DKplasma
That guy who films Dorkfest [Search For Quotes] [View this user's webcam]

#studio64

Ocarina of Time, Link to the Past, Wind Waker, Metroid, Super Metroid, Metroid Prime, Super Mario Bros. 3, Splinter Cell, Halo, GoldenEye, Tetris, Dr. Mario, Donkey Kong, Jet Force Gemini, Marble Madness, M.C. Kids, Samba de Amigo, Rush 2049, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Mario Golf, Super Mario 64, Mario Kart, Half-Life, Street Fighter 2, Soul Calibur, Tony Hawk 2, Pokemon, Wario Ware (PAPER PLANE), Sonic the Hedgehog (series), F-Zero (series), StarCraft, Diablo II, Truck Dismount...

(Note: Andrew begged me to write a profile when Dorksnet was still in-the-making. So I wrote something horrifically long and sent it. Seeing as how it hasn't been posted anywhere yet, I'll host it here for the time being. But you have been warned!... or something.)

In the beginning, Bog created the heavens and the earth. About 4.6 billions years later, Jack Douglas Kentala showed up on the scene.

My youth was spent like most others in the sleepy suburb of Burnsville, Minnesota. I went to elementary school, played baseball in the summer, and rented the occasional Spike Lee joint. My computing experience was based solely on playing floppy-disk Apple II games until the revolution that was the Macintosh came into my first grade classroom. After being amazed with the amazingness of these fabtraptions, and after heartily enjoying its many games on the black magic wizardry that was CD-ROM, I pitched the idea of owning one to my parents, and sooner than later we had an IBM PS1 in our basement.

Not long after our initial investment did I get bored of solitaire, watching screensavers, and deleting my parents? spreadsheets. I began to develop an interest in the physical hardware of the machine, and on several covert occasions I opened the case and looked at all the pretty electronics. Like some alien artifact I discovered the mysterious something-baud modem, and after hearing about the new computer system installed at my dad?s workplace, I was set on hooking up a phone line and getting connected with another machine. Had I been born in a different era, I?m sure I would have been hooked on the idea of ham radio, flipping pidgeons, and smoke signals, but fortunately computers were safer than matches. Sort of.

My family dabbled in Prodigy and CompuServ, but exclusive content and primitive e-mail were not enough to keep sending monthly checks to sustain service. We somehow caught wind of America Online in its infancy and took it for a ?free trial? of about three hours. My sister and I were immediately hooked with its mass of content, especially the Nickelodeon trivia channel and the infinite possibility of chatrooms. Ah, the glory days of AOL, when pre-teen kids could successfully infiltrate gay and lesbian chatrooms, posing as forty-year-old men and not being expected to show a photograph. I fondly remember the ominous time chart that loomed over the downstairs computing area, in which my sister and I kept track of our fifteen-minute stints to preserve the free trials.

After finally splurging on a membership and getting a second phone line, I was faced with my first important decision of my online persona: my screen name. Still being the youngster, nothing seemed cooler than the word ?dawg,? which was becoming quite popular at the local schoolyard. Alas! such a handle was taken by some crafty fiend, so I grudgingly thought of numbers to tack onto the end. Born on the hellish Minnesota winter day of November 14, I was overjoyed that Dawg1114 was soon my name and mine forever. Accompanied by the paternal MDKentala and my sister sidekick Boo917, the Kentala?s were the first on the block to be internet savvy.

Tired with always winning Nickelodeon trivia and subsequently being hate-mailed for my victories, my internet usage dwindled over those early years. I was still an avid television watcher, and around this time I began to notice that my favorite shows now tacked on strange codes at the end of each episode?s credits. The strings of words and symbols always started with the cryptic ?http://www.? and then had some sort of show-related term, then ended with ?.com.? In my sister?s infinite wisdom, she heard through the grapevine that those were ?URLs? for ?sites? on the ?world wide web.? Gasp! Another electronic frontier to explore?! Let us go, in the name of exploration!

