<
https://freedium.cfd/https://devonprice.medium.com/interact-with-minors-dd2bf03c972a>
'When I was in fourth grade, I made an America Online account. The handle I
chose for myself was Batlover4, because I wanted to be a bat biologist when I
grew up, and I was in the fourth grade.
I started frequenting AOL's game review community, the Antagonist Game Network
(or ANT for short). Every day after school I would spend an hour or two in the
ANT chat rooms and posting on their weekly forum threads. I interacted
regularly with dozens of people — some of them children, but most of them
adults.
There was a weekly caption contest on ANT — a moderator named ANTPogo would
post a screenshot from
Banjo Kazooie or
Tomb Raider III at the top of the
week, and members would compete to see who could pen the funniest response.
ANTPogo was a game reviewer in his mid-20s with a snarky voice and a CGI wolf's
head for an avatar, whose audio commentaries on games industry news I quite
liked. I decided that rather than submit captions, I would start role-playing
as ANTPogo's adoring stalker, sending him unhinged love declarations and
cartoonishly violent threats into the caption submission box.
Thankfully, ANTPogo and the broader gaming community found my antics funny. It
was 1998 and I was writing in the prototypical
rawr random register that
would soon become inescapable among tweens and teens.
With my claims of having studied all of ANTPogo's favorite anime waifus so that
I could imitate them, and my promises to kill all his enemies with knives and
hammers, it must have been clear that I was just an embarrassing kid. Yet
everybody humored me and played along with my character. ANT Pogo began
publishing my captions every single week in a special sub-section of the site
called
Batlover4's Asylum.
I became a fixture of the site. When ANTPogo mentioned he was moving house,
complete strangers messaged me on AIM to jokingly ask if I had found his new
residence. A competing "stalker" introduced herself and we began a fake
rivalry, and ANTPogo pretended to be terrified of us. An entire ANTPogo-stalker
storytelling universe emerged with numerous characters and plotlines that
unfolded for years.
In all the time that I spent on ANT, not one single adult was ever
inappropriate with me. Though I myself was pushing boundaries and pretending to
desire a grown man, nobody ever broached sexual topics with me or asked me for
any private information. My comedic writing was treated as something
interesting and worthy of engaging with, my awkward moments looked past with
grace.
Being on ANT gave the 10-year-old me confidence in my ability to improvise,
write jokes, and interact with a diverse network of people in drastically
different stages of life. I left the community a few years later a more mature,
capable version of myself, and a better writer — all thanks to the care of
adults whom I'll never know the names of.'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
