Tag: old internet

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A magazine ad for Lunar Silver Star Story, announcing that it will cease being sold on January 01 2000 after listing postive attributes. I have edited it to what I think my titles were on FB (annoying, unhinged, easily irritable), before declaring that my final title I'll earn on Jan 01 2025: not on fucking facebook. The smaller text is just a rant about the ToS, how AI sucks, my other sites.

I don’t bring attention to it, but I do have a Facebook account. But by the end of this year, that will be in the past tense.

I’m finally deleting the damn thing.

It had been on thin ice for me for years. I’ve been on much more fun sites, and I’ve been really getting into the whole "Old Web" pre Capitalist Hell we’re in now. And also. Let me count the ways…

  • accessibility nightmare
  • bad vibes

…well, that’s about it. "Bad vibes" has its own sublist of things that make up for it, like

  • ""community standards"" that leave actual hate speech up
  • algo nightmare
  • ads
  • is totally evil

But I stayed. Why? Because that’s where most of my friends are. And that’s where the local communities put their events and groups. It’s the only place where I can reach certain family members via Messenger.

And that is finally, finally not enough anymore.

Like WordPress, but worse, FB decided to do more in feeding the LLM slop machine and really come down on how they treat creators and their work. By swiping it to use it however they see fit.

I’ve made my flouncy posts and reached out to people to trade contact info. I’m holding out until Dec 31st, New Year’s Eve, before I cut my losses and delete the account.

I have over 200 friends. I’m blessed to have several handfuls of people that I love and adore and admire– and we have rapport in other places besides Facebook, including offline. I’m lucky to have support networks that meet up for trail, game nights, and social things.

I’m going to miss the groups I’m in.

And the reels my partners and I send back and forth to annoy each other.

And the memes, and silly groups where we all just shitpost (respectfully).

And the groups I have been in for yeeeaaaars that had been there for me when I needed them. There is a ghost of a ghost of a remake of one that I’ve been in for over a decade and we’ve kiki history, babes.

But it’s time to move on, because I have to do better than fucking Facebook.

If I miss things, oh well. I’m on mailing lists, bookmarked websites, and frequent my haunts.

If the one group I’ve been trying to revive ends up tanking because I’m no longer on FB to pester people about it (I’ll be on other platforms, including an old-school forum)… well, can’t say I didn’t try.

(BTW, tangent, communities etc– please have your web presence be somewhere else besides Facebook. At the very least have different options. Instagram does not fucking count. And neither does Twitter.)

And for those that never reached out… I don’t think I’ll be missed. And if I am, hopefully we’ve people and hobbies in common that we’ll eventually cross paths again. Otherwise… yo. You had time to make me a priority, and by New Year’s Day you’ll be out of it.

So, that is all.

What better New Years Resolution, right?

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I grew up in the 90s, so computers were an up-and-coming thing before they became a staple in all of our lives.

We had an Apple with Oregon Trail in our portable 5th Grade classroom, but I couldn’t really do anything on it. You put in the floppy disk and called it a day. There were other computers, yeah, but you couldn’t leave the fenced-in areas of educational games. 7th grade was when I finally felt like I could get my hands dirty on how things not only worked, but how things could be created. We covered different office programs and their files, databases, and light networking.

The recreational vibe of Computer Club, however, was where I was most comfortable. While I applied what I learned to fun middle-schooling projects (I really enjoyed making PowerPoint presentations), I surfed the Internet. A lot. I spent those weekly Wednesday afternoons putting search queries in Yahooligans! and coming across forums, shrines, and personal sites.

It all clicked in High School. The class programmed in QBASIC before lesson plans for FrontPage became available, and as a self-proclaimed Internet Denzien I pivoted to that. I was familiar with Web pages, but it wasn’t until here that I realized I could build. I fell in love with HTMLing and building Web sites of my own.

I also got into blogging around this time, too– teens love self-expression, and back in the day we were used FreeNetDiary, Xanga, and the highly-coveted Livejournal (way back when, you needed an invite from an existing user). I settled on BlogDrive for my first blog, the URL referencing Cloud Strife.

I also had someone’s fan page of Chibi Usa always bookmarked, and I was able to see it evolve over the years (until I lost the link). I thought to myself, “I want to put information out there, and I want to do it with style.” It has since morphed into an emphasis on accessibility and readability.

I still love blogging, and I still love manipulating content with color theory and best practices to display different media types, for everyone.

