<story><title>The secret inside One Million Checkboxes</title><url>https://eieio.games/essays/the-secret-in-one-million-checkboxes/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>asolove</author><text>This part is so important:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The adults in my life were largely not mad at me. They asked me to knock it off, but also made me a t-shirt. I don’t think I’d be doing what I do now without the encouragement that I received then.&lt;p&gt;Teena need a place to be moderately mischievous, with semi-real social outcomes, but also some boundaries and help to not take it too far.&lt;p&gt;And adults who aren’t authorities over them except insofar that they have cool talents the kids want to learn.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Sohcahtoa82</author><text>Back in 1999 while I was in high school, I played a goofy harmless prank on one of the school computers.&lt;p&gt;I created a 2-page slideshow presentation.  Both of them had the same black background with grey text that appeared to be a DOS session indicating that Windows was deleted, except one had an underscore at the prompt.  By telling the program to automatically advance the slides every second, and to loop the presentation, it gave the impression of a blinking cursor.  It looked like a broken computer, but simply pressing Escape would get out of it.&lt;p&gt;Of course, it&amp;#x27;s worth mentioning that these were Macs, so they didn&amp;#x27;t even have DOS or Windows.&lt;p&gt;Anyways, a teacher saw it and thought I had hacked&amp;#x2F;broken the computer and sent me to the principal that didn&amp;#x27;t think it was funny and punished me by making me spend the second half of my lunch period with the school IT guy for the next 2 weeks so I could shadow him and see how much vandalism he has to deal with.&lt;p&gt;When I saw him the first time, he was like &amp;quot;Wait, what did you do?&amp;quot; and I recreated it.  He thought it was funny as hell and thought it was ridiculous for them to act like I broke a computer.&lt;p&gt;We had a lot of fun hanging out.  Even after my punishment was over, I still frequently went to his office to chat or walk around and fix computers.</text></comment>
<story><title>The secret inside One Million Checkboxes</title><url>https://eieio.games/essays/the-secret-in-one-million-checkboxes/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>asolove</author><text>This part is so important:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The adults in my life were largely not mad at me. They asked me to knock it off, but also made me a t-shirt. I don’t think I’d be doing what I do now without the encouragement that I received then.&lt;p&gt;Teena need a place to be moderately mischievous, with semi-real social outcomes, but also some boundaries and help to not take it too far.&lt;p&gt;And adults who aren’t authorities over them except insofar that they have cool talents the kids want to learn.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eythian</author><text>Yes, I had a similar experience in high school. I ended up modifying a virus that infected a bunch of computers and causing problems, so I got kicked out the lab until the next year (but this was late September, so no biggie.)&lt;p&gt;The next year I mentioned to the teacher that I had something I wanted to play with, can I please get access to a PC (the lab computers were Acorns), and so he gave me after school access to the accounting classroom, more storage on the network drive (50MB when everyone else had 5!), and basically free reign if I didn&amp;#x27;t break things. So I didn&amp;#x27;t, and was running Tierra on piles of machines overnight, just to see it doing cool things, and getting in in the morning to save everything and reboot them. It certainly set me up well for the future.&lt;p&gt;And didn&amp;#x27;t break things, because I didn&amp;#x27;t want to kill the golden goose!</text></comment>