Radio Tapio.

From PRX.

Dear diary.

6th grade, February 14th.

1991.

I am really depressed.

How could she break up with me?

Mom, you can't read this.

I would spend hours and hours and hours every week on Microsoft Paint

One pixel at a time with a mouse trying to recreate the posters from the local

video store where they sold the lottery tickets.

The poster was just an advertisement for the lottery, like it just said $3 million jackpot.

And so I would just go and look at that on my way home from school and look at my version and see if I was close enough.

And for some reason it made sense to me that if I could get the poster right, it would make some magic happen.

It did not.

Growing up in New Zealand, Richard Fairgrave was a kid with big dreams and an obsessive attention to detail.

I was an absolute perfectionist as a child.

I would have been like 9 I think, 9 or 10.

I would usually get home about 4 and I would be on the computer usually till 8 or 9 working on this.

Each week just trying to match the different shapes of the numbers, the kind of shiny reflective things that put on them,

sometimes they have stars or be outlined in gold.

I was just trying to recreate it pixel by pixel, trying to draw the perfect curve on the three and get the like the bevel on the number.

...