I still remember the day I fell in love with writing.
My siblings and I had just returned from raiding the cafeteria at our grandpa's office, the last stop on a long tour he had given us now that retirement was approaching and that he had enough seniority to get away with letting three loud kids wreak havoc among a place of the utmost importance. Grandpa worked for a company that handled extremely dedicate matters and inside a building in which printers were considered "too noisy" to be allowed in offices, so they were all set apart in their own corner. That's the kind of place we were let loose in. That's how much my grandpa was trusted and valued after nearly seven decades of busting ass for the good of the business.
But, of course, we couldn't stop being ten, eight, and four, no matter how many warnings we were given or how much everyone smiled at us as we squealed and talked loudly about topics that had nothing to do with the environment in which they were being uttered. And so, a nice lady took us to a small side office and let us do whatever as the rest of the workforce did their thing, hacking away at keyboards, organizing binders the size of my head, and generally doing important-looking stuff while we started in open-mouted awe at those suit-wearing authority figures, the living funhouse mirrors in which we saw our own, future reflections.
That lady that took us in as the entire office let out a collective (almost audible) relieved sigh once we were out of the picture was also nearing retirement, and so she wasn't particularly worried about letting us ruin her own work space, even sitting me in front of a typewriter (her main work tool), getting the paper in there and quietly explaining to me the basics of how that machine operated, as if I could understand them.
That little gesture (probably something she didn't even think about) was of such monumental importance to my personal development that I honestly feel like I owe this person something so precious that money could never buy. For the next fifteen minutes or so (up until grandpa returned to fetch us and take us home) I was mesmerized, pushing keys with nowhere near enough force to actually get my words stamped onto the page, but still trying really hard as my fingers moved as if automatically, crafting a nonsensical story in oceans of black and red ink as the mechanical "arms" of the machine gave soothing, rhythmical feedback, "slapping" the page like the tentacles of a Lovecraftian horror emerging from the depths of a technological sea, wire and ink combining with the most rewarding of sounds as if encouraging me to keep going, a small bell ringing at the end of each page, reminding me to turn on the little nob to the side of this magical object and to slide the little bridge back into place, so I could keep trying to craft a world of my own making.
Looks good, doesn't it? But looks can be quite deceiving, specially online.
I didn't even get to take this crude draft home with me, regardless of how feverishly I had been working on it. It probably ended in the trash.
I had completely forgotten about it amidst the excitement of seeing a world so different from my own: an adult world seen from the eyes of an Elementary School kid, someone whose biggest worry at the time was missing the latest episode of Pokemon whilst all the people I had seen throughout that day worried about unpaid bills and tuition fees for their own miniature human beings. I didn't get to see what my "masterpiece" amounted to, but I do recall what it was about: a story about a kid holding a time machine and encountering tales of days past, reliving them with crystal clarity as he cranked on his invention and went back to places where he was once happy, showing them around so that happiness could be shared.
Little did I know that those would be the exact same sentiments that would one day power my craft.
This text wasn't written on a typewriter (much to my annoyance), but still packs the same feelings that my kid-self first encountered as he wrestled with a machine so indescribably beautiful on the top floor of an office building somewhere deep in Buenos Aires while the Sun bathed everything in the kid of pale gold that could only be observed through a round window in the middle of the Austral Fall.
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My friend and I weren't bad people, but we definitely could have used a stern talking-to, particularly when it came to addressing these terrifying new online developments that swept our entire generation and made us gravitate towards the glow of CRT screens and monochrome phones like moths on a suicide mission. In no time flat a huge portion of our lives took place inside a digital reality composed of fat zeroes and pointy ones, the thrill of the unknown, of finding the next cool thing a drug we couldn't refuse. And once YouTube hit the scene? It was nearly impossible to look away.
YouTube did something my friend and I had always fantasized about: letting us watch entire TV shows whenever we wanted to, without worrying about missing a time slot, right in our computers (and at that point of time many people began uploading entire series to the platform on gloriously inefficient 10-minutes chunks, having the dreaded "1/5" or "Part 1" proudly displayed on nearly every relevant search result), so we were sucked right into it. It certainly looked like Nerdana, the promised land for us geeks.
