My first website found its way onto the internet on February 11th, 2001, with the help of my friend ChanLing. That would put us at just over 12 years old. It was Pokémon-themed, but can you blame us? Maybe you can. Regardless, a number of things have changed over the years. For one, the domain name. For another, the look. Perhaps most importantly, the content has changed. What hasn’t changed, however, is my willingness to write, and my hope that others enjoy reading whatever it is that happens to end up on the page.

Altered-Screens in itself started out in 2006 as a video game-themed website, the spawn of my mind and my friend Ryan’s, written entirely in HTML and pieced together pain-stakingly in Notepad and Photoshop. It quickly became clear that not only was raw HTML editing a very inferior way of updating a site, it also was a seriously detrimental factor in motivating one to write if it meant he or she (in this case, he) had to wade through a sea of less-than and greater-than signs to find the pertinent information that was to be updated or replaced entirely. There was also an intimidation factor going on - with literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of video game-themed blogs out there, and some of them with hundreds of thousands of readers, it suddenly became very clear to us that there were far too many assholes out there writing on the very same topics - and, we conceded, these assholes were better at it than us.

Inevitably, the combination of trying to be a unique fish in a sea of other very-unique and well-written fish as well as our general laziness about editing HTML and error-checking every time we updated the page kept updates to a relative minimum. Ryan was doing his own thing, and I was finishing up my last year of high school. With my trip to California and foray into the college world close upon me, I decided I’d convert the blog into something practical - namely, sort of a journal of events of my first year of college, and perhaps subsequent years of that worked out well.

Well, it didn’t work out so well. I guess it did, but my infrequent updates remained infrequent, even as I added the nifty new WordPress system that you’re reading all this on now. It occurred to me recently that the site needed to take a new direction. Tracing back to our roots as video game enthusiasts, Ryan and I suddenly remembered that we were interested in other things too. Furthermore, while there were innumerable video game-themed sites infesting Google search results for anything video game-related, there weren’t as many blogs that seemed to focus on the other aspects of pop culture - movies, books, and music, to name a few. Ok, so music’s an exception, but generally music sites are about one band, or one genre.

That’s where we step in. We’ve decided to take a new direction with this page. Given the number of movies I seem to almost accidentally see on a regular basis, the number of books Ryan tears through in a month, and the amount of music he and I both listen to, we figured it only fair to share our opinions of these things with others.

So we present the new Altered-Screens, a name whose origins apply very little to the topic, but is still unique enough that people won’t really care (or I hope not), and whose content aims to be something of interest to the average book reader, movie goer or music enthusiast.

Surely you can find this information elsewhere, and perhaps in greater detail. But we’ll do the best we can with what we’ve got. Just remember: the internet is a series of tubes, and with any luck we’ll be clogging those tubes with interesting information.

Give it time, I’m updating this.