A Series of Carefully Selected Moments Over the Course of 35 Years

In all sincerity, I actually attempted to construct this in a more conventional narrative form, with the initial phase being the following series of roughly dated bullets. Upon completion, I realized the bullets actually covered my “nerdom coming-of-age” origin tale better than any formal composition.

So yeah, in all it’s abstract glory, here you go:

1980s… My Saturday Morning line-up for a decade was (in no particular order): Spidey and his Amazing Friends, Captain N: The Game Master, The Get-Along Gang, Pole Position, Fraggle Rock, The Gummi Bears, Danger Mouse, Inspector Gadget, Mighty Mouse (The New Adventures), Garfield and Friends, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, ReBoot…

1984… Hearing Megatron speak for the first time: “If there’s a new source of energy to be found, the Decepticons must find it first….”

1985… Putting this together for the first time…

Circa early 1980s… My first martial arts movie (The Four Assassins aka Ma Ko Po Lo, directed by Chang Cheh)…

1986… Bumblebee: “Look…!”
Spike: “It isn’t even dented. Ahh shit, what are we gonna do now?”

1987-ish… Mom introduces me to comic books…

Summer 1989… Finally figuring out this was not a set of teeth while standing in line with my mom to see it opening weekend…

Fall 1989… Lisa Turtle dancing “The Sprain” with Screech…

1991-1994… Nintendo Power, GamePro, and Electronic Gaming Monthly magazines on the rush hour A-Train to Brooklyn Tech…

Circa early 1990s… Pulling this off for the first time…

Blizzard of 1996… sophomore year at West Virginia University… Diablo…

1997… Then this happened:
1998… Psycho Mantis reads my thoughts/memory card…moves my controller…

1998… First (unsuccessful) attempt to watch/play Resident Evil 2 in the dark… Still have never done the whole game that way…

Spring 2001… At my first legitimate job out of college at a marketing research firm, Boss says to me six months in: “Shawn, we need to get some intel on current video games. Here’s the company corporate card — go buy the top three video game systems on the market (i.e., GameCube, PS2, Dreamcast) and pick some games to go with them.” Score.

Spring 2008… My 60-Day Deep Space Nine Marathon Initiation (thank you, Raymond) and subsequent two-year odyssey to convert all seven seasons to MP4s… 95% complete as of this post…