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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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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When the boom of Minecraft’s popularity happened, I was barely exposed to what had happened to keep track of it. I was either out of the loop or not around the gaming scene to remember much. But when it became popular, I realized that it wasn’t just some silly cube game, it was actually something quite remarkable.

Circa 2010, first semester of ETSU. I was in Color Theory class with a few other people. There was this one kid in particular called Coty. He was a bit of a nerd and we talked now and then. I remember that when we weren’t painting, he had his laptop out and would play games.

One week he kept going on about “Minecraft”. He had asked me to borrow $20 to buy it, which I agreed to lend him. He never followed through for me to buy it for him that evening, but when we had Color Theory the next time, he had it out on his laptop, running around and hitting cows. I thought it was rude until he explained that you needed to eat, so you had to kill animals.

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Foremost, I do apologize if any images seem haphazard or out of place. It was hard to find creative common images that depicted office life in the era that I’m talking about, or show images about devices or setups that I describe. Any images of hardware are of those I took myself of devices I used to own. With that, let’s get started!

As someone who’s been working in an office for two years now, I can see how people can get annoyed with it. However with working in Food City and what was available for jobs when you were 16-18, working in an office was a dream.

Now I did have some sort of experience working with my parents. But it wasn’t really office work. Truth be told, I was still an observer. And even then, they were still busy trying to keep you off a computer rather than letting you grow with what you were good at. (One reason I’ve entered the gaming scene so late).

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Gaming was quite a different experience for me compared to some people. Not having really touched a console except for an occasional bout of SNES at a cousin’s house, any gaming (if any) was done on PC.

It was only about 2004 that I was allowed my first personal computer. Before that, my “gaming” machine was an old IBM 300PL desktop, running 512MB of RAM and had a 550mhZ Pentium III processor. Sat in the “label room” at my family business at the time, an empty spot where a commercial label printer was set up (hence the name). Said computer ran the machine.

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Since my beginning of driving a 1990-91 Nissan Maxima, I’ve rotated through a total of four vehicles. Some I’ve driven on and off, all I’ve owned for only about two or three years. Except one.

The Orion. The car that went through hell and came back.

Orion was nothing special at first, a 1991 Toyota Camry. 4-cylinder 2.0L block, automatic transmission. I was gifted the car in 2004, but didn’t start officially driving it until 2005. I was issued it after an accident I had gotten into with my parents’ Mazda 929, who didn’t trust me with their “high-end” vehicle anymore.

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