I'd like to take a moment and point  out how appropriate my shirt is today.
Hello hello how are you? I'm Echo
So I've had a fairly long internet life as far as internet lives go
I am technically older than the internet
And I take great pride in this because when I get really old I'm going to get to brag about that
I'm going to get to be like "When I was born there was no internet!"
So the internet as a  thing I want to say was developed in like the 60's?
But in terms of the thing that we now consider to be "the internet"
the "world wide web" was released for the public in
August of 1991
and I happen to be born in February of 1991, meaning that
I am half a year older than the publicly accessible internet.
The internet and I are the same age!
This year the internet and I are 26 years old.
Yes.
26.
I like the fact that the internet
And I are the same age. We grew up together.
I could marry the internet, and it would be completely acceptable.
The internet is just kind of going through
It's weird 20s right now where it's trying to figure itself out. I feel like everyone
nowadays has a given name and a chosen name.
For example,
My name is Echo Gillette and my internet name is Echoisweird.
However, Echoisweird
is not the only prominent internet name that I've ever had, and this is not my first internet persona .
In this video you're going to learn things about me that you probably never wanted to know.
For starters I was super obsessed with Japan and Japanese culture and
Anime and Manga, so I wanted my username to be "Red Kitten" in Japanese.
I was a little tiny weeaboo
So essentially what I did is I plugged "red" and "kitten" into an English to Japanese translator
And then I put them together
...Not realizing that the grammar was completely wrong
However it happened to work out that I could just change it to "A.K.A Koneko" or "Also known as Koneko"
Or "Akakoneko" (I also like "Neko" because it secretly had "Echo" in it)
Anyway when the internet and I were
wee young children I used to get on three sites probably the most.
Runescape
Neopets and Gaia Online
Also a bit of Deviantart but not that much
My Runescape account is pretty much gone
However there are still some remnants of my Neopets and my Gaia Online accounts
So today I figured
We could go through some of what is left of my past life on the internet
Lots of shame.
In terms of my
YouTube accounts, I have had an account since 2006
The first video that I ever uploaded to the internet was in 2007
It's a legacy account!
But I'd never really count that as being as influential as something like Deviantart and Neopets.
When It came to YouTube
It was mostly consuming content
...Mostly A.M.Vs...
The majority of the content that I put out on the internet
was actually on Neopets in the form of a thing called
"Screenies"
Screenies are essentially screencap comics on Neopets
I personally think that Neopets is the reason that I am capable of having Youtube as a job.
Neopets CONDITIONED me to be able to run a YouTube channel
Here's why.
So the entire point of Neopets is that you have these, like,
Virtual pets that you get to take care of
As you can see, mine are dying
And for every Neopet that you have, you
Also get this thing called a pet page
Which is essentially just a blank HtML page
that you can do whatever you want with
So because a pet page was just a blank HtML page
what you would have to do is upload your images somewhere else, and then display them Via HtML
It might sound complicated
this is like really basic stuff
So many people in their 20s learned how to code because of Neopets and
Myspace layouts.
So you would play Neopets and be going about your average day
And then if something interesting happened you could take a screencap and then draw a comic over it
And I used to do this almost every single day to the point where I was getting about
300 people a day looking at my page.
And back in the days of baby internet that was a lot.
Especially for a 13 year old
All the image links to my profile page have been completely severed because I haven't updated this in years.
You can see here at the bottom of my profile
I have a trophy that says "Neopian Times 8 time champion"
The Neopian TImes was a neopets Newspaper
And I managed to get EIGHT COMICS
in the Neopian Times.
See, this is the Neopian Times and it is
Permanently in their archive that I have stuff published on this website.
On all the comics that I had published in the Neopian Times I would
always put a note that said "Hey,
I have more comics on my pet pages" to try and draw in traffic.
Neopets freaking conditioned me to be able to do Youtube
I drew all of this in Paint
I was a very creative child when it came for the internet.
My main Neopet was like this red cat creature called Hanahoseki
And my first internet persona was a girl with a ponytail, a red hoodie, a purple hat, and cat ears.
