User:Kabaka
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Kabaka
Contents |
Intro
I, Kabaka, run this little wiki here. If you've read the main page, you should know that this entire site is just a bunch of crap I feel like putting somewhere. Maybe by the time you're reading this I've got some friends I'm allowing to add stuff. I dunno. But enough about the site and more about me.
On the Internet
You're probably expecting me to explain that I live two lives: one online, the other offline. This is not true. I have only one life, and it takes place excuslively on the internet (or other forms of telecommunication).
My Name
In this life, I go by the name Kabaka in all non-professional correspondence. Kabaka is Swahili for "one who behaves as if he were a king (humorous or ironic term)" according to Yale's Living Swahili Dictionary project. Many people have called me egotistical and one of those types that constantly proves (rather, tries to prove) that everyone else must be wrong. Thus I saw this to be a fitting name. Besides, it has kind of a neat ring to it.
Previous Internet Incarnations
I began my life on the internet many years ago. I believe it would be best if we skipped the first few years of my online life and went on to the last 3 or 4 (around 2000 to when I wrote this the first time (March 19, 2007)). I'll probably earn some enemies by typing all of this here, but oh well.
Discovering Why I Need the Internet
It took me quite a while to find a good use for all of the social interactivity 'things' like forums and chat rooms. By this time, I had been playing online games for a while -- specifically, Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, Battlefield 1942, and Elite Force -- so I knew what there was for me to use. I was in a few "clans," used voice chat and my webcam all the time, and regularly visited and occassionaly posted on a few gaming forums. But that was about it. And the guy that got me started on all of it (the best gamer in the world -- officially in one game, if I remmeber correctly) eventually said he was going to quit playing. That didn't happen, of course. We didn't talk for a while, and when we did, he was being paid to play games.
A while after all of this, I found myself entangled in the furry fandom. This group has quite a bad reputation which I need to set straight before anyone reading this gets any ideas about me (be sure to click on the link above (the one that says furry fandom) for complete information on this group).
The Furry Fandom
Before I explain how I was involved, you need to know a few things. All of this is covered in the furry fandom entry, but we'll just have some quick background info here. "Furry" is not a sexual fetish. Well, okay, it can be. But so can anything. If you watch CSI, you have probably seen the episode with the furries in it. This was a poor portrayal of the fandom in general. There are some private parties like the one in the show -- these aren't common. Also, there aren't lectures like that at conventions. At least, I've never heard of such a thinkg taking place.
A "furry" can be any of the following:
- An anthropomorphic animal character, such as those in comics ("funny animals"), including Bugs Bunny
- A fanatic of anthropomorphic or non-anthropomorphic (usually called "feral") animal characters, such those from The Lion King
- A nature-loving person
Some furries dress up in costumes. Some don't. Most don't, in fact. And quite a few of us draw (or try to) or write stories about these things. Just like sci-fi fans doing the same with sci-fi, or any other group of fans doing the same thing with that stuff.
Finding My Way In
Now, back to me. How and why did I get into this group? It's kind of a pathetic little story, but here we go. I was a bit depressed at the time (it was November, I believe, in the middle of the week) because someone who I thought was important to me had betrayed and abandoned me. I couldn't sleep. A few days ago, I decided to download The Lion King just because I happened to own a copy and it would be perfectly legal. It had been a few years since I had last seen it -- probably since I was 8 or so. But it was always one of my favorite movies. So, instead of being asleep at 3 am on that school night, I sat down at my computer and started watching the movie. For some reason -- probably because of the state in which I was left after the last few days -- I became rather attached to the story and the characters. For something around a week, I watched that movie every night until I just had to get some sleep.
It was clear now: I either had some kind of mental condition that was making me enjoy things for little kids or this was just something really great. I wasn't very open-minded at the time. So, a quick search on Yahoo! would solve my problem, I thought. It sure did. There were what seemed like hundreds of forums and websites for fans of The Lion King. There was even a huge website dedicated to the movie that contained pictures, lyrics, translations of the lyrics, and a giant fan art section.
My first instinct was to make my own website in which to place my own set of captures from the movie and my own art and stories. I already had a small linux server under my desk hosting a clan website for a small clan my friends from school and I ran. So I bought a domain name, pointed it at my box, and started getting a forum set up. The whole thing turned out rather well for what it was. I got some members on the forum, and the interactive story section got pretty far pretty fast. The first new member ended up being a very good friend of mine and actually came to visit me during one spring break.
