About Me

Heya welcome to my bio.
Now I'm gonna be honest, I don't know how to talk about myself because I feel like I'm either gonna be too positive or too negative about myself. I don't know how to describe my attributes to others but I CAN give you the basics; I go by Barracuda, I was born May 29th 2005, I'm a cat person AND a Reel Big Fish fan (not that I hate dogs I merely prefer cats as pets. dogs are cute too). Instead of writing an actual bio, I instead filled out one of those "about me" worksheets you had to do in elementary school as a replacement. here it is:

My Oddly Complicated History with RBF

I’d say I have quite an interesting history with this band and their music.
I first heard of them in late 2016 (when I was 11 years old) via one of Echo Gillette’s sketchbook tour videos where she had named one of her old art binders the “everything sucks binder”, based off a drawing she made inspired by the RBF song. She had linked the song in the description and I listened to it and THAT’S when I got my first taste of the fish. (Though I’m pretty sure I saw The Wild Thornberrys movie before this and RBF was on the soundtrack but that doesn’t count) I then listened to a few songs from Candy Coated Fury and I was hooked! I even used a youtube to mp3 website to download all the songs I liked onto my tablet along with some anime openings for anime I never watched.

However, it wasn’t for very long as I was a little kid and I was scared of listening to music with bad words because my mom would get mad at me, even though she wasn’t even monitoring my online activity. (Unmonitored internet access is one hell of an experience!) I stopped listening to RBF after like a few months because of their FOUL LANGUAGE and because I thought I was the only one who liked their music. (Weird reason to not like something but I was 11, ok?)

It wasn’t until mid 2018 when I would start listening to RBF again. I was looking through the DeviantArt profile of an artist called v0reos and I saw they had drawn fish fanart, and I thought “Oh my god I’m not the only one who knows this band exists??” and I started listening to them again, and I wondered why I even stopped because I forgot how good they were.

Funny thing, I had never listened to Sell Out until I got into the band again, I didn't even know the song was a hit either! But good god the song's a bop. I also had never seen a high quality picture of the band's members, I wont say much but let's just say that finally seeing what their lead singer Aaron looked like permanently altered me in an incomprehensible way.
But yeah getting back into the silly ska band eventually spiraled into a years-long obsession that would change my life, and I ended up making a whole website about it so take that as you will.

(My RBF obsession has lasted longer than the American confederacy! State's right to listen to Reel Big Fish!)

Things I Like (That Aren't RBF)

Hypnospace Outlaw

If you've never heard of it, It's a 90s internet simulator game that takes place in an alternate history 1999, where you play as an enforcer for Hypnospace, an internet service that allows people to browse the internet while they sleep. Your job is to track down and remove content that breaks Hypnospace TOS (Content infringement, Harrasment, etc.) This game has a good deal of puzzle solving involved, Not all violations are easy to find and you'll need to piece apart information from multiple pages in order to achieve your goals and it's very rewarding and really makes you feel like an investigator.
It's quirky, funny, and surprisingly emotional and I highly recommend it if you have any interest in 90s internet and/or general sleuthing.

Homestar Runner

I'd heard about Homestar Runner in passing for years until a friend of mine actually showed it to me in a voice call and BOY was I missing out
Homestar Runner is a flash animated web series that began in the year 2000 that revolves around a cast of VERY quirky characters, The main character being the titular Homestar (last name Runner). The website ended up becoming VERY popular during the 2000s thanks to the Strong Bad email segments (sbemails), where the character Strong Bad (originally meant as the series' villain) responds to emails from fans and hyjinks ensue. Despite the series running for over 20 years, its aged surprisingly well compared to a lot of other flash cartoons made around the same time. Mostly because it, intentionally or not, avoids the usual crude/politically incorrect humor that was VERY common back then which leads to its interesting brand of surreal humor that makes for a good watch when you're intoxicated. Give it a watch if you ever want a lil piece of 2000s internet culture.

