Well, since you ask. Quite long and in this weird subdued voice:
I first used the Internet in 1994, at the age of five. I went on
Questacon's website. That's all I remember. I continued to use it very infrequently.
Soon after I turned nine, I searched the Internet for Neverhood cheats, and stumbled across a Neverhood fanpage. Soon, I'd also discovered discussion forums, fanfiction, OCs, and fanart. I'd been making up my own fan stories for a long time, but this was the first time I'd found out that other people did it.
I didn't actually join the Neverhood fandom, but I lurked for a long time.
I got a Nintendo 64 for Christmas that year, and I soon got into Banjo-Kazooie, though my parents didn't buy it for me for another eight months. I explored the fandom, and even wrote a couple of my fanfics down. Fortunately I didn't put them online. Being ten, my writing skills were... lacking.
I decided that I needed a screen name, and that it needed to be a character from the game that hadn't been taken and probably wouldn't be taken. I decided on Clanker, a character who appeared in a few of my story ideas, and shared the first three letters of my name.
I eventually started posting on the YBK Forums as a guest in early 2000. Soon after, we moved house and I lost my Internet access. When I got it back, YBK seemed to be gone. I didn't discover that it just moved until September, when I registered.
The forum was very much like this one, except less active if I recall correctly. Of course people probably mocked me. I was eleven and posting on a forum very much like this one. But I still had a lot of fun for about a year, after which the webmasters announced that they'd got bored with Banjo-Kazooie and would no longer be updating the site.
I really loved the site, so this news saddened me. But the forums were still up, so I continued to post on them. Most of the members left for the IRC channel, however. Soon, the forums had changed to being more like the fanstuff wiki. Really, the resemblance is creepy. We even had the hrwiki forum-like IRC channel disliking us for being the twelve and thirteen year olds we were.
I got into Neopets at around this time, and started writing a fic that never got finished, which I still kind of like. I did put up the prologue and first chapter on fanfiction.net, but it got no reviews and my account was eventually deleted because I put up a four line Harry Potter fic.
On the YBK Forums, I started a roleplay with the others. All five of us. It was pretty stupid, but a lot of fun, and that's the important thing. At this time I was kind of annoying and a hypocrite, but apparently the others had a lot of respect for me. We held some forum awards, and I got voted wisest and best all-round. I guess that's what happens when you're the only girl in a group of thirteen-year-olds.
In September 2002, I got into Discworld, and started annoying the others to read Discworld, over and over and over. We also started another roleplay, which was a sequel to the first, but infinitely more mess up. I shall call it, Shwoo's Law of Roleplay Sequels. I eventually dropped out, but my self-insertion stayed in the story.
In December, we got our own word, shwoo, which is a combination of the word shweet and the word coo. I've already described how that happened in too many "where does your screen name come from?" topics, so I'll spare you the details now. Shwoo meant "cool", or "awesome", and everyone put it into their sigs, except for this one guy who stuck with "coo".
I joined Room 3B, a tiny Discworld forum, a little after that. It was fun for a long time. I was also exploring the rest of the Discworld fandom, especially alt.fan.pratchett and its section on fanfiction.net. I believe that being into Discworld made me a wiser and more sensible person, but maybe that was just growing up. I also finally got an email address at around that time.
Some time in the first half of 2003, I wrote my first passable fanfic, which was about Ponder Stibbons, my favourite Discworld character. I was so happy when I saw those favourable reviews. The best part about writing that, other than showing me that I really could write decently if I tried, was that my mum showed it to my English teachers, and they changed my grade for the semester from a C to an A.
YBK Forums finally died some time around late 2003. I'm not sure. I think I started hanging around TV Tome. I'd recently got the Disney Channel, and had got into Kim Possible during a marathon of all the season one episodes. I checked out the corner of the Kim Possible fandom that had recently vacated TV Tome, and it was kind of scary.
After that, I got into Lilo & Stitch: The Series, for reasons I couldn't figure out then, and can't figure out now. I suppose my obsessiveness was just looking for something to latch onto or something. Anyway, I tried the TV Tome forums for Lilo & Stitch, and found them not really to my liking.
In Room 3B at the time, a member I had a lot of respect for, to the point of hero worship, mentioned that it was possible to make good looking art in MSPaint, and showed a picture she'd done of Susan Sto Helit. This inspired me to start drawing again. I think I'd stopped because I hadn't wanted to waste paper. But it didn't inspire to get some instruction on drawing, and I didn't improve much.
Then I got into the Weekenders, and started posting on a tiny Weekenders forum. It was pretty fun, but eventually I lost interest, and I didn't try any more forums until I got into Ed Edd n Eddy, which I loved and probably still would if I still had Cartoon Network. This was in mid 2004 sometime. I had tried making some MSTings during this time, and they were fairly funny but extremely OOC.
The forum I joined up with was Earth 2 Edd, which was renamed Edtropolis while I was there. It was pretty fun, but the mods were insanely strict. You weren't even allowed to address your posts to any one person, ever, even if other people might be interested in seeing it. We were supposed to use PMs instead, but the inbox could only hold something like six PMs at a time. I also remember getting edited for mentioning the song American Idiot. The mod who edited me thought I was insulting Americans.
The thing about Edtropolis was that there were quite a few artists there, which introduced me to deviantART. So I got an account there and put up some of my MSPaint drawings.
I downloaded Earthbound and really liked it, so I tried joining the starmen.net forums. But I got sick of some people being jerks and left. I tried making an Ed Edd n Eddy themed hack of Earthbound, but I didn't get very far.
I hadn't liked the screen name Clanker for some time, and I was thinking of possible alternatives. I considered oneinnabun, which was an Ed Edd n Eddy reference and a Discworld reference, and even made a LiveJournal under that name before I decided not to make my screen name fandom related.
