. ◍Never posted on 4Chan, but I was there a lot in middle school and high school to get those passwords to Japanese fansites, fanart dumps, and quick (and bad) translations of novels we still haven't gotten stateside. It was a pretty awful place. Seeing young people kind of glamorize it these days as "not so bad" is wild to me. Yeah, you could have some normal threads going on, but you had a good chance of accidentally seeing some shit that's NSFL two seconds later. ⍟The first time I went on the dark web as a kid, I was afraid someone was going to immediately hack my computer, start talking to me, come to kill me, and I'd find 3 red rooms before they got to my house. All I came across was lots of people selling weed and a bunch of prostitutes. ⚠Meanwhile, on the clearnet, in middle school, I found a forum dedicated to celebrity death photos, autopsy photos, and crime scene photos, all uncensored. The boards weren't locked down to members or anything. No images hidden behind a spoiler tag. Just loads and loads of dead bodies. Obviously, LiveLeak was on the clearnet too and really easy to get to if you knew it existed. I guess between the rumors of the dark web and the stuff I found on the clear net, I expected to find worse digging deeper. But the clearnet's already pretty fucked up. I mean...*gestures at early 4Chan* I remember seeing Left Eye's death photos straight up on Google Images. What the fuck. ◍I've tried Mastodon, Lemmy, BlueSky, Kbin, and read enough at Tildes to know I hate all of them. BlueSky was the least bad in the invite era. It reminded me more of early Twitter, which actually wasn't so bad. Once the invite system went away? Yeah, took a few days before it became insufferable. Alas. Honestly, in general, I'm really not against invite systems or paid to post type systems, because it does keep a lot of stupid/bots out. But I know that's not good for most businesses either. ◍I like the idea of Instagram in theory, but not in practice and just wish it was early Flickr. I've tried going back to Flickr many times, but it's just not the same. I've tried looking into alternatives, but it's either places way too elitist (camera snobs) or too focused on the social part with the photos being more to show off a lifestyle rather than to share photographs. ◍I hope Reddit dies off. No, adding "reddit" to the end of my search doesn't get me better results. It just gets me ones less likely to be SEO. Still a 50/50 bots make up most of the replies, and the human ones are mostly karma farmers or idiots shouting into the void. I miss old forums. I actually have Reddit, along with Wikipedia, blocked in my Kagi search results. Most of the Fediverse is blocked as well. ◍I hate Discord and hate that a lot of people left dying forums to something with such a small character limit per reply and so hard to search, along with, you know, not being public nor necessarily easy to find. So much is going to be lost because of that. I don't understand why people left those spaces to basically go to a shittier version of AIM. It's really not even remotely the same type of experience. ◹I read every visible page of every person who follows me before I consider following back. Every single one. Every few months, I go through anyone I am following on either account and read through all their pages again to see if I still want to follow them or if they've abandoned their site. It's really obvious to me most people on Neocities just follow based on site layout or hoping to get mutual followers to boost their follower score. I will never understand this. ◹When I was a kid, I always wanted one of those see through phones, but I never got one. For some reason, I thought they were the coolest thing ever. ◹The highest number of people on separate lines on a call I was ever on was a five-way call. This was in fifth grade. I don't remember what we were talking about though. ◹The first video game I ever played was Primal Rage. It was my uncle's. He brought his console over to my grandparents' house for some holiday and we all took turns playing it. ◹I participated in the Loxian Games. ◹Whenever I see an "OG YTer" get cancelled, the majority of the time, I have no idea who the fuck they are. I was on YT at its earliest points and never watched these "personality" type people. I don't know of anyone who did in my age range back then. For reference, when YT started, I was in HS. I always wondered if the fans for these types were like in MS or ES instead. Most of my time on early YT was watching music videos, anime in 3 parts, YT poops, old made-for-TV movies, The Brother's García and The Zack Files, and cat videos. Porn was everywhere then, especially hentai. Porn videos would stay up for like a day, then get taken down. Hentai would just stay up. I wasn't looking for those kind of videos either. There was just so much porn there you'd see it. Officially, IIRC, it wasn't supposed to be there at all. ⍟I remember coming across Happy World when searching for this old live puppet show I couldn't remember the name of that I still don't know the name of. When I found it, all the episodes were still up on the local channel it used to air on. The creator has a few of the episodes on YT still, but not all of them. I was planning on saving the episodes as an archive, but I never got around to it and now the old local channel doesn't have them anymore. My wife says it's better off lost, LOL. ⍟There was a time as a kid I collected AOL trial discs. ⍟In fifth grade, I was selected for some special two-week academic program for the summer held by a nearby university. A certain number of kids were chosen from each of the surrounding counties based on like population size or something. Our county