In early 2004, somebody created a Newgrounds account in my name and submitted five old Flash pieces of mine — Shinji-San and the four Oddgods episodes — using descriptions apparently cribbed from the pieces’ original HotWired Animation Express entries. They got my hometown right, but listed my age as 42.

I didn’t learn about any of this until three years later, when I discovered it while tracking down hotlinked images, looking for unauthorized versions of my stuff online. Once I got past the mystification, I had a lot of fun reviewing the comments on my pieces. I hadn’t ever seen any large body of response to any of my work before — it all went online before the great populist wave of feedback culture happened, and I only ever got emails from people, including a Russian stalker who used to send me flash files with pieces of my animations chopped up and rearranged. I kind of miss that guy.

Anyway, the comments included some really nice stuff — in fact, overall, the three years’ worth of responses discovered all at once like my own personal Dead Sea scroll encouraged me to go back online. But this comment struck me as particularly amazing, speaking of “Shinji-San”:

It’s like you went “Hey, let’s take a pointless series of images, combine it with vague ideas, add in lots of color and low-level suburban white man racism, claim its abstract art that’s simply beyond the comprehension of its critics and get rave reviews.” This is, at its heart, empty, pointless, and meandering. It’s not a child’s story, nor does it even count as nonsense. It’s not art; it’s crap. Try again.

Honestly, this is the beauty of the Internet. Step 3: Profit!

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