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cyanide-latte · 2 years ago

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Got to thinking again today about pirating media and how many people make it about a moral quandary and how we here on Tumblr tend to be very gung-ho about pirating and this time in particular it boiled down to what I think the root is of why I'm largely okay with it.*

(*please take note, this post is about pirating platform-exclusive movies and shows. I do not support or condone piracy of books, comics/graphic novels or manga unless literally no other option is available to you. I've been a teen who had no choice but to read awful scanlations for manga growing up because I wasn't able to or allowed to purchase physical copies or even borrow them from the library. So I know that struggle, and I'm sympathetic to a degree. But please support your libraries, ask the librarians to teach you how to use the system, and use it to help support authors and artists before it is a legal and free way that actually helps. If you are in a situation where you have literally no choice for now, I recommend being responsible and trying to either buy the physical books when you can to help make things up or use a library when you are finally able to and borrow the materials, in order to still show support.)

This is probably my age showing but when I was a kid, we recorded shit on the VCR all the time. Buying actual movies was still something we did when we could, but in the 90s, stuff on VHS could get as high as $40 [USD] sometimes. Not all of them were, but the prices tended to be high enough we couldn't really afford to buy them ourselves; those had to be asked for as Christmas or birthday gifts, and even that wasn't a guarantee we'd open a rectangular gift to find a brand-new clamshell of the newest Disney movie.

But you know what we could afford to get? Blank video tapes. Depending on the brand and the length of the tape strip, they could cost as little as $3.99, and you could often get multiple blank tapes for a decent price. (I vaguely recall a half-dozen pack of tapes for maybe $25? We got a few of those when I was around 7 or 8 y.o.) And we would use that "Record" function on the VCR. We caught movies on the TV way less often than we would have liked because without a TVGuide or knowing someone who kept up with movie showtimes on various channels, you were kind of at the mercy of fate and fortune. Plus, we rarely tried to record a TV run of a movie if it was one we knew we REALLY wanted to buy on VHS.

Ah but shows! Shows we could generally depend on. You learned what channel(s) it played on and when, and you'd time it so you could record your episode(s), commercials included, and stop recording at the end of it. Presto! I could watch my episodes of Batman the Animated Series or Wishbone whenever I wanted. I'd have it forever (well, for as long as the tape can last anyway) even if the show went off the air and it didn't get any real VHS release. Lots of shows did get VHS releases, but they were limited to maybe three random episodes per tape, and were not usually for regular sale at most retailers; they were on the shelves of rental video stores and we couldn't keep them.

Until we got a special VCR that allowed us to record a copy of a tape onto one of our blanks. Again, not an endeavor we really did with movies, but when the family decided we were going to move in the future and wouldn't be sure we'd have a Blockbuster or Hollywood Video or Family Video wherever we were moving to, there'd be a burst of going to the nearest rental chain and carefully picking the tapes we knew we loved and wanted to be able to watch again, renting them for a couple of days, and putting that copy/record VCR to work before returning the proper copy back to the video store. Or if some friends had a movie and we wouldn't see them again, there was often an offer to record copies of their tapes. Didn't happen often but it was a handy solution to the desire to have access to the media in the long-term, and it wasn't looked down on as far as I can ever remember, because everyone recorded stuff on blank tapes and none of those people had no major moral crises about making copies in order to have the movies/shows they loved.

Now, when DVDs came out, things got a little bit different. DVD players and DVDs were expensive at the start, so the cost of all VHS tapes gradually started dropping. As with pretty much anything, pirating DVDs took off before long and soon just about every DVD had that in-your-face message about piracy, reminding you that copying and selling bootleg DVDs was illegal and "piracy isn't a victimless crime". I only vaguely recall being annoyed with DVD piracy, because what bootlegs I tended to see were extremely bad quality, and it was more annoyance at the idea that you could be swindled out of your money for something of barely-watchable quality. (I was 10 at the time and had not ever yet had to face the idea I could one day fall victim to being swindled myself, cut me just a little bit of slack there.) But to me it didn't really seem any different than what everyone I knew or ever interacted with did with VHS tapes. Selling the bootlegs to make your own profit, that I did eventually get; a chunk of a movie or show's success soon came to depend on DVD sales, and for a while I was very anti-piracy in that regard. But I never saw an issue with like, making DVD copies to trade with friends if we were able to do that.

