[applause]
>> Hi, I'm Neil Cicierega, and due to a bizarre
set of circumstances, I have a creative career. [laughter]
So when people ask me what I do, I stutter a lot and I'm like, I'm an artist or sometimes
I say I'm a comedian or a musician or a filmmaker, but none of those words properly conveys the
fact that I spend pretty much all day on a computer, like just making images and videos
and music to amuse myself. But since I have a giant screen, I can actually show you a
few things that I have made that might convey that so here's -- there we go. So I made an
album of Smash Mouth-centric mashups called Mouth Sounds. [cheers]
And its Smash Mouth-free followup, Mouth Silence. [laughter]
I made a whole bunch of albums as Lemon Demon
with a hit 2005 Flash animation called The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny. [applause]
I made a horror blog called Windows 95 Tips,
Tricks, and Tweaks. [laughter]
I made a comic called Ariel Needs Legs. [cheers]
I made a very popular video series called Potter Puppet Pals, and some less popular
videos, like It's The World Wide Web. [laughter]
Bustin’. [laughter]
Mouth. [laughter]
And Brody Quest. [cheers] But it's okay if you don't recognize any of this stuff, because whatever,
it's weird. But — [laughter]
But on our modern monetized internet, there's nothing too unusual about having the vague
job description of content creator, but for me I've actually been locked into this weird
role for over 15 years, since I was an actual child, a time before content. [laughter]
Luckily, for this presentation, I happen to
have uninterrupted backups of every hard drive that I've ever owned since 1995.
[applause] Yeah! Never throw anything away.
[laughter] So this talk is going to be sort of a period
piece. I'm going to talk about the Before Times and I'm going to use just all this material
that I still have kicking around and screencaps from the Wayback Machine on Archive.org and
I'm going to take you through it, so gather ‘round. Okay, thank you.
[laughter] And this is How To Be An “Internet Explorer”
with Neil Cicierega. [laughter]
[applause] So I can't remember having fewer than two
computers in my house. It was the early -- [laughter]
It was the early '90s, and I loved normal-kid stuff, like drawing and reading and watching
cartoons, but I was really weirdly captivated by computers, even if it was just like a business
computer with no games on it, I would load up applications and just like figure out what
they did. And I'd like open up the MS-DOS text editor and I'd hold down alt and type
in random numbers just to see the weird symbols that would come out of this machine. So, to
me, as a little tiny kid, even before there was internet, the computer was like a glowing
box of secrets. My dad has been a programmer since the mid '80s, so he made internal use
software for companies, like databases and point-of-sale systems. So there were always
these computers in my house and he was always fixing customers’ computers and I have all
these memories of amber monochrome displays and dot-matrix printers, and those chunky
‘90s laptops with the LCD screens that you’re not supposed to poke but you poke anyway because
it makes a rainbow. [laughter]
Now, still in the '90s here, in second grade, Goosebumps was huge with me and my schoolmates.
[applause] Yeah, give it up for Mr. R. L. Stein and the
thing about these books was, you know, they weren't good, but they were just exciting
to collect and anticipate next month’s book and every book had a preview at the back that
would spoil like a little bit like what's the next book's title, what's the first chapter,
and everybody would be like, oh, yeah, ready for that one. Well, one of my dad's clients
was a local bookstore, which meant he had this entire ISBN database on his computer.
So I was like, "Dad, can I use the ISBN database?" And he's like, "Sure, son," so I typed in
R. L. Stein and it happened to list not only the next month's book but the month after
and the month after, because this guy just cranked these books out and he had them lined
up. So I brought this secret knowledge to school and I don't remember if anyone actually
thought I was cool, but I felt really cool. [laughter]
Because it was like magic. I used a computer to learn things no one else knew. Now, around
this time, my parents noticed how into computers I was and they got me something called Klik
& Play, which was a game creation suite and it didn't involve any real coding, so it was
easy enough for kids to learn but it was actually pretty flexible if you were clever. And this
software, as you can see came out in 1994, but it actually has had a continuous stream
of sequels and spinoffs and it still exists as Fusion which was used for like Five Nights
at Freddie’s. So suddenly I could make interactive multimedia and this was like a lot of things
to take in for a kid, because not only could you make your own graphics, which I did poorly.
