I Think It Started With an eMachines

I wish I remembered more of this.

It was around 2008. I was maybe eight years old and this old-ass eMachines T-series computer running Windows Vista came to us from one of my uncles. I could probably spend a night digging through old product photos and figure out the exact model, but the blur might be more honest. I remember the eMachines logo. I remember Vista. I remember that we did not even have internet in the house yet.

And I remember Alien Shooter.

I have no clue how I came into possession of that game. When you are eight, you do not ask where software came from. It is either on the computer or it is not. Somehow this one was, and I played it a lot.

Without internet, I clicked through whatever was already there: games, folders, Windows settings, random programs.

We got internet eventually, although I cannot remember the exact order anymore, and I got really into Windows Movie Maker. I barely remember the videos. Just dragging clips around, putting text over things, and adding way too many transitions. It felt like making something, even if the thing was terrible.

When I was around eleven, I think, we upgraded to an Acer Aspire.

This thing was way too nice.

We were really broke, and my parents bought it with income tax refund money. At eleven I mostly understood that I was lucky. Now I understand why that computer felt like such a huge deal.

The nice computer did not mean we suddenly had money for games. I ended up with a cracked version of Minecraft and a cracked copy of Halo: Combat Evolved.

I am not cleaning that up for the origin story. At that age piracy was not a position I had. We did not have money for games. It was just how the game appeared.

But I could not join any servers in Halo. I do not even think there were PC Combat Evolved servers still running by then, at least not any I could find. The timeline is fuzzy. Either way, having the game still was not enough. If I wanted to play with actual people, I had to make that work too.

That is how I found Hamachi.

I did not know what a VPN was. I knew I could install Hamachi, join the same little network as other people, use the weird IP address it gave me, and convince a LAN game that we were all sitting in the same house.

I like joking that I was setting up VLANs and VPNs when I was ten. VPN, sure. VLAN is not technically right. Hamachi installed a virtual network adapter and made a private mesh network over the internet. It gave us LAN-like connectivity. I know that now.

Back then, “host” meant the person whose computer everybody else depended on. An IP address was a string you copied very carefully. If the host left, the game died. That was networking.

But wait.

I am realizing something while writing this.

Hamachi.

Why the hell do I give so many of my projects these short Japanese names?

There is Utsuwa, the AI companion I built. Utsuwa means vessel. There is Mizu, the component library I am working on. Mizu means water. And right now I am building a VRM AI motion SDK called Ugoki. Ugoki means movement.

Utsuwa. Mizu. Ugoki.

Hamachi.

Oh.

I have never connected those things before. I do not remember consciously doing it. These names just feel right when I find them. Small words. A little strange.

Maybe Hamachi put that shape in my head way earlier than I realized. This weird little piece of software with a Japanese name let broke ten-year-old me do something I was not supposed to be able to do. It made computers in completely different houses act like they were beside each other.

Wow. Okay. That actually makes so much sense.

I do not want to turn being broke into some secretly beautiful thing because it made me resourceful. Being broke was being broke. I would have loved to buy the game, click Multiplayer, and have it work.

That just was not the version I got.

The version I got kept dropping me one layer below whatever I wanted. I wanted the game, so I had to figure out the files. I wanted multiplayer, so I had to figure out why two computers could not see each other. I wanted to make a video, so I had to figure out how a project became a video.

None of it felt technical. I was just trying to get stuff to work.

Now I am sitting here in 2026 working on Utsuwa, Mizu, and Ugoki, and only just noticing that their names have probably been talking to an old piece of VPN software this whole time.

Maybe that is a reach.

It does not feel like one.