A Trip Down Memory Lane
I was up at 4 AM last night (today) reminiscing.
It started off with a memory of some game that I used to play but couldn’t quite remember the name of. Sometime during the Windows XP / Windows 7 era, there was this recurring memory that wouldn’t quite leave me: a 3D game where you played as a dog, exploring an open world freely. It recurred enough that I couldn’t quite forget it but it was vague enough that I suspected it potentially a false memory.
After consulting ChatGPT, I fortunately confirmed that I was not developing early-onset dementia: JumpStart Adventure 3D. It was nearly exactly as I remembered it. I spent a good chunk of time watching gameplay videos and reading about the game. And then I felt old when I learned they had shut down the game and it was no longer available.
Now, the woes of software preservation will have to be a topic for another day…
Because after rediscovering the game, I took a trip down memory lane.
To one of the first times I felt free.
I was in 4th grade when my school starting handing out laptops. IT didn’t really know what they were doing yet. There weren’t many restrictions and plenty of ways around what little existed. I definitely took advantage of that.
Boredom and that freedom turned into experimentation. During the remainder of my time in elementary school, I started learning VBScript and seeing what I could do. I started messing around with batch scripts and even built a simple turn-based Pokémon game in the back of the classroom neglecting my classwork.
While I was looking back, I suddenly remembered an old project of mine: An Instructables account I had made.
I had completely forgotten it existed.
With the help of Google, I was able to log in.
Joined April 4th, 2017. Four projects. Over 100,000 views. Username: “ThatHacker-Hackers United.”
I was eleven.
I’m cringing hard reading that username now but I bet eleven-year-old me thought it was the coolest thing ever.
At the very least, I’m glad I had some sense of internet privacy at the time, my username notwithstanding: my location field simply reads “no.” It looks like my sense of humor hasn’t changed much.
The projects were exactly what one would expect from an eleven-year-old attempting to apply a simple hacker ideal: if you ask a computer the right way, it will comply. Batch files for prank message boxes. A rudimentary keylogger script. A “Basic Batch Coding” tutorial written with a confidence that clearly exceeded my understanding. I’d honestly forgotten this had all existed but even after all of these years, my intent, which I was blissfully unaware of at the time, was clear: I wanted to understand how things worked and show others why.
At the time, I didn’t quite have the ability to do that of course.
It looks like my sense of style is unchanged as well. Blunt. Direct. Minimal. At least now, I like to think I succeed in explaining things a bit better.
I was free in the sense that I felt like nothing I did had consequences. I broke things. I wrote bad code. I started things over on a whim and moved on without a second thought. I broke rules that would probably get me in trouble. Now, in retrospect, my actions came from not knowing better but that doesn’t excuse anything bad I did. However, it does explain why I tend to approach everything with a trial-and-error mindset. I was learning by doing, failing, and trying again.
I’ve since learned that some systems in the real world offer very little margin for error. You can’t reset a path taken in life. You have to live with the consequences of your actions, good or bad. The freedom I once felt has now been replaced by a cautiousness that occasionally borders on fear.
I’m not going to clean these projects up. I’m not going to rewrite them or pretend they were better than they were. They’re messy, naive, and very eleven-year-old. I’m not going to pretend I had everything figured out. I didn’t and I still don’t.
I’m going to keep this up. One must learn to live with their past and grow from it.
Though I did delete the code for the keylogger scripts.
Adult me is winning that particular moral battle.
My original batch script tutorial ended with this line:
That still feels like the right place to stop.