Until YouTube's staff cracked down on all those things with a vengeance, that is.
It is almost impossible to explain just how frustrating it was to go down a playlist, jumping from link to link like a nerdy Pitfall Harry, as we tried to go through an old cartoon or anime just to have half an episode missing because it had been copyright-claimed and taken down. It was the kind of thing that made you wanna smash your screen, particularly at a time when torrents were almost unheard-of (at least the good ones, those would only come about a little later with the advent of Oink's Pink Palace and its revolutionary system) and impossible to pull up due to the crappy speeds we could reach with our Dial-Up connections and ridiculously under powered ADSL offerings. There was simply no recourse once episodes started vanishing, which made us look towards random videos uploaded to the site instead.
I remember watching a lot of good things at the time, like The Golden Age Of Video (a love letter to the entire movie industry) and weird stuff like Cows With Guns, but the one act that truly caught my attention was an American who went by the name of "JamesNintendoNerd" and who uploaded fun comedy skits hating on games whose graphics and bulky cartridges resonated with me and filled me with the kind of nostalgic feelings that came with barely remembering something, but giving me a warm feeling that I would later come to associate with pure, unfiltered joy framed in primary colors and the sights and sounds of childhood.
Nope. Still bad.
But watching James (and being a member of several retro game and Abandonware sites at the time) had the unintended effect of making us want to recapture some of that in physical form, away from the convenient world of ROMs and save states, almost as if itching to get the cartridges into machines and holding onto ancient controllers, using them with the same kind of muscle memory that remembers how a bike is ridden regardless of how much time has passed.
Consoles? Oh, we still had those somewhere in the back of our wardrobes, tangled on forgotten socks and buried under Power Ranger action figures and old books. But we didn't have many games... we had traded them all for newer offerings, as one does. You don't get nostalgic while still a kid, that's a development that comes later in life, a shield that prevents memories from turning into scars and something that hadn't existed when we parted ways with our NES games.
Luckily for us, a site called MercadoLibre had ridden the electronic wave of those rapidly-moving times and had emerged as the local, poor man's alternative to eBay. And because the world could only move in one direction, it was soon filled to the brim with postings and auctions centered around this new, gargantuan retro fever, with people thinking they were dealing in gold by taking blurry pictures of yellowed knock-off consoles and giving them eye-popping price tags as if they were the hottest stuff on the planet. We were in because we were kids and didn't have to pay rent, buy groceries or any of that agonizing grown-up stuff, but the overall impression we got was a very weak one indeed, like traveling to a place that you know may be a scam but hanging on to the possibility that it may turn out not to be.
We wanted an NES, a real one (as opposed to the locally-made replicas we gamed on) but taking just one look at the ones that were already being auctioned off on the site told us that that wasn't happening -- the cheapest machine I had seen went for $350 (for comparison: a brand-new Genesis Model III retailed for $190), but still tried to go at it by snipping at newly-posted ones, taking turns pumping money into the page whenever we found ourselves outbid by someone else (and believe me, it was a bloodbath out there). We planned it like if it was a military operation, often texting late into the night just to make sure we were still on top, anxiously watching as the number grew and neared our absolutely threshold — the total money we could scrape and pool together, an amount gathered with herculean efforts and that couldn't be topped no matter what.
Unsurprisingly, we lost that auction (and many others). But we weren't all that discouraged because we started noticing a most interesting pattern: scrolling down to the question/answer part of every relevant item we saw that almost every seller on the site was an insufferable prick, the kind of asshole that thinks of themselves as royalty because they have an object the rest of us want to buy. It was too much fun seeing just how much they flexed that temporary power over other people, particularly when they were really insulting for no reason at all. And that, y'all, is how you get teens to grow claws.
Top-rated article!