got two slots, and I was one of them. The program was some classes we could take as basically summer prep for the following year. (There's tons of programs like this these days, not all of them merit based. Some are income based, etc.) We could take up to two classes. These classes were two hours long each, for a total of six hours at the university if we took both, with the first hour being breakfast and the fourth hour being for lunch. Out of all the kids who were selected, only two took two classes, me and this girl from another county. At lunch, it was just the two of us. We'd roam around the university unsupervised or goof off in the dining hall. We actually had no classes in common either, so we only saw each other during the very busy breakfast and during this empty lunch. The kids who came in for class two only showed up after lunch, but most of the kids showed up for breakfast for class one. My classes were math (I wanted science but it filled up immediately) and composition. Hers were science and history. Even though we only talked in those two hours for ten days, it felt like we got really close. We even had in jokes by the end of it. We exchanged some drawings with each other. I kept the drawings for a long time after that, but I eventually lost them and even forgot her name. I can barely remember what she looks like. On the last lunch, I had thought about asking her phone number, but it also seemed weird. We only spoke to each other for ten days in total, and we'd probably never see each other again anyway. So we just said our goodbyes. Realistically, that's all that it could've ever been, some fun summer memories. She was from the east side of the metro, and I was on the west now. If my parents hadn't moved and I still lived on the east side, maybe, but there was just too much distance. But middle school me regretted it. ⍟There was a period in my life where I talked on the phone so long I'd have to switch phones multiple times a night from the battery dying. One of the many disadvantages of cordless phones, haha. ◍After going to a couple of cons, I realized a lot of people who say they're introverts online are actually super extroverted, just in a way that's so obnoxious they scare off the average extrovert. Put these types together and they can run off their social energy for days on end, to a frightening and smelly degree. ◹In the late 00s, at some point I was in negotiation with getting a poetry book, a fantasy book, and a paid book reviewing gig all at once, but I ended up not going through with any of them because they all wanted me to make a Facebook and a Twitter as part of the deals. I tossed out an upfront $30K between the two book advances (they were small houses, so the advances were pretty tiny) and whatever the pay for the regular reviewing gig was (it was per article, I don't remember how much) because I didn't want to make a Facebook. I don't regret it, TBH. There was some talk about a potential fantasy book series too with the one that was going to pay me the $20K advance, but I was like, nah man, I'm not getting a Facebook. This stuff started off as messaging on Goodreads of all places that then moved to e-mail, in part because I had my various LJ accounts linked where some of my writing was posted. What a weird time. ☏One time at work in between shifts, I was sitting outside for my break and I hear a bunch of noise. I look over and this SUV is pulled up against the curve. A bunch of guys get in (there's three rows of seats). One guy, who's sitting in the front passenger's seat, is half hanging out the car calling out to this girl who's sitting a few feet away from me. She's rolling her eyes at him and waving goodbye. The SUV pulls away. The girl is sitting with another girl, talking about them. I overhear what they're saying about the group. The guys in the SUV are all friends, most of them were roommates. The driver didn't work there, but worked somewhere else and was the first one of the group to get off work, so he'd come pick everyone up. Two of them in the car didn't live in the same rental, but lived really close by. However, there was one little oddity in that set-up. The guy in the front passenger's seat didn't work at all. He lived in a rental nearby with his mom and spent all day doing nothing. He'd walk over to where the guy driving the SUV worked at just to get in the SUV with him to pick up the others. The reason he did this was because he had a thing for the girl he was shouting at. He knew she worked there. She also lived pretty close by. I didn't hear this when it happened, but from what the girls were talking about, he had been begging the girl to call him and go on a date with him. She had been rejecting him for weeks at this point. One of the other guys on break joined in to laugh, as he also knew the group and mentioned that guy hadn't once held a job in his entire life and wasn't a student either. He just lived with and mooched off his mom along with mooching off his friends whenever he could get away with it. The man in the front passenger's seat was twenty-five, apparently. From what I heard, he had a history of doing this flirting "routine" with other girls who had worked at my job and the place the guy driving the SUV worked at. This method was, uh, never successful. His buddies had tried talking to him about getting a job, but he saw no reason to get one if his mommy was still paying for everything and cooking for him. I sat there thinking, holy shit, I just saw "No Scrubs" in real life. ☏Since his teen years, my brother has always been really racist. It started in middle school. My brother and I are, obviously, full siblings, but we actually look really different. He looks "white", I