My first foray into having some kind of presence on the Internet was around the turn of the millennium, in the 5th grade. I somehow found out about Expage aka The Express Page, and the ease with which I was able to put things together lit my little brain on fire with potential.

I remember making at least two pages (both sadly lost to the ravages of time) - one for my two best friends at the time, Brendan and Chelsea called “ZBC”, and another one that I used to create a very shortlived newsletter that I remember going so far as to print on-demand for anyone who wanted a copy before a teacher rightfully stopped me. I was absolutely enchanted at the idea of making something that anyone could find, and like a lot of people back then, it didn’t really matter how many people stopped by. It was just cool that they could at all!

My presence online has since waxed, waned, and waned some more in the current era of social media. Before the Internet went lame, my time in cyberspace has been marked by what I would consider some awkward albeit earnest attempts at creative expression.

There was the “Post my poetry to DeviantArt” phase of early high school, which as thrilled as I would have been to provide evidence of, I’m sad to say there’s just no way for me to track examples down to share. Absolutely impossible!

I do however have screengrabs of a few early efforts to become “YouTube famous” in the late 2000s, as one-half of the dynamic comedy duo “Fail Drive”. We actually did, due to our registering the channel as being Australian, become the 20th most viewed Australian channel in the Comedians category on August 20th, 2009, which was a high that we rode for several days following despite being largely undeserved.

This was followed by a fledgling effort to make a game in Flash (cutting-edge) that I published to Newgrounds called “Punch the Bear” to, dare I say, mixed reviews.

No matter what I get wrong in life, there was at least one person in the world that seemed to love Punch the Bear.

About five years ago, and true to the stereotype of straight white guys, I tried starting a podcast based around Pop-Tarts (“A conversational popcast from tart to finish” was the tagline). A friend of mine made a pretty kickass logo for it.

Then there was the Tumblr thing for a brief minute and the Blogspot thing for, like, an afternoon, and that’s sort of how a lot of the whole writing thing went for me online. Plagued by imposter syndrome and harried by fleeting interests, I could never seem to stick with blogging even though it probably would have done me a lot of good to write for the sake of it. It’s silly to think back on how much I cared about whether or not someone would read what I wrote, much less like it or think it was “good”.

These days, I’m just glad there are spaces to write in that feel a little bit like when I tried making a newspaper for my 5th grade class. Stay tuned for the guest book and page counter, I’m off to find a choice GIF of a 3D construction worker to stop you from proceeding any further, to remain posted till someone unplugs the big computer all this runs on.