And now it's time for the sad, sad, stupid ballad of Lazlo Falconi. This will be a long read but it's late and I feel like waxing nostalgic so deal with it. (Or just don't read it.)
Preface:
I should note that my internet history is a large part of who I am. I discovered the Internet (and computers in all) in the formative years of my life, and as such there was a lot of spill-over between what has happening in real life and what was happening on the internet. I also feel like I should start earlier than my first "real" encounters with the internet, so I can probably covey the feelings that welled up inside me, and why I felt the way that I did.
Chapter I: The Dawn of Time
It all began before the turn of the century, sometime in the early 90s. I'm not exactly sure when, but it was during the "Eternal September", back when AOL first came out. It was a crappy little machine with Windows 3.1 on it (Not even Windows for Workgroups!) and probably MS-DOS 2 or something. It was
oooold. But it was ours. Mind you, this was one of those PCs that laid down underneath a huge CRT monitor, not like a tower that became much more common place later that decade. My dad had a friend with a subscription to one of those shareware magazines that were all the rage back in the day, and so we had a lot of stupid little half-baked games that I loved playing. Mostly we got games from EPIC, but every now and then a treasure from id was tossed our way. One of my favorites was The Catacomb Abyss, which was also my first FPS!
I'm not exactly sure when or why it happened, but we eventually got one of those free one-month AOL diskettes (Back when they were still distributing things on floppy diskette!), and my dad went through the arduous task of installing it and dialing out for the first time.
...It didn't go well. After installing everything and downloading the AOL homepage, our hard drive was full and the computer shut down. So he uninstalled everything and we went back to our regular, offline lives.
My first real taste of the Internet came in 1996ish, when I was at a family member's housewarming party. He had a futuristic PC with Windows 95 on it. I don't remember how it came about, but there was some other kid around my age there, and we started playing around and found an IRC channel. We chatted and I "learned" that here, spelling didn't matter. It was okay to type ur instead of your (or you're). The chick who taught me clearly taught me wrong.
That was only a single night of fun, though. After that, I had a few run-ins with the Internet, mostly at friends' houses. It was mostly going to nick.com and stuff like that, but for a kid of around 10, it was great.
At some point we got a computer with a "massive" one gigabyte hard drive. A good old Packard-Bell something or other. I remember staying up nights playing Transport Tycoon and later, Roller Coaster Tycoon until the crack of dawn. These were good times for me.
When we eventually got our own internet connection, the world was new. For the first time ever, I could go to all of the websites I wanted. Of course, being 12, I had no idea what sort of websites I should go to, so I was mostly relegated to things like Lego.com, and other kids brands.
My first run-in with an online community was sometime in 2000, when Cartoon Network launched it's Cartoon Orbit service. It was a weird sort of "game" where you'd collect stickers or something and put them up in your room. Me and a few real life friends would show off our rooms to each other, and it was fun times. There wasn't much "online" connection to be had though. If you visited someone else, you could only say predetermined phrases like "Cool room!" or "Toonami rocks!" I don't remember when or why I stopped playing this, but I gave it as I was learning more about my computer, and the way it worked. I was the kind of kid who would delve deep into my system files and try to open every thing in the C:\Windows folder. I would have taken the computer apart, too, if my parents had let me.
At one point, I found that my computer had Microsoft Frontpage on it, which was a (severely limited) web designing software. I made a few websites, but I had no idea how to get them online, or how to register a domain name or anything like that. I eventually did find a free hosting company that would let me upload my site, but I couldn't get the pictures to work! Frontpage was not my friend.
At some point, I decided I wanted an email address for myself. My parents had a Yahoo! account, because it came with our internet connection, and so, obviously, I chose to make a Yahoo! account too, and all that that implies. They made it easy to find everything that I never knew I wanted. Instant messenger, chatrooms, and, the holiest of holies, Yahoo! Games. The Yahoo chess was the first ever real community I was a part of. I knew a lot of the players, and they knew me. And I actually got pretty good at playing chess! I don't remember what my ranking was on their ladder, but it was just below grandmaster level! Not bad for a 13 year old! And as I played more, and started learning how to talk to people over the internet, I ventured more and more into the chat rooms. During this time I met many friends, though the one with the most lasting impression on me was a girl from Washington--the state, not DC. At the time, it was still relatively uncommon for 13 year-olds to be on the internet, and us being the same age, we hit it off pretty quickly. Some time that year, she confessed that she really liked me, and we started internet dating. For three years. It was great, though doomed to failure. As we grew, we changed, and eventually split, and since it's not that interesting of a tale, I won't bore you with any further details.
