User:AngelFire3423/Autobiography

Birth
Born June 8, 1991, I grew up 1 year and 2 months in the state of New York. From there my family moved to China where I only remember having one really good Dutch friend. I was part of the founding Kindergarden class for the Western Academy of Beijing. I moved back to the United States where I attended grades 2-5. There I had two friends; we'd often play Super Smash Brothers together. Like everyone else, this is when I was first exposed to anime, specifically Cardcaptor Sakura Yugioh, Digimon, Dragonball Z, Pokemon, and Big O. I had a Gameboy Advanced which I used to play Pokemon and soon became a fan of the Legend of Zelda series. My family also had a Playstation for which we had three games, Final Fantasy XII, Legend of Dragoons, Xenogears, all of which probably lead up to my love for long detailed plots. This I then moved to Kenya where I spent the rest of my primary/secondary education in the International School of Kenya. There I had only one good friend for all of my middle school, grades 6-8, although he left at grade 8. And thus continues the tale where I unfortunately never retain any long distance friends.

Middle School
It was around the age 12, soon after I arrived in Kenya, that I began playing Neverwinter Nights which was what first got me interested in programming. I remember attending Taekwondo practice with a set of 12 lessons that I had printed out from the school computers. I became inspired by my brother's talk of Rick Burton's Paladin series and I really tried to incorporate some of his techniques into my own pet project, to create a flash ritual of summoning a lich king. Soon after I began developing an interest for C, the web languages, and assembly. In fact the very reason I got into Neverwinters, the reason I got into trying to make a mod for the game were both inspired by my brother. I would often spend ample amounts of time watching him play games, not really play them myself aside from Zelda. Neverwinter Nights gave me my first taste into power gaming, stat maximizing.

When the one friend I had until 7th grade, I sank into depression, particularly when the school trip for our grade was coming up and I had no one to talk with up or could dream of thinking of staying with in a single tent. I ended up getting stuck with the class oddball, who would later turn grown into a fairly decent friend and be a friend in learning the world of programming, mostly how mac terminals work. It was really during this time that I would spend many a nights reflecting on a great deal of things, from the meaning of life, to why I thought language was inherently misogynistic (particulary English), to what a successful time travel would be. It's from this time I began constructing a logic reasoning for why things where the way they were and why I thought the way I did. I'd often spend long hours of thought, sometimes all nighters thinking about certain things and I kept many things recorded in a notebook which I have still actually. Back then I'd also spend long hours reading and pretty much read the entire fantasy collection my school had.

I began to complate various ways in which to kill myself, though I knew that I wouldn't actually do any such thing. So I just continued to justify the world's economic imbalance, themes of existentialism, and other such musings. To be honest the only way I really got out of depression was when I found in me the resolve to work on several programming projects that I even now have started working on but unfortunately will unlikely ever finish. Two ones I held in especially regard would be an actual language translator (I was planning on creating a group theory model for joining letters together, joining words together for a machine to understand the meaning of what is being said and to translate meaning across language. Being psuedo-bilingual and having learnt more language since, I've always felt that people who've learnt at least one other language don't think in words but another representation or meaning) and an entire kernal that would rival Windows doing what Linux with wine did but as a fluid system written entirely in Assembly. And I knew without a doubt I could pull it off if I spent the time on it.

Looking back now, I realize that doing well in school was mostly a show of my competition and me showing that I was smarter than the rest. And I knew it. I had the rare ability present in those that do mathematical research of being creative in math. I also was good at writing, though analysis of literature

High School
Because we were close to family in Malaysia and Mauritius, I soon was reintroduced to Anime (maybe back in middle school, can't remember) thanks to three Mauritian cousins to Angelic Layer, Naruto, and Ouran High School Host Club (by my favourite cousin of all). I also got into Defense of the Ancients thanks to my Malaysian cousin. I began to spend long ours *cough* obtaining *cough* Simoun AVIs, and I'm rather proud of learning how to make a fragmented AVI run, by simply replacing the last ~500 KB with the same part of a working AVI. It was through anime that I meet a good Korean friend and we'd often exchange anime, talk computer hardware/software, and have lan parties with a diverse mix of people. I started to learn Counterstrike and Dawn of War. He also introduced me to the MMO Ragnarok Online on a private server AnthemRO which has gone through several name changes and exists in some form still amazingly.

I really have to credit Simoun with teaching Japanese. I can't even began to tell how many times I would rewatch an episode as my slow *cough* copy speeds would slowly render the files on my computer. I still remember the moments when I learned words like "hikari", "mirai", "ashita", and "hora" all from the song's opening. Simoun still stand as one of my third favorite anime of all time to this day. I slowly began to learn Japanese as I watched shows. I must say, i do have dail up speed internet to thank for something. I was beginning to lose interest in French which I had initially taken up in middle school in an effort to keep up with my Mauritian cousins. Many thanks to Tae Kim for his wonderful guide on Japanese grammar that gave a nice push in the right direction. Props to wikipedia for helping learn the IPO and the vocabulary behind making different sounds.

I also began to make friends with that French friend I had spent the school trip with in 8th grade together with and we even attended a learn Perl 4 from a ISK house husband parent and fell in love with regular expressions. It was from then on I knew I wanted to be a house husband. It was only until my final two years that I really made two close friends whom I'd hang out with, talk books, and talk anime, talk games. One of them I knew from a long time ago in fact but never really talked with much.

Between the 9th and 10th grade or 8th to 9th grades, I attended the summer program at Yale where I learnt pretty much all of Computer Architecture aside from all the CMOS etc transistor details of power management. Between my 11th and 12th grade, I went to Carnegie Mellon's National High School Game Academy as an "expert" programmer. There I met the first person who affect change in my life.

