What got you into Veeky Forumsence?

What was it? That thing that just... swept you up and made you say "THAT's what I wanna do"? Grab a seat, order a drink and tell us your story.

Come on Veeky Forums, let's be wholesome for just a little while.

I'll go first. My parents are simple folks. They own boats, fields, a farm, such stuff. My uncle owns a successful restaurant in Crete. Not much else to say about them, really. Point is, I didn't have somebody in my direct family to introduce me to such things. What I got was from school, and Yuro schools ain't exactly great at making you interested in... anything. My folks took me to extracuricular activities, but the only things we had around here was music, painting, martial artists, sports. Tried a bit of everything, really. Still, I hadn't found anything to enamor me yet.

And then one day, I was... 7 or so, during summer vacation at our cottage, I came across an LCS. Twas the time when Marvel had launched their Ultimate line, so most of the books where Ultimate in nature. And so, I picked up Ultimate Fantastic Four, amongst others. And wew, did it have an effect on me. Here was a Universe where a bunch of science nerds got powers and went around exploring the universe. Having fun, discovering things. Naturally I kept reading, every month. I got into stuff like X-Men (Morrison) and Iron Man (Knauf & Layton) later, but that's besides the point.

Anyway, a few years later I caught some Star Trek TNG reruns. And again, here was a bunch of people, bound together, who were exploring, having adventures and changing everything. A bit after that, I caught some reruns of Doctor Who, specifically Tennant, and again, same pattern. The same year I played Mass Effect, and being 10 at the time, wew... Since then I've gone back and watched/read/played the original/continuing stuff of all those properties.

Point is, through them I saw places where people, through their love of discovery and science, had managed to be happy and spend their days exploring, creating, saving, and... being kind. And, autistic as it might be, I longed for that. A bright, light-fueled future, you know? Exciting, and full of fun and adventure. And so, at about 10 is when I truly made up my mind about what I wanted to be. Bless their hearts, my folks were and are supportive.

Anyway, it might sound like kiddie crap to you, but I don't believe, for a second, that everyone here is the cynical asshole that calls people faggots 24/7. I mean, shitposting is fun and all, but just... be human for a second, huh? Just... let it out.

Granted, I've grown up to be tad more down-to-earth, and have shifted my interests towards engineering due to its immediate applications, but, call me a fool, but I'm still optimistic. Maybe I'll set up my own company and contribute a bit to making stuff that I grew up with a reality. Or maybe somebody from you will. Who knows?

I know I'll be called a R*dditor or whatever, but eh, I don't care. Christmas is near, I'm feeling happy, and I thought a nostalgic thread about what got us all in this would be fun.

Gay

...

Come on Veeky Forums, don't you have any heartwarming childhood discovery stories to share?

No, this derives from an innate inferiority complex and stubbornness. I hate everything.

>I hate everything.
Well, that's pretty awful user. Have you tried to change it? I feel down myself sometimes, but I always focus on the good things and end up bouncing back!

I wanted to make money and was going no where else in life lol

Nice blog faggot

Well user, that's as valid as anything. It's why I shifted towards engineering really. Well, that and because I always liked robots... In the off-chance you're one of the lucky few to make enough cash, you might be able to fund the projects you really care about.

>Nice blog

why the homophobia?

I never liked super hero stuff. But I can't talk because what got me into biology was some furfag webcomic.

Well, F4 was never a Capebook. Well, maybe at first, but only for a while. It revolutionized comics, really. Iron Man back in the 80s (stuff I got into even if they're before my time) was more about corporate espionage than super-heroics. Those were abandoned in the first few dozen issues of V1 after Tales of Suspense.

But sure, different strokes for different folks, nothing wrong with that user!

I'm a friendless and unlikeable loser with extremely poor social skills so I feel the need compensate for my social failures with knowledge. Video games and other common distractions don't really appeal to me, I figure I may as well be studying and doing something productive so I have something to show for all the hundreds/thousands of hours spent in silent isolation.

Reading popsci magazines like Discover and American Scientist(?) in middle school and high school. Probably the first popsci book I read was A Brief History of Time.

Ive always been into science; when I was a little kid, I wanted to be a marine biologist so bad. As I got older my tastes changed a little bit, and after my 9th grade biology class I knew I wanted to go into genetic engineering. Thus, I applied to college to be a biochemistry and molecular biology major, and now hope to go to grad school and become a synthetic biologist.

No idea. I was always interested in science as far back as I can remember. I already had a chemistry set, microscope, and telescope in grade school. I used to make homemade rockets, melt metals, dissect amphibians, and rig up crude electronics projects while other kids were out playing ball. When I was in junior high school I read a book about relativity and it blew my mind. I never looked back.

