Hard Drive Dive!
In theme with the UofT WHWC’s April theme Nostalgia, I found it was a good time to go over some of my digital effects I have archived over the years.
Ever since I got my first laptop the summer of 5th grade I’ve made sure to properly backup all data when swapping over computers. Earlier on I didn’t know anything about redundancy or hard drive failure so my sole copies of everything existed only on the latop I was currently using. With a few small mishaps (and a 10 year old disk drive surviving its mortal coil) I’ve been able to retain close to everything. I thought it would be a good time to revisit some of these to see how far I’ve grown and to justify my growing collection of digital artifacts.
Old Websites
My first exposure to programming what actually an HTML class being taught at my middle school. This was an Aramco school in Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia, so there weren’t exactly alot of opportunities to have a real person teach these things. After completing the class, I kept learning more and more about HTML and moved on to self teaching Javascript, my first actual programming language. With just these skills I was able to get alot of fun stuff done.
tank-game far my most ambitious project. I decided that using HTML canvas was too annoying to work with so I created a game (and an ad-hoc engine) that manipulated actual HTML elements using CSS across the screen. This came with actual level design, a map design data format, controller support via the then-experimental browser API, and of course patch notes in the form of a .txt. It’s 2 player, controls are WASD and arrows (with Z and Enter for boost), and the goal is to achieve either the map objective or to kill the ‘queen’ tank (the one with no transparency). Give it a try!
If you wanna see more, heres a funky math demo, a dabbing simulator (it was 2017), and a Monopoly game tracker with now-broken image links. Oh, and a suspiciously well made Russian Roulette game where I learned how to program animations and turn-based combat.
Video Editing
I had a stop motion and video editing fever at one point. I made them by importing photos taken by my sister’s 3DSXL camera into Movie Maker (none of us had phones).
Here are some of the less embarrassing ones. Credit to my little sister for some of the voice acting, I have no idea how I got her to say her lines considering she was in kindergarten at the time, but I’m guessing she was excited to see her Shopkins move and talk around our marble dinner table which may have helped.
School Work
Theres way too much to go over since I saved literally everything I’ve ever submitted via computer but I found a rendition of “Captain Djibouti” I made for what I’m assuming is either a social studies or Arabic class presentation on the country. This was 7th grade, so yes, I spent nontivial time coloring in between the lines on MS Paint.