So this is essentially how a screenie would work, essentially a random
event would pop up and you would
Screencap it and then you would draw little comics around it.
Because you only had one pet page,
It would just kind of end up this never-ending stream of images
And you'd have to scroll all the way down to the bottom to see the new ones.
It was a running gag in my comics that the Island Mystic hated me
The Island Mystic used to be a fortune teller who would
just tell you random garbage that essentially meant nothing.
But it was a free thing that you could do on Neopets
So I tried to use it as often as I could to make comics.
When I first started doing this I had my inbox open
So sometimes I would get fan letters in my mail
So I would turn those into screenies until eventually my screenies got so popular that I had to close my inbox.
That was a proud day for me.
"OMG!"
Whenever I was on Neopets the =3 thing like my thing it was part of my branding
and it was the "Neko smile"
Granted, lots of people did that, but I was one of them.
So each of my pets kind of
represented a certain part of my personality in these comics  Hanahoseki was like my voice of reason
Ukkaricho was my sense of adventure
And Mizutonbo was my curiosity.
And those were the parts that they played in my comics
I even had fan links so that
People who liked my comics could link back to them on their pet pages.
Dude I had this so down.
"Can you feel the anime?"
Ohh my god some of the jokes in these are so bad...
This image is so cute!
This is who I used to be on the internet
Another constant gag that ran throughout the entire series was that my character was incredibly
afraid of Llamas.
Partially because at a point Hanahoseki actually was turned into a llama
Oh here's where it happened
On Neopets the Llama creatures were called Gnorbus?
And thus began the forever running joke of
Neko being terrified of Llamas.
Llamas were really popular in the early internet days.
That's what the cat creature was called
It's called a Wocky.
So much fan mailll! Ugh, I love fan mail.
I used to even get creative with page errors.
Okay. So this is essentially why I quit Neopets.
Because I grew up really poor and we didn't have a computer,
the only way that I could really access Neopets on a regular basis was to go to the library
But because the library's computers were slightly older and slower, after they updated the format of Neopets, the pages wouldn't
load anymore, and it actually drove me off the site
That's the thing that made me quit me Neopets.
Loading.
And then from here
I'm going to show you what's left of my Gaia online account
So essentially the main point of Gaia is that you get this little naked chibi avatar and then you buy all these little
Customizable things and you dress it up
And make it look however you want.
Now the art scene on Gaia was huge. I
used to get so much gold for commission work.
and I used to advertise all of my commissions on my main page, but unfortunately,
Photobucket has severed all of my links, so this is what's left of it.
So this is my Gaia account. Ignore all the shattered links from photobucket,
I will show you those in a moment.
Unfortunately someone stole my username
So I had to add a bunch of random underscores.
Even then I had a solid obsession with black and red
"Oh yeah, well I don't like your pants."
That was a clever snap back in 2007.
Last time I logged in was in 2012 and I registered in 2006. Ohh yeah.
There's the =3 thing again.
Look at my wish listttt
Awww... People saying they like my art...
Unfortunately since all of my links have been severed here
I need to show them to you on another site.
So for now, let's just go poke around my photobucket account.
You can see it's completely empty. Very covered in ads now.
*Photobucket, my dear friend*
So I actually had two photobucket accounts
But this was one of my first ones, and I vaguely remember it completely filling up
Which is why I had to make the second one
So I want to start by going through a couple of the Neopets images that
I have on this account.
Avatar Adventures. Avatar Adventures was a mini screenies
series that I started because all of the avatars on Neopets were preset
So I wanted to try and make a comic for each one.
Ohh the Comic Sans.
"Neko's gone on vacation!"
This is the thing that I made for when I was gone
I even had absentee notices
Let's see what other folders we've got on here...
Wow these are some of my screenie awards.
Also my character had yellow eyes, I forgot to mention that.
Sometimes there would be these weird
Customization things that would circulate around the internet,
and I would always try and make them match my character
So that's what this monstrosity is.
