At the core, my love for web and graphic designing stemmed from watching my older siblings create their own web pages. I am the second youngest out of nine kids, so you can imagine how many time I saw my siblings code and create their own spaces on the web. I was about eight years old and this was around 1999 to the early 2000s. I probably had a dozen sites out there... I'm not sure why I had so many websites and why they were spread out amongst Angelfire, Freewebs, Geocities, and Tripod to name a few...! There may be some out there that I don't even remember anymore.

Around this same time, I frequented Final Fantasy-centric message boards. To name a few: ffx2.net, eyesonff.com, and adventchildren.net. I also discovered the world of fan shrines and fanlistings. So, combine all these occurrences and growing up when forums and shrines was super popular, my love for this community just... never died.

It sounds super cheesy, but I had fond memories of the internet back when it wasn't so common. Back when not a lot of people knew of it. I had fun being members of the forums mentioned above and reading through shrines. I love how unique and talented people were with creating graphic design pieces. I think this is why, many years later in 2020, I am still here trying to keep a part of the community alive.

English is not my first language and I'm also not good with words, so I let this held me back on joining the community when it was booming. I was legit a lurker and admire things behind the scenes, haha. I always dreamt of owning my own domain too as a kid, but my family grew up poor and my parents would have never allow me to get one.

Now that I am nearing 30 years old and have a full time job, I currently own four domains. Young me would be so happy! I also speak English more than my native tongue now so I gotta work on completing some of my childhood dreams, haha.

I tried to retrieve some of my old layouts from the early 2000s through web archive, but couldn't get much. Lots of broken images. I am including any that I could get. I was super proud and felt accomplished for creating these. Looking at them now of course makes me cringe, haha.

From 2003 to mid 2005, I blogged on Pitas then got hosted at silence.nu. Sometime in May 2005, I shifted to LiveJournal. I dug up some entries from back then and will reflect back. I was pretty much of a loner. I still kinda am to this day. I have my big family and a small social group of friends, but I still keep to myself most of the time.

Reflections: I sound so naive. I mean I was twelve years old! I do remember what caused me to write this entry. It was during English class. Some girls who sat around me knew I like Final Fantasy because of my binder folder (I had FFX photos decorated on the transparent cover). They were whispering so I could only pick up some words, but it was pretty much talking about how I was too into it. I looked over my shoulder and one of the girl made eye contact with me as she was whispering. Haha, it sounds so juvenile. I'm just upset at myself for not speaking up. But also to what I mentioned in the 2003 entry, I hated school fights and the girl who made eye contact with me was known to be quite the trouble maker. It's funny because she friended me on Facebook a few years back and she was happily marry with a family of her own. I'm sure she doesn't even recall the 2003 event since I was pretty much a nobody. Down the line she defriend me on Facebook, which hey, no hard feelings. We barely knew eachother. Anyways, FFVII: Advent Children AND Kingdom Hearts 2 was not released yet??? God damn, haha.

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