I quickly developed a love-hate relationship with the internet. This was during the era of impossible AOL-dialups after five in the evening, and when disconnects were expected at least every hour. Beyond that, my connection speed was snail-slow, to the point where I could click on a site, go make a sandwich, and return to see that the site was almost finished loading. It was also nearly impossible to find what I was looking for, and my surfing was usually done by starting at a base site and clicking to others, however far that would get me.

By this point in the story, the old IBM remained in the basement, coated with dust, while a new HP purred away softly in the upstairs office. I was about to graduate grade school. It was the magical year of 1996. Being the avid Sega Gensis gamer, as well as a recovering NES addict, my shiny copies of GamePro brought dreams of PlayStations, Saturns, and Ultra 64s. The latter was my obsession, as the E3 demo of Super Mario 64, along with a plethora of Dream Team sure-to-be-masterpieces, was enough to send me into a money-saving frenzy for September, when dinosaurs would fly and wings would be piloted, along with empires shadowed and USAs cruised.

Again did my sister introduce me to a wondrous new concept, the search engine. While she was off learning HTML and making fantastical GeoCities websites, I was content with plodding along from site to site, a method which the search engine did away with entirely. Upon first visiting Yahoo, I hovered at the ?search? window, contemplating the topic of my inaugural search. Staving off the urge for ?boobies? or ?Street Fighter 2,? I typed a single word in lowercase, without quotes. nintendo. I was nearly knocked backwards in my chair from the amount of results I received. Not wanting to spend days wading through the results, I took the most exciting-sounding matches from the first few pages. N64.com (later IGN64), Nintendojo, and a little site known as The Nintendo 64 Underground became my internet haunts during those pre-teen years.

The rest is history. I grew older, ventured into the wastelands of GeoCities, bought an N64 in November, and visited certain sites on a daily basis. While N64.com and Nintendojo gave me my news fix, the Underground felt more personal. With its focus on humor, Daily Reader Comments, The Cellar, and whatnot, I fell in love with the white void between two throbbing purple sidebars. I became a regular reader, with the DRCs quickly becoming my favorite thing on the internet, even moreso than my cherished AOL chatrooms, or at least conning people inside of them. As the world first played Mario 64, then Mario Kart, then the divinity that was GoldenEye, I was there with the Underground, sharing the enthusiasm in spirit with my fellow (Ninten)dorks around the globe.

Timidly did I finally decide to make myself known and establish a name for myself. Wearily approaching the DRC box, I entered a favorite saying of my friend Jason Vaurio: ?You know what?s good? Steak.? I breathed deeply as I finished typing, yet my attention was drawn to the ominous box. NAME. NAME? Name?? It being the magical year of bullet-time in ?99, I entered ?Neo.? History was made when my comment was posted the next day, with an enthusiastic response from Brandon: ?You got that right!?

More time elapsed, and after a decent DRC batting average and some crappy system wars editorials for The Cellar, I was ready for something more. Tired of the imbecile-infested AOL chatrooms, I eagerly eyed the ?Chat? link on the purple sidebar. One day I felt quite audacious and clicked. Expecting to be immediately thrown into a dork-soup with words whizzing past my head, I was a tad disappointed with the instruction screen that I was greeted with. mIRC? #studio64? After overcoming my initial confusion, downloading the program, figuring it out, and typing in the necessary information, it was again time to choose my name to be forever known as. My AOL screen name had evolved from Dawg1114 to Stymie14 to SPECTREno7 to a brief stint as GamingGuru and presently to NeoXIV, since The Matrix was the coolest thing ever in my eighth-grade mind. As I had been known in the DRCs as both ?Neo? and ?Jack,? I went with the distinctive former with the coolness of my roman numerals.

First figuring out the commands and culture of #studio64 was like learning a foreign language. So overwhelmed, I recall never once speaking outside of single-line ?Yes? and ?No? responses when on the nick NeoXIV. After those days of being the mute, lovable newb, I eventually learned not to press alt + F4, not to hack OperServ, how to register a nickname and how to moderate a channel, all the while uncovering the eccentricities of the godlike operators and the regular denizens such as MKDemon, Graphic_V, and Anders.

