

Player after player would roll out “Bolmeteus Steel Dragon” decks and tear me to pieces multiple times a day. If memory serves, I spent about a month getting thrashed by this card. You could imagine the frustration seething from this high schooler who’s leisure derived mainly from playing cards online with strangers. You couldn’t go two games without playing against a deck that focused on using this card. “Bolmeteus Steel Dragon” was a card that was so cost-efficient, and ignored so many of the game’s basic mechanics, that it rendered several once viable strategies obsolete. The introduction of this set included a card that in my eyes, ruined the strategy of the game forever. All was great, at least for the time being.Ībout a month into my regular participation in the online Duel Masters forums, the team that hacked together the online client announced that they completed coding the most recent set of cards into the system. Needless to say, I felt like I was living out a trading card game anime where I was the plucky hero who would always draw the perfect card for whatever pinch he was in at the time. I built several decks, joined the forum, and I even found a couple players that I could talk strategy with into the wee hours of the morning. I found a fan made java application that allowed you to build decks and play with people from all over the world, it was a dream come true. So like any kid my age, I turned to the internet to solve my problems. Since it was a largely unpopular game, I wasn’t able to find many people that I could play with on a regular basis. But the one I got the most involved in was Duel Masters. I played Pokemon, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh, MLB Showdown, and I’m sure there were half a dozen more that I at least bought cards for once.
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Much to my mom’s frustration, I played every single game I could get my hands on, those little pieces of cardboard crack collected in messy stacks all over my room. We’re almost to the good stuff in this story, but I still need to give a little more context about my high school self.Įver since I was a kid, I love playing card games. I want to focus primarily on this second point, I think the self-inflicted embarrassment that typically forces one to learn this lesson is a pretty common framework for how people my age cemented our self-presentation habits online.

We have this shared experience for two reasons: I feel confident in asserting that everybody that was reared during the revolution of interconnectivity practices very similar internet hygiene. Needless to say, everything that goes online is filtered, distilled, revised, and mutilated to a point that it’s no longer a fair representation of me, but of a bizarre caricature. Speaking for myself, I take minutes to make sure that the next status I’m positing is an accurate reflection of my informal “brand,” I take great care to make sure that pictures of myself are curated to my liking, I don’t post on this blog for months on end due to a combination of laziness and a vicious internal editor that says everything I create isn’t good enough.

In 2017, online presentation is a practice all too familiar to anybody with an account on Facebook or Instagram. Growing up during the turn of the century was a cultural moment unique to itself and I believe many of us take for granted how special the ride has been. How did my internet usage habits influence how I think about myself now? How do I think about my online presentation now compared to my more anonymous days? I fully intend to return to this disgruntled youth, but I think it’s important to frame him in the context of a mid/late 2000s adolescence so I can give my takeaways from this experience. Spotting myself among a couple dozen anonymous users on a once thriving forum, it got me thinking. It was a surreal experience for me, stumbling upon a moment in my life that was all too familiar to me, but also felt so foreign due to the amount of time since I originally wrote the post. He was on a long abandoned forum channeling his frustration and hormones into a rant about overpowered strategies in a card game that he played. The other day I found my high school self online.