look "Latino". That's usually how we're both read to the point sometimes people just assume I don't speak English or start speaking to me in Spanish. Around middle school, he started making fun of how thick and dark my hair was and how that was "gross" and he was better since he was born blond (it turned brown later, but he still would harp on about how he came out BLOND) and his hair was good and properly "thin" and "silky". He made fun of pretty much anything else about my appearance--facial features, skin tone differences, etc, but he fixated on my hair and eyes a lot for some reason. He also made fun of me for having a few greys in high school. Most people on my mother's side of the family start greying pretty young, but still have really thick hair into old age. Well, fast-forward to his late twenties. We've gotten our ancestry tests. My brother, in advanced of this, is convinced despite all logic, he will come out 100% European and it will reveal, if I am not, that I'll be a half-sibling fathered by some other man. Well, still full siblings, just different genes got expressed on the outside. And neither of us are 100% European, roughly a quarter not. As I expected, most of that is Native American. However, neither of us expected a small portion to be African. My brother was deeply upset by this, because, you know, racist. He was angry at both of my parents for this, especialy my mom, where all the non-white genes come from. How dare she give him African genes! How dare my father marry a woman with such genes! LOL. He did, however, inherit something quite European from my father though. Unlike me, he inhereted all the genes for baldness and soon began to rapidly lose his hair. The baldness genetics are so strong on my father's side of the family even most of the women would have bald spots. And while the baldness usually sets in pretty young on my dad's side, my brother is the youngest in generations to be going bald so quickly. I joke this is a curse from my maternal grandfather. You see, along with inheriting his wonderful hair genes, I also inherited a lot of his facial features--enough so we could pass for siblings if you only saw pictures of us. I look more like my grandfather than either of my parents, my brother, all my aunts and uncles, cousins, and my other grandparents. So when he was making fun of my hair and my face, he was making fun of my grandfather too. Now, he's going bald. Should've been more respectful to grandpa. ☏Aside from the "Kissed From a Rose" obsession, I had a few other weird song obsessions. One was "Total Eclipse of the Heart", Nicki French's version. We had a CD with just remixes of that and I'd listen to it all the time. I have no idea why I was obsessed with that particular song. It happened for like two years two different times. One of the other song obsessions was from when I was a really little kid, "Take my Breath Away" by Berlin. No idea why. However, my dad hated it. He hated it so much he forbid me from owning the single. My mom snuck it into the cart one day at Best Buy. He found it that night and exploded with rage. But he never explained why the song made him so angry. I still don't know the real reason. It's not a great song, but it's so generic it's like, that's it? That's what makes you explode? A love song from a movie that sounds like it could be a 50s prom song? Looking back at my early kid song obsessions, it kind of comes off like I just really liked dramatic romance songs for some reason. Hilarious. What would a little kid know about grand romance? Maybe that's what I thought my love life would be like one day, haha. ⍟I really was very emotional as a kid. Sad songs hit me so much harder when I was little. Like, what deep sadness was I getting cathartic release from that I wouldn't be getting now? Am I just more jaded? Romantic songs really hit hard to me when I was like, eight and had never dated anyone. Break-up songs were the peak of music for me. I'd be in my room crying about nothing I'd ever experienced. Maybe I was using the music to release emotions I didn't have the ability to label yet from something I didn't want to face or was too young to understand, like these were the most adjacent concepts to whatever the real thing was. I don't really know. It seems strange looking back. ⍟Me and a friend of mine in middle school tried out for the next year's chorus as a joke, assuming we wouldn't be good enough to get in and mostly just to screw around. The kids in chorus took it way too seriously, so it was intended as a joke on them for being so uptight. My friend moved to Texas and I was stuck in chorus the next year. I got a solo part in a song. What the fuck. »Some cartoon crushes. From ReBoot, I had a crush on Dot, Bob, Mouse, Ray, Matrix, and AndrAIa. And if you're thinking, that's like basically most of the core cast. Yes, you are correct. I was really into the show. ◹Speaking of Matrix, I always liked him as a kid. As an adult, I can really relate to him...unfortunately. ⍟I used to work at a zoo. Early into working there, we had a Code Adam. A woman had lost her grandson and I was the unfortunate person stuck with her during this event. She only spoke French and a few English words. I only know a tiny bit of French. You can already see the problem here. I used what little French I knew and attempted to guess what she was saying by assuming French words that sounded close to Spanish words probably meant the same thing. All I understood was the kid was four because I've seen Gundam Wing and that he disappeared somewhere near where we were at in the park. Protocol was to call a back number and keep the guardian in one spot until the kid could be found. Well, out of all days, my phone