And what now? I am nostalgic from when The Internet seemed more fun, less cookie-cutter and corporate.

Backwards into The Old Internet, I go.

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I’ve had not much to blog about, other than the vague yearning to fill up a page with little old-school gifs and stamps. I’ve also been craving to create and I’ve made good on that craving, beyond poetry. There’s VTubing and taking immense joy in noodling about with the lore. I’m finally kicking off two fanfiction ideas that have been in the back of my mind for years. I may even get into pixel art. And at the same time, this blog has been quiet. I’m (trying) not to stress (too much) about it. Sometimes things happen on other platforms, sometimes privately, sometimes in progress, and sometimes things are just still.


But hey.


I’ve found something ancient.


It’s an account I’ve had since high school, if you can believe that. It’s pretty neat to come across things that are over two decades old, still floating around. I guess that’s true for anything posted on the internet; it’s just a matter of if you can even access it. (The more embarrassing pieces are very well Lost Media. So the hope goes.)


On top of this discovery, I’ve been feeling pretty nostalgic lately. A recent trip to Hot Topic had me obtain a few tees:


  • Linkin Park’s Meteora 20th anniversary edition
    Meteora was my go-to album just starting college and figuring my shit out. I still bump to it when I’m feeling particularly emotional. My girlfriend has seen me drunkenly sing and mosh along to the entire album, once. I destroyed all video evidence but if it pops up on MySpace I wouldn’t be particularly mad about it.

  • a panel from a Junji Ito manga
    Tomie, specifically. That was the first horror movie series that I really got into, thanks to the local video rental store that had a lot of different stuff on its shelves.

  • The Sonic the Hedgehog tee does not count; it was not Archie!Sonic. And the round belly 90s Sonic did not have any in stock in my size.


Cue pondering my current draw to the things I grew up on: the usual. It’s fun. “I know that thing!” It reminds me of happier times when the world didn’t seem to suck so much. Maybe, even something profound on how history marches on but at the same time, falls back. It’s comforting, like the childhood blanket lovingly folded up in the closet– except it’s unfolded on my bed.


“This was something I loved as a kid, and is still important to me, and even a codifier to who I am today.”


Revisiting stuff reminds me of my mindset, and it’s wild to compare/contrast the then/now. “Faint” is still a personal favorite, but at least I have a support network that does not make me feel like that (those work emails, on the other hand…). And as I start sliding back into my Goth phase, maybe I’ll be creepier this time around. I’m certainly building up the makeup arsenal to pull it off.


The current Sonic comic run is okay. I’m enjoying it. I miss Princess Sally.



I should probably say something about The Old Internet. A lot of people have said it better already, and I will certainly link to some of ’em later. I miss it, and I don’t mean in the Eternal September sense– that’s some cynical elitist bullshit. What I mean is, an Internet before things became about content, content, content, c o n t e n t in front of as many people as possible using the most intrusive algos. Wait– I have content? Yeah, but that’s a technicality. And you don’t see me shoving it in your face and I’m not trying to sell you something. I’m just hanging out over here.


And here’s the kicker:


The Old Internet never left. Some of it is abandoned and/or archived, but that is the nature of most things. When there isn’t a revamp, revival, or a “classic” spinoff– it’s here, continuing, slowed down perhaps but hasn’t stopped. Pretty obvious, if you look beyond the big names. You know the ones. They usually have apps, maybe a Material theme, and are just geared to enrage you unless you did some tweaks. And install an adblock.


I’m compelled to quote/cite Ploum, who also penned this excellent teardown as to why Facebook Entering The Fediverse Is a Bad Idea, Actually. But I digress:


It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can’t stay in the middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your CPU cycles to run JavaScript tracking you or walking away from the big monopolies. You are either being paid to build huge advertising billboards on top of yet another framework or you are handcrafting HTML.

Maybe the web is not dying. Maybe the web is only splitting itself in two.

“Splitting the Web“


I’m also in danger of repeating myself. In short, the dusting off of old habits and a more engaged involvement of my media consumption. And, how I spend time online. (Some updates: Pocket was reinstalled for the edge cases of articles I didn’t come across in RSS. Tildes ultimately won out and kbin gets a visit when I want a TLDR news cycle and the urge to be snarky.)


But, here is a list of what I mean:




Nostalgia? Old Internet? 1


eeeeeeey tiny button!