Most things are representative of where I was at in terms of whatever at those points in time.
I don't particularly know what to do or think about things when I was a child -- was what I made when I was 9 as good as what I can do now after decades of engineering, repair and fabrication training, practice and pondering (to say nothing of the huge advances in technology, or at least affordable technology)? Of course not, or at least I hope not as it would have been an awful waste otherwise. To that end anybody that wants to hold it up and say "that is representative of the dude otherwise known as FAST6191" is rather foolish. Equally I can safely say I internalised the new york times rule (never say anything online/in text that you would not be happy having printed on the front page of the new york times) early on enough that I am unlikely to be troubled by that.
An example might be my earliest attempt at my ROM hacking docs. It was about a year after I took it up in earnest, however I was still seeing a lot of "ooh it is crazy hard" when actually no. Some things were, and still are (and sometimes, this side of crazy AI, always will be), but almost anybody of vague technical competence could achieve real and desirable outcomes. For example basic sprite edits, colour changes, in the case of the GBA and DS then music tweaks, maybe a phrase change, cheats like infinite consumables. in the case of the DS file system manipulation does a lot for you (most games don't care what order they load the levels in so rename the final level to level 1's name and you have a level swap hack, if you can extract and compress a zip you can unpack and repack a DS ROM).
Some years later I had learned an awful awful lot more and basically did a full rewrite, this time including many of the more advanced techniques, though no small number of refined and "try it anyway" methods as well.
The earlier version however is still out there (I did not make any effort to rehost it when various hosts shut me down for whatever reason, but at the same time could have blocked it easily enough, and still actually could) and for me right now is so laughably basic, and not necessarily wrong but if you did read it then you might come away thinking some things are harder than they either are or have since be made, that I hope nobody uses it to try to learn hacking. For the rewrite I did however quickly learn the need to at least play editor for myself and spent the following 24 hours after its initial release doing as such, said early version you will be somewhat hard pressed to find but it is functionally identical. Speaking of 24 hours then around that time I also instituted a rule for myself that I try not to put anything on the front page of this site after midnight, especially not trying to watch all the e3 presentations live and summarise them thereafter (UK time is 8 hours ahead of west coast US, if these things are happening until evening time there and tedious enough to bore me to sleep anyway...). Suffice it to say my normally scattered approach to writing (I will usually write one paragraph, jump to another, expand a concept in an earlier paragraph, jump to another and finally finish everything off) really did fail me then. Also it meant I did not get to see the series finale of game of thrones with my family on the normal day as I was watching e3 instead.
I actually gave up watching e3 entirely after that, I was planning a "2 weeks later, watching them on my own time" thing and even have some notes somewhere from those. However I think it was still the now apparently considered classic (I still remember the big three hardware makers being it) of ubisoft, ea, ms, sony, nintendo lineup, konami might have had something as well, and even with 2x speed and the ability to skip the sports games and on stage nonsense I got about 40% of the way through EA's conference and had lost the will to live. It was not just EA either and ubisoft had laid the groundwork.
At the same time it is very rare that I share anything. I once heard a story relayed of someone that liked making videos as a kid. They would record them onto VHS tapes and then a few months later record over them when they ran out of other tapes. I also actually really like playing with video and I still do the virtual equivalent of that -- it would be trivial for me to upload things but I don't. Make them, watch them for myself, then delete them and usually the source material. That said I did find my video for the switch press event thing and was considering a "from the archives" type session. The other side of that is I learned many years ago that nobody cares what I do, see also
Some might say doing such things is limiting, and in all likelihood they are right. I am OK with that though. My image editing skills have improved massively as well but unlike text and video the internet is OK with the sort of crappy images I had made back then.
Choice videos at this point
