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A Brief History of My Internet Usage
I was going to do a write-up of my complicated relationship with the lonelygirl15 franchise yesterday when the week's new video was posted, but it never was. So I'm probably going to sit and wait on those thoughts until I'm riding the high of new content.
That's really my goal for this blog: Longer, in-depth entries about specific topics. A lot of it will probably be media, but I might do some kind of entry on Election Day in order to help cleanse my soul of that whole horrific event. I'd probably still do entries like this but not as frequently as I do them now. To me honest a lot of the "miscellaneous thoughts" that would make up these types of entries is better suited to tweets. Now that I think about it I probably should've written something for Spirit Day yesterday but oh well.
Maybe I'll go over my internet usage history now, since it seems like as good a time as any.
So I first really started using the internet in earnest around late 2002. I had used it before to visit Nick.com and stuff, but 2002 was when I really started wandering off to areas of the internet that weren't already pre-packaged for kids. I remember it was around this time because its when Digimon Frontier was airing, and I wasn't particularly interested in wating Frontier so I was mostly looking up information about Digimon Tamers and a theoretical fifth season. A lot of it was information selectively cherry-picked from Japanese websites so it didn't really generate any kind of complete picture. For a while it looked like a fifth season would be something called Digimon Chronicle - which was actually a manga supplement being released around that time.
I didn't join my first real fandom until 2004 with the advent of Danny Phantom. It was good for a while, and then it wasn't. I might write more about this in another entry but a lot of it really resembles the more severe fandom wank today. I also got into Warriors a bit though never quite as seriously online. However, it was what lead to the creation of my most common userhandle - fireheart14. "Fireheart" being the main character of the Warriors books and "14" being the age I was turning in 2005. At some point this would also be shortened to "fh14" - I suspect because I wanted to distance myself from the more flowery aspects of the longer name.
It was with Danny Phantom I actively started using forums. By 2005 most of my online activity was devoted to browsing and posting on forums. It was around this time I first started writing fanfiction. It was awful - the first one was even written in a script format! - and most of it is still rotting away on an old fanfiction.net account. I was aware of livejournal's existance at this point and briefly attempted to use one as a personal diary before quickly abandoning and deleting it. I also got a deviantart account, which would be my brief refuge after things with the Danny Phantom forums I frequented really went south.
In 2006 I was a sophomore in high school and I was really obsessed with American Idol, as one was in the mid-aughts. One of my favorite contestants was Katherine McPhee, the runner-up for the fifth season. In early 2007 she made a cameo in a webseries called lonelygirl15. I won't go into detail here, but it began my intense love affair with YouTube and had a pretty pronounced impact on the course of my life. I won't write about that right now either though, that's best saved for when I'm intensely drunk and actually feeling like ranting about crushed dreams and aspirations.
Over the next four years, my picture of the internet really expanded. I got a Facebook and I really liked it until I didn't. I got a MySpace and I really liked it until I forgot about it. I starting editing wikis and lost hours and weeks and days compiling content the very best I could. In late 2008 I got a Twitter, mostly on a whim because it had looked like the LG15 storyline would make use of it. They didn't, not really anyway. But I had it. The LG15 storyline did make use of chat rooms, they had for a while actually, but I only started to use it myself in early 2009.
Mid-2009 through Mid-2010 was a really bad time for me. Like really bad. I don't know if I'll ever write about that here.
When the dust cleared in the Fall of 2010 LG15 was effectively over. My love affair with YouTube was essentially dead. I still used the chat room but not as frequently as I once did. By sheer random happenstance, I had grown attached to this online anime series. Hetalia represented both the cartoons I obsessed over as a child and the short web-based format that had consumed my life for the last four years. I found a wiki for it and I started editing it. I started tweeting about it. On September 3, 2010 I created this account in order to post in the livejournal community about it.
In Summer 2011, under sway from the upcoming unveiling of Pottermore, I created a Tumblr account. I didn't end up using Pottermore as much as I thought I would, but Tumblr ended up swallowing everything else. I kept up with Twitter and LiveJournal for a while, but by late 2012 I was spending the vast majority of my time on Tumblr. The thing about Tumblr is that time all kind of blends together in all forms of terrible meme and fandom wank. I don't hold the same resent and vitrol a lot of people seem to have for it now. Exasperation sure, but I'd take Tumblr in a heartbeat over a lot of the other websites out there. During this time I also started writing again, first on a shiny new Fanfiction.net account and then on Archive of our Own.
After a few false starts, I dusted off my Twitter account in 2015 and began using it more frequently. In 2016 I experimented with more websites. I got a reddit account which I almost never use. I got a dreamwidth account that I'm now using as a writing index. I fell back in love with YouTube and then quickly fell out of love with YouTube once I'd discovered what it had become in my six year absense. And then this week I dusted off this old account and decided to give it another go.
Honestly, I think I revived this account specifically because I'm feeling nostalgic for when the internet was a lot less complicated to use. It was always wanky as hell, but it felt like there was a lot more breathing room. Hell, maybe I'll revive my old deviantart account next.
Watch Status Roundup:
Ashita no Nadja - 32/50
Star Wars: The Clone Wars - 28/125
The X-Files - 62/210
That's really my goal for this blog: Longer, in-depth entries about specific topics. A lot of it will probably be media, but I might do some kind of entry on Election Day in order to help cleanse my soul of that whole horrific event. I'd probably still do entries like this but not as frequently as I do them now. To me honest a lot of the "miscellaneous thoughts" that would make up these types of entries is better suited to tweets. Now that I think about it I probably should've written something for Spirit Day yesterday but oh well.
