windiigitlord
windiigitlord
| Forum role | Member since | Last activity | Topics created | Replies created |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Member | Jan 2, 2018 (8 years) |
3 years | 1 | 0 |
- Forum role
- Member
- Member since
Jan 2, 2018 (8 years)
- Last activity
- 3 years
- Topics created
- 1
- Replies created
- 0
Bio
I'm not very good at describing myself. But I suppose that's what these infoboxes are for so I'll try.
Anyone who knows me knows that I love Sonic the Hedgehog. Way back in 2004-ish, I got my first PC and one of the games that I happened to get for it was Sonic Adventure DX (also a Freddi Fish game, but that's a story for another time). It proceeded to irreversibly alter my brain chemistry, much to the chagrin of my Cold War-era parents. While I eventually ended up forgetting about all the other PC games I used to own and play (besides Freddi Fish), the next few decades have been consistently all about spending thousands of cash-money on collecting Sonic goods and thousands of hours watching, drawing, reading, writing, talking, and thinking about the Sonic series. It brought and continues to bring positive energy to my life.
I go by Windii. I saw Sonic perform the Sonic Wind move in Sonic Adventure 2 in a YouTube video and thought it was the coolest thing ever. I decided that move would define my entire personality, but "Sonic Wind" doesn't quite catch your eye the same way weirdly-spelled "windy" does as a username, does it? All I know is it used to be trendii in the late 2000s to spell like that, but now we're over 15 years removed from that context, so here I am dedicating a section in my infobox to explaining how my current name came about so people can stop asking me about it.
Because there was (is?) more than one Windii on the Internet, I thought it would be Very Funny to have my sickeningly British then-friend's "gitlord" insult as my online surname to stand out in search results more. That's the actual origin of my last name and has nothing to do with that other similar-sounding (and more heinous) family name. These days I go by either Windii, Windii Gitlord, Windii Gaylord, or Windii G. It doesn't really matter what you choose to use.
I started off my Internet footprint making Sonic AMVs in the late 2000s. There were several talented, trailblazing creators in those days whose work still holds up incredibly well (which isn't true for most AMVs from before 2010) and I interact with some of them on and off to this day. It's hard to imagine now, but finding quality Sonic footage without on-screen subtitles or company watermarks was very, very hard back then, so anyone who had access to it was revered as a God (that's God with a capital G) and their videos were considered automatically awesome regardless of whatever other technical flaws they had. There was also very strange and very stupid gatekeeping going on from people who had such footage. I decided I was going to make it my mission to make those people very, very mad by learning how to get it myself. Take gatekeeping and elitism and wring its neck.
I began learning Japanese on a whim, with the help of some phone apps and Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese, in 2015, when I was bored in class at a school that I hated. I didn't think I would get anywhere, but I was already an avid JP Sonic Enjoyer and wanted to know more about it without relying on the (frankly quite poor) scattered translations on YouTube or the extremely rudimentary (at the time) Google Translate, so it was the primary motivator (funnily enough, Sonic Adventure DX is what got me to study English). And with my prior experience of learning how to find, record and edit quality Sonic footage and my infinite talent for making people mad, I thought I'd do something truly revolutionary: Make the highest quality Sonic cutscene compilations on YouTube, subbed accurately from Japanese to English. Obviously my fansub work from before 2020 or so was not spectacular in the slightest, but everyone has growing pains. SnapCube used my footage for their dubs because it was the only footage on YouTube that used the correct aspect ratio and no on-screen subs. Yes, really.
As I mentioned earlier, I also write fanfic and draw these days. Drawing is something I started to do semi-regularly after a particularly troubled existential nightmare in late 2024. It's a long and touchy story, but after avoiding anything related to art for more than 14 years, I think I'm better now than I ever used to be. As for fanfic, the main reason I started publicly posting it is because I just really like pretty words and passages that sound smart or deep and want to barf them all out into a text file so everyone oohs and aahs at them. The less important reason is I feel like writing coherent narratives with a start and end and some resonating messages helps me grow as a human being. I can go months or years without writing any new material or editing new AMVs until I happen to get this burning desire to change something about myself. In that sense, consider any new fic or AMV of mine an all-out release of all my bottled-up feelings or experiences.
In the future, when I somehow manage to let go of my lasting insecurities and pride, I might dive head-first into making a comic, ultra hard mode advanced video editing with Adobe After Effects or similar (I think UmikaSayoji was the most noteworthy creator who dabbled in that kind of masochistic "After Effects for everything" style), or even 3D modeling. What I even want to accomplish with any of those I don't know, because I'm not an ambitious or hardworking guy by any means, but I do have some vague desire (pipe dream, really) to make a really pretty and high quality but also really weird and experimental CG fan film about Shadow and Maria on the Space Colony ARK that will appeal to no one but myself. It will probably be all music with no dialogue, have a bunch of long scenes of the characters staring at things or each other and not doing anything, possibly some headache-inducing claustrophobic handheld shots to really give the whole thing an uncanny and disquieting vibe, and hell, maybe it will just be a set of gorgeous CG wallpapers and not a film at all. If you want a basic idea of what that's supposed to look and feel like, look up "MEGAMAN ZERO REBUILD" on ArtStation and maybe watch Liz and the Blue Bird. Obviously no ETA on any of that; I don't even know what the world is going to look like a couple years from now, what with generative AI and things. But it's nice to fantasize about.
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