decided to stop working. We had to use the phone in the gift shop. The woman didn't want to stay put and wanted to search for the kid herself. She wouldn't let go of my hand. I couldn't get free. The adrenaline was pumping and she had a death grip on me. She dragged me around the park crying and screaming until one of the other people who worked there, this old man who'd been there a long time, calmed her down and somehow quickly found where the kid was. The kid had snuck into the kitchen of the restaurant at the park and was in a corner eating chicken fingers. The kid and grandma were happily reunited. The kid was oblivious to all the trouble he caused. Definitely one of my most stressful days there. Sadly, the guy who helped that day passed away a few months later. It felt like something vanished from the park. I don't know what I would've done if he wasn't there that day. ☏Working at a zoo, I started to hate most of the guests at the park. The regulars were locals who got in free, which included a couple of daycares and small private schools. These groups always beelined to the train and the playground area. They never bothered with seeing the animals. The other main regulars were new moms who would stare at their phones the whole trip while their very small children would watch videos on tablets in their strollers, never looking up at all. Other groups would be public school trips where the kids would mostly try to harass the animals (usually the tiger or lions) or whine about not getting to go straight to the play area, or families who would bitch about literally everything from animals smelling to giraffes not being bottomless pits to feed leaves into all day and leave trash everywhere. They mostly just looked at their phones too. The only people who showed up that seemed to actually want to see the animals were all the furries who would arrive in their fursuits on special animal days. They were some of the few people who came to the zoo both happy and happy to specifically see the animals there. ☏When I was in college, there was this girl who always showed up in ripped up, dirty clothes with a collar on in one of my classes. A man in a suit would wait outside of the class and then put her on a leash when class was over. He introduced himself to us as her dom. She only had this one class, from what the rest of us taking that class could gather. Our teacher was an Indian immigrant who spoke alright enough English, given it was her second language. One day, the dom decided to sit in our class with his sub in his lap, leashed up at the back of the class. They started fooling around. The teacher noticed and asked him who the hell he was, since, you know, he wasn't on our class roster. He introduced himself as her dom and her as his "submissive" (he always said submissive instead of sub). She exploded at him about how women weren't property and shouldn't be "chained" and how he was absolutely not allowed to be sitting in a class he wasn't registered for and interrupting this class other people paid to learn in with his sexual fetishes. In that moment, she was speaking English faster and better than I'd ever heard her speak it before. She went Super Saiyan with the English language. Mr. Dom cowardly slunk out of the class with his sub unleashed at the teacher's demands. This duo waited until class ended, then had sex directly beside our class. We never saw them again after that day, but our teacher's English had been permanently improved. ⍟Speaking of college, one time I was waiting outside for someone and my phone started glitching out. This caused it to start blarring, at max volume, "Wrecking Ball" to the entire front part of the campus. ⍟Another time at college, I remember standing around and I thought I heard someone playing Florence + the Machine's "Howl" really loudly. Which I thought was weird because that's obnoxious to just do that with any song, but also I was curious who it was since I liked that song. Then I realized, it was me. My phone had unlocked and opened up my music app. I was the rude dumbass. ☏In my Japanese classes, we had a weeb who always insisted on using "boku" before we'd learned that pronoun in the lessons. When we finally got to "boku", the definition was something like "I (used by men)" and the mnemonic some students used was "S-san likes to be used by men" to remember what it meant. He also got a nasty nickname thanks to his obsession with using that pronoun, Boku no Pico (if you don't know what that is, don't look it up). We got a new guy in semester two from another college, and someone had to explain to him what the nickname was a reference to. I remember him shouting "And he knew it was a little boy?!" so loud everyone heard it. TBH, people probably wouldn't have been this mean if he hadn't had not one but two different video presentations where he decided he would be naked in them. Yes, naked. I saw part of that guy's dick on the projector. ☏When I worked in education, I remember being on a Zoom meeting where one of the teachers kept calling Firefox "Foxfire" and went into a rant about how all the "kids are using Foxfire these days" instead of a "real" browser like Chrome. He taught our computer literary class. ◍I've definitely reported a former employer to the IRS for tax fraud. »I had a bad habit of falling in love with whoever my best friend was at any given time, regardless of gender. I think I had all of one close friend this didn't happen with, and that was in elementary school. The feeling always ended up eventually being mutual. My wife is one of these people. I just live the "Friends to Lovers" trope for some reason. Honestly, I love writing this too. It's like a part of my very essence. I don't know