Maybe I'll go over my internet usage history now, since it seems like as good a time as any.
So I first really started using the internet in earnest around late 2002. I had used it before to visit Nick.com and stuff, but 2002 was when I really started wandering off to areas of the internet that weren't already pre-packaged for kids. I remember it was around this time because its when Digimon Frontier was airing, and I wasn't particularly interested in wating Frontier so I was mostly looking up information about Digimon Tamers and a theoretical fifth season. A lot of it was information selectively cherry-picked from Japanese websites so it didn't really generate any kind of complete picture. For a while it looked like a fifth season would be something called Digimon Chronicle - which was actually a manga supplement being released around that time.
I didn't join my first real fandom until 2004 with the advent of Danny Phantom. It was good for a while, and then it wasn't. I might write more about this in another entry but a lot of it really resembles the more severe fandom wank today. I also got into Warriors a bit though never quite as seriously online. However, it was what lead to the creation of my most common userhandle - fireheart14. "Fireheart" being the main character of the Warriors books and "14" being the age I was turning in 2005. At some point this would also be shortened to "fh14" - I suspect because I wanted to distance myself from the more flowery aspects of the longer name.
It was with Danny Phantom I actively started using forums. By 2005 most of my online activity was devoted to browsing and posting on forums. It was around this time I first started writing fanfiction. It was awful - the first one was even written in a script format! - and most of it is still rotting away on an old fanfiction.net account. I was aware of livejournal's existance at this point and briefly attempted to use one as a personal diary before quickly abandoning and deleting it. I also got a deviantart account, which would be my brief refuge after things with the Danny Phantom forums I frequented really went south.
In 2006 I was a sophomore in high school and I was really obsessed with American Idol, as one was in the mid-aughts. One of my favorite contestants was Katherine McPhee, the runner-up for the fifth season. In early 2007 she made a cameo in a webseries called lonelygirl15. I won't go into detail here, but it began my intense love affair with YouTube and had a pretty pronounced impact on the course of my life. I won't write about that right now either though, that's best saved for when I'm intensely drunk and actually feeling like ranting about crushed dreams and aspirations.
Over the next four years, my picture of the internet really expanded. I got a Facebook and I really liked it until I didn't. I got a MySpace and I really liked it until I forgot about it. I starting editing wikis and lost hours and weeks and days compiling content the very best I could. In late 2008 I got a Twitter, mostly on a whim because it had looked like the LG15 storyline would make use of it. They didn't, not really anyway. But I had it. The LG15 storyline did make use of chat rooms, they had for a while actually, but I only started to use it myself in early 2009.
Mid-2009 through Mid-2010 was a really bad time for me. Like really bad. I don't know if I'll ever write about that here.
When the dust cleared in the Fall of 2010 LG15 was effectively over. My love affair with YouTube was essentially dead. I still used the chat room but not as frequently as I once did. By sheer random happenstance, I had grown attached to this online anime series. Hetalia represented both the cartoons I obsessed over as a child and the short web-based format that had consumed my life for the last four years. I found a wiki for it and I started editing it. I started tweeting about it. On September 3, 2010 I created this account in order to post in the livejournal community about it.
In Summer 2011, under sway from the upcoming unveiling of Pottermore, I created a Tumblr account. I didn't end up using Pottermore as much as I thought I would, but Tumblr ended up swallowing everything else. I kept up with Twitter and LiveJournal for a while, but by late 2012 I was spending the vast majority of my time on Tumblr. The thing about Tumblr is that time all kind of blends together in all forms of terrible meme and fandom wank. I don't hold the same resent and vitrol a lot of people seem to have for it now. Exasperation sure, but I'd take Tumblr in a heartbeat over a lot of the other websites out there. During this time I also started writing again, first on a shiny new Fanfiction.net account and then on Archive of our Own.
After a few false starts, I dusted off my Twitter account in 2015 and began using it more frequently. In 2016 I experimented with more websites. I got a reddit account which I almost never use. I got a dreamwidth account that I'm now using as a writing index. I fell back in love with YouTube and then quickly fell out of love with YouTube once I'd discovered what it had become in my six year absense. And then this week I dusted off this old account and decided to give it another go.
Honestly, I think I revived this account specifically because I'm feeling nostalgic for when the internet was a lot less complicated to use. It was always wanky as hell, but it felt like there was a lot more breathing room. Hell, maybe I'll revive my old deviantart account next.
Watch Status Roundup:
Ashita no Nadja - 32/50
Star Wars: The Clone Wars - 28/125
The X-Files - 62/210
no subject
It's interesting how big the internet is for us that we have histories like this now. So many people face it like "it's just the internet", but idk it's been such a big part of my life and I literally would not be where I am without it.
Thanks for sharing this!
no subject
The rise of Facebook and Twitter have really shaped the way the internet operates nowadays, and I feel like it would take something significant (like MySpace-falling-out-of-general-use significant) to change that status quo. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing, but there was something fun about how scattered the internet used to be.
I can't even imagine my life without the internet because it's allowed me to meet you and so many other people who've had such a huge impact on my life.