I want to say a fan actually made this one for me, which is so sweet.
I've been getting fanart since I was like 15.
This is one that was definitely sent to me by a fan, and then here I actually changed the background for fall.
I would do that sometimes.
I want you all to appreciate how close I was to being a furry.
I had an anthro character.
Let's go... less?
So this was an art commission that I did, my friend wanted to be half fox
So I drew a cute picture of her holding her tail.
Animated backgrounds with sparkles and butterflies...
Early internet days.
Now we're going to explore the Gaia section of my photobucket.
Also this word. I could be saying it wrong.
I'm just going to put that out there,
I probably am.
But this is how I grew up saying it because no one ever read it to me
So this is the banner that was actually at the top of my page right here
Before photobucket severed the links.
Here is one of the first
Sample images that I made. This is my avatar next to a drawing that I did of that avatar
to show people what I could do!
This was essentially a commission sample.
This was a couples commission that I did.
I severely undercharged for my commissions which is why I was always so busy.
Don't do that, man. Don't undercharge for commissions.
This was another commission, another commission, and another commission
I was so fancy
And now I'm all lame.
I need to get back into Gaia because I miss doing these commissions
This was one of the first commissions that I did that had no base image.
Miss Brownie. This one's cute...
I was really happy with this one. This is another commission sample
I made this of my own avatar.
One of my first anime drawings ever.
Do you see this? Do you see what's on here?
Like, look at this. I used to do Anthro commissions on Gaia.
Looking back on it
I wouldn't have classified it as that, but now that I'm like, viewing with hindsight...
I totally used to do Anthro commissions online.
This was the one that I was working on just before I quit so I never actually got to finish coloring it.
I think that's all of them.
One last thing I do want to poke around a little bit is Deviantart
because I uploaded a lot of stuff there
but I feel like I didn't do that much on Deviantart.
At least I wasn't as...
Into the community as much as I probably should have been.
I updated my photo a long time ago
But, um, yeah. Akakoneko. It's still there. I've been a Deviant for 10 years.
I do have TWO completed comics on here. Like full stories, 25 page minimum.
Like little comic books, that you can go on here and read
There's 'Sandwich the hideous hideous taco'
And there's Bob.
Because I wanted to name the comic Bob.
This comic actually won me a statewide
competition and I got a gaming console out of it.
Oh yes.
Regular comic artists right here.
I also had this thing that was the massive upload project because I was trying to upload all of my drawings to the internet
and I just couldn't because it was so many.
Also all of the Chewy Bunny comics are on my Deviantart,
so if you wanted
decent scans of those,
they're up for download.
This one was like my pride and joy for the longest time.
this was, uh, Naruto fanart
that I made when I was going to high school.
I don't really have time to go through all of these, but if you want to go look through all of my Deviantart, that's totally cool.
You can go do that. I will put links to all of this stuff down in the description.
It's very hot in here. When I film I have to turn off the air conditioning. And I live in Phoenix
But otherwise it messes with my audio, so I have no choice, but essentially yes
This is who I was on the internet before I became Echoisweird.
I was Akakoneko.
So if there's any person out there who used to know me by that name...this is me now.
This is what I do.
Also heads up I'm going to be at Summer in the City this year, so if you see me, please come up and say hi.
We'll have a grand old fun time.
It'll be great.
Also gishwhes is coming
So prepare yourself for the Chaos.
If you've made it all the way to the end of the video then I would like to give you
Five hundred Awesome Points to apologize for my internet past life.
If you would like an internet shirt, by the way, you can buy them on my store.
I made this for a  skit that I was supposed to film like two years ago, and then never filmed it...
But I got a really cool shirt out of it. So that's fun.
It's freaking hot right now
I'm gonna go turn the air conditioning back on because I am so *shinyyy*
But I think that's everything I hope you have an awesome life and stuff, and I will see you later. Bye.
Mmm. My hair feels nice today. It's like a pillow on my head.
You and your tree trimming. You have to trim the trees now?