I shed my old cloak and rejoined as NinteNeo, which in retrospect is probably my best alias ever. Not only did it roll off the tongue like ?Kareem Abdul Jabar,? it also combined my two primary interests, Nintendo and The Matrix. The age of NinteNeo spanned not long, for the infamous story of ToTheThird.com began soonafter, and for site-pimping purpose, my nick changed to T3-Douglas. ToTheThird.com collapsed, but from it ashes came a new beast, the long-standing ToTheThird.net.

As the time neared for Nintendo?s next system, there was fevered speculation involving even the most basic information of the project, including the Dolphin?s final name. When IGN heard rumors about the final name of StarCube, despite despising the name, I jumped on the bandwagon early and changed my alias to DouglasCube. Following the trend that has spanned the previous 1500 words, I eventually grew tired of the name, both for its unnatural sound and its confusing combination of words.

And lo! from the fallout of the mighty DouglasCube came the new version of the man with the plan (and the canal), DKplasma. Starting fresh was difficult, as I grew tired of claiming, ?Yo yo, this be DouglasCube, fools,? upon entering the studio at various hours with various people. I began at phase one with DKplasma, reforging contacts with my wit and charm and humorous webcam pictures, including the infamous ?DKplasma?s Mansion? and ?DKplasma?s Bad Fur Day? parodies. I also played a mean game of StarCraft. So DKplasma was established as something as a regular in the channel, the DRCs, and the growing popularity of Graphic_V?s camportal. My website, MPC -- a multimedia extravaganza at the time -- fueled my prominence, an era pushed forward also by my quasi-nightly radio show, DKplasma?s Power Hour, broadcast LIVE on the then-free live365.com.

DKplasma was around for a very long time, surviving the innumerable meltdowns of Nintendorks and the long doldrums between N64 releases, GameCube news, and later, GameCube games. When the camportal added forums for its members, my hordes of loyal MPC readers flocked to them and quickly made the DKplasma forum exclusive to my close circle of friends/readers. Many of the ?elite? studio members were not fond of non-Nintendorks using ?their forums,? and eventually I was the reason that the short-lived forums closed. As that occurred, a band of studio fascists had me kicked off the camportal, for they feared that the image of my face would be enough to incite riots in the streets and topple their iron-fisted rule. I left the studio and all other channels where I idled, and that seemed to be the end of that.

Summer 2002 came, and through my co-T3 contact, Eric ?White_Fly? Morgan, I learned about the planned Dorkfest 2002 in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. While I knew that I might not be entirely welcome, I jumped at the opportunity of hanging out with Eric for a week in his hometown and in the Chicago area, so I left for the event armed with my video camera and hundreds of dollars in gaming equipment. The event was terrific, and my video -- intended solely as a personal memento -- soon became a desired item. About a year later I built a computer that could handle video editing, and after figuring out how to use my capture card (a $200 paperweight for a long time), I transferred the video and finally got around to editing it for those who attended the 2002 event.

T3 collapsed before I finished, and thus my means of distribution were limited to e-mailing and DCCing the gigantic video files. (Thankfully by this point in time I had abandoned AOL and splurged on broadband.) To send out my video, I cautiously had to brave the dark waters that was studio culture, though I kept to the quiet corner that was #dorkfieldtrip. As I had to stay connected for the files to transfer, I idled with the other people there, mostly those who I had fraternized with the year before. Plans were being made for Dorkfest 2003, and naturally I wanted to attend again.

So here I am, some weeks after goodbyes were said and Dorkfest 2003 ended, leaving me with memories and a video to edit. Having spent two weekends of my life with a handful of Nintendorks, I freely talk in #dorkfieldtrip every few days or so and play the occasional game of Isketch. I still read Nintendorks -- whenever they update -- though I rarely, if ever, visit the camportal and Plinkomedia, which has become an entirely different culture unto itself. As Dorkfest 2004 is almost for certain, I suppose I?ll be forever known as ?that guy who tapes Dorkfest.? I haven?t made peace with the studio, though time has done that for me. So here I am, idling in #dorkfieldtrip and writing about how I once was a regular.