back to the roots

Here it is. I've been playing with the idea of making a personal website again for a while now. As I've mentioned on the about page, video games are how I got into technology in the first place and building little personal web- and fansites turned me from a user into a creator.

I got into creating sites around the age of 13 when a boy I met during my summer vacation told me of the German online chat website Knuddels. Before that time I knew of the internet's existence and had used it to look up some facts for school presentations but I didn't grasp the magic of it all so I stuck to playing video games and watching anime on TV after school.

But when I looked up that chat website to stay in touch with the friend I made on vacation, a new world opened up to me. Suddenly I could talk to strangers on the internet. Completely anonymously and without all the awkwardness of getting to know people in real life! A dream come true for awkward, introverted and shy teenage-me.

I got hooked immediately and spent way too much time on the family computer in the basement. The whole system was designed to push all the right buttons in a teenager's brain. After signing up you got assigned the rank of newbie. Your username got displayed in a boring default black. Unlike the bold light and dark blues or even reds of other users. It turned out that you needed to accumulate some online-time before you got promoted from newbie to family member status and your name would be displayed in a bold light blue. This allowed you to create your own homepage and link it in your user profile. After that you could be even further promoted and become a regular which allowed you to vote on certain topics like which users should become moderators among other privileges. The regulars were the cool kids of the site and well known in the channels they frequented. If you weren't online long enough or too inactive in the chat you would fall from grace and get demoted back to family member status.

Having learned all that, my first goal was to get rid of that lowly newbie status. As an avid fan of roleplaying video games I joined the roleplaying channel and started chatting. I quickly learned that this was not what this channel was about. While a lot of the community members were video game enthusiasts like me, the channel was focused on roleplaying in the sense of interactive fiction writing. Using the /me chat command one could write messages that got displayed without a colon after one's name to explain a character action like FishHead drew his sword and attacked the goblin!

I saw players writing back and forth, creating a story by writing and responding like a literary tennis match. Some would write short, straightforward messages, telling each other how they're countering the other player's spell or shooting their bow. Other's would write long elaborate prose describing initial scenes with their characters, inviting other to engage with them and start playing. There were few to no rules and a lot of creativity.

I absolutely loved it. I could be whoever or whatever I wanted and play that character without any of the technical limitations of roleplaying video games of the time. So I ditched my initial account and created a new one. Like a lot of the other community members I named the user after my fictional character and filled out the user profile like it wasn't mine but the character's. This kind of roleplaying was a fun, risk-free exercise in creativity like I had never experienced before.

It didn't take long for me to gather the necessary online hours to get the ability to create a homepage for my fictional character. This immediately served as more space to fill in the background story, mention other player's characters and the relationships between them.

I immediately noticed that my website looked really lame compared to those of some other user's which looked so cool. They had custom cursors, background-images, dynamic effects like snow falling from the top of the window and lots and lots of glittery, sparkly, flashy gifs. And so I stumbled on tutorials for adding these effects to your site with the help of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. And so I became a programmer and a fiction writer at the same time.

I created countless accounts for my different characters. It was a time of experimentation, both in writing and programming. I tried on different characters like clothes in an infinite walk in closet: male, female, young, old, human, non-human, cute, soft, cool, edgy. Each character deserving of a different, unique website.

The majority of my teenage years was spent in this cycle of dreaming up characters, creating accounts, creating websites and roleplaying until I got bored of a character.

I don't remember exactly when and how it happened but around two or so years before I graduated from high school and started studying computer science I stopped with this hobby of mine. You can't earn money with writing words and you're too bad at math to become a programmer. Nobody ever said these words to me but I got the feeling that that's what everybody thought. Even though I never told my friends or family about what I was doing online.

I switched my focus to graduating and decided - motivated by a mixture of hope and spite - to study computer science. Sure, I flip-flopped between failing and barely passing grades in math for my entire school life up to that point but who said that couldn't change?

The gamble worked out thanks to a lot of hard work and I ended up doing very well in university. It followed what other's would think of as a dream career. I quickly went from junior to regular to senior developer and software architect. I took on more responsibility and became the youngest team lead in the company. Me and my team worked on exciting technologies in the big data space, implementing real-time systems, working with machine learning models to provide fancy features for our customers. My family was proud of what I had achieved.

Only I wasn't really happy with it all. I felt exhausted and empty. My creative hobbies had fallen by the wayside as I was too tired to practice piano or write something when I came home. Eventually I was even too tired to enjoy video games anymore. I had played the corporate game and the winner was the company.

Fast-forward to today. While Covid didn't mean less work for me it still robbed me of many distractions in my spare time which led to me eventually admitting to myself that I probably need therapy. I was lucky enough to find a good therapist and work through a lot of unprocessed emotions. I started making changes to my life and eventually quit my corporate job. Now I'm self-employed and working together with my brother. This doesn't solve all my problems but it allows me to be my own boss and look out for myself better than my former employer did.

Recently, while tidying up my apartment, I realized that I had gotten into the habit of buying too many books and reading very few of them. In fact my book shelves were full and I didn't really know where to put the books strewn around the living room. At that point I decided to stop buying so many books and start reading again. I got myself a library card and realized that it helped me tremendously to know that I had to read the book within the lending period and read 4 books in a month. Wow!

At the same time I was frequenting the Insert Credit Forums and enjoyed reading everbody's thoughts on the games they were playing and the books they were reading. It was refreshing to see people taking time to reflect on the media they were consuming and actually engaging in thoughtful discussion about it. I tried doing the same, first for the books I read and then for the games I played. The effect was immediate: I spent my time reading and playing much more deliberately and also enjoyed it more. Writing about it felt awkward and hard at first, since I hadn't done it in a long time but quickly the writing and thinking about books and games became as fun if not more fun than actually reading and playing.

And so I decided to go back to the roots. I hacked together this website. While I'm not much of a designer I nonetheless still enjoyed figuring out what I wanted this site to be and I'm happy with this humble little thing that came from it.

My hunger for excercising my creativity has reawakend and I'll use this site as a repository for my writing. I also have plans of collecting music and little games I'll make on here. I'm excited to see where this will lead!