Hi there.

Normally I would follow a greeting by telling you my name, but since no good could come of that on a bulletin board closely related to the infamous /b/ I will simple refer to myself by a pseudonym. 

My name is Joseph Redwood and I am 20 years old.  My first introduction to syntactic world was attempting to make a website for a video game clan that I had join.  The video game was Worms Armageddon and some other internet fellow wanted to start a clan and he recruited my pre-pubscent self to help him. 

I was a relative newcomer to online gaming at that point, and was looking for a clan to join.   Worms Armageddon was a bit of a dated game even then, so there was already some well established competitive clans; but they wouldn't recruit a noob 12 year old like me.  This is why I helped this internet fellow found xBOUSx.  Looking back I can't reckon for the life of me what xBOUSx could have possibly stood for. 

In any case, our first order of business was creating a website.  My internet fellow had already created a little something with something called homestead.  It was one of the first WYSIWYG html editors, and it was also a web app to boot.
This was in the 56K era though, so even though it was a good idea, it was terrible in implementation.  The web app could take up to a half hour to get going! 

I remember I waited something in that range and when it finally loaded I was greeted with a screen sized xBOUSx text graphic and a simple gradient background.  Anticlimactic to say the least...

In any case that was our current clan website.  I discussed the website with this internet fellow over aim(like everyone I knew with internet, we had aol). Eventually the topic of html came up a topic which he and I were mostly unfamiliar with but he seemed to no a little bit about.  He linked me to an html cheat sheet and told me that web pages could be made with it but it was hard. 

I was a bright kid for my age, I skipped a grade in elementary school and never felt particularly challenged or interested in my school work or the pace of learning mandated by the government.  In that day and age when someone called something hard, I took it as a personal challenge.  So of course I visited that web page.  That became my first brush with the syntactic world.

To my disappointment html didn't strike me as particularly hard, and after some research on how I could create a clan page of our own in html, I didn't delve too deeper since our clan quickly fell apart as most clans who have a 12 year old as a founder do.

The next chapter of my story begins in an ambiguous time period I will call "when runescape was getting big".  As I remember it was around the time that diablo 2 released, since my brother made fun of me for playing runescape since it was essentially a crappy free version of diablo2(which we happened to own).  Lets just say repeatedly clicking a grey square until you get a green message saying you leveled up was something you had to experience first hand to understand.  It wasn't about the grey square or the message, it was about the social context that it happened in.  In retrospect it was good I cut my teeth on MMO's in their barest form since In the future I would instinctively know the dangers of the gilded runescapes that have trapped so many.

Beyond pre-pubescent, I was solidly into teen-angst by the time I got into runescape.  I chose my name to be "Die Loser", a less poignant version of the desired but rejected "Die Bitch". And so it went that I clicked on rocks, and trees, and watched the same 3 frame combat animation over and over and over.  It was hailed as a major combat graphics update when the dev teams added colored circles with a number inside to indicate damage dealt and received.

In time I became aware of the various community forums and things related to the game.  I remember now that it was around this time that I truly lost my trolling virginity, popped my T-card if you will.  I had found a moderately sized forum/fan-site called rsguide.  In a fit of teen angst I decided to spam the fuck out of it.  It worked out way better than expected.  This particular forum didn't have a time limit between posts, and I could just shit out posts as fast as I could refresh.  So I start doing this, and soon the entire forum is freaking out.  A mod enters the fray and I think I'm done for, but apparently only the site admin had banning powers and of course the mod only had primitive tools to stop me.  The mod starts freaking out as well and says something along the lines of "I'm deleting them as fast as I can but in the time it takes me to delete 3 posts he makes 300!!".

But I digress.. the real reason I mention runescape is because things in game items and leveled characters had become something of value.  Predictably this led to scamming.  The scam that interested me was what today is widely recognized as phishing, but in those days was a very novel thing.  Most phishers in those days didn't even bother to make their website look official, there was no need!  Nobody knew what phising was.  One box for username, one for password, and a couple forum posts promising an attractive service(free gold maybe?)! easy as pie stolen accounts.

I set about making one of these websites, I got as far as the 2 boxes and the submit button but then I got stuck.  How in the hell do I get the information from the forms??  The websites I was looking at were oddly unhelpful about the matter.  There was a big disconnect from the html tutorial websites. As if what happened on the other side of the form was some kind of black magic.  I eventually found out that the black magic had a name, and it was called perl.

Perl was my second encounter with the syntactic.  My first real encounter with code was reading perl sample code.  An outside observer at that point might note that if that didn't scare me off for good, then chances were good that this particular angsty teen would grow up to be a programmer.

In good time my syntactic prowess takes off, in large part due to over-zealous calculator requirements for high school.  I ended up with a nifty programmable Ti-83+.  So it happens in match class one day doing group work that another bright and slightly arrogant freshman mentions hes trying to write pong and shows me what he has so far.  I interpret this as an opportunity to show my classmates that I'm smarter than him if only I can make a pong game before him.  That day I crack open the 300 page ti-83+ manual to the programming section and retype the TI-BASIC examples one by one into the calculator. IF, THEN, ELSE, END, WHILE, DO, REPEAT, LABEL, GOTO, ptOn. I could not comprehend in the slightest how you could make video games with these tools, so I slept on it. 

The next day I came home from school whipped out my calculator and the manual.  Four hours later and deep deep into 'the zone' I paused and reflected, it was very clear that I had knack for this sorta thing.  Not only that but I was enjoying it, my brain was being challenged in ways I had never thought possible.

Then I thought about all the stereotypes that existed for geeks and nerds.  Believe it or not as a 13 year old I thought about how being one of the above would make attracting women more difficult. 

I decided in the way the teenagers can make little moments into big things that I had a symbolic choice to make.  I could put down the calculator and actively avoid the syntactic world in seek of a profession that doesn't have such a lousy track record with women. Or I could continue and commit myself to a life of code and perhaps loneliness.

Looking back now it's apparent that making the decision while I was so far in the zone made the outcome predestined.  I was high on code.  My brain was pushing out so many pleasurable chemicals that, had I put my hand down my trousers I wouldn't have been surprised to feel a couple drops of pre-cum. 

Another two hours later and many, many, LBLs and GOTOs later I had created something that had an unmistakable resemblance to pong.

closely related to the infamous /b/
Nice try, back you go.

In before ``Fuck off, ``faggot''''.

>>4
In before
Join him, please

>>5
Nice try ``Fuck off, ``faggot'''' guy. But Back to the imageboards, please

Welcome to Shii Academy for Special Children, you should feel at home.

TICKLE MY ANUS

Is it wrong that I enjoyed this?

Is it worth reading?

>>8
A slimy black tentacle tickles your anus.

>>10
tl;dr I did pong on my ti83. I let him take 3 minutes of my life :(

I could continue and commit myself to a life of code and perhaps loneliness.

as long as you code you feel nothing but your code, if you stop to code you die.

dont stop coding.