Some time later, one of my uncles told me he was into designing websites, and had even made one for his collectibles business. He gave me a book that I used to learn HTML, and around the same time I learned of Geocities, which was by then owned by Yahoo. I started my first real website which pretty much just contained links to other sites I liked and some stolen anime artwork that I thought looked neat. For years I worked on this stupid site with no real purpose, except linking to friend's sites and what not. It was not good, but it was fun, and hey, it gave me the foundation for design work!
Chapter II: How to get ahead in games
Around the same time, I discovered a neat online game called the Alien Adoption Agency. It was this really weird game that was basically just raising this alien... I don't really remember much about it, except that I got super involved in it for a few months. I was also sort of an unscrupulous player, tricking people into giving me their passwords so I could steal their items and money... What a jerk. At some point the server went down for a couple weeks, and the owner changed the layout of a lot of things during that time. I just couldn't get into it, which is sad because I did have some friends there.
One day, I did a search for free online games. Now, as we all know, this can be a very dangerous search term, and I probably got my share of viruses from it, but I was probably 12 or something at the time, so it didn't really matter to me. I found various MUDs--which were still popular at the time--that I didn't much care for, and one very interesting game, Well of Souls. I bummed around that game, and it's sister game Arcadia for about a year before losing interest. In the years that followed, I would always have Well of Souls and Arcadia installed, and I'd pop into the games occasionally, but I never really got all that into it.
Then it came to pass that my younger sister was introduced to Neopets. Now, I looked at this game and thought it was completely lame. I had real pets, why would I want some kind of crazy griffon like creature that I have to feed? But then I saw her playing some of the games on the site and got hooked myself. I actually had quite the good business of buying and selling codestones, and eventually made over a million neopoints. I no longer remember how I did it, but I suspect it had something to do with stealing. You see, I went back to my old habits from AlienAA, and turned my Geocities site into one claiming to be from a disgruntled ex-neopets employee. I told everyone that I knew of a super secret coding exploit that could get them thousands of Neopoints and codestones and everything they wanted if they just left their username and password on my guestbook. The crazy thing is that it actually worked! At one point I went so far as to completely copy the Neopets layout, and if you clicked any links it just took you to a page saying you weren't logged in. Looking back, it was all very unprofessional looking, but what's surprising is that a friend of mine had the same scam going, but his was just some black text on a white background saying in so many words, "free neopoints". The grammar was terrible and the spelling sucked, and he still raked in way more passwords than I ever did.
I eventually stopped my terrible dealings and became an upstanding member of the Neopian society, even donating Neopoints and codestones to new players, sort of as a way of retribution I guess. I even joined a guild and became one of the top-ranking officials in it, basically being in charge of the guild store. Oh and what a guild it was! In case anyone is wondering, it was called the Green Sand Guild, and we... Collected bottles of green sand. Your ranking in the member list was actually determined by how many bottles of green sand you had in your shop... But it was more the people that made it fun! The owner was actually quite proficient in PHP and made a bunch of games for it and it had it's own points system which could be used to buy items from the "shop" at a discount, and could even be traded in to the owner for Neopoints. I remember one night chatting with these people until the sun came up, and then chatting with them until it went down, and then came up again, and only sleeping on the third day. Eventually the owner disappeared from the internet, and everyone lost interest in the guild... No longer a thief, and without a guild to impress, I sort of lost interest in playing for years... Sometimes I wish I could find her and thank her for all the fun we had, but she seems to be gone without a trace.
Chapter III: Webcomics and Message Boards
And now we get into the real meat and potatoes of the subject. When that guild died, I felt lost. I had no home, and I didn't really know what to do. I tried playing the old games, but they just weren't fun for me anymore... But I finally started "surfing" the web. The process by which you'd search for a term, and just click through all the links on each site and just delving deeper and deeper. Sort of the way you look at TV Tropes today.
