I'm chilling and enjoying the silence and coziness of my study.
I was planning to work a little more, but soon my efforts came to a forced
stop: I have to merge a few pull requests, but they need to be accepted by my
colleagues before I can do so. And nobody works at this time of the evening.
I failed miserably at spending my free time in a useful way. Probably it's
just not the right moment to be productive. So I decided to pay a visit to the
"wallpaper general" (/wg) board of 4chan: a thing that I haven't done in years!
Why? You may ask. Well, a few days ago I was searching for some old data, and
I ended up roaming in the directories of my back up disks. I found various
collections of pictures and videos, including a few awesome wallpapers, that I
downloaded ten or fifteen years ago, from /wg.
I've never been a big fan of 4chan, to be honest, yet I used to lurk in /wg
quite often back then. There I could find some really good wallpapers, and the
occasional NSFW threads were often erotic art, nothing outrageous.
Tonight I have been there, and while scrolling in the catalogue I found a
thread about fantasy art, introduced by a picture that I know very well, since
way before 4chan even existed.
My memories date back to the early '90s, when I was a teenager. I was
of the nerdy kind, of course. While my peers spent their time playing
football and thinking about football players, I was into computers
and video-games.
A little digression is due: I find it ironic how I stopped being into
video-games just a few years later, while it's far from unusual to find people
of my age being a lot into gaming. The most recent game I've played was issued
in the year 2000!
Back into my story, I was into video-games, and I was particularly fond of the
fantasy kind, being reminiscent of titles such as "Golden Axe", that I had
played as a 6 years old, on my Intel 386 running MS-DOS.
One day I followed my dad to the wholesale marketplace. The marketplace was
divided in two main areas, and we were typically spending time in the food
services area, since my parents used to own a bar. In the other area one could
find various goods, among which stationery, and computer-related goods.
I used to check the computer area every time. You could buy both
accessories and software, the latter being usually distributed via
CD-ROMS. Of course we are talking about business oriented software,
management software, etc. Stuff that I found irremediably boring.
I kept going there nonetheless.
That day I found an intriguing box that strongly recalled all the stereotypes
of fantasy world. I don't exactly remember what was depicted on it: probably
some barbarian wilding an axe, back to back with an amazon armed with a sword.
All I remember is the excitement of having finally found an interesting piece
in the pile of lame software. And if that was the graphics, it must have been
an awesome game too! Cost? Very cheap. What can go wrong?
Well - spoiler alert - pretty much everything went wrong. My dad bought
it to me, and I was very happy, until I put it into my CD drive, and I
found myself browsing in a collection of digitalised paintings of Boris
Vallejo, a Peruvian-American painter.
I guess I should have paid attention to the fact that the CD was entitled
"Boris Vallejo, Fantasy Art". Sure, I didn't know English, but to be honest
it was a poor excuse.
My sister frowned at me, implicitly alleging that I knew perfectly well what it
was about, when I bought it. Many of those pictures had in fact a hint of
eroticism. Nothing gross (you be the judge, just search on the web for "Boris
Vallejo"), but it still qualifies at something that I would have appreciated
later in time. But not in that moment. I was genuinely disappointed.
So many years passed. I wonder if that CD is still laying around at my parent's
place. Probably not. And to be honest I would have a CD drive where to put it
in.
