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…

• July 2008…The Dark Knight on opening Night… then 12 hours later… The Dark Knight in IMAX…

• May 2013… Meeting this man twice within thirty minutes…