The only interests I had at the time were video games, and this of course eventually led to emulators and ROMs. I didn't join any of the communities at the time--in fact, I didn't even know there were such things, I just spent a majority of my time playing NES games. For some reason, I got really into Metroid, which led me to
the Metroid DB, which was then hosted on GameSpy or IGN or something like that. This is only notable because it had a link to a silly little Metroid sprite comic called
Planet Zebeth. It is actually still running to this day, though I no longer read it. But, what's important is that it finally got me into Web Comics! Now, this comic had a sub-forum on a message board that is still around but never has any posts these days, but back in 2002-2003 it was a really active, booming place. It was not the first message board I had ever joined, but it was the first one I actually posted at. I loved it. Looking back, I can see that I was quite a n00b, but at least I tried to spell correctly, and tried to be a good member. I kind of get the impression that I wasn't well liked, though, but I don't blame anyone. I wouldn't like me if I met my 14-year-old self either. I had a few sprite comics at the time that were truly awful. The first was supposed to be a tie-in with Planet Zebeth starring Mario and Mega Man for some reason. I didn't even really like Mega Man at the time, but it was kind of stylish to put him in web comics I guess. Another sprite comic I made was based on the Super NES game "Troddlers", which is sort of like Lemmings. Me and a friend stayed up all night playing it once and for some reason thought it would make a good comic strip--It didn't. I eventually quit the comic business for good. The forum eventually made a sister site that was sort of like BuzzComix (Does anyone here even remember that?). There were a lot of comics that I liked reading from that, and if anyone has read any of these, I would be surprised: I read Screw these Comics, Planet Zebeth, For Pete's Sake, and my favorite was for years Minimalist Stick Figure Theatre. It was a pretty absurd and elitist comic, and only like six people read it. I only became friends with one of them, but we'll get to that in a little bit. (Or maybe not)
At the time I also went to a site dedicated to Game Boy Advance games (But not emulation!),
Kiwibonga Advance. The site is still there but it is severely broken. It was the kind of place where everyone thought it was cool to be all nihilist and sarcastic all the time, but when your 14 or 15 or whatever, that seems cool, doesn't it? I don't remember how long I was there but my account is now old enough that it should know how to read. I'm not really sure what happened to this one. It just kind of died of lack of interest...
Anyway, there were some server issues, the database was deleted and a lot of internets drama occurred. Lots of members leaving, fights, and what not. I thought it was lame, so I left. I floated around from various sites for a while, never really becoming too attached to anything or finding anything I liked too much, but I read a lot of web comics at the time, more popular ones that those I just mentioned.
Now I was in my sophomore year of high school, and a pretty awkward guy when my parents told me we'd be moving to a different state. This is important because when we moved, my parents didn't want me going to the high school where we lived because it was a really bad neighborhood. So my social life pretty much disappeared and my few spatterings of friends on the Internet were all I had. I became a very boring person, and this would be about when my Inernets girlfriend that I mentioned earlier broke up with me.
Chapter IV: The Rom-Source Saga
So I didn't go to school, didn't have a job, and didn't do anything at all except watch TechTV. But my friend from Minimalist Stick Figure Theatre convinced me to join Xanga... Got what an annoying little wanker I was at that time. I had like two friends from that site that I never talked to. It was actually a pretty bleak time in my life, but then my friend from AlienAA and Neopets showed me a site where I could get GBA ROMs called Rom-Source.com (Now romsource.us). At the time, Visual Boy Advance had just come out (I think), so ROMs were pretty hard to come by, but this site had them all!
But it wasn't just a regular ROM dump. It had had a forum attached, that you actually had to participate in to get the ROMs. You needed site currency (Called Gil, of all things) to download ROMs. Around the time I joined, the site got an IRC channel, and since I was in there all day, I eventually became an operator in there, and then a global on the forum, and finally an admin. I felt like I was pretty hot shit, and I was on the site all day, every day. The IRC was never very popular, with only about 4-6 active users in it, but it was still a lot of fun for me. I made a lot of good friends during this time, and enjoyed the site very much.
But, as with all sites, some drama occurred because there were a lot of admins and globals who were inactive, and one of the other admins decided to just prune a lot of them. This caused a huge backlash in the community, but we actually didn't loose that many members at the time. I decided to step down as an admin, but kept Ops in the IRC channel. I sort of stopped posting and eventually moved back down to Florida to live with my grandfather. I didn't have stable internet access, so the IRC sort of died during this time. I'm not exactly sure how long I lived with him, probably around six to eight months, before my mom decided that she didn't like living a state away from me, so I moved back in with them and got a job. I went right back into posting at Rom-Source, and found to my horror...
The IRC channel was gone! The original owner lost interest due to inactivity, and eventually the whole thing died out, so I moved it to a new server and became the owner. Consequently, I took on a much more active role in the development of the channel, eventually putting in a bot. I learned a lot of mIRC code and put a lot of custom content into the bot, including little trivia games, the ability to search Google, and even to pick up on certain words and have funny duped conversations. I named it Umi-San and gave him personality, and then I coded a similar bot for a friend, named Roll-Chan. He didn't do much to her, but I coded a little bit of a love-hate relationship between the two, and we'd stage arguments between them. The IRC got much more popular during this time. We also had little competitions between the users to see who would type the most over the course of the week and what not. There were no stakes in it, just boasting rights. The last stats update I ever did is still on the web somewhere, and I look at it and read the quotes from it occasionally.
One of my best friends from Rom-Source, called CJ, was big into Bob and George, and was convinced that he wanted a web comic based on his adventures in the forums and IRC. You see, for some ungodly reason, we treated Rom-Source as a city... I don't know, it was weird. Anyway, since I was actually good at making sprite comics (Just bad at writing) we decided to team up and make a web comic for everyone to read! It was sort of funny, but sort of bad. The original comics that I made are still in his Photobucket or my Photobucket somewhere...
