I was born in December of 1998 to a single mother in an unimportant midwest state in a small unimportant midwest town.
I had a lot of passions and hobbies growing up (not unlike now) and would draw anything and everything I could get my hands on. I would spend a worrying amount of time on the family computer, my mother would constantly boot me off and tell me to go outside. We lived out in the middle of nowhere so the only thing to do outside of the house was climb trees until you fall off and get the breath knocked out of you.
Something happened in the woods around the time I was 6 that freaked my mother out so much, and I guess in an effort to keep me inside again, she bought me my first computer with a fresh install of Windows XP.
I felt like I had the entire world at my fingertips, literally. Every click felt like an adventure. I learned and saw a lot of things during these years, good and bad, and it fundementally changed who I was from an early age. I remember browsing sites not unlike this one, reading blogposts about aliens, ghosts, band news, browsing MySpace.
The internet felt way different then. It felt more open and free, nowadays it feels like a shell of it's former self, and I know I'm not the only one who feels that way. (Plus it's easier to say this website is purposefully early 2000's looking instead of admitting I'm a novice at best when it comes to Web Development lmao)
Reguardless, as I grew up I started looking for "my place" online. Everyone seemed to have their home community, and years later, in 2012 at the age of 13 while reading creepypastas (remember those? lol) I found the paranormal board of 4chan, /x/. The pure anonymity was appealing. It really made stories feel real, 'ya know? You couldn't confirm these stories easily, and even though you would tell yourself the stories were bullshit, even though the tag-line of a more infamous 4chan board, /b/, being:
"The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Even with all of that, there was that little voice in the back of your head that would surface in the late hours of the night. Your fan buzzing in the back and the faint clicking of your mouse wheel. You think to yourself, "...maybe". After that you're hooked, they got you now, you've become one of them.
The site was a big infulence on me as a teen. Because of /x/ I became interested in the occult. Consuming more and more occult literature, getting more and more ballsy with the rituals and rites I would find in pdfs I'd find posted all over the internet. For years I would identify as a "Chaos Magician" but never openly. As I stated before I lived in a small town in the midwest, people don't take kindly to what they percieve as Satanism in their town. As the years went on I lost focus on occultism and came back to my original passion of art. My occult beliefs watered down to forcing my friends to break into abandoned houses in the night and hold seances. (mostly to try to spook them)
Nowadays I live a boring life working a dead-end job in the same town I grew up in. I realized in high school that I'm retarded when it comes to everything I'm not personally interested in. Aside from the paranormal, computers, art, and history, I have 0 skills. I'm trying to teach myself Web Design in hopes of actually getting a decent job that I don't absolutely hate, because I don't think my art is gonna go anywhere anytime soon if I'm being honest.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading I guess, if you want to get in touch for whatever reason and my guestbook is broken/not finished, you can reach me here at:
gumstikzer0@gmail.com