2023 Update

Hey there! It's MattKC from much, much later here. What you're seeing is my official website from 2011 when I was 15 years old. It served as a central location for virtually all of my creative output back then, as well as occasionally some friends who would agree to make a cameo in a video or write a text review or something.

Back then, before the internet was a centralized as it is today, "networks" of creators would band together to create their own platform like That Guy with the Glasses or ScrewAttack, and that's more or less what I was going for here. Essentially, I wanted to make fun stuff with my friends, and hoped we could launch it into our own online community/careers.

Obviously that didn't happen - I think we averaged maybe 11 views per video at best - and for good reason: most of these videos suck. Occasionally I'd put some effort in and make something pretty decent, but generally my philosophy was "I'll wait until we have more viewers before I make any really high quality content". It took a long time before it occurred to me that more viewers would come if the content was higher quality to begin with.

For fun (and I guess preservation?), this website has been restored as faithfully as possible to how it looked back in 2011. A handful of technical changes had to be made for the site to work correctly on the modern internet (see below), but there have been no changes to the content, look, or feel (outside of this page and its accompanying link on the homepage). You're getting a truly authentic experience, and yes, that means there's no mobile version.

Obligatory disclaimer that anything written on here (besides this page) was written over ten years ago when I (or one of my friends) was 15. Opinions expressed here are likely not opinions I still hold today.

Technical Changes

If you're curious what changes I had to make to get this site working again, I'll list them here:

• I did have to make one minor CSS change to make it render properly on modern browsers. I had to change a height: 100% to min-height: 100% on the main body element (which, yes, is a table. I know...)
• The site's backend code relied heavily on PHP's old mysql module (deprecated in 2013 and removed in 2015). All of these calls had to be upgraded to use the newer mysqli module instead.
  • Since 15 year old me wrote terrible PHP, almost all queries in the original code were susceptible to SQL injection. For obvious reasons, I addressed this during the upgrade.
• If you see a lot of blank rectangles around, those used to be Google ads that no longer worked, but I've gone ahead and excised the ad code anyway just to be sure.
• You may notice the footer says "2010-2023". This was actually not an update I made, the PHP code automatically pulls the current year, so it will always claim to be under copyright no matter what year you're seeing this in.
• I used to host some videos on Blip because they had no minimum subscriber count to start monetizing your videos. Blip shut down in 2015, so these videos are no longer available, but many of them were also uploaded to YouTube and you can probably find them by just searching the titles.
• The site served largely as a frontend for a phpBB forum. I would post new videos/blog posts/text reviews as forum threads, and this frontend would read from the forum's database and provide a somewhat cleaner interface to the content (similar to what MacRumors does to this day). For the most part, this functionality has been restored, however since the forum itself is a very old version of phpBB (3.0.10 from January 2012), it similarly uses a lot of deprecated/removed APIs and therefore no longer works at all. Since the site used phpBB APIs to render the BBcode and emoticons, that functionality has broken. I wrote a really quick regex BBcode parser for stuff like [b] and [i], but expect some formatting in text articles to not render correctly.
  • I'm not sure if I'll ever get around to fixing this. Upgrading over 12 years worth of phpBB versions sounds like a huge pain, and I doubt any meaningful discussions really occurred on there (just imagine me and my friends being LE EPIC LOL RANDOM and you'll probably get the idea).

Comments

• Can you tell I really liked gradients? These aren't even CSS linear-gradients, they're gradients that I'm pretty sure I made in PowerPoint and then exported as images and infinitely tiled. To be fair though, I still really like gradients. Aero and Aqua were the peak of software UI design.
• I have no idea why there's a "galleries" section. I guess I thought it would be cool to have a meme repository but I have no recollection of putting any of those GIFs in there.
• The random quotes at the top was an idea stolen from another forum I used that actually had pretty funny quotes. Unfortunately a lot of these are either in-jokes or the epitome of "I guess you had to be there", so oops.