Once we were over the disappointment of never owning an NES (although I did end up getting one shortly thereafter), we decided that our efforts would be much better spent just trolling the absolute hell out of those man-child sellers, particularly targeting those who were rude for no reason at all, snapping at legit questions being asked and then getting madder when replied in-kind. But we weren't so utterly green as to think of that as a good idea on a site that demanded to know your full name, address and phone number to function. We couldn't afford getting in trouble with our parents over a joke! We would never be allowed in front of a computer again! Not after blowing up their phone bills several times over by watching Flash animations when we were supposed to be studying... but what if the mountain standing in front of us was nothing more than an anthill? What if the site was so new and so poorly moderated that we could somehow bypass these seemingly impossible obstacles? My friend was ready to brave this possibility and I followed suit, not wanting to look like a chicken (but still having serious doubts about the whole thing).
And you know what? He was absolutely right.
The staff didn't care when sellers and would-be buyers went at it like Moe's tavern patrons on a bad night. They didn't care when publications were flagged as scams, then went immediately back up by someone with a different username. And they certainly didn't care when we filled the mandatory profile fields with a 0-800 customer service number as our "home phone", the address of a governmental office as our "mail box" and a moniker as our "full name". It was delicious.
We sniped at clearly overpriced garbage (broken consoles, brutalized games, painfully obvious knock-offs being sold as original stuff) until all bidders backed down because of absurd prices we had driven, delighting as we imagined the seller's eyes turning into dollar signs just to see that they had sold a Polystation for $300 to one Yakko Wacko. We asked thorny questions when someone fancied themself a master of the field and couldn't even address the most basic concerns. And we just generally were arses for no real reason, like the time we "bought" a steering wheel for the DreamCast from three provinces over, then replied the e-mail sent to us with "sorry, not interested". Oh, the site had a system in place to prevent you from doing exactly this: a reputation system that ranked you based on how many positive negative reviews you had gotten, but that only worked if you actually had a real account and planned to stick with it. Ours? Ours were disposable, made on throwaway e-mails and cycled through whenever the site's moderators caught on with these online Zorros, these Diego de la Vega-esque characters doing some backwards "justice", almost like reverse Robin Hoods: stealing from no-one, keeping nothing, but being a pain in the butt regardless.
It didn't take long for us to get bored, though... this landscape, exploitable as it was, was lacking the kind of instant communication we are so used to nowadays. Replies from sellers would take long hours to arrive (if they arrived at all) and lost all rhythm between rounds of shenanigans. Our accounts were being banned faster and faster, too, keeping us fighting a defensive battle that gained us nothing by winning. Thrills could be found anywhere on the net by that point, and they generally demanded far less involvement, so we folded. Couple that with the fact that we were teens, running on hormones and adrenaline, and the whole thing just grew so dull as a result as to not even warrant a passing mention... a sharp, Dragon-slaying sword turned into a butter knife from overuse and lack of discipline.
But the true dagger to this idea's heart came a few months later, when the retro gaming sites we used to visit started seeing an increase of "hall-of-shame" threads calling out the same kind of people we had been after: overzealous sellers offering discount (often broken) goods for outrageous prices. Only difference? No-one was angry anymore. These people were seen as jokes within the community, hardly worth getting mad at. At some point people were actually way more annoyed with the AVGN for destroying games than with those people for selling them in such sorry states. And that was our cue to leave.
Hot selling! (Literally).
Was it fun? Hell yeah! Was it the thrill of a lifetime? No, not really. But it allowed us to put some of that wild teenage energy to good use, and the tales of us (and many others doing this exact same thing) have survived in a unique form: to this day there's people tagging the CEO of that one site on Twitter and telling him just how much of a sh****storm his site was (and, according to many posters, still is) and how easy to exploit it had been as a result of launching with such poorly-thought-out measures, naively expecting people to behave at a time when anonymity and chaos were the name of the game.
There's something deeply satisfying about making fun of millionaires, specially when you realize that their house of cards was so easily shaken.
PS: Kudos to the guy who actually got away with posting an utterly destroyed smartphone (which had fallen from a skyscraper) and got an auction going around it, making it exceedingly clear that it was only good for tiny spares (obviously a joke). And also kudos to the myriad of guys who kept asking if the phone was in working order, despite not only seeing the million bits of plastic and glass that once formed it, but also a bleeding red, ALL CAPS banner saying that it had been nearly vaporized.
God bless the internet.
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