A few days ago, I received the following email through my contact form on Neogrotesque:

Subject: [Neogrotesque] Hello.
Name: Sarah Strange
Site URL: sarahstrange.net

Message:

Do you believe in God? I wanted to know since some of your sites seemed erm, you know…and I wanted to let you know Jesus loves you and if you dont believe in God I want you to go to heaven!

Love, Sarah.

I must admit that I’m mildly amused and perhaps, also mildly offended. I never saw any of my sites as seeming “erm, you know…,” whatever that means. Some of my designs are admittedly a bit dark or edgy, but I’ve never made anything particularly offensive, in my opinion. Either way, webdesign is only a hobby, and those that find my work offensive undoubtedly have the option not to visit my sites.

To be honest, I never understood religion. I’m technically a Chinese immigrant (though very much assimilated), and really, questions of faith were never raised in my household. As such, I was never conditioned to believe in any such thing as “God,” and nothing has ever convinced me to since then. On a good day, I consider myself agnostic; on a day like today, when I want to distance myself as much these religious fanatics as possible, I’m happy to accept the title of “raving atheist.” Irrationality knows no bounds.

By the summer of 2006, I was pretty confident in my webdesign skills. It had been 2 years since I first opened Firefly Studios, my first graphics site, and my design tastes were beginning more and more to reflect my growing interest in JRock and visual kei. This was when I discovered Mija’s Malice. Right away, I was impressed with Mija’s designs and quickly applied to affiliate with her site. It wasn’t long before she invited me to design for Visual Fetish, a LiveJournal graphics community that was starting up at the time. Oddly enough, I had never paid much attention to LiveJournal and had no idea how to design for it. Luckily, Mija was there to help me, and I learned quickly. My career as a designer for Visual Fetish was rocky and short-lived, owing to some bizarre drama on the part of its main administrator. It wasn’t long before Mija, Hideko, and I broke off to start our own graphics community, Crazed System.

Admittedly, I don’t update Crazed System as much as used to. I do, however, still consider it (and more importantly, Mija and Hideko) to be my present life on the internet. Here’s to many more years!

In my teenage, internet forums were one of my favorite online pass-times. My Sailormoon fandom had led me to love of manga in general (I was always more partial to manga than to anime, but that’s another story). Either way, I somehow happened upon the now-defunct Ochiba.net, which was then a bustling internet community. Ochiba introduced me to oekaki, which led me to spend many hours in front of my computer, attempting to scribble sketches with my mouse. Wonderful artists like S.Jen and Kurot became my idols and, at one point, I aspired to be like them. It wasn’t long, however, before I realized that I was a terrible artist and decided to shift my focus elsewhere, toward webdesign.

That was when I discovered Metropolis (Met, as we called it). At one point, my post-count here was well over 2000, and I was proud of it, too. I think I was even a moderator at one point. My best friends at the time were Jamie and Casey. I looked up to Yukie and her co-admins a great deal, and was overjoyed when Yukie asked me to affiliate with her site. I don’t know why I drifted away from the Met crowd– maybe it was because my interests changed. I actually tried to re-register there recently, though it looks like the script glitched. I wonder if any of my old friends are still around…

Here I go, once again, dredging up my dark and embarrassing past. It was around the year 1999-2000. Not long after I got over my Pokemon craze, it was quickly replaced by an undying obsession with Sailormoon in general, and with Sailorsaturn in particular. Indeed, my first website was a shrine devoted to Sailorsaturn; it was first entitled The Tomoe Mansion and later renamed Silent Destiny. It was a crappy little site, initially built using Tripod’s sitebuilder. I don’t remember the process of actually learning HTML for myself, but I do remember that once I did, I moved to Angelfire, which, at the time, was still offering ad-free hosting.

Even more embarrassing, however, was the fact that I had taken up RPing. I discovered online RPs via Yahoo! Groups, and eventually found one to call my own. Naturally, I played Hotaru, but, perhaps due to my lack of creativity, I also played a whole slew of original Hotaru look-a-likes (long lost twin sisters and the like). I don’t remember what our group called ourselves, but it was probably the first true internet “clique” that I became a member of. We were all internet newbies, with our ugly websites and our Yahoo! Messenger accounts. We actually grew quite close, and I remember many a late-night conversation with Sara, who played Usagi, or Val, who played Haruka.

Ever since writing my last post about feeling old, I’ve been thinking about my life on the internet and how it’s evolved over the years. I first discovered the internet at the age of 12, so I suppose that since I’m now 22, I’ll consider this my 10th anniversary of sorts. I’ll start with this article and, with each successive article, I plan to cover another phase of my online life until I get all the way up to the present.

When I was 12, Pokemon was a big deal and I, embarrassingly enough, was a huge fan. One day, my father, for whatever reason, decided that it was time I signed up for my own email address. Thus, he eagerly shoved Yahoo! in my face and insisted that I set up an account. Soon afterward, with my newly created Yahoo! username on hand, I discovered the Yahoo! chatrooms and the unexpectedly large Pokemon fanbase that populated them. I don’t remember much of the experience, except that it did wonders for the speed at which I would eventually be able to type. One thing led to another and, soon enough, I had installed Yahoo! Messenger and was chatting regularly with a handful of online friends over IM. Thinking back, this probably wasn’t the safest way for a 12-year-old to pass her time, what with all the “internet predators” out there, but I suppose I lucked out as nothing ever happened to me.