why. »I started being into my wife back when we were in high school, but I didn't realize it until a few years later, after high school, on Valentine's Day of all days. We were laying in the grass with our DS's talking about video games and I looked over and bam, it hit me. We ended up going out several months later, on Thanksgiving. I didn't want to say anything at first because I was worried about losing a friendship if things went south. Seven years after we started dating, we got married on Halloween. Lot of holidays in there, haha. We were engaged for about a year, IIRC. It was really informal. We decided we were going to get married, but "not right away" once we decided that. I have no idea who suggested it first, but it just felt like a given at that point anyway. No rings, court room wedding. We didn't even dress up for it. I was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. None of our family was invited. As I am writing this in 2024, this year will be anniversaries 8 years married and 15 together. We started dating when we were 19. We first met when we were 9 in fourth grade. We weren't friends until 9th grade when we were fourteen. As of 2024, we've known each other for 25 years and been friends for 20. ◹My wife and I are only ten days apart in age. Due to the way those ten days line up, my wife and I are the same zodiac sign. We lived in the same neighborhood for a good chunk of our childhoods. I married someone who was basically down the street from me as a kid. We were both originally from other counties in Georgia that started with Ds then moved to the same place around the same time. ◹We freaked someone out at a RenFaire once because we were unconsciously walking in sync. »The moment I knew I was going to marry her was when we were chatting in Trillian and we both posted the same image and a quote from the scene in the movie the image was from at the same second. ⍟I've practiced multiple religions over the course of my life, including a somewhat lengthy period of non-religiousness as an agnostic atheist. I am presently not an atheist. Once, I was even a Christian. ⍟I had a college reading level by fifth grade. This has served me in no way whatsoever in life. ⍟When I was a kid, so many people, movies, and TV shows told me I'd remember the first time I had sex for the rest of my life. It'd be this big experience, life altering. I'm gonna be honest here. I don't even remember that night anymore. It was night though. I remember that. ◍Never play air hockey against me. That is a warning. ☏A teacher at my HS proudly proclaimed no one would be able to find his LJ account. His LJ account was found that afternoon, along with one of the other teachers because they just straight up used their real, legal names and the legal names of other teachers and their exact locations all over their entries and profiles. They posted from school computers too, by their own admission. There was a poem about a teacher's (who was not in this little clique) sweaty armpits, again with the teacher's actual name in it. ☏Some of my classmates actually listed our HS on their LJ profiles and had icons of their own faces as their default icons. Using a picture of themselves was pretty common on Xanga too. I never did this nor used my real name in these places, but I did join my HS's Xanga ring. I had an anime icon from an anime I'd never seen because I thought it looked cool. ⍟I tried calling Johnny Bravo once. I didn't get through. I wasn't gonna prank him or anything. I was legitimately going to request something. Don't remember what though. Probably an episode of Courage. I was a big fan of JBVO when it was airing. ◹I had an account at Cartoon Orbit from pretty much as soon as it went up. I was invested in collecting new cToons for about a year straight, and logged in every now and then for about a year after. I was getting a bit too old for it by then. Some characters I know without a doubt I had cToons of: Gohan, Jade, Static, and Scooby. I don't remember what else I had. I'm sure I probably had ones of Samurai Jack, the Ed boys, and some other favorites at the time, but I can't remember enough to say one way or another. I'm sure I probably had a few of Gohan. My cZone was a complete mess, LOL. I'm surprised Cartoon Orbit stayed online until 2006. I did try to look at my old account as a younger teen once but I'd long forgotten both my username and my password. ⍟My first email account my dad set up for me in 1997 used my real first and last name. I used that email until I got a second one that also used my real name when we changed internet providers and then a third email that I ended up using for most of my childhood as my main email. This one didn't use my real name because I didn't want to sign up for every place ever with my actual name. Now, the dumb part is I didn't have an email that was for "professional" situations until after I was about 18 or so. Back then, students weren't given school emails outside of colleges. So I was emailing my teachers and friends with the same email I was using on fandom locations and forums. I usually kept my email hidden, but I did list it publicly on some fanlistings and at least one guestbook. I couldn't find it last I looked, but I know at some point the Wayback Machine had a page or two of that guestbook that had two different emails listed of mine with nicknames I used at the time. The second one was even an update announcing I had changed emails. ◹Back before the Unity forum got nuked around when DSK dropped, I listed my favorite song as "Tea-house Moon". If you were to ask me five years ago or so, I'd have probably answered "Diamonds on the Water". At this point, I think I would've put "The Humming". Next