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Storytime – Janeil Harricharan

Storytime

As 2023 starts to roll around, I’ve done lots of self-reflection on myself. A lot of it has to do at a milestone point of my life, the winter of 2016. A lot of good and bad things happened that year; and while there was that swirling torrent of negative things that were going on, there were a few bright lights that made me look ahead and see something beyond that.

Mostly I looked at how my life could’ve gone different, and actually did have a ton of regrets with a lot of things. But, I found myself still coming back and thinking about those few positives that happened in that season.

Why am I mentioning this seven years later?

I think that’s exactly it; just time passing by, and still trying to sort out where I want to go in the future. And then you look back at happened, remember some things and wonder what’s going to happen to all of that. Moreso, what’s happening to all the things in my head that I don’t share with people.

To just preface, I don’t go around and say “I’m going to make this for people online to see!” I do keep quite a lot of things to myself, either for my own enjoyment or to share in person. But when 7+ years go by and you’ve not shared these things with a single soul, I do step back and wonder if there’s any value of those experiences to put in the public space. A lot of the time they do get censored and filtered to leave the interesting bits, protect privacy, etc.

I think that cycle does have to do with me aging and reflecting, for sure. Maybe that’s musings for another day; but today, I’m here to actually share something from that databank of memories.

Your late Christmas 2022 present is what my space was, several tunes and some munchies from the period.

This is also the first time I’m doing “read this blog entry to these tunes”. I listened to this on loop a few times while writing most of it, with some other stuff later in the actual post when that got repetitive. So feel free to have this play in the background as you read.

Consider this my holiday gift to you for 2022.

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When people ask me what I do to relax to sleep or get in the mood for writing, they’re often shocked when they hear my response. Most likely because they don’t hear me say I need to lock myself in a corner of a room with a blanket, or whatever a typical introvert would say.

Apparently going out into public to write is such a big shocker.

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You can always say I can’t sit down in one place for a long time, in terms of months and years. Sure, I may have called East Tennessee home for so most of my life, but it’s especially bothers  me in the spring. And these past few years particularly, it’s not been that different.

It could be a ton of things that give me that feeling. Daylight Savings Time ending, the sudden warm temperatures; or the deja vu I get at waking up early and feeling I should be waking up in a hotel or rest area instead of my bedroom.

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In 2005, I was basking in the sudden influx of uninterrupted Internet access at Walters State Community College. DeviantArt was my 2nd go-to place, I was getting a lot more writing done and I could use the Internet without having to bother what my parents would say.

A lot of time would be spent here. Hours beyond than what I usually needed to be at school. All because I didn’t have a proper computer at home, and didn’t have free Internet access.

It was one afternoon in early fall of 2007, I had joined a forum and discovered by the name of Game Maker. The people of the forum had recommended it to me when I have voiced how I wanted to make a game. I figured that I would bomb at computer programming since I had failed Visual Basic a semester before. What harm would it be to fool around with it?

Turns out I was wrong.

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I’ve been drawing for quite a long time. I sadly can’t say I’ve been drawing for most of my entire life, but it’s safe to say I’ve been drawing for 1/3rd if not more of it.

As described in my previous story about deviantART, my art skills didn’t really take off until I had access to the platform. A couple of years before that I had taken a short three-week special course at Walters State in a summer drawing class. That helped up my skills a whole bunch over my pre-teen drawings. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible, either.

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When I started to get my feet wet on the Internet, not all of it went well. Quite the opposite. I was quite a newb, and my homeschooling background coupled with strict parents didn’t help. Then add that I wasn’t on it enough to get the hang of things. It was a very bad combination.

I talked to very few people online. But there was one person I was in correspondence with that I had met over an Atlantis fanfic. As time went on they introduced me to a site by the name of deviantART. I signed up in 2004 after hearing them mention they were on it, and slowly started to delve into what it had to offer. I do remember I had posted a few things but because of my social ineptness mixed with poor drawing skills, pieces were lackluster at best. I didn’t even have a proper scanner at the time.

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In 2007 I was coming to the realization that I was barely making headway with friends and social life at college. Everyone was so country, dating someone or people old enough to be your parents. I wasn’t part of the “I graduated from Morristown High School” group, the ghetto click or “redneck romeo”. I was really standalone, slowly discovering that there were more sociable people online than the people in front of me.

In February or March of that year I had started getting into contact with one of my cousins. He, his brother and another cousin were all attending East Tennessee State University, or ETSU. I hadn’t talked to them much earlier, but was beginning to learn that this mystical college was well within reach. All I had known that it was a big school and was more like a “university”.

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As extremely odd as it sounds, I’ve only recently owned a second laptop. I’ve always owned the same one or done without. It was a monumental move for me to get a second laptop after the cooling fan went on my first machine, it also being the second new computer I had bought for myself. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the story of Novablade.

Circa 2010, I had just enrolled in ETSU and had just settled into my apartment near college. After being quite well-informed that my college courses were tech intensive, my family decided to get a laptop for me to do the work that I needed to do.

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This one is a bit of a short Storytime, but this came back to memory when I started putting together some special content for my own site.

When I had gotten interested in Steampunk in 2009, it didn’t really stick with the people around at the time. However, I had tried to pursue my interest in it, namely in writing. When a cosplay group and that flopped, I decided to bring to light some of other people’s creation. If I couldn’t be a contributor, I could at least be an information hub! I was heavily inspired by a Steampunk-only blog with actual articles, information and promotion for the genre. Sort of like an online newspaper.

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Around December of 2007, I was browsing Big Lots when I found a clearance CD of Sid Meier’s: Civilization 3. I had seen this game in action a year earlier, loving how the game played and never had gotten the chance to own it for myself. For $3, it was a bargain.

About two months later, I found the Gold edition in Target for $20. Nice cardboard box, 3 CD’s, even a manual. This had two expansion packs and even a map editor, something that my original game didn’t have.

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