Hello! I apologize to any new persons baffled or bored by my noisy protrusion into this most ancient of realms, but it dawned on me a couple weeks ago that this day would be 10 years after I first registered on these forums! Wow, I feel old! What better time to poke my head back in and look around, eh?
Hmm. I wonder how many people I knew are still around? I see a few just checking over the threads! I suppose some of you can also share in my "oh my god it's been 10 years" sentiment, since I know a couple of you registered even before me.
Well, in light of the occasion, I shall do what I do best: prattle on about myself! Yaaaaaay! *tomatoes splatter on the stage nearby*
You see, for those who don't know me, I was homeschooled by my parents. When I say homeschooled, I mean kept at home almost all of the time I grew up (unless we went to the store or something, or they dragged me to church, the latter of which became a less and less willing affair), and didn't register me with the state or anything. Legal status questionable, there, but they did it in Texas, land of the homeschool, so probably not off by much.
Because of this, I had very little social experience growing up. I rarely talked to anyone who wasn't in my family unless it was to ask something like "do you have a copy of Dragon Warrior II somewhere?" at gamestop, or some politeisms like "thank you" at pretty much any old store, or some awkward "uhhhh okay, yeah sure" type stuff when people would approach me at church.
So, then, AGN was effectively my high school social life! And it actually sort of functioned as one for real, I think. I shall therefore proceed to babble out a retrospective that explains this sentiment.
The year 2000:
Way back in the far-flung future year of TWO THOUSAND!!11, there was a young male child, youngest sibling in a semi-large christian family. This child was very lonely, and spent free time either playing video games or poking around websites about those specific video games.
This pokery led to the discovery of a certain zhq.com which would later cease to be; and on that site, there was a news update talking about a neat Zelda program the site's author had discovered and linked to: Zelda Classic.
Initially, I was baffled by Zelda Classic; why remake Zelda 1 for the computer when there's perfectly good emulators that could already do that? But then the real draw occurred to me: it was going to have an editor. Not some confusing, half-functional ROM hacking editor, no, this would be a game designed to use an editor, that you could go nuts with. Make your own Zelda games, conveniently! Share them on a website!
So I poked my head all around Zelda Classic's old website, and there I saw a link to some mysterious thing called the "forums." I had heard of these "forums" before; they seemed akin to a chat room, except (the ones I saw) instead of the single page showing only the recent text, it retained old posts like some kind of bulletin board or something. This "AGN forum" business looked more complicated, more classy- there were like, sections and stuff.
"Game Ideas" was a pretty cool sounding section. People would go and post game ideas and share them! Wow! So I decided to check that out. So fascinated was I that I decided to register and post.
Now, my parents had told me never to go in chat rooms. They hadn't specified forums, but I decided to keep these activities to myself anyway.
Then I almost instantly realized what I'd done; I'd found a place where I could like, talk to other people and maybe even make friends who had like, similar interests and stuff! So I started posting just about every day.
So, I continued to post all the time. Eventually, there came to be an AGN chat room. I was hesitant about it, because I was still like, doing what my parents told me to and stuff back then- I was 11, and I'd been pretty solidly conditioned to do that. But then, as I wrestled with the decision, I realized there was no logical harm in doing that which wouldn't be present in the forums as well; and those are safe, right?
As a regular at AGN, I did many foolish things. I was for some reason made a moderator of the Sega forum- hahahahaha. Yeah, I edited MetaStaiford's posts about Sega's declining success to preach the virtues of Sega's future in comical fashion, and promptly lost the moderatorhood. Rightly so, but it's a funny memory to me. Taught me some sort of lesson I suspect.
Then there came the member Goatboy, who said various crude sexual insults to me via private message, called me a 'bone-choker' and some other such things. I promptly went crying to Warlord, who didn't care in the slightest and did nothing. I had never been dealt such heinous insult in all eleven years of my life!
The year 2001:
So frustrated did I become, as time went on, that after several months I stormed off, announcing my ultimate departure from AGN because I was sick of getting insulted and mocked. I said my goodbyes and took off for a few months...
While I was away, I played around with GRAAL, but decided I didn't like it, and it was harder to hide from my parents anyway. I also became totally obsessed with Back to the Future, more so than previously.
...then a thing called puberty happened...
My feelings about puberty were not the ones most young males have, from what I can tell. I was extremely, horrifically unhappy; not so much out of fear of god hating me, since I was persuaded by the "he loves everyone" stuff at the time- which would soon become a horrible issue, of course- but because, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I did not want to be a man. Not in the slightest.
And that I really, really did want to be a girl. I'd pretended now and then, I'd had fun playing house the rare time or two I got to play with a girl from church, or my youngest cousin (who was about my age). That almost never happened, but it stuck in my memory.
Thinking of it on every level- the way my body was, the way I looked, this whole new sexual thing I was learning about... I didn't want to be a man. I didn't even want to be a scrawny nerdy man. I wanted to be female. I felt-well, feel, really- like I am a girl, in my heart.
This led to me looking up a little site called transsexual.org, where I learned more about the subject. I learned how hard surgery was, that hormones took years, that the social side of it was terrible, that far worse things than simply being insulted or mocked would happen- that I could be beaten and killed for it.
And I was sure about it anyway.
It dawned on me that I kind of missed AGN. Glenn even e-mailed me and told me he and a couple other people kinda liked me and missed having me around. So I figured, what the hell.
But wait a minute- this is the internet, I thought. No one could see what I really looked like. I could totally just say I was a girl, and some people might believe me...
So I decided to try that. I came back and announced my girlhood, coming up with some fib about how I'd said I was male because I thought it'd make people treat me better- my social ineptitude and the questionableness of my parents' values showing through immediately, of course.
But, well, it didn't work. I didn't know what I was talking about, I barely understood how the period worked, and as it became more and more obvious, I decided to stand up and announce the truth, that I was a male-to-female transsexual. This was met with a mix of boos and insults (I seem to recall those mainly coming from one or two members, but that's ancient history, so I really don't care much anymore) and scoffs and... honest, genuine support. Holy crap. Thanks, AGN!
Another interesting thing: AlexMax, resident general-purpose anime lover, happened to make an offhand joke about Otohime Mutsumi when I talked about my poor health and some lightheaded stuff I was having/fears of fainting I had at the time. This led me to research who that character was... and of course, I became completely obsessed with the Love Hina manga in later years, and Ken Akamatsu's works in general (A.I. Love You is horribly underrated. Check out volumes 7 and 8 especially!) so thanks, AlexMax!
After that I started to feel pretty good about AGN and started posting and chatting all the time (when I could sneak around my parents, of course, which usually meant sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night and being ready to hit alt+F4 and run quietly back to bed if I heard them up).
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