My Internet Presence
From Mara Continued
God, I love the internet. I've loved it for a long time! Here's a look at the kind of things I've gotten up to since 2007, with links where still available.
Timeline
Web 2.0
Honestly not a lot at this point. I didn't start contributing to the internet for a while, seeing as I was 7-10 years old. I recall accidentally reading Avatar: The Last Air Bender smut, being convinced I was a vampire by a hoax site, and getting really into https://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/, which was actually very useful to me.
Game Dev
I first got into game development in 2011, specifically using Scratch! This was the first time I contributed to the internet. At the time I was using the name FLASHBACKGAMES, which is my oldest internet alias. This was the name of the game development "company" I started with a few of my friends that year. We were pretty serious for 5th graders, with various roles and a design document for upcoming game UNIVANA, but things fell apart fast. Anyway, you can still play all the games I made. I would lose access to that account for some reason, and make a new account under long time username maracont. I still have that one actually, releasing [an unfinished version of UNIVANA] in 2023, over a decade after its conception. That account also includes a limited version of Asteroids that I converted into a long dead Android game through some inane process.
Youtube
This was when I got really into Youtube in 2012, one of the best years to be on the internet ever. The computer I had from 7-11 was an old desktop I bought entirely with dollar coins (I just think they're neat) at a Discount Electronics. It could not stream video very well. For my birthday in 2012 my dad bought me a pretty nice laptop for the time, and I typed in "utube.com" as we were setting it up. It brought up some weird looking website, so he rerouted me to the real deal.
Youtube would, of course, go on to entirely take over my life. I have 2 tabs of it open right now. I dabbled in all the popular stuff obviously. Smosh, Fred, Annoying Orange, Game Theory, Angry Video Game Nerd, Gangnam Style, Nyan Cat, this, I was definitely experiencing the moment. I recall my first exposure to Lady Gaga being the Lady Pasta Annoying Orange video, which I apparently found hilarious at the time.
A category that I've actually stuck with was edutainment, science and history stuff. Sci-show led into Vlogbrothers, and I became a lifelong fan of Hank and John Green. At some point between 2012 and 2014 I dedicated every second of free time to watching all 4,000 videos on Vlogbrothers at the time in chronological order, about 267 hours worth.
Of course, 2012 was prime time for my budding obsession with video game history, so I was watching a lot of retro let's plays and review videos. Game Grumps, JonTron (RIP), ProJared (RIP?), Peanut Butter Gamer, Chuggaconroy, NintendoCapriSun, a lot of the classics. Channels I've stuck by from this era include HCBailly and Kikoskia, two excellent old-school channels focusing on JRPGs and CRPGs respectively. These guys are straightforward, game-focused, no facecam, short-episode, catch-phrase-having let's players, absolutely chugging along unchanged in the year of our lord 2025. The horseshoe crabs of Youtube.