Interact with Minors

Against the collective neglect of the young.

An adult mental health influencer refusing to engage in polite, public chit-chat with a minor.

When I was in fourth grade, I made an America Online account. The handle I chose for myself was Batlover4, because I wanted to be a bat biologist when I grew up, and I was in the fourth grade.

I started frequenting AOL’s game review community, the Antagonist Game Network (or ANT for short). Every day after school I would spend an hour or two in the ANT chat rooms and posting on their weekly forum threads. I interacted regularly with dozens of people — some of them children, but most of them adults.

There was a weekly caption contest on ANT — a moderator named ANTPogo would post a screenshot from Banjo Kazooie or Tomb Raider III at the top of the week, and members would compete to see who could pen the funniest response. ANTPogo was a game reviewer in his mid-20s with a snarky voice and a CGI wolf’s head for an avatar, whose audio commentaries on games industry news I quite liked. I decided that rather than submit captions, I would start role-playing as ANTPogo’s adoring stalker, sending him unhinged love declarations and cartoonishly violent threats into the caption submission box.

Thankfully, ANTPogo and the broader gaming community found my antics funny. It was 1998 and I was writing in the prototypical rawr random register that would soon become…