Who Fanboat is
Fanboat, sometimes called Richie, is a native Kentuckian, an enthusiast of video games, programming and Derpy Hooves. If you are interested in things about me beyond this site, further examples of my illustrious web presence can be found at the bottom of that little box to the right. You can also friend me on various gaming platforms such as: Switch (Friend code SW-5019-6719-0694), PSN (Fanboat) or Xbox (Gamertag: Fanboat42).
What Fanboat is doing
Currently I’m working for the Louisville branch of OnTrac, a parcel company which doesn’t ship anywhere near Louisville. I like Kentucky though, so I’m not complaining. My current pet programming project is a database, bot and subreddit which work together to combat the plague of comment-locking on the front page; more info on this is available on the subreddit itself. Of course, I’ve got a bunch of other little things going on: recently I got a 3D printer! Previously I’ve done programming work for WKU’s Distance Learning Department while studying computer science, but graduating means I’m moving on from both of these things. I’ve also done graphic design for D&D Screen Printing, and devoted some time to being a not-very-terrible administrator of a Minecraft server. I did bits of coding for the server but the most impressive bits were certainly Parker’s. I’m also kind of doing this bloggish website. It’s only wordpress for now, but it’s growing on me, so I might keep this format.
Why Fanboat is Fanboat
You may be more familiar with this vehicle as an airboat or a swamp-skimmer, but when I was in high school, Dan told me that we ought to build a “fanboat.” We never did, but I did make a lovely little GWBASIC game that I called ‘FANBOAT.BAS’ in which you piloted a fanboat faster and faster through a swamp, dodging alligators and collecting power-ups. It was, to my knowledge, at the time, the most advanced fanboat simulator ever conceived by man (due to the fact that it was, to my knowledge, the only one). Shortly thereafter, the amazing Half-Life 2 released, bringing with its mind-blowing real-time physics simulation a fun little airboat, pushing my program firmly into second best.
I had gathered a small group of fans for my little fanboat game at school. I had placed it on a few of the public machines and implemented a high score list. It was in plain text, so someone edited theirs to be insanely high, prompting me to implement a rudimentary encoding scheme to obscure the file when it wasn’t displayed in the game. I had made continuous expansion and improvement to the game’s capabilities throughout its lifespan, it was something I poured a lot into. So when Half-Life 2 came out, I was just giddy that someone else had enjoyed the idea of the fanboat so much. Gordon Freeman’s airboat was my favorite part of that game, which is one of my favorite games in a large library.
When I got an invite to the gmail beta, I was at first unsure what to call myself, but when ‘Fanboat’ dawned on me, I knew that it was the username I would want for everything. It was a great pick, too; no one else wants it. Unlike trying to be called ‘Bob,’ you won’t be fighting with hundreds of other users wanting the same name. As I recall, I’ve only had to append numbers (typically ’42’) to my username on three occasions, and I’m pretty sure at least one of them was because I had claimed the one without numbers and lost the password. I kind of wanted the dot com, but ten grand is at least nine thousand dollars more than it’s worth to me. I actually watched it for a couple years waiting for the price to go down before I noticed the dot co was unclaimed.
So that’s the story of how I made a shoddy BASIC game in high school and structured my online identity around it.
And the bobcat logo?
That’s my personal sigil, or banner, or whatever. Inspired primarily by the Stark’s direwolf sigil from Game of Thrones, I wanted a simple, readable logo I could use to replace my then-ubiquitous icon based on the aforementioned airboat from Half-Life 2. Picking an animal that was native to my region, badass, and sort of an upgraded version of my housecat, I found the bobcat to be an easy choice. After that, I found some reference images on them and created my sigil and banner in Adobe Illustrator. You can learn more about it on my DeviantArt page.
