tl;dr: A nostalgic recollection of growing up in the pre-mainstream Internet era, pirating games on floppy disks and dialing BBSes in a rough neighborhood where owning a computer made you a theft target. The author describes being captivated by cracktros—the demoscene intros attached to pirated games—and discovering Denthor of ASPHYXIA's VGA demo coding tutorials in Turbo Pascal, which sparked their desire to become a programmer.