Hello! My name is Michael. That's me on the right.
I'm 27 years old and living in New York, the worst state in the union.
The name Monstro comes from Disney's Pinocchio (1940), one of my all-time favorite films. I started using that name during my days as a tournament organizer for Super Smash Bros. This is the name I currently use for my website and YouTube channel. Everyone I know personally just calls me Michael.
My YouTube videos are also available on Odysee.
To my chagrin, I am perhaps best known as TheStimpyland. That was an old YouTube channel of mine dating all the way back to 2012. I didn't really form an audience until around 2014, when I started making game reviews. I find the videos kinda embarrassing and was once very agitated by their continued existence. I'm at peace with it now. You can check out a fan-run archive of the videos here.
I spent a whole year learning Latin from an excellent book called Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. My skills aren't quite advanced enough for Cicero or any other classical writers yet. I'm also currently learning Spanish, albeit at a slower pace than I would like. (If you speak Spanish, hit me up!) In the future I would like to learn more languages, especially other romance languages.
I started to become enthusiastic about free software and self-hosting in response to increasing big tech censorship and surveillance. Luke Smith has a really great analogy for the current state of the Internet:
The problem with the Internet nowadays is that there are too many Internet peasants and not enough Internet landlords. [...] The Internet was not founded to be this place where there are only five sites and people don't exist independently of these sites. [...] You are supposed to be your own landlord, it's supposed to be empowering, but now people are just serfs. They are at the mercy of what Facebook will allow them to see.
Excellently put. Get a website today!
I don't use any social media. I was once an avid Facebook user and I deeply regret it. I'm not sure if YouTube qualifies as social media, but I don't use it like a normal user. I use RSS to get all my updates.
I do not use any proprietary communication apps and I would strongly advise against any of you doing so. If you'd like to reach me, use Matrix.