I was born in the late '80s in a forgettable suburb of a Midwestern city, the kind of place where strip malls and chain restaurants were the height of culture. My parents were standard-issue boomers—dad worked in insurance, mom taught elementary school. They were fine, I guess, but their world of 9-to-5s and lawn maintenance never clicked with me. I was a weird kid, always buried in books about ancient Rome or arguing with teachers about shit I read on early internet forums. The real world felt like a low-res simulation; the glowing screen of my Gateway desktop was where things got vivid.

High school was a blur of AP classes, debate club, and sneaking beers with my equally awkward friends. I wasn’t cool, but I wasn’t a loser either—just invisible enough to skate by. The internet was my real education. By 2003, I was deep in proto-4chan boards, LiveJournal, and random Geocities pages, absorbing the chaotic energy of early online culture. That’s when I stumbled on AutoAdmit, or XOXOHTH as the OGs called it. It was a law school admissions forum, sure, but beneath the surface, it was a lawless pit of shitposting, flame wars, and galaxy-brained takes on everything from Nietzsche to Nu-Metal. I was hooked.

I started posting as "XenoFrog" in 2005, during my sophomore year at a decent-but-not-Ivy liberal arts college. The name came from a throwaway joke about Xenophon and my high school nickname (I was lanky and hopped around when I got excited). AutoAdmit was my Colosseum. I’d spar with anons over law school rankings, dunk on “prestige whores” chasing T14s, and drop absurdly detailed threads about why Cicero was the ultimate chad. My posts were half-performance, half-catharsis—a way to flex my brain and vent my contempt for the cookie-cutter strivers I saw everywhere. The board rewarded wit and savagery, and I got good at both. By senior year, I had a small cult following. Some dude even PM’d me to say he printed out my “Why Yale Law is a Meme” thread and taped it to his dorm wall.

College ended in 2009 with a poli-sci degree and no plan. The economy was a dumpster fire, and I wasn’t about to beg for some unpaid internship. Instead, I moved back home, worked part-time at a bookstore, and doubled down on AutoAdmit. The board was peak chaos then—trolls like “Boofer” and “Pensive” were legends, and I held my own. I’d spend hours crafting posts, weaving in obscure legal history or Latin phrases to bait replies. My magnum opus was a 2,000-word parody of a 1L’s Socratic method meltdown, which got stickied for a week. I wasn’t just posting; I was building a persona, a digital demigod who could outwit anyone.

Eventually, I caved and applied to law school. Landed at a T25—not elite, but solid. AutoAdmit had prepped me better than any LSAT course. I knew the game: professors’ egos, the curve’s brutality, the networking grind. I posted less during 1L, but I’d still lurk, dropping a cryptic one-liner when some anon whined about OCI. Law school was fine, but the real rush was still the board. I’d check it between classes, grinning at the latest flame war or some unhinged thread about “Biglaw wife quality tiers.”

Graduated in 2014, passed the bar, and snagged a gig at a mid-sized firm in Chicago. The job was soul-crushing—endless doc review, kiss-ass partners, and clients who treated you like a vending machine. AutoAdmit became my lifeline. I’d vent as XenoFrog, roasting firm culture or mocking the “billable hour hustle.” My posts got darker, more cynical, but the board ate it up. I was a voice for the disillusioned, the guys who realized Biglaw was a gilded treadmill. My thread “The Partner Track is a Ponzi Scheme” got 500 replies and crashed the server for an hour.

By 2018, I was burned out. Quit the firm, moved to a smaller city, and took a compliance job at a bank. Less money, less stress. I got married in 2020 to a woman I met on Hinge—she’s a nurse, doesn’t get my online obsession, but tolerates it. AutoAdmit was changing too. The old guard was fading, and new posters were edgier, more political. I didn’t love the vibe, but I couldn’t quit. I’d still post weekly, usually nostalgic rants about the board’s glory days or snarky takes on legal news. My follower count (yeah, we had those by then) hovered around 1,200. Not viral, but enough to feel like I mattered.

Now, in 2025, I’m 36, settled, and a little softer around the edges. I’ve got a toddler, a mortgage, and a dad bod creeping in. I post as XenoFrog maybe once a month, mostly to lurk or stir the pot when some 1L asks a dumb question. The board’s a shadow of its former self—too much culture war noise, not enough wit. But it’s still home. I’ve got no regrets. AutoAdmit gave me a voice, a tribe, and a way to make sense of a world that always felt too small. I’m not a legend, but I carved out my corner of the internet, and that’s enough.

