DOCUMENT CLASSIFICATION
Founder Origin Story / Anti-Consumerist Manifesto
DATE RECORDED
February 26, 2026 — 2:27 AM Indiana Eastern
LOCATION
The Barn (adjacent to house, cat supervised)
BEVERAGE
Coffee that tastes like motor oil (third cup)
SPITE LEVEL
Foundational

The Setup (Or: Why Other Kids Were Wrong)

Look. It was 1984. I was seven years old. Every kid in my neighborhood had one of three things: a Rubik's Cube they couldn't solve, a Cabbage Patch Kid their mom waited in line for six hours to buy, or a Transformer that cost more than my parents' car payment.

I had a screwdriver and a terminal case of "I could make that."

While my classmates were memorizing the He-Man theme song and trading Garbage Pail Kids like they were currency, I was in the garage dismantling my parents' broken toaster. Not because I wanted to fix it—because I wanted to understand it. The other kids had action figures with Kung-Fu Grip. I had a robot made from a coffee can, spare circuit boards, and what I can only assume was pure spite.

This wasn't a phase. This was the beginning.

The Christmas Incident (Or: How RadioShack Ruined Me)

Christmas 1984. The year every kid wanted either a Nintendo Entertainment System or the official Ghostbusters Proton Pack.

I got a RadioShack electronics kit.

My grandparents meant well. They really did. But while my friends were hooking up their NES to CRT TVs and becoming temporary gods of the Mushroom Kingdom, I was staring at a breadboard and a bag of resistors thinking, "I can make something better."

Two weeks later, I had a working voice synthesizer built from the kit's components and a Speak & Spell I'd "borrowed" from my cousin and never returned. It sounded like a demon learning English. It was perfect.

While other kids were blowing their allowances on Donkey Kong at the arcade, I was in my bedroom turning a broken Walkman into a listening device that could pick up conversations through walls. My parents thought it was cute. My neighbors thought I was weird. I thought I was building tools.

Everyone was wrong except me.

The Junior High Divide (Or: Why MTV and I Had Different Priorities)

  1. Junior high. The cultural explosion was in full swing. My classmates were dropping serious money on Swatch watches, Air Jordans, and enough hair spray to single-handedly destroy the ozone layer.

I was at RadioShack again. Not buying—scrounging. In the discount bin behind the counter, where they put returned and broken merchandise. For $2.37, I walked out with a bag of "defective" electronics that worked perfectly fine once you figured out their secrets.

The Commodore 64 was the machine every serious gamer wanted. I bought a used ATARI-XE from a garage sale for $15 and spent the next six months writing my own games because I was too cheap to buy software. My magnum opus? A Pac-Man clone where the ghosts cheated. It was frustrating and unfair and everyone who played it hated it. I called it "Pac-Man But Better."

While other teens had Duran Duran posters on their walls, I had handdrawn DOSSHELL 5.0. While they were memorizing lyrics from MTV, I was memorizing resistor color codes. While they were at the mall, I was in the garage building a pinball machine from cardboard, rubber bands, and the electromagnetic guts from a discarded electric typewriter.

It worked. Sort of. The flippers were controlled by a car battery I'd "borrowed" from my dad's garage. The whole thing smelled like ozone and teenage rebellion.

The Late 80s Escalation (Or: Things Got Weird)

  1. Things were getting serious. The Game Boy had dropped and every kid who wasn't saving for a Nintendo was saving for one of those. Kids were collecting Pogs, wearing slap bracelets, and basically doing whatever MTV told them to do.

I had already moved on.

I'd gutted a cheap calculator, replaced its brain with a custom microcontroller, and created my own handheld gaming device. The screen was green. The graphics were terrible. It ran on nine-volt batteries and died every 20 minutes. But it was mine.

While my friends were begging their parents for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures, I was building actual working communicators from surplus radio parts. They played with toy proton packs. I built a working particle detector from old guitar pickups that actually reacted to static electricity, possibly even the remenants of The Big Bang and at the very least made cool humming noises.

The Ghostbusters movie had special effects teams and million-dollar budgets. I had RadioShack, my dad's tools, and a refusal to accept that I couldn't build whatever I wanted.

My projects weren't pretty. They were held together with duct tape, hope, and what I now recognize as the foundational stages of what would later become a serious spite problem. Everything I built existed because something commercially available, just NOT to me, pissed me off. The Game Boy? Too expensive. TMNT toys? They didn't actually DO anything. Communicators from the store? Fake.

Mine worked. Ugly as sin, but they worked. Well, sometimes…

The Inevitable Conclusion (Or: SPOILER ALERT: I Never Stopped)

By age 15, in 1992, the path was set. While other kids were debating New Kids on the Block versus New Order, I was building 3rd hand systems and reverse-engineering proprietary protocols. While they were at the mall buying CDs, I was in the garage building my own computer from spare parts.

That ATARI-XE I bought for $15? By 1992 it’s remaining guts and that old-skool modem were the heart of a custom system I'd engineered from scratch. It ran an operating system I lifted via BBS. It connected to networks I wasn't supposed to access. It had a graphical interface I designed in a notebook during math class.

The other kids grew up and got normal jobs. Some of them probably work at those same companies that make the subscription software I still can’t afford today. They probably have Patagonia vests.

I'm still in the garage. The tools are better now. The coffee still tastes like motor oil. The fundamental principle remains unchanged:

Why buy something when you can build something more refletive of YOU?

That seven-year-old kid staring at a Transformer and thinking "I guess I could make one...” never went away. He just got more used tools, more experience, and more reasons to be spiteful.

Some things are worth renting. Other things? That's just a subscription treadmill designed by people who never spent their childhood in RadioShack discount bins, and clearly aren’t afraid to have a best friend that’s “owned” by some corpo shills. “Hey kid, short on the allowance this week huh? Looks like ‘your’ C3PO is going back with us then.”

That's why I still build.

Probably aways will.

Legacy means what persists after you are done being spiteful.