EHOWTON as Cilliax

Salty Sea Dogs

EHOWTON as Tennant

Salty Sea Dogs, Take II

There's probably something fundamentally wrong with me. What that might be, I have no idea. I got my first PC in 1995 - a "clone" as anything not manufactured by IBM was called back then, this one an HP Pavilion with a whopping 16MB of RAM and a 1.6GB hard drive. It came pre-installed with the newest operating system, Windows 95. To afford the $3200 price tag, I opened a Best Buy credit card and told myself if it helped me get an IT job when I separated from the Air Force, I would never begrudge the cost.

Being brand new to PCs, Windows operating systems, and pre-installed apps, I became preternaturally fascinated with the ability to cut and paste images from one photograph into another with the random pre-installed graphics manipulator which came bundled with my PC. One day after work I took a 5x8 photograph of my supervisor accepting an award out of its frame on his desk and ran over to a friend's house who owned a parallel port scanner and wrote the enormous TIF file to my Zip drive, quickly returning the photo to its proper place that evening. That Christmas, I slid a beautiful print of him shaking hands with Santa, the award now reading, "Merry Christmas." That was the beginning of the end for me.

As these things sometimes play out, younger me escalated both the frequency, and absurdity of my new pastime, touching on all manner of controversial topics at the time - through imagery - to the point I was threatened with being officially admonished if I didn't cease my shenanigans.

Then, in 1996 I was given a pirated copy of Adobe Photoshop 4.0. You know the rest. Its the Year of our Lord 2022 and nothing has changed.