last seen
Mon Oct 16 2017 at 05:47:33 (5.8 years ago)
I suppose the last time I logged into this website is as good a thing as any to remember. And I do remember it. What else do I remember?
user since
Mon Nov 30 2009 at 19:11:40 (13.7 years ago)
I remember that too. I also remember the thirty or so writeups I made, although I don't remember how to link to the list of them, and it's anyone's guess whether I remembered the markup well enough for the above text to indent correctly. I have no idea what the formatting will look like when I press "sumbit", although I do remember that the button here says that sometimes. I remember when people would be cute about stuff like that. Google used to have a button that said "I'm Feeling Lucky". Google used to have a slogan that said "don't be evil".
The Internet used to
whip the llama's ass. This is a trite and clichéd sentiment — it used to be a novel one, although it's very hard to remember a time when that was true. They have been saying it since the first day I logged on. Do I remember how to make a
piped link to Eternal September?
Yes, I do.
And I can preview the formatting by saving this as a draft and then pressing "update draft". But everything is on one line. I guess I have to type <br /> out on my own. I remember that I can make that show up without actually rendering as a line break, by typing <br />. But in typing
that sentence, where I have to escape out the escape codes themselves so that you see "<" and not "<", I have to think about it for a minute to remember that the escape code for an ampersand is &. But there's no limit to how far that can go. I can just as easily tell you that "&amp;amp;amp;" is how you get it to say "&amp;amp;".
The Internet used to be a fun place where I hung out with my friends, enemies, and others. I used to not have many friends. Now I have a lot of them, and a lot fewer enemies. But both of them are dwarfed by the others. Boy, there are a lot of others now. I remember 2009, when Reddit was still mostly known as the website where everyone went when Digg started to suck. It was lousy with open-source freaks and programmers and nerds who knew what "
COLEMAK" was, and the main premise was that it was better than Digg because it was run by people who understood that freedom was the core bedrock of the Internet. I liked this. The site was not yet iconic; for many years the harshest burn
Encyclopedia Dramatica could lay on them was making their article a redirect to Digg. I remember when everyone hated Digg for selling out. I remember when Aaron Swartz was hot shit. I remember when people remembered when Aaron Swartz was hot shit.
I remember when a truly iconic post there, which everyone would remember by name and which was notable by its score alone, would sit somewhere around ten thousand. Now the lowest-rated posts on the frontpage have about fifty thousand and are forgotten by sundown. Now they have a hundred thousand. Now they have two hundred thousand. Now there is a website called "TikTok" where they have millions of upvotes or favs or likes or whatever the hell they are called. Back in the day, if millions of people watched a video, it was called a "TV show", and you got paid a lot of money to be in it, and you had to devote your whole life to becoming famous enough that they would let you be in one. Now you can just be some guy. But you don't get paid that much.
I remember there used to be all of these funny videos on the Internet, and they were called "
all your base are belong to us" or "
Numa Numa" or "
The Star Wars Kid". If you were in one of these, you were just some guy, and you didn't get paid a red cent. What if the Numa Numa guy got famous today? He would probably be on a bunch of podcasts. Your grandma would know about the Numa Numa guy. In fact, your grandma would know about the Numa Numa guy
before you did, because she's retired and can watch TV whenever she wants. Or TikTok. Or whatever the adults are calling it these days.
Now there is all of this weird stuff going on. They talk about shitposts in Congress. They talk about Congress in shitposts. There are normies all over the place. In fact, there is a particularly insidious type of normie, and you can identify him because he is always calling people "normies". He is the worst of them all.
Deep breath.
I remember — you probably do too, since you are reading an Everything2 writeup in 2023 — that back in the day, getting thirty reputation on a writeup absolutely whipped the llama's ass. Even if that thirty pluses came with a few minuses, and it worked out to twenty-five in the final count. Thirty people? Are you kidding me? I typed out some little thing, and posted it on the Internet, and
thirty people read through the whole thing and thought it was worth clicking on a button to say they liked it? I imagine — I don't
remember, because I've never been the Pope — how the Pope feels when he walks out onto the balcony at a cheering crowd of devotees. I remember getting four C!s on a single E2 post. I got the impression that this was far past the zenith of E2 as an institution, and that back in the
real good old days a writeup would have gotten hundreds of votes. I didn't care. I got my thirty votes and I felt like the Emperor of Holy Rome.
I remember 2009. I remember being very bad at everything. Not because I was an idiot, although that didn't help (and neither did getting mad at myself for being an idiot, so I eventually gave up on that). I just hadn't done a lot of stuff. I had never been anything besides a student, and not a particularly distinguished one. Now I have been lots of things. I have been a welder, an engineer, a janitor, a lover, a hater, an ex- of both those things, an employee, a boss, and a bunch of other stuff I forgot about which lives safely nestled into my kilobytes of journals between then and now.
Most of the time, things I created a long time ago are not very good. At least, they are not very good by my current standards. Looking through the few photos that survived a cavalcade of improper backups and lost data (remember I wasn't very good at stuff back then), I see a bunch of stuff that is either hideously overbuilt, hideously underbuilt, or just plain ugly. I was not so great at deciding how thick a piece of steel should be. Oh well — most of my contraptions have held up pretty well anyway, since my rule of thumb was to overbuild when I wasn't sure.
I remember making a bunch of e2 writeups during a period of several years. What I forgot is that they were pretty good. I guess they were in the "hideously overbuilt" category. This doesn't make a lot of sense. On purely objective metrics, I am much better at writing than back then. I have worked as an actual technical writer, and I regularly write stuff for a magazine. How I could have been this good at writing, and this bad at everything else? I can't explain how, but I suppose it is true regardless. It has to be true. Who else could have written all that stuff? I guess I just had lopsided stats back then.
I remember when you used to be able to say stuff about what kind of job you had and not have to spend several minutes doing the mental arithmetic of how closely it ties you to your real-life identity. Did I link to my e2 profile from any other forums I posted on? Or maybe you always did, and I was just stupid. It used to be that only deranged obsessives would be willing to hunt a poster down Jason Bourne style — I guess that is still true, almost by definition — but there are a lot more of them now, and it's an increasingly accepted hobby. People nowadays love it when making posts online is an activity that involves somebody being shot with a gun in real life.
Frankly, I have never been a huge fan of that. Of course, there is a tradeoff too. I could write this somewhere else, and have it be attached to my real name, and I could drink the beautiful nectar of Internet clout, and I could go be one of those guys who gets paid to write long rambling posts for
Vice or whatever about how online used to be good and now it sucks ass. Maybe I could get twenty thousand people to read my long rambling post.
Maybe the editor could name it something provocative and misleading, and then I'd get hate clicks from people on Twitter who at some point decided to style themselves as pundits and despite their past bearing all the hallmarks of prestigious employment and intense training and obvious intellectual heft seem to be content to sit around all day and watch their brains turn into Swiss cheese in real time as they scroll furiously past stuff they hate, eager to see the next piece of shit that is bad and sucks, and then show it to everyone they know, lest anybody get through a whole 24 hours without being aggressively confronted by something that makes them mad, a fate apparently worse than death based on the lengths they go to avert it. Maybe these strange creatures could have "discourse" about it. Maybe they could have a "national conversation". Maybe I could "join the conversation" and become one of them. Maybe that would pay the rent.
I don't know. But I am not going to do that today. Instead, I am going to fill a nodeshell on e2 —
for the ages, no less. Maybe the dozen people who read it will think that the experience of doing so was worth the time it took to do it.
I remember when that was enough.
Maybe it still is.