But I needed more people with which to interact. To get the name of the site out there, I found the most popular and most welcoming site I could. I joined and made (or had someone there make, I think) a banner which I put in my signature to be shown on all posts I made. After about a month, my site had gained a tiny amount of popularity, but I knew it wouldn't be able to directly compete with the forum I had joined. It needed more behind it, and there just wasn't anything I could really do to make it a lot better than the rest. Eventually it died and has never since been revived.
Furfect.com
After several months on the new forum, I learned about something people called "furry." So I did some quick searches and discovered, to my shock, that I was a furry. I learned that furries were a group which, whether some of them liked it or not, encompassed the Lion King fans, as well as almost anyone else who likes animals and likes to be artistic. Sounds like fun. Time for a new project; time for a new website. This was by far my most successful website: furfect.com. I have plans (just made them the very minute I typed that, actually) to revive the site and start over. It only took a few months for me to get almost 200 users and lots of people actively posting in their galleries. The forum had some posts going on, and everyone was getting to know each other and making new friends.
It became clear that I needed more than a forum and gallery system. I needed an integrated news system, user blogs, etc. -- and all tied together. Somehow, after a few days of planned downtime, I managed to piece together an entirely new system that incorporated every feature the users could want and all without losing any of the old uploads, posts, etc. Being as new as I was to hosting, this was quite an accomplishment. And everyone abolsutely loved it. About six days later, someone used a fast exploit on one of the parts of the system and everything was gone. Just gone. All that was left was a partial logfile that explained what had gone wrong. Some jerk had run some little piece of code through part of the site that brought the whole thing down. It wasn't even a SQL injection. I don't really know what it was but it deleted the whole site, and I'm still really pissed about the whole thing. My weekly backup didn't catch the new, monster site -- it was due to run that night. I wasn't about to make the whole thing again, either. I had to be very inventive to get some of the different parts to interact correctly, and I didn't want to do it again.
And so we had the end of my website. By this time I was gone from most of the forums and I had no accounts on any other galleries (neither did one of my members, who I personally helped get involved in everything), so I completely vanished from the internet for a few months. Maybe it was longer than that. The only people I spoke to were those that happened to have made it on to my buddy lists.
Life After the Hack
Once I got over the loss of my child, I started drawing again. I also started taking a lot more photographs. Since then, my biggest hobby has been photography, not drawing or making websites. But I still did draw occassionally. And there was still some fine-tuning I wanted to do to my character, KabakaLion.
A Digression
I have avoided talking about what characters I used/made throughout all of this, but I'll summarize here: I started out going by Simba and roleplaying as such. Then I saw The Lion King 2: Simba's Pride, and started going by Kovu, because he's just that much more amazing. The idea was to stall for time while I built up the artistic skill to design and draw a character of my own. Once I got there, the task was fairly simple. I knew what I wanted. I didn't know why I wanted it, but I did. So I sat down and sketched out a black lion with a partial golden mane.
About the same time, I decided, based on many people I have met and my own personal tastes, that long hair would be too awesome to not have. So as time went on, the partial mane turned into something that looked like a ponytail in the back and longer and longer in front. Again, pictres will make this easier to see.
Back to the Story
I never was completely satisfied with this character. It just wasn't quite me. It was time to change things, I decided. I added feathery wings. Nobody cared; everyone who drew me drew me without them -- nobody aknowledged that I had made the change. Oh well.
Draconity
The reason I had added these wings was to be more like a dragon. Right now, I'm still in the process of really figuring this one out, so I'm not going to talk about it here.
Off the Internet
I do have some things I do that aren't online. Photography, to which I alluded earlier, is at the top, next to videography. I don't do either one nearly as much as I'd like to, but I keep myself so busy that I just don't have the time. Nonetheless, I have managed to take well over 10,000 photos in the last four years. Most of them are absolutely terrible, and none of them quality as "artistic." The better photos are finding their way to my photography page. I'm also taking a course at Tulsa Community College on Adobe Photoshop. So far it hasn't taught me a whole lot -- apparently playing around with the software on my own has done well.
As for a job, I run a small web hosting company. Until last month, profits have been between -500-0%. In Februrary, we had a positive profit. The next month, that went up significantly as well. At this rate, I'll be making several thousand / month by the end of the year. Yeah right. I can also produce some unimpressive things with Photoshop if propertly motivated. I've taken a course on how to correctly use the software, and I am now, at very least, very confident I know what every single button does and how to use it.
For school, I'm currently a student at Booker T. Washington High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I'm a senior. I'll be out of there pretty soon, so this entire section is going to change radically quite soon. I'm only doing half a day there, hence the college class(es). I'll be starting classes OSU in late August, 2007. I'll probably forget to update this page by the time that happens, so maybe I've graduated by now. You never know.
More to come. I think.