During the 6 week program, I only met this one girl in the last two weeks when we were assigned to work as a 6 person team to create a fully fledged 3d game in python in Panda3D. She was an enrolled as an "advanced" artist and she was the first to introduce me to the wonderful world of cosplay/dance community of self-expression. I was able to truly geek out over anime things I never was able to before. The first person I knew who would dance the Hare Hare Yukai dance really made me accept my liking for anime for what it was and just generally not being ashamed of my musical interests.

On that note, what really got me into finding the genre I liked was once again thanks to my brother. When he first introduced me to Nightwish I knew from that moment on I liked symphonic metal (well to their first 4 albums anyway, Once and Century Child are rather power metally). I would say that song to song, Nightwish rarily ever performs ideally, but albums as a whole are exactly what I'm looking for, particularly true of Oceanborn. I like complex music, in other words counterpoint, with the strong feel of adventure stemming from my fantasy roots.

I will admit however that my applications to colledges was really not of my own doing. There were several things I regret from that time, particularly not doing research and refusing to apply to schools in California and refusing to apply to MIT because of an entry interview. I rarily studied for the SATs since really up to that point I didn't know how to study since I never had to, and would never study until my university years. At this point in time I really wasn't too interested in what I wanted to do for university.

Gap Year
After an unhappy experience my parents had with my brother in University, my parents were apprehensive at letting me go to university immediately and began strongly pushing for me to go to Outward Bounds or Peace Corps for a year. I then proposed the idea to take a gap year off to relearn Madarin Chinese since I had completely forgotten Chinese and thought it would help with my Japanese. By this point I was already at the point of being able to understand any Japanese story with the exception of formal academic/news-like speech, science, military, and history. Anything shounen/shoujo was perfectly fine without subtitles thanks to the long hours I spent on marathoning/rewatching shows, and in particular singing each and every song until I learnt the lyrics by heart and pronounced the words correctly. I had also at this point learned about 1000 characters or was level 2 in the 2009 JLPT format.

It was here that I meet well three girls that were also rather character building. One, the smoker who wore grey contact lens, made me accept my suicidial urges for what they were and have a go and do what you need to do outlook on life. Thanks to her, I became willing and open to talk about anything about myself should take an interest and ask. The second girl was much taller than most people and pretty much just made my character much more well rounded.

The third would be my first and only girlfriend, and unfortunately I was a home crasher and stole her from a Japanese gentleman. I finally understood of design and how to really look through the eyes of an artist. From typography, color balance, spacing, to calligraphy. My time with her gave rise to a greater sense of direction and calm confidence. I also got to eat the bitter fruit of an outsider in a traditional (chinese) home, and what's more to experience the life of a social class below me. However it was really when she acted upon the immature feeling of not knowing what to do hence acting needy for attention under the pressure of an overbearing extended family that really pushed me away.

There are jumped two grades thanks to my time with her from beginner chinese to the top section and began being able to think in and speak in fluid Mandarin. I became able to read anything without a dictionary, able to guess words I don't know given my knowledge of the characters. I estimate my hanzi vocabularly is around 3500 characters whereas a native speaker is at 5000 from having known no Chinese to start with. I'm quite proud of myself actually.

The only things I really regret are never keeping in contact with my friends there. I had a large group of indonesian friends, about 5-7 close ones, my group of foriegn friends 4 or so foreign friends who were just as international as I, my Japanese Corner friends, and finally my Chinese friends. I particularly miss my group of foriegn friends. Perhaps my most interesting friend was a through and through playboy. It's from him that I understood the few small things extra one had to do in order to create the opportunities to be considered by many as a player does. It's really too bad I don't keep up with anyone.

University
Well nothing much to say here except annoyed by how many times the system has shafted me. Taking classes I never needed to take, not having classes that I wanted to take particularly in the currently non-existant animation department, assigning me uncoroperative advisor, astraying me from my classmates because of the major I choose and the timings on the subjects, etc. I however am truly satisfied with myself in that I finally, finally started working on the project that I said I'd start so long ago. Particularly I've done quite a bit of work on CanvasEdit a raster-based image editor based entirely in HTML5 and Javascript. So much wonderful programming practice went into that project and so much Javascript magic. The programming infrastructure for creating tools, managing layers, performing layer effects, saving and uploading files is all there, just the user interface and tools have to be added. The never ending battle of knowledge and intelligence as two inseperable parts. The only thing I regret is not working finishing anything up.

I began a renewed interest in playing Rangarok Online on the same server I was playing on before. This time I took my characters to near top tier however by this time the server was already on the decline, nothing like the 2000+ players in it's brillinace, it was now a meer 400. However like many things, it was my chance to finally complete something I had started long ago and said I would back when I was in the very grasp of depression. I got a solid experience of what it was like, what true balancing would look like, how designers design. I had pretty much spent my every waking hour playing it for two academic quarters of my life, becoming a hermit and withdrawing from society.

I knew from the moment I lost interest in programming, that I would have no other option that to end my life, it was the only thing that kept me going really. I lost interest in completeting my programming project and continuting with school simply because well, I suppose loneliness finally got to me. It's more of a truth that I knew from when I was 14 would bite me in the end, however tried with all my might to give life a chance and turn my eyes from the truth. It's not that I am depressed now, it's just I've done what I've set out to do and I'm quite satisfied with the results CanvasEdit will likely turn into what it's meant to be.

Conclusion
The only thing left I really wish I would have done was found a nice wife and settled down to become a husband. But then again, do I really want to inflict this world with myself? That's the real question. Though they say that when people fall in love they change; I was half betting on that, but alas I hermitted my way half of time in university. Either way I've caused too much trouble for my guardians and I'm highly unlikely to be anything more than a leech to society. I really don't myself adding a single good thing to this world. I apologize for never having paid back the debts I owe to my parents for bringing me this far.