About Me
If you were ever curious to know more about the person in between the lines, that spews out all these walls of text and collects and publishes them into a neat little package on the web, this is the place!My Internet alias, whether you may or may not already know, is Silverwing, and sometimes Red Lugia if Silverwing happens to be taken. I'm Asian (more specifically Chinese) and I currently live in California. My name in real life is Katherine, and it gets kind of annoying to write out all the time since it's too long.. oh well, there are probably worse and longer names than mine so I shouldn't be complaining.
I'm more of the artsy and imaginative type than the mathematics type (I grasp the concept of math quite easily, but I'm not exactly the most pin-point sharpest person ever and I make a lot of random, careless mistakes in my equations..). One of my passions is art, and currently the mediums that I use are a) good ol' pencil and paper b) watercolor with Prismacolor Watercolor Colored Pencils and c) digital art on the computer, with Photoshop and a tablet. My art can be found here and here if you're interested.
I'm a real talker in real life, and I can pretty much hold a conversation to myself if I wanted to (well basically, if I'm talking to a really silent person, they won't even need to say a word to add to the conversation to keep me going). I'm also just a naturally loud person; ever since I was little people have told me to quiet down my voice. When I talk fast or when I really get into the moment, my voice just gets louder. Don't ask why.
For a career, I would love to do anything in the medical field, although right now I have my eyes on becoming a surgeon when I grow up. I'm currently taking the nerdiest and highest AP and honors classes in high school, with pushy parents that expect better than straight A's every term (typical Asian ones, basically), so I would say that I'm well on my way.
The only bad thing is that school projects and me do not go together. I'm a huge procrastinator on anything that's due later than the next day. I'm fine with lots of homework, but it's those times when the teachers assign us projects that are due two months away is when I go into major procrastination mode and I don't bother with it until it's finally almost due. Funnily enough, I always get a good grade on it and have never pulled an all-nighter because of a project before, so I must be doing something right. Same goes for tests and exams. Studying doesn't really make a difference and I always just seem to get a good grade. Ah well, I'm not complaining.
And for a little history rundown about me... I first arrived on the Internet when I was nine years old. I found this totally cool RPG site called Pokemon Crater (it lived on for a long time until it suddenly disappeared... dunno what it is today) where I can catch, train, and level up my own Pokemon just like in the games, but all on my computer. I played around with that for a while, then I discovered the forums there and posted around a bit there. I had no idea about the concept of forums until then, and needless to say, I was quite a big noob.
I remember distinctly posting a poll about your favorite Pokemon; I just went to one of the forums called "The Pokemon Crater" or something, and didn't really bother to read the description under it. Later, I found out that the forum that I posted under was for help on the actual Pokemon Crater game, but heck, what did I know back then. Anyway, I posted the thread, it got a few replies and I was really excited. Then, the next day I checked on it, to my dismay, it was gone! I looked around for it, confused at what had happened. So then, after concluding that it had magically disappeared because of some glitch or something, I remade another thread in the same forum, leaving a note saying that I had already posted the thread but it somehow slipped into nothingness.
Those were my very first memories of me being on the Internet at all, much less Pokemon.
But then, around 2003-2004 (I forgot which year exactly), my brother introduced me to an IRC channel called #rsarena, where you could battle with Pokemon without the hassle of training and raising your team; you simply had to select the Pokemon and you were free to change its moves, nature, etc. however you wanted. I had a blast with this, and back then, rsarena was still pretty active and there were plenty of people to battle. Needless to say, in the beginning, I sucked quite a lot and lost a lot of my battles, but I shamelessly pushed on. (Back then, I remember some of the staple Pokemon were Miltank, Slaking, Latios, Latias, before they became uber, Raikou, Snorlax, and Jolteon.)
I had fun with that for a while (I remember befriending someone named Xtreme and some Brazilian person and gave him some lessons on English... lol), but eventually rsarena died and I migrated to NetBattle. This was somewhere in early 2005, and I was still in the competitive battling scene. I was never a master champion player or anything, but I suppose I was decent and knew the fundamentals of competitive battling after a few years of playing.
My competitive battling craze died down a little and soon I was just a lurker of a few competitive battling forums. Then, one day in late 2005, I found a link to some forums called the PokeCommunity. I clicked around a little, exploring, and then that's where I discovered the oekakis. I had never heard of an oekaki before, and I was curious about what exactly it was. Apparently it was some Internet drawing board, and I was pretty into art my whole life, so I made an account (I remember distinctly that I made the account on the last day, December 31st, of 2005).
I thought that the oekaki was one of the coolest inventions made on the Internet. An Internet drawing board that wasn't as crappy as Paint was beyond me back then, and pretty soon I ditched competitive battling (I still did it occasionally, but it was never my main focus) and got hooked on the oekakis. Back then, I made all my drawings with a mouse, which discouraged me a little, but heck, I was determined little thing, and I kept pushing and making new art. One of the happiest days back then was when I got an archive from a Valentine's day drawing (it had a Luvdisc that said Happy Valentines Day).
After a while or so on the oekaki, I decided that it was high time I got around to joining the PokeCommunity forums themselves, so I finally made an account. Then, I sort of "accidentally" discovered spriting (it was more of an experiment, when I was bored, and I noticed that I can recolor Pokemon sprites with the Paint bucket). I soon got into spriting, and I had a fun time making sprite shops and what-not on the PokeCommunity boards.
This was around early 2006. One of the spriters became a friend of mine, and she owned a pair of forums and asked me to join. I thought it was interesting that someone can just make a pair of forums themselves so easily; I always had the idea that you had to be some advanced professional to get a piece of the Internet all to yourself. Needless to say, the more I saw these everyday people making their own forums, I became interested and decided to make one myself.
The most popular hosting site I noticed was InvisionFree, so I made up a random named -- Lugia's Island -- on March 26, 2006 and let it fly and see how it did. And I'm pretty sure you know the rest of the story. If not, head on over to the Site History page!
And you must have been very interested in learning about me or extremely bored if you actually went through and read this big bumbling textwall of a page. :P
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