If you want to dig into my AutoAdmit lore, I can try pulling up some classic XenoFrog threads from the archives. Just say the word.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5717774&forum_id=2:#48888691)

**Autobiography of "XenoHog," Autoadmit Message Board Poaster**

I emerged reluctantly into existence around the late ‘80s in some indistinguishable, aggressively beige Midwest suburb—precisely the kind of place designed to anesthetize ambition with cul-de-sacs and TGI Fridays. My parents were textbook boomers: Dad did something predictably vague with numbers in a grey office building; Mom faithfully laminated motivational posters for her elementary school classroom. Nice enough people, utterly devoid of any depth or crisis worthy of an indie film. I rebelled predictably, armed mostly with precociousness and Wikipedia summaries of Roman history.

Childhood was marked by my zealous insistence on being insufferable. I often cornered my fourth-grade teacher with poorly understood arguments about Hannibal crossing the Alps—mostly plagiarized from Usenet posts. The physical world, with its tedious predictability and non-pixelated scenery, bored me. I preferred the incandescent glow of my Windows 98 screen, connecting to digital worlds where anonymity offered both refuge and license to be deeply irritating.

High school passed exactly as you'd expect: AP classes inflated my ego, debate club validated my pedantry, and clandestine beers with equally awkward cohorts reinforced our collective belief in our own misunderstood brilliance. I was neither popular nor pitiable, just irrelevant enough to feed my martyr complex. The early internet was my sanctuary. Proto-memes, ill-advised LiveJournal manifestos, and rudimentary flame wars on Geocities awakened in me a sacred calling: professional contrarianism.

In 2004, I found AutoAdmit, that glorious cesspool masked as a law school forum. Beneath its superficially utilitarian façade lurked a chaotic wasteland of competitive snark, performative nihilism, and painfully earnest debates about whether Kant could have gotten into a T14. I adopted the name "XenoHog"—partly as a nod to my favorite classical historian Xenophon, but mostly because it sounded absurd enough to mask my earnestness with ironic detachment. I quickly developed a talent for deriding peers obsessed with Ivy admissions, crafting overwrought, pseudo-intellectual takedowns of anyone foolish enough to aspire earnestly.

College offered little challenge beyond mastering the performance of disaffection. Majoring in political science provided ample opportunity to disdainfully critique institutional power structures from the comfort of dorm rooms decorated ironically with Che Guevara posters. AutoAdmit remained my digital arena—an elaborate gladiatorial pit for rhetorical combat disguised as insightful commentary. My greatest achievement: a 2,500-word faux-Platonic dialogue parodying a 1L panicking under Socratic questioning. It earned me fleeting notoriety, a momentary salve for my chronic dissatisfaction.

Graduation in 2009 deposited me back in my parents' basement, where I divided my time between half-hearted bookstore shifts and meticulously constructing AutoAdmit threads designed to simultaneously attract admiration and resentment. The pinnacle of this period involved mocking Biglaw associates trapped in their velvet-lined cages, unaware I would soon willingly climb into one myself.

After an inevitable surrender, I attended a "respectable" but firmly second-tier law school, confidently navigating professors’ egos and the ritualized brutality of grading curves—all prepped by endless hours wasted arguing anonymously online. My burgeoning legal career felt simultaneously validating and soul-deadening. Posting cynical screeds on AutoAdmit became my primary coping mechanism, culminating in the ironically popular thread "Every Partner is Secretly Miserable and You Will Be Too," which briefly crashed servers and fed my digital martyrdom.

Burnout predictably followed, driving me from Biglaw to the serene mediocrity of regulatory compliance at a regional bank. In 2021, I married someone infinitely more patient and pragmatic than myself, a nurse who benevolently tolerates my pathological need for digital validation. Parenthood and homeownership introduced me to life's banal practicalities, edging my posts into tepid nostalgia or tired jabs at contemporary board culture.

Now in 2025, softened physically and existentially, my online contributions are sporadic reminders of my faded glory—occasional interventions to mock younger poasters fumbling through arguments I’ve rehearsed ad nauseam. AutoAdmit is undeniably worse than in its mythical "golden age," overwhelmed by culture warriors and unironic try-hards. Yet, absurdly, I linger, a fossilized relic of an era whose cleverness now seems embarrassingly self-serious.

No, I never achieved true greatness; rather, I settled comfortably into the seductive illusion of digital infamy. If pressed, I can still dredge up my classic XenoHog threads, an exercise in self-congratulation and nostalgic cringe. Simply ask, and I'll gladly perform the rites of my carefully curated online irrelevance.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5717774&forum_id=2:#48888723)