[laughter] But I mean it came with lots of stock sprites,
sound effects and weird games to learn from so I was in hog heaven and this was something
I could do all day. So I started making all these little games, or trying to, anyway,
I never really finished any of them. But it was just the first thing I would do after
school is sink all my time into kind of making games. Then in the mid '90s, two things happened.
One, my family got online. Prodigy, first, and then AOL—America Online. I found out
there was a Klik & Play community and I could download other peoples’ games and potentially
upload my games instead of just making them for myself. So I was like, okay, I got that.
Then something else happened that doesn’t happen to most kids, and after fourth grade
my parents decided to homeschool me and my brother and my little sister, not for religious
reasons and not because we were having trouble in school or anything, but because -- I don't
know. I think my parents just wanted to try something different and my mom claims that
she missed us during the day, but I know the real reason. Who else was famously home-schooled
in 1997? [laughter]
My parents wanted that MMMBop money. [laughter]
So this next part is going to sound iffier still. See, I didn't mind being taken out
of school, because as it turned out homeschooling in my house did not mean being tutored regularly,
it didn't mean having a curriculum to follow. It meant one test a year to prove to the state
that we weren't, like, being taught nothing. [laughter]
And that test only really took a week or two to prep.
[laughter] So
I mean to be fair, my parents did, for a little while, make me play JumpStart 5th Grade.
[laughter] But, for the most part, they just year-round
encouraged me to teach myself whatever I wanted to learn as long as I was learning something.
So I wasted a lot of time making hundreds of awful games that never went anywhere. I
spent hours and hours every day making title screens, cutscenes, maybe the first level.
I really wanted to learn 3D so my wonderful supportive parents got me some 3D software
and I kind of learned that. [laughter]
But I continued trying for years and I wanted to make puzzle games and action games. That
one was actually kind of good. [laughter]
But I most dearly, in my heart of hearts, wanted to make adventure games in the style
of LucasArts, but I never had the follow-through to make the kind of games that I wanted to
make, although I did learn some skills in the process of kind of making games. See,
my dad, I keep mentioning my dad, but he was just a big nerd like me and he was also a
good guitarist and he always kept MIDI keyboards and musical software in our house, so it was
just around. And I really loved the idea of my games, my awesome games that will totally
come out, having custom soundtracks because everyone else’s games just used the Final
Fantasy MIDI files and stuff. And I was like, no, this is all original content coming from
me. So I used this program called Cakewalk. And I learned how to make MIDI files for my
hypothetical games and I was about ten and my songs sounded like this.
♫ TERRIBLE MUSIC ♫
[laughter] [applause]
I did get better but it turned out that I loved making music and it was more instantly
achievable than making an entire game so I just made tons and tons of MIDI files and
I started to think, why can't I put my music out there for people the way people put their
games out there? But MIDI files did not have a big listener community.
[laughter] But luckily, the new millennium was coming.
MIDI files were becoming a thing of the past and a new format arose. Originally developed
by the US military for use in Desert Sto -- no. [laughter]
MP3s, they were just there, and I kind of --
[laughter] I transitioned from MIDI to MP3 by kind of
making MIDI files and then adding bad techno drums to them and somehow I discovered a website
called MP3.com and this website was so high-tech, you could upload your 128 kilobytes per second
MP3s and put them on a profile and people could listen to them all they want and you
didn't have to worry about, like, the server crashing. And not only that
they would burn these custom CDs with artwork and they'd sell them to your fans if they
bought them. So this was like Bandcamp, basically. So, anyway, I picked the name Trapezoid because
it was my favorite shape. [laughter]
I have this distinct memory of kindergarten and someone was playing with the blocks, this
is a circle, this is a square, this is a trapezoid, and I was like, that's not a shape! So anyway,
I made three albums of hyperkinetic synth instrumental music and I don't think anybody
bought any, but I didn't care, because I was a kid and I didn't have to go to school and
I could just make my beep boop music all day. Here's the serious part. It wasn't all great.
