I got my first experience with the internet back in 1997. A year later, near the end of seventh grade for me, I got my first e-mail address: littlebratgirl[at]hotmail[dot]com. It was another two years before I had a computer at home, though, and by that time, I started getting interested in website-building. I didn't know much or have any money, but I was willing to try. My first site (omegaslayer.freeservers.com) was entirely devoted to Final Fantasy VIII. I changed e-mail addresses many times over the next few years, all of them at hotmail, including the usernames omegaslayer, rinoaheartilly_ff8, and pocabell.

I started actually learning html and toyed around with a few sites that don't exist anymore, hosted by FreeServers and Homestead. During my freshman year, I got very heavily into Gundam Wing and started writing fanfiction. I made my first site that I actually coded (angelfire.com/gundam/rinoa), and I got addicted. Soon, I decided that I just didn't like the ads and wanted a more professional site, so I built one on Envy.nu. Unfortunately, when Envy made the switch to ads, I lost my account and lacked the FTP capabilities to recover my files. Thus, the sites I had been most proud of were lost forever.

Annoyed and discouraged, I quit coding for a little bit before regressing to Angelfire and creating my Solo Angel account (angelfire.com/rpg2/soloangel). I got into image editing, and soon discovered how to make my sites more beautiful than before. Armed with the ability to pay for my account and thus remove ads, I built a site that I could be proud of, although it stayed mostly content-free due to time constraints. My wonderful mother bought me i.am/rinoa from V3, and for a long time, I was very satisfied.

With the advent of college, I suddenly found my summer breaks to be empty of the carry-over assignments I'd had in high school. So, I started building fanlistings and learning how to utilize PHP scripts. Eventually, I grew sick of Angelfire, got an FTP client, and bought the domain and hosting that you see here from Dreamhost.

And so, here I am. Voila!