Eventually there was some more drama on the site, and I sort of became disenheartened by it I was totally done with everyone and everything there and started looking for a new forum. I eventually settled into the Club Nintendo forums as Nylar, but I didn't stay there long before the call of Rom-Source brought me back.
All throughout my time at Rom-Source, a tonne of small, auxiliary forums sprung up here and there, and I was at them all. Some were good and lasted several months, others were bad and were dead before they hit the ground. Some might still be around--though I doubt that.
Chapter V: The Golden Years
I used to look back at the heyday of Rom-Source, back when it had thousands of visitors each day and I was a hot-shot admin and creator of the IRC channel and banned hundreds of users per day as the pinnacle of my internet experiences. We had our tight core and looked down on everyone else like some kind of elitist clique that was better than everyone else because we used "proper" grammar and Firefox. Now I realize we were just being douchers. My fondest memories are of the Protoman Homepage, and it's (At maximum capacities) 20 active users.
In any case, because CJ was so into Bob and George, he was also into Mega Man in general--Or maybe it was the other way around. In any case, he found a site which hosted that old Mega Man cartoon to watch. Called [url=http://protoman.com/"]The Protoman Homepage[/url], it featured a very small site with a lot of video game music, and the Mega Man cartoon, and most of all, a forum. I joined, and met a bunch of friends and we became firm friends added each other on MSN almost instantly.
However it happened, it was a very important moment in time for me--though I wouldn't realize it until years later. The Protman Homepage was actually a small forum, with probably a core of 10 active posters, and probably 20-30 sporadic posters to add in filler. But those ten of us were fiercely loyal to the site, and an extremely tight-knit group. For such a small forum, it exploded with activity for almost a year.
At the same time Rom-Source had more drama now, and fewer members. There was also a lot of legal pressure on the site because if its ROM hosting. It kept getting cease and desists and servers kept dropping the site, deleting backups and knocking it around. It went from Rom-source.com, to rom-source.us, to romsource.net, and finally to where it resides now at romsource.us. But it would sometimes be months between when it was taken down and put back up. The IRC went strong for a while, but eventually due to Facebook and MSN and the lack of a main site to tie it together, everyone lost interest. Umi-San and Roll-Chan were quietly buried, and life moved on...
I invited a few friends to the Protoman Homepage, and for a time it was actually quite a booming little ecosystem. But then Capcom sent a cease and desist for the cartoons, and the site was down for about a month. When it came back, those ten core members came back to posting up a storm, but we had lost pretty much everyone else. It didn't really matter to us, though. We just kept posting as if nothing had ever happened, but without the draw of the cartoons, new members were few and far between--mostly referrals from other forums, that the rest of us already had met.
I don't really know what to say about this time... You know how you have that one summer when you were in high school that was really great? Like even though you know you were bored a lot, as you look back on it, it just feels like the best time of your life? And then as you grow older, the fun seems to grow, and the times when you were bored and miserable seem to fade away even more and more until it seems like every day that summer was action-packed fun every waking minute? Yeah, this summer was mine. I don't even know how to explain it in a way that could possible make sense to anyone else but it just... It was so much fun. Everything was just absolutely perfect.
Sometimes I wish that summer could have lasted forever. Playing Sonic 2, sitting in all of the IRC channels (Zebeth--which was still around for a while, Rom-Source until it died, and several other comic channels), and watching TechTV. I even got a job at a supermarket to fund my soda, snacks and video games. I remember being so full of hope for the future, the idea that all of these people would be my friends and... god just leave me alone and let me cry for my lost youth.
Uh... Moving right along, CJ, who I mentioned earlier as having been wanting to make a comic, decided to open his own forum on InvisionFree for his comic. He got someone else to sprite it because I was totally done with it, and this site was pretty barren for a couple months until...
Chapter VI: The Death of Protoman and the Birth of CJFN
There was a huge mess at the Protoman Homepage. I don't really want to get into it, but that core of ten users split. It was a very rough time because for the ten of us, we didn't really have any sort of social life, and the Protoman Homepage was actually like a family. But the betrayal from it ended up destroying the site. Everyone who was there at the time stopped posting. the site was (And has been ever since) dead. This scarred a lot of us I think. All of the people who were there at the time don't really get attached to people on the internet anymore, which is kind of sad. Or maybe I just don't hear about it, which isn't as sad but still hurts me deeply. The site is still there, and if you ever have (a lot of) time on your hands and are bored, you can still read all of what happened there in its entirety, since it mostly played out on the boards. But I wouldn't recommend it, it's not at all worth it.
Stay tuned for more exciting developments in this so-called story!
![[+]](images/collapse_collapsed.png "[+]")
Spoiler