Myself as a writer/reader

I find myself writing and reading quite often actually. I've been an avid reader my entire life, and in recent history, I've been writing quite a bit more as well. I frequent an irc chatroom filled with a sizable number of people my age with far too much time on their hands, this leads them down paths of intellectual curiosity and ultimately it ends up with nightly debates on topics like religion, politics, science, and/or philosophy. In addition to this chatroom, I've frequented discussion boards since I was 11, and spend far too much time on a website known as Reddit. This website is probably one of the largest discussion boards on the internet and serves as a hub for many of the happenings occurring on the internet (as well as 4chan, but we try not to mention them). Typically, I write as I'm writing now, in a casual manner, but with enough spelling and punctuation that it could pass for "formal" if need be. When I was younger (around 15) I made a conscious decision to type as if I were writing an essay for school at all times in an effort to improve my writing because my lowest section on my SAT was my writing section, and it hindered me from meeting the goal I had set for myself prior to taking it.

As a reader, I'm quite voracious. I always have been. The difference with my reading habits is that I haven't always been interested in reading things that have served any intellectual merit. When I was a child, I was heavily into non-fiction (still am), but around ten or eleven I got my hands on manga (japanese comic books) and the next five or six years of my life and thousands of dollars went into this endeavor. Luckily, when I was around 16, I found a multitude of free online websites that allowed me to get first hand translations of the web comics as they came off the presses in Japan. That, and the fact that many of the series that I had been so fascinated with ended, so it gave me a lot of free time to explore other avenues (currently only 3 are left). Throughout this period I spent far too much time on the internet (as mentioned above), and this led to lots of reading on various topics; however, it was never really my explicit intention to go online because I wanted to read something. When I was seventeen, I began my freshman year of college and around this time, my interest in non-fiction began to bud again because of the lack of manga reading. I've spent many hours reading what most would find heinously boring (e.g. philosophical essays, dry nonfiction science and history books, etc.) but more recently, I've been trying to find some literature that might allow for me to "lighten up" a bit. I've started reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation series (science fiction novels about the budding of a intellectual utopia on the outskirts of space and the challenges it faces as it blooms into a Galactic Empire), some books on pop culture like "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs", and various novels that have been recommended to me in high regard like "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn. For both my reading and my writing, I do so because I find myself incredibly bored all the time. I dont watch much television anymore because most of it sucks (if I want to watch a television series I'll watch an entire series online, in one sitting practically), and because of various circumstances I have a small group of close friends, all of whom live at the very least 2 hrs away.