I’ve spent the past ~6 hours going through stuff on my hard drive. There’s things on there from my very first webpage (back in 4th grade) to my first VB programs (4th grade) to my first Java programs (6th grade) to various LPSO board stuff to every photo I’ve ever taken to a bunch of Games Factory games I made with Jim in middle school.

As I read through the various archived forum pages and chat logs, it occurs to me how horribly arrogant and self-righteous I was then. I acted like an ass to so much of the LPSO community, and for that I apologize. In chats, I was intrusive and annoying (hopefully I’m not as bad now… hopefully). Bleh. I hate who I was back then. Stupid stupid stupid.

I look over my old websites and I realize how horribly devoid of content they were. Sure, they featured interesting layouts and advertised themselves as “Fanfics, forums, and much much more,” but there really wasn’t “much more” than that. I think that’s one thing I’m proud of in AlanvDotOrg… it actually has content. Design is important, sure, but it comes second to content. Back in my early web design years, I seem to have forgotten that and used and reused the same old tired layouts as many times as I could just to have many pages up, even if those pages had only a “Coming soon” sign on them.

I was so full of myself… things were created under the assumption that everyone was interested in me… that my site was the one that everyone wanted to come to. I had password protected pages. I had exclusive members-only content. I put together tons of web games and quizzes. I had a page to give out awards to other websites. Meh.

I also stumbed across my first website ever. It’s an animorphs fansite with stuff copied directly from the official site and random animated web graphics. I was a little confused until I remembered it was before I knew to use “index.html” as the splash… so the index is “t1.html”. Odd, but meh. I should upload it sometime in case people are interested… it’s 1.2MB, but only because it contains WAV files.

So yeah, it’s highly amusing to go back and look through my old webpages. I just realized I have screens of them here. Heh. They evolved so much.

Looking over old photos, I’ve really changed.
Here’s me from Halloween 2000 with my Sonic pumpkin

Here’s me from before we even had a digital camera, at my birthday party (probably 5th grade) with Kat, Katie, and Jim

Oh, and me with my 6th grade homeroom class

My photography has also changed a lot… I guess you could say it’s matured. Interesting.
In any case, my folder containing almost every photo I’ve ever taken is now 47.2GB (94,872 photos) and growing weekly.
…
That’s a hell of a lot of photos.
I wonder if I can break 100,000 before December.

Looked over my massive archive of game screenshots from back when I loved posting screens of video games online. There’s over 1.5 GB of horrible-quality 640X480px screenshots from SoAL, Sonic Adventure 2, Animal Crossing, PSO, Grandia 2, Evolution 1/2, Starfox Adventures, SSBM, and Super Mario Sunshine. So much random crap in there. I really should get back into video games… I kinda miss them sometimes. I should also get my video capture card working again. Meh.

Looked over my archive of card games, from the failed games to my first “successful” one, the Starcraft TCG (although the definition of “successful” is debatable). So much potential. I still want to create RPG Get! I think they’re the best set of card game rules I’ve ever created, and the system is expandable such that it can encompass potentially-limitless numbers of RPGs in the game as seperate affiliations. Meh. One of these days I’ll get around to taking more screenshots of the games so I can have enough stuff to create the base set (which I think was supposed to be themed around Grandia 2 and Skies of Arcadia). Whee.

Ahhh so much more I want to write about, but it’s almost 2 AM, so I should probably sleep.

Edit: Meh, it’s 2:30. I’ve uploaded some (more) old pictures onto Facebook. Go and look. Whee.