A little bit about me

I have never been good at introducing myself - or at talking at all. I am somewhat lonely though, and I'd like to meet like-minded people, and so I feel compelled to write a bit about myself. I wanted to focus here a bit more on the development of my character and interests than specific details of my personal life. We'll see how it will turn out.

Since I can remember I was interested in matters related to history and literature. At some point in my childhood I have developed a liking to "the wise books", that is, non-fiction books for children that were sort of like watered down encyclopedias just to get children into reading. I remember one having one titled something like "1001 questions about the world". It had lots of random questions ranging from history "Why did Romans fight in a turtle formations?" accompanied with an illustration and some description, to pictures with a cross cut of the sun listing out it's layers and answering the question about its longevity. I think that this was one of my first genuine interests and formed some attitude towards the World that became the leading interest of mine. That is - exploration of the world as a place full of interesting and oddly harmonic facts. I have struggled to keep to that fascination of mine through the years, but I think that fundamentally I am not very far from it.

I think that since an early age I also used to use the internet a lot - and I mean a lot. I remember spending time on GTA San Andreas: Multiplayer, browsing internet and finding some place in communities from that period on websites like jeja.pl and wikia. I don't know whether it was a matter of people on the internet being friendlier or me being more outgoing as a child, but I've made plenty of friends there and enjoyed being part of the communities. I remember that even back then I felt anxious and used to develop a dislike for various people but somehow I didn't run away from these communities, which seemed to be a net positive for my life back then. I do not remember what youtubers did I like the most. I think that I liked Ivona (A legendary Polish speech synthesier) parodies of various cartoons which were known for poor, vulgar and absurd humor. Since I had interest in history I also have had some interest in politics which at such age mostly resulted in me having embarassing interests in various niche ideologies. I never took to them too seriously though.

That was also the time when I've discovered Europa Universalis. My parents were somehow poor and thus I had a really crappy PC, so I couldn't really play new games, but were quite open to playing titles that were my age or older. One of those was one of the CDs that I found around my father's discs, a white brandless CD with "Europa Universalis II" written on it with a marker. I installed the game and a completely new, mysterious world has opened itself in front of me. I never really understood the mechanics or design of the game. The colors of the territories on the map and the peculiar touch of the province tiles, the presence of a huge white cloud around the map that grew smaller as the game progressed, but never could be fully explored, events that I knew nothing about which changed my country significantly, odd, unknown nations sometimes surrounded with uncolonised tiles. These nations were basically unplayable due to a huge static tech disdavantage that Paradox fixed through westernization in it's later games. I was so terrible at this game (It never came to me that I could play the game at a very easy difficulty, and even then I was too dense to figure the game mechanics out) that I don't think that I've ever done a serious run of the game, but I just pasted the montezuma command into the console and kept building my world empires and exploring the events of various nations over and over. After some time I have grown out of the Paradox games, but I think that they did expand my interest in history a lot.

Despite my current interests including a lot of reading I was a pretty poor student mostly due to my completely indifferent attitude to the schooling system (That attitude, a little tone down, seems to stay with me to this very day). I didn't have terrible problems passing tests due to my general knowledge, but had trouble with grades whenever it came to stuff like returning homework and what not. Since I kept passing grades neither the school or my parents cared really about these outcomes, which today I think is a bit of a pity. I think I would have enjoyed being good at school and perhaps I would have been less lazy these days if I sticked to my studies... I remember my leading teacher questioning me why the hell am I learning Glagollitic script while my math teacher threatens to held me back a grade due to me ignoring all failed tests from all year back.