I first joined deviantART back in November of 2011. I had graduated high school and realized I had no hobbies outside of drawing and sleeping during classes.
I drew a lot, but I couldn't really share my artwork with many people since I lived out in the middle of nowhere. I remembered a friend of mine, kageokami96, had been a part of a website dedicated to artists. I had made a profile a loooooong time ago, but forgot the password and never did anything with it. I decided that I might as well try again and see where this mysterious new website would take me. I am so glad I did.
I spent the entire first day of the creation of my account scanning and uploading drawings. Tallis1990 was the first person to watch my account, favorite my art, and give me the support I needed to continue visiting this website! I started doing free requests for people, and my list of watchers grew rapidly. It was an amazing feeling. Looking back at my art at the time, it's a wonder I had so many watchers. Thank you all so much for putting up with my noob skills.
Then came the spam bots. As I spent more and more time on this site, I stumbled across accounts whose only goal was to spam dangerous links that often led to viruses. I started a group called "ScamBot-Alert-Squad", which focused on alerting people when a new wave of bots came to the site. We also reported the bots and urged the admin to do something about the problem. It was a very stressful and annoying time for me. I learned a lot about the workings of the site and every nook and cranny of the TOS. This is about the time I met Hacker8. A freaking awesome guy that is now permanently banned from the site indefinitely. He kind of pissed off Angelo, deviantART's CEO. Despite the opinion the site staff have of him, he was a cool person I was happy to have met. No, he wasn't a hacker. I won't get into exactly what happened with him, but I think he's a notable part of my story here on dA. Back to the bots... Thanks to the effort of the site admin, measures have been taken to keep spam bots off the site. This is why you don't see them around here anymore. Thanks again, guys!
After that little endeavor, I closed down the group I had created to handle the spam bots. It wasn't really needed anymore~!
The rest of my time here has been spent doing random commissions, trades, and the occasional request. I once handed out business cards with links to my dA profile when I was drawing people at a local fair. That was pretty cool.
Yeah... I think that's really all I have to tell. I spend hours on this site a day, unless real life gets in the way, which it tends to do quite often these days. I kind of miss the time I spent here in the beginning. There were days I would literally sit and be on deviantart for about six hours at a time... occasionally more! Now that I live with my fiancee in our own house and responsibilities keep piling up, it's hard to find the time to do that.
It's still pretty amazing to know that I've got so many friends and supporters here. You guys are awesome. WE are awesome. I'm happy to say that this is one story I don't see ending for a very, VERY long time. ^^