Splatoon

A VERY colorful 3rd person shooter series courtesy of Nintendo where instead of shooting bullets, you shoot colorful ink. You play as either an inkling (squid) or octoling (octopus) who are able to switch between a humanoid and cephalopod form (former for shooting ink and the latter for swimming through it) which gives you a lot of movement options. You can wear certain clothing or "gear" that'll increase certain stats and you have a very wide weapon selection from sniper rifles to literal buckets of ink. I haven't played the first game since I've never owned a Wii U but I DO own Splatoon 2 and 3 which I have clocked in over 1000 hours combined.
If you like competitive games or colorful graphics, Give it a shot.

Revolutionary Girl Utena

Oh man where to start with Utena…
Revolutionary Girl Utena is a magical girl anime from 1997 that follows Utena Tenjou, a teenage girl who, after having an encounter with a prince as a child, strides to become a prince herself. Her search for the prince brings her to Ohtori Academy, where she's drawn into a weird sword dueling game played by members of the student council. The victor of the duels becomes "engaged" to the rose bride, Anthy Himemiya, a girl who possesses the power to “revolutionize the world”. Utena wins her first duel, and is now obliged to defend her position (and Anthy) from the other duelists who seek the power of the rose bride for themselves.

As much as this sounds like the setup for the typical “fight of the week” sorta format, Utena is a very deep and surreal show caked in layers of allegory and can get VERY intense and disturbing at times. (especially starting in the second arc) It’s probably not a good idea to go into it without any content warnings, so here’s a link to a tumblr post containing warnings for every episode. Despite everything though, Utena is still an incredible show and if you like media analysis, or if you enjoy shows like Madoka Magica, you’ll get a kick out of this.
You can actually watch the entire series for free on youtube! (Both subbed and dubbed, but only in 480p.)

Things I Absolutely Positively

Beans

It's nothing personal but I just don't like beans. I have alot of texture-based food sensitivities, like how I don't like certain thick creamy foods with chunks like homemade mashed potatoes or strawberry yogurt with lil bits of strawberry in it. Every time I've tried eating beans they've made me GAG.

Internet Callout Culture

A lot of people like to dunk on celebrities for complaining about cancel culture when they get called out for doing something horrific, but there are genuine points to be made about how and why callouts are created on the internet. I believe callouts CAN be helpful, if someone is known to be bigoted, a scammer, has a history of predatory/abusive behavior, ect. However, I’ve seen a lot of callouts that were either unnecessary, misguided, or actively malicious. I once saw a callout post where one of the points against the accused is that they kept calling Billie Joe from Green Day ugly. I'm not joking.
There’s other times where a good callout can be muddied with unnecessary/irrelevant accusations, like if you’re calling someone out for repeated patterns of abusive behavior, you don’t just bring up how they used a slur once when they were like 14. All in all, I really hate frivolous callouts like this because it can lead to innocent people being harassed, in some cases for YEARS over stupid shit (I promise you that xxANGELGUTZ09xx doesn’t deserve to be exiled from the internet because they made a 9/11 joke). When making a callout post, ask yourself: “Is this person actively dangerous to others?”

Generative Ai

As someone who makes art, I’m not a fan! I don’t think Ai is inherently a bad thing, I think boring tasks should be automated so we can focus on creative ventures. With that in mind, why would you want to automate the creative process? (Answer: laziness and greed.) A lot of generative Ai models are created unethically, made from scraping images or audio from all over the internet without the permission of the artists, photographers, musicians, and other creative people involved. Ai generated images and audio are not only soulless, but are being used to replace artists and voice actors, even by massive companies who are more than capable of affording voice actors and artists and it’s really depressing. I really hope it’s just a passing trend because artists already have it bad enough as is, we don’t need to be flat out replaced by generative Ai models BUILT from our hard work.

Fruit Flies (Drosophila melanogaster)

God's worst creation.