This isn't really Veeky Forums, since I'm a CS brainlet. For whatever reason, I didn't really socialize in highschool or middleschool. My school was much too far away for me to walk to anyone I met there from my house. I was never bullied, but I never seemed to connect, so I spent pretty much every weekend at home alone playing video games or watching anime. I didn't have any money for games, so I ended up learning programming to make games and ended up liking programming by itself. I went through programming books during study hall, read SICP, taught myself Lisp, learned Python really well, did lots of side projects, etc. Now I'm finishing up a Computer Engineering degree.

This one really hit home.

I'm a depressed, angry, bitter, petty asshole who's sure nobody loves him or will ever care about him, apart from his parents. I doubt I'll ever accomplish anything, but at least by studying physics I can feel like half a failure, and not a complete failure.

I hate niggers

...

My mom was an elementary school teacher and had animal encyclopedias. I would always opt to be read encyclopedia entries in alphabetical order for my bedtime story. I was always very interested in the living things encountered, I would catch and identify insects study their behavior. So by the time I was 5 I already had a very strong interest in entomology and marine biology. I remember a passionate fight with my father to keep a patch of my backyard un-mowed so that wildlife had a place to live. I was no older than 7 because I had a back yard. So that trend continues and now I study systems ecology, biodiversity, landscapes, succession. Things like that with many particular niches

My parents smoked a LOT of weed.
Most of the people I came into contact with were high.
Someone at a party is too high? Have them hang out with the kids until they sober up.

Then we moved to a Florida town full of retirement communities that my parents sold weed to the rich retiring boomers.
Median age was 68.
We lived in one of the few poor/blue collar neighborhoods.
No kids within 3 years of my age.

The retirement homes started a gifted school to attract doctors etc to take care of the old people.
Most of the kids at the school were there because their rich parents moved to that town for easy money taking care of the old people while giving their kids a good education.
School was a 40 minute drive away, but I tested into it so my mom was willing to drive me before dealing weed.
Because of this I didn't really fit in with or understand the other kids at school, so I didn't have many friends.
I also lived too far away to hang out outside of school.
Was friendly with most of the other kids, but that's about it.
I also think their parents warned them to stay away from me because of my parents.

My parents hid the weed dealing shockingly well from my sister and I.
Somehow I didn't know until moving out for college 6 years ago, and catching my parents when coming home early one break.
My older sister still has no clue.
Neither of us do drugs.

The cover story was a computer repair business, so we always had a bunch of old computers and parts lying around that I'd play with at home when I wasn't studying.
And at school I wasn't distracted by friends, and mostly just focussed on getting good grades and figuring out how things worked.
School was mostly outside, right next to a state forest, great for exploring and curiosity if you didn't care to make friends.
And great teachers, and every AP course was offered.

I wish I had better social skills, or had ever gotten laid, but I'm in grad school now with a big role in the Mars2020 mission and a bright future.

My parents said i was special so i did a degree in geology, that and i liked digging holes in the ground and looking at pretty rocks.

I kind of skipped some steps in that too.

Every summer my family would roadtrip from Florida to Massachusetts, and we would stop at a dozen or so places along the way for my parents to visit some "friends".
These friends usually lived in rural areas, and while they were meeting with my parents my sister and I would wander around in the woods and mountains.

In 6th grade I took a really good Earth Science class with one of my favorite teachers of all time.
Learned about Geology, Meteorology, and Astronomy.
While in the state forest near my school, the swamp near my home, and the various rural areas up and down the US east coast I would put my knowledge to use.
I would find cool things and try to figure out how the features I could see were made.
I would look up the geologic history of an area before visiting it so that I would have context for clues.
I would wander around on google earth and find large-scale geologic features, then look for evidence of them up close when I got there in person.
I mostly did this to impress my parents and their "friends" so that I wasn't just lonely and on my own the whole time.
My sister just reread the Harry Potter books over and over, and also a lot of fanfiction. She refused to interact with anyone.

I got really good at geology during the day.
At night, I would usually be in rural areas where I could see the stars well, and the milky way.
I would similarly look up cool facts about the stars, nebulae, and (mostly) other planets.
This was also mostly just to impress people so I could have someone to talk to.

It turns out that stoners love being talked to about cool space and geology stuff, so it was a lot of fun for them too.

