"You made it a hot line. I made it a hot SONG."

I made a meme. The image is, of course, not mine. As in no, I did not find a Star Wars DVD play on my laptop, freeze it at this spot, make a screenshot of it somehow. I just rifle through Google Images like er'body else. It was, however, my idea to write those words over this image I found via Google on who-remembers-what-specific-site.net. So does that make the whole thing mine altogether? To me, intellectual property is a very confusing issue--as confusing as it is touchy.

I'm totally late to the whole blogging game. I've played around with this site, tumblr, and whatever else.  I can't tell if people's blogs are a serious thing ("with this blog, I will spread awareness about the disappearing wetlands, and showcase my work as a wildlife photographer!") or they're just kinda trollin ("here's a bunch of shit my friends might think is cool.") Me? I'm more of the latter, but wouldn't mind being the former either. What snags me up is the pressure I feel to take one approach or the other.

When I was in 5th grade, I created what I called an "offline website" dedicated to Dragonball Z. I was inspired by my friend Danny who showed me his Mega Man website. All I remember it being was a random scanned image of Mega Man he found perusing Netscape (similar to the one below, found on fightersgeneration.com ),

that he spent days carefully cropping on his stepdad's Adobe photoshop. He had me over his house one day to show me the finished product (imagine this image pasted over an outer space background and a lens flare effect just behind Mega Man's head...it was awesome). His page was offline for two reasons: the first being because his parents explained some very confusing and possibly expensive process to have a website published, which in retrospect was likely just a cop-out preying on the reality of the second reason--that's that was as far as Danny's expertise went on the matter.

In any case, the awesomeness of what he had created inspired me to make my own webpage about DBZ (nowadays, such things are called "fanpages") using Netscape PageMaker (or whatever it was called). The computer it was on, of course, has long since died and been tossed. However, these were some awesome features I remember about it:

-Color scheme was red lettering on a black background (duh, I was 11.)

-Still Image and Animated GIF sections categorized by character and complete with thumbnails.

-Various pages you navigated to had were headed by various GIFs I thought were cool, the coolest of which was on the homepage and looked something like this one:

Aside from the fact that it could not actually be accessed via the Internet (then known formally as the "information superhighway"), my website was pretty fuckin' sweet. And all it was was cool things I found around the internet. I loved doing it!

As middle school and high school rolled around, I had to put my nerdy tendencies on a shelf to do things like play sports, awkwardly crave any and all interaction with the opposite sex, and overall begin cultivating the personality of a reasonably normal adult...which is sadly something you just can't do if you're rushing to make it home before 4 everyday to catch your favorite imported action cartoon. And over time I kind of forgot that I loved all this nerdy stuff.

But basically when I tried to get reacquainted with the ol' computer screen after some years, the atmosphere seemed to get real touchy about giving proper credit for pictures.

Granted a lot of this might just be in my head because I majored in the humanities in college, and I've been molded into a soldier of academic honesty. But hey but if an image isn't mine, I'm not pretending it is. Just still allow me to enjoy it being on my blog. And I am going to voluntarily spare myself the hassle of consistently citing everything properly...please and thank you.

And maybe I could've saved a lot of time just saying that "I do not claim ownership to any of this unless I say otherwise." But I guess I just wanted to reminisce with you guys, and welcome myself back to the world of internet trolling. It's been too long.