I was missing out on middle school. I didn't have a lot of social outlets, but it was the
turn of the millennium and online communities were kind of exploding, so I was posting a
lot on forums and newsgroups and IRC chatrooms and I had a chance to talk to other people
who were fans of the things that I was fans of and to link people to my music. I was part
of a forum for LucasArts fans, obviously. And I'd make remixes from the music from those
games and I would post them so it would be relevant to the forum and people would say
nice encouraging things and that was kind of it for my social life. So around this time
there was also multimedia, Flash was becoming a huge deal and you could use it to make incredible
interactive websites. [applause]
I didn't make that one. But you could also use it to make silly animations that could
be watched directly in browser. And this sounded really good to me, so I pirated a copy of
Flash. It’s 15 years ago, I don't care. And I messed around with it for a year, but
I was not a talented animator at all and I couldn't come up with anything worthwhile
until inspiration struck. I had a friend named Jules, he was really into Japan. Everybody
knows a Jules. [laughter]
One day he brought over this CD that he bought at a mall kiosk. And the songs on it were
from the Japanese version of Pokemon. And there were these weird hilarious songs and
I was not into nu metal like everybody else. I was into this kind of music. And it was
so funny and the voices were like all over the place, and we would just listen to these
songs and we wouldn't know what was being said in them so we'd make up our own interpretations
and in-jokes. So I took it, I ripped the MP3s and I loaded them into Flash because I wanted
to capture the nonsensical fun that they had inspired in me and my friend and I was a terrible
animator, so I just picked various images that I’d saved on my computer and I kind
of made them dance around. It took an entire two days to make two videos and the first
one I called the Japanese Pokerap.
♫ MUSIC ♫
And the other kept its original title, Hyakugojyuuichi.
♫ MUSIC ♫
[laughter] [applause]
I know, right? So I put them up on a website and dubbed them Animutations.
I didn't know about Newgrounds yet, so I only posted them to maybe one forum and I went back to making
music and games. Over the next month or so, Hyakugojyuuichi got linked somewhere, maybe
Metafilter or Fark.com, and suddenly it took off and I was getting thousands of hits a
day and my website crashed and I had to find new hosting and I started getting emails and
calls from news reporters. [laughter]
Because in 2001, this was newsworthy. [laughter]
They always made a note of my age. That became a part of the mystique of the videos when
people would link them. “Have you seen this crazy animutation? A 14-year-old kid made
it! Definitely watch it!” [laughter]
So I figured, okay, I better start making more of these before I'm too old for it to
be cute anymore. [laughter]
So I made about 20, and they became increasingly complex and chaotic, and I would just like
dig up all these weird songs, whether they were Japanese or English or German and each
featured like a cast of characters pulled from pop culture or any interesting image
that I came across in my everyday internet surfing. And because it was an easy style
to imitate, fans started finding their own songs and making their own videos, and we
called them “fanimutations” and there were hundreds of them, some by actually good
animators, and there was an email discussion list and an IRC chatroom for animutations
and it became its subcategory on Newgrounds. And this whole movement kind of lasted from
2001 to 2004, when like real videos started to become like a replacement for Flash. But
like that's a pretty good run, and for an adolescent making something that is not only
enjoyed by others, but inspires them to create their own artwork was like, I don't know what
the right word is for it, but it like really impressed on me and I didn't have any schoolwork
or a job to focus on. I didn't have college plans, so this became what I did.
So it's now 2016. [laughter]
And I don't make Flash animations anymore, but I do still make all sorts of silly videos
and I still make music and for the first time since the early 2000s, I'm working on a game
again and hopefully I'll finish this one. But it's really strange to realize that I
have two decades of creative output and it's mostly still online, whether it's good or
cringeworthy or what. And it's really strange to think that kids today are practically born
straight into this recording device that is the internet and they're discovering their
creativity and putting it out there and it might never go away. But I think that's fine.
I like that, I hope children continue to be an important voice on the internet, because
that kind of twitchy humor and DIY ethic that children have is like the lifeblood of internet
humor, and that's why I think it's important to be nostalgic as much as you can, and stay
in touch with who you were as a kid, and keep all your old files.
[laughter] Because you want to keep those synapses alive
so that it’s easier for you to remember that feeling, that everything is hilarious
and wonderful and new. So, thank you.
[applause]