In college, I joined the Astronomy Society, which was just a bunch of stoners that thought space was cool.
I did the same thing I had done my whole life, and was a big hit. Suddenly popular, but still not one of the other kids.
I loved astronomy and knew that that's what I wanted to do with my life

Now I'm in my second year of grad school.
I love teaching and being a TA.
I'm good at my research working on the geology of Mars and Titan, and love when I get to be the first person to see images come down.
Exploring new worlds, and putting my skills to use.
But I'm finding that I'm not as passionate about it if I'm studying these places and having to talk/write about it for other scientists.
I just don't get/understand them like I do stoners.
I enjoy doing the work, but now that I'm in grad school there aren't any other stoners doing it with me, and the type of stuff I'm doing is too detailed for casual discussion with a member of the public.
I don't know how to talk to the scientists.
I'm a bit lost and confused and trying to figure out how to bridge my skills together.
Combined with the fact that it turns out grad school is pretty damn time consuming, work intensive, and stressful.
I kind of want to drop out and become a teacher somewhere and find a group of amateur stoners with an astronomy problem to hang out with lime I had in college, but that might be a pipe dream.

Kind of getting my feet under me still and trying to figure out what I want to do with my life.
I think I fucked up choosing the grad school I did. Better opportunities for research, but I chose it over CU Boulder which (I didn't realize) probably would have fit my personality better and been a better social fit.
I'm figuring it out though bit by bit and it's coming together.

Thanks for sharing user. And I hope you do end up figuring it out. You deserve to be happy!

A desire to understand everything like a true scholar who doesn't afraid of anything. Not completely sure where it came from but I knew I liked to overanalyse myself and was interested in how my environment works.
A combination of my family always overrating education, religion, believe it or not, and the desire to understand the whole science vs. religion charade are some factors that I can remember shaping my views on science.

I probably should have explored more about applications or how to make money in a research career which I didn't do until university and I had to go through a bit of a reality check after being jobless for a while but c'est la vie.

So they were religious scientists?

No scientists in my family but we are religious. Separate reasons. Understanding God's work in the field of science and using science to understand God's work are pretty good reasons to me.

Huh, who would've thought. Same here. My folks always urged me to seek out answers and understand how everything worked, but still were religious. Not "Bible-Belt" types, more "lax".

For me what got me into is was the 'I fucking love science' website and their interesting articles!

ITT a young Carl Sagan struggles with impostor syndrome and considers dropping out of grad school.
Don't give up man. Get that PhD so you can make big bucks teaching stoners about space.

Since i was a little boy i would watch documentaries about various stuff and work very hard with my homework. As time passed i became more and more interested in science and now i am a very good student.

>Was a kid in a chaotic household, parents never got along, both kinda dumb
>I thought the world was morons
>I didn't wanna try to fix all the bullshit, why bother trying at anything, nothing matters
>most of my teachers didn't give a shit when they saw I didn't care
>be awful at everything because I never developed any skills
>barely scrape by through high school
>life sucks
>maybe do physics?
>no, now work a shitty job for a couple years to help my now-divorced dad as he struggles to keep house, because family is more important
>dad dies
>what the fuck is the point of anything
>contemplating suicide
>happen to watch some Aubrey de Grey rant about immortality
>Wow, maybe fuck all the rules. Maybe things don't have to be retarded if we just try whatever the fuck we want in spite of the stupid bullshit
>realize mom, who at times would work 3 jobs to make sure her kids had food and whatnot is one day going to start grinding down
>maybe I should do something nice for people who work their asses off their whole lives and basically get nothing in return
>start biochem program at age 25 with hopes of helping to understand biological processes responsible for ageing and age-related disease
>finish undergrad with honors this spring
>start grad school this fall

Late start, but, who knows. Maybe I can still be part of something that makes life less shitty for somebody out there.

That is the single greatest meme I've ever seen posted in regards to /pol/.
What's the source?

I'm glad to hear you've turned things around and found a true calling and purpose.
You have the courage to choose a goal in life that helps other people and the drive to follow through, drawn from your own circumstances and life experiences.

Edited page from Preacher. I found it in /co/.

Wanted to kill myself and asked myself if theres shit in this world thats interesting that id wanna get to know before offing myself.
I figured id wanna know whats humanity's most fundamental understanding of how the world works.so now im studying physics and its pretty interesting so far although it makes me more interested in mathematics then give me much fundamental knowledge.

Thanks.
I'm not sure why I was compelled to share this shit, I guess I feel validated when someone acknowledges it.
I guess I also kinda hope that those who feel like they've got nothing to live for can maybe find a future for themselves by just saying "fuck it" and diving into something they care about. I have zero regrets about my decision so far and would encourage others in the same boat the take the plunge.

this nigga knows