Ulillillia assures us his name is easy to pronounce. And for him, it is. This is not a man that exists in the same reality as the rest of us; he is obsessed with video games and mathematics, afraid of chairs and mirrors, and endlessly captivated by an imaginary game only he can play – The Mind Game. He writes with a devout enthusiasm for his subject matter because his subject matter is his life – his neuroses and hang-ups, his successes and failings. All of it is categorized with a meticulous precision that comes off as absurd to the rest of us, every paragraph and thought clearly labeled and quantified.

The Internet assures me that Ulillillia is actually fairly well known, as far as things that are fairly well known on the Internet go. Until just a few days ago, I had never heard of the man. Now, I find myself unable to get him out of my head. His obsessions have become my own, and I long to see him overcome them.

Ulillillia blames his problems on video games, but it’s difficult to imagine that’s the case. He certainly plays games in a way that is wholly his own, however. He has transformed the linearity of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 into an open-ended puzzle with infinite solutions. In his mind, drowning Tails or triggering a bug are no different from finishing the game. In fact, Ulillillia has spent so much time so completely obsessed with certain games – having spent 500 hours in the second level of Bubsy 3D, for example – that he has long since deconstructed them. He now plays to find what he calls “secrets,” but what the rest of us realize are simply bugs or obvious, unsaid exceptions to gameplay rules. In one video, he shows off 50 “oddities” in Spyro 2. Why is he not working as a video game tester?

His many social hang-ups, for one. Though he has overcome his fear of blue water, he is still so afraid of the words “people” and “person” that he writes them as “peo___” and “per___” instead, and then only if he truly must. Ulillillia is also afraid of chairs, forcing him to update his site and edit the many videos that fill his YouTube account from the floor. These are but a few of his unusual selection of “issues,” as he calls them. Metroid is the reason he can’t stand red ketchup. He rarely showers.

He also seems to be a mathematical genius of sorts, despite only having a high school diploma. Math dictates the very way he thinks, every thought and statement numbered, filed, and organized. His site is a massive, sprawling beast, held together by a strictly rigid system of numbered categories and subcategories. Its pages are filled with charts and graphs detailing his ideas and trains of thought or the specifics of one of his animated GIFs. He offers up several helpful math tips and dabbles in C++, having written a program he uses when editing his YouTube videos. There’s a sense that Ulillillia doesn’t think in the same way you or I do, that his thoughts form a carefully constructed matrix of ideas, and that organizing these ideas is just as important as having them in the first place.

The Internet has decided to figure out what’s wrong with Ulillillia, in the collective, Wikipedia copy-pasting way only the Internet can figure things out. Maybe he has OCD, suggests one Blogspot post. A Something Awful forum thread suggests it may be autism or Asperser’s Syndrome. Maybe he’s just so genuinely different, so unlike anybody else and yet so able to express his differentness with such clarity and poise, that a large group of strangers have grown to care so much about him.

Whether something is “wrong” with Ulillillia or not, his site, his videos, and his life are infinitely fascinating. The Internet is good for very little; this site and the million like it are proof enough of that. But occasionally, someone produces something truly worthwhile, something that could not have existed in any other form. I wrote once, in a post that may or may not still exist somewhere in this site’s archives, that a blog’s real strength is its ability to exist and be updated over time, an autobiography that is written as a per___ lives. A blog left unviolated becomes a record of a per___’s thoughts, ideas, and opinions, recorded forever on a server in a well-cooled basement and available online for an entire world to see. It becomes, in a way, a record of the per___ themselves, or at least as much of them as they were willing to share. Ulillillia shares everything – his exhaustive dream journal, detailed descriptions of his most intimate psychological hang-ups, and a couple dozen videos of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 – and we are thankful for it.