ABOUT THE WEBMASTER

What's up, world? The name's Nighthawk. I'm a Millennial (born 1989 — old enough to remember a world without the internet, young enough to have grown up inside it). I was raised on a steady diet of SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, and later PlayStation and Game Boy. The first game I ever beaten was Super Mario World, sitting cross-legged on the carpet while my grandma dozed through a Pee-wee Herman rerun.

Then came Pokemon. Pokemon Red version in 1998 changed my whole life — I was 9, and suddenly every kid in school had a Game Boy Color and a binder full of cards. Pikachu was on EVERYTHING. A year later Digimon hit and I had to pretend I wasn't into it because "Pokemon is for babies" — I was VERY into it. Agumon evolves into Greymon, that's canon, don't argue.

I also got to live through the last of the old-school arcades — the ones with carpet you could smell, fog machines, and a row of cabinets where your quarter meant something. And skating rinks: Friday nights, rental skates, the glitter ball, the carpet pattern burned into my memory, and the little arcade corner with the Street Fighter II cab. That's the world this website comes from.

I like pixel art, chiptune, synthwave, cyberpunk novels, Tarantino flicks, pizza rolls, and late-night AIM chats with people I'll probably never meet.

>> MY SETUP (THE RIG)

This site is brought to you by:

   ________________________________________
  /                                        \
 |  CASE:  Generic beige ATX tower         |
 |  CPU:   AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (~1.5GHz)  |
 |  RAM:   512MB DDR (PC2100, HUGE)        |
 |  Mobo:  ECS K7S5A (dad picked it, grr)  |
 |  GPU:   GeForce4 MX 440 (64MB)          |
 |  Sound: Creative Sound Blaster Live!    |
 |  HDD:   40GB Western Digital (UDMA100)  |
 |  CD:    48x CD-ROM + 24x CD-RW burner   |
 |  Zip:   Iomega 250MB (for swap files)   |
 |  Modem: 56k (for when the DSL drops)    |
 |  Net:   EarthLink DSL 1.5Mbps (FAST!)   |
 |  OS:    Windows 98 SE (XP is weird)     |
 |  Mon:   17" MAG Innovision CRT          |
 |  Kbd:   Microsoft Natural Elite         |
 |  Mouse: Microsoft Intellimouse Optical  |
 |  Joy:   Gravis GamePad Pro (2.0!)       |
  \________________________________________/

Don't laugh. This was the DREAM RIG in 2003.

>> FAVORITE THINGS (RANKED BY IMPORTANCE)

>> A BIT OF BIO

I was born in 1989, somewhere in the lower 48, and grew up in front of a TV with a joystick in my hand. My folks got me an SNES when I was 5. The rest, as they say, is history.

I'm currently an eighth grader (class of 2007!!) and I'm thinking about majoring in computer science in college. The web is the future, man. I want to be a part of building it. Maybe I'll work for a startup. Maybe I'll start one. Maybe I'll just get a job making websites and make bank. Who knows. The future is bright and the Y2K bug was totally a non-event — I stayed up until midnight for NOTHING. My dad was disappointed he didn't get to unplug the freezer.

I do most of my coding at night (hence "Nighthawk") after the rest of the family goes to bed. The cool thing about being online at 2 AM is that nobody's clogging the DSL.

Some kids my age are out doing whatever with their Friday nights. Me? I'm at home with a two-liter of Surge, an N64 controller, and 50 million polygons of Zelda. Or I'm at the skating rink, because the rink still has an arcade corner and I refuse to let it die. I'm good.

>> THE LORE / MYTHOLOGY

Stupid origin-story stuff, skip if you don't care:

The nickname "Nighthawk" came from a particularly intense Batman: The Animated Series phase in early elementary school. Kevin Conroy's gravelly Batman was the coolest thing in the universe. "I'm Batman." The night-hawk reference was just a natural extension — I was always the last one awake, under the blankets with a Game Boy.

Why "Den"? Because dens are where you hang out. Bears have dens. Foxes have dens. Nerds have dens. Like the La-Z-Boy in the basement that my dad's friend gave us. With the computer. And the bookshelf full of Nintendo Power back issues. The Den.

The "Den" part was a GeoCities thing — every neighborhood on GeoCities was themed. Hollywood, TimesSquare, SiliconValley, Area51... I would have been in Heartland or Wellesley but I wanted somewhere edgier. (GeoCities closed the Hollywood neighborhood in 1999, sadly. RIP, GeoCities.)

>> WHAT I BELIEVE (90s WEB ETHIC)

• ▶ The web is for everyone. Not just for ad networks and algorithms.
• ▶ Personal pages matter. A blog run by a 14-year-old in Nebraska is more interesting than any Forbes Top 100 Site.
• ▶ Webrings beat search engines. A friend pointing you to a friend beats a bot.
• ▶ Frames were a mistake. (But I still love them, deep down.)
• ▶ Comic Sans is fine. Don't @ me.
• ▶ Sharing music with strangers over Napster wasn't a crime. It was community building. (It also had viruses. But the dream was real.)
• ▶ Visitors are not metrics. You're a person, not a pageview. Sign my guestbook!
• ▶ Animations are the spice of life. Marquees, blinks, fades, slides. A web without motion is dead.
• ▶ The LAMP stack is forever. PHP + MySQL on Linux, baby.
• ▶ Netscape > Internet Explorer. Always.

>> CONTACT THE WEBMASTER (BACK IN 2003)

• ▶ Email: nighthawk@aol.com
• ▶ AIM: Nighthawk97 (I'm usually online 9 PM - 1 AM EST. Fine, fine — I'm also on MSN Messenger. Don't tell anyone.)
• ▶ ICQ: 13371337
• ▶ IRC: #nighthawk on EFnet (rarely)
• ▶ USENET: alt.cyberpunk, rec.games.video.nintendo (lurker mostly)
• ▶ Snail mail: PO Box NHT, Somewhere USA (don't actually, I haven't checked it in 3 years)

Email is the BEST way to reach me. I check AOL Mail like 6 times a day. I will reply, but maybe not for a week. School is hard. ＼(º □ º lıl)/