This is my first blog post. I had in mind a lot of stuff to write about but now when I am actually typing, my mind went blank. I guess for starting this, the best idea is to introduce myself.
My name is Carlos and named this website Carlangas since it was a nickname from back then when I was in middle school and my wife for some reason registered my phone number under that name. I live in Mexico and like to play video games like a lot of people that are involved in tech.
The idea for this website is mostly to put whatever I am thinking about during the week. Sometimes it can be tech/videogames related or maybe about something totally unrelated to my hobbies but that I can find interesting.
Now that I have the mood after my introduction, I want to write about the website I built 20 years ago. I was around 13 years old and at the time, the computer class teacher was teaching us how to build websites using Microsoft FrontPage. For the project, we needed to manually copy the website of our school but changing the background color to light yellow. Some of us found the way to inspect our school website, copy the html and just change the color. I think around 10 of the 60 students actually did that since the teacher graded us with 100% if it was a perfect copy of the website. Anyway, after that, someone in the other classroom found about geocities and we started to mess around with that.
One guy, let’s call him Pedro, from the other classroom built a website that had the list of homework for the week. His website had a sky blue background, some gifs of clouds and the homework list. I thought it was cool and I decided to do the same but for my classroom. I created the new website, added a table/grid for all the subjects, days when we need to deliver the homework and the actual instructions of the homework. I also added a background from the final boss of Double Dragon II for NES and the song in MIDI format.
It was the game I was playing at the time and thought it was awesome. After a couple of hours building the website, I sent a message through MSN messenger to my friend Manuel asking his opinion. He told me that he liked the website but asked me if it was possible to add the homework of his classroom. I told him that Pedro has a website for his classroom and sent him the link. Afterwards, I decided to put the link of Pedro’s website in my own in case the students of the other group used my website. A few minutes later, I spammed all of my contacts with my website. I received both praise and hate mostly for the music. A couple of hours later, I received a message from Pedro. He just sent "Hello :)"
When I saw the message, I honestly though he was going to say that it was awesome that both of us had a website about our class homework but that was not the case. So of course I answered, what’s up, it is cool that both of us have similar websites for our classrooms right? He took some time for him to respond but finally he put a big paragraph saying that it was his idea, that I stole it and he was planning to ask people of my classroom about their homework so he can also put that in his website. He was really angry at me, and since I was such a pushover back then and thought that Pedro was my friend, I decided to change the idea of my website. After I told him that I was going to change it, he demanded to tell him how to build tables and how to add music. I showed how to do that and he changed his website. He added a Harry Potter background and also the theme.
Since I was now in square one, I was thinking what should I use my website now and remembered that some people liked the song so I decided to put a link to the NES emulator NESter and the rom links for Double Dragon II, Mario 3 and Contra. My idea was to expand the list of games every period of time and some brief review of the games. The next day at school, some of my classmates started to talk to me about Mario 3, that it was a lot of fun and even their siblings were playing. They were requesting me to put “more Marios” in the website.
About a week later, I got called into the principal office. He was furious at me because my website had violent games (Contra and Double Dragon). He told me that Pedro came to his office concerned that I was promoting violence. Since I was a good student, the principal told me that he will not do anything against me but requested me to delete the website and ask everyone to delete those games, so I did it.
And that’s the story of my one and only geocities website I built. In hindsight, I should had told Pedro to fuck off. It has always been hard for me to make friends but during that time, I tried to please everyone but they took advantage of me. Some time later, I became more reclusive and sadly that became my main “personality” for a lot of time. I have been opening myself a bit but the damage is still there.
Anyway, first entry of my blog. I never thought that I was going to finish that way, lol.