I'd watched a few episodes of Codename: Kids Next Door by this time, and decided that I wanted to see the fandom. But I didn't find it until March 2005, at which point I suddenly got obsessed with KND. I lurked at the largest forum in the fandom, which didn't have a name so I call it Stardrifter's KND forum, and decided that it was the best forum ever. So I joined. And had a great time.
After a few months, I decided to start roleplaying, and had a great time doing that. Those roleplays were so messed up. Especially the sequels. This was also around the time I thought of the perfect name to replace Clanker: Shwoo. It wasn't fandom specific, and it preserved a word I'd always liked. So I changed everything I could to Shwoo. I couldn't change my deviantART or my LiveJournal, however. This was also around the time I left Edtropolis and Room 3B. Edtropolis was too strict to be fun, and I was sick of the people in Room 3B after spending so much time there.
I'd been into snark for a long time, since I'd discovered mildly humourous guestbook entries on a Zelda site when I was ten, and a site for making fun of the cheesiness of the English dub of Digimon when I was twelve. So I was Googling badfic, and discovered the fanficrants LiveJournal community and the Godawful Fanfiction Forums. I wasn't old enough to join GAFF, but I really enjoyed lurking. I even tried reading some of the more notorious porn fics they made fun of. They didn't bother me at all.
At Stardrifter's KND forum, I became a mod, and then an admin. I posted more than anyone else and was really popular. For some reason. I loved that forum, despite the n00bs and crazy shippers. But the people I really idolised were the college students who'd got sick of the stupidity in the forum and left for LiveJournal.
I wish I could go back in time and tell me what a bad idea that was. The superiority didn't warn me off, because I idolised them. Neither did the occasional mocking of the people in the forum, because GAFF had somehow given me the impression that that's what mature people did.
So yeah. Something happened. I'm not going to deny that I made mistakes myself, and at least I know not to make them now, but spending several weeks in my haven from real life being told what a horrible, horrible person I was, and how wrong I was about everything... It really messed me up. This was over two years ago now and it's still sort of hard to talk about.
I endured it for as long as I could, because I loved the forum so much, and since I was an admin I had a commitment to it, but I took a break in March 2006 because I didn't want to be depressed on my birthday. And then I just didn't go back, because I couldn't handle it. I cry all the time, but that's the only time the Internet's ever made me cry.
I couldn't handle any sort of Internet socialisation, because I was an idiot and actually believed that I was the only one in the wrong, but I started lurking in the South Park fandom. I'd got obsessed with it after watching the movie on my birthday, which was pretty lucky. I don't know how much more badly depressed I would've been without an obsession to think about all the time.
I'd decided not to get into the fandom of something I really liked again, because what happened in the KND fandom made it difficult to watch KND. So I just lurked, and decided that I didn't want to get into it anyway. But I did start writing a South Park slash parody. It didn't get finished because a reviewer got the wrong idea about the purpose of the story and I was too scared to correct her. I told you the KND fandom messed me up.
After that I got into Clone High, but that doesn't have much of a fandom, unfortunately. Then, in August 2006... Well, I'd heard of Homestar Runner, but decided based solely on the name that I didn't want to watch it. I don't know why. But I was reading a bunch of Wikipedia articles and I found one on the Brothers Chaps. Because my mind works in messed up ways, having to think the toons are written by real people made it seem much more attractive to me. So I tried watching it one Thursday when bored.
By Saturday I'd watched most of the content on the site, and felt reading to check out the wiki, which I'd found some time in 2005 when searching for Kids Next Door MSTings. I don't know why it came up then either.
Even though I definitely didn't want to sully Homestar Runner's awesome with bad experiences with the fandom, I succumbed to the temptation to join this forum sometime in September. Soon after, I noticed a typo in the transcript of the newest email, coloring, and decided to make an account and stop editing as an IP. I joined the fanstuff wiki a while afterwards, but didn't edit until I finished the fanfic I was working on in January 2007. I wanted to be a regular at all three places, and... I have been a regular at all three places at some time in the past, right?
In early 2007, I was halfway to getting over what happened in the KND fandom, so I tried going back to the forum. It wasn't as good as before, but it was okay for a while, when I got caught up in a war between a mod and this other guy who's been in the fandom forever. The moderation at this point was horrible, and I eventually went into why in a friendslocked post on my LiveJournal, which is friendslocked for a reason. Things haven't changed much since then.
When I realised that going on the forum was just stressing me out, I left again. I tried coming back many times until early this year when I decided to forget about it. So meanwhile, I was writing a lot of fanfiction, and having fun in the Homestar Runner fandom. I got made a sysop on the fanstuff wiki about halfway through 2007. I tried to improve it, but eventually gave up. I got frustrated with the atmosphere on this forum. I regretted not being more active on the knowledge base, and not going on IRC anymore. My neuroses from the KND fandom had begun to go away in October of 2006, and continued to go away during 2007. And right now I'm working on not letting seeing the people involved on LiveJournal or deviantART spoil my day.
There was a popular roleplay on deviantART that freaked me out, which I mention because it really freaked me out. I wrote an alternate ending, which made me feel better and let me get my serious writing fix. It's hard to do serious Homestar Runner fanfiction and make it work.
I have recently become more active on LiveJournal, but I don't know if that's really good for me, so I'm taking a bit of a break. But I might get into this LiveJournal roleplay I applied for a month ago, which would be good because I really miss those KND roleplays. Also, I got made a mod here at the start of the year. The end.
Like I said, you did ask. I know I missed some things out, too. When did it become ten past two in the afternoon?
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