internet forums scrapbook

As a young teenager I was quite lonely. I looked to the internet to find others like me. I found them in forums and in "fandom" spaces on places likt Tumblr and Instagram.

You can click on large images to view larger versions.

The first place I found friends on the internet is the forum for the mobile game The Blockheads. Nowadays the game only remains as an old version on the apple app store, the android version long gone. Gone too, is the forum itself. It shut down sometimes in the early 2020s. But this scrapbook takes place before that. It starts in 2013, when I first joined.

On the right you can see the way the forum looked when I signed up.(Once I edit it in XD)

As a 12 year old at the time, I had the bright idea of using my real life first name as my username /)_-) I was techically too young to join, as I only turned 13 a couple months later.

The very first video game console I ever used was the Playstation 2 Slim, after my brother got one for his birthday.

We would play so, so much local multiplayer, which is something I really miss. Local multiplayer is not so common these days, which is a shame, as working together to find the next objective or solve a puzzle is so much fun and a fantastic bonding activity. It's really something special.

Now, I know, there is online multiplayer, but the ability for a handful of kids to play a game together on the sofa by simply plugging in another controller is unparalleled.

The game we played together the most and my favourite ps2 game is The Simpsons Game, released in 2007, in which the simpsons characters find out they are living in a video game. As this comes with a host of problems, like enemies wreaking havoc on Springfield, they decide they must get to the end of the game. Thankfully, Bart found the video game manual which guides them towards their goal.

At the end of the game, the characters find God, literally, as he is playing the very game they are in. After God is defeated in a game of Dance Dance Revolution, he reveals that the video game that they are in is a mini-game in another video game about Earth. He dropped the video game manual by accident, which gave the family superpowers. Realizing his mistake, he promises to restore Springfield, let them keep their powers,

and to improve the working conditions of all video game characters. He also gives Homer three wishes. Lisa asks if God ever wonders if he himself is a character in a video game. As God nervously scoffs at this theory, it turns out that Ralph Wiggum is playing the entire game before he looks at the screen, wondering who is looking at him.

Of all the video games I ever played, Spore was my first love and remains my most treasured video game. One day my cousins exitedly showed me the game on their computer. As a kid with a big imagination and a love of play pretend, I was enamoured right away.

They let me borrow the disc so that I could install it on my parents' then Windows XP-powered PC, as the game does not require a disc to be inserted to play after installation.

The slogan of Spore is "your personal universe in a box". The objective is to develop a species throughout its evolution in the various stages of the game. You start from a microscopic organism in the cell stage, to its evolution into a complex creature in the animal stage, its emergence as a social, intelligent being in the tribal stage, to its mastery of the planet in the civilization stage, and then finally to its ascension

into space in the, you guessed it, space stage, where it interacts with alien species across the galaxy. Your dominant playing style in each stage (peaceful/religious, neutral, aggressive) impacts the conditions you face and the perks you receive in the next stage. You have complete control of your species' appearance and can go pretty wild.