Now it's 2022 and we are so inundated with streaming platforms left-right-and-center, I don't have regular TV channels or cable or satellite. I use a streaming platform to find what I want to watch, or a pirating site if what I want to watch isn't available otherwise. I also have a very large DVD and Blu-ray collection, and I use them regularly. And, the more and more so many streaming platforms release "exclusive" movies or shows that you won't be able to watch anywhere else and that they have no intent of making physical releases of? The more and more I find myself reverting to the mindset I had as a kid, wanting to make a copy of that Swan Princess tape we could only find at Blockbuster but couldn't afford to constantly rent. It isn't that I don't want to support the movies or shows themselves, or the people who pour themselves into making something I love. I want to support them in any way I can, including watching it on the platform if I have access to said platform.

But sometimes those platforms just...quietly remove the titles they've carried. Sometimes they jack their prices too high and I can't afford to keep paying that fee month after month because it stacks over time. Most often, I want to collect the media physically so I have the opportunity to revisit it in the future whenever I want, especially if I have a friend who has never seen it or even had access to it before. Physical media is wonderful, and there's something special about owning it. It's the same kind of special magic that it's always been about when I was 10 and could hold a freshly recorded VHS tape with episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess on it and know it was mine now for keeps.

This has already been quite a lengthy ramble and it's very colored by a sense of nostalgia, but for once I think that nostalgia really has come in handy for explaining why my outlook on something like pirating shows and movies is the way it is. I don't like this platform-exclusive direction; it's more or less just another paywall that can prevent entire swathes of potential audiences from connecting with movies and shows, and at this point, it's becoming almost too much for me to keep up with. So no, I have no moral quandary about cancelling subscriptions at some point and pirating episodes and movies and burning them onto a physical copy for keeps, and any reservations I used to have about buying bootlegs? Gone. I've seen blu-ray bootleg releases of platform-exclusive media that are much higher and more accessible quality than some official stuff, especially the made-on-demand stuff. At this point, I gotta respect the hustle and I can't complain about someone who burns a DVD better than I could.

Yo ho ho, y'all.

#long post #physical media #piracy #platform exclusivity #pirating media #streaming services #VHS nostalgia #personal experience #personal post #not sure what else to tag this #Cyanide speaks

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haltandcatchfiretothemax · 6 years ago

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FEMSLASH FEBRUARY 2019 #19: In which Cameron reads a book

[CW: mentions of food and eating]

Things had gone back to what she and Donna apparently both took for granted as normal. Or, not really, Cameron had decided. There hadn’t been any sort of going back, things had just continued forward after that Sunday night, both of them seemingly comfortable, at least for the time being, with not talking about why Cameron had brought up the realtor. Cameron thought of that night often, she’d dreamed more than once of Donna’s chicken pot pie, probably because she habitually thought about that evening, about how warm and bright Donna’s kitchen was, and how relaxed she’d felt there even when she was self-conscious and afraid of upsetting Donna, when she was trying to fall asleep.

In the mornings, Cameron thought about work: if she should follow through on designing the game she’d been imagining for a year, whatever freelance project was paying the bills that week, and Donna’s idea. Donna was always one of the first things to cross Cameron’s mind when she woke up. But, that was how it had always been: when she’d been recruited to Cardiff, she’d thought of whatever game she was playing and the alterations she’d make to it if she were a game designer, the Giant’s software, and J*e. At Mutiny, she’d thought about whatever game they were in the middle of writing, their user base, whatever she and Donna were arguing about that week, and then, Tom. It took a long time for her to stop thinking about Mutiny and Donna after she relocated to Tokyo, or maybe she never really had. She’d never thought to question any of this. It was easy to think of it as thinking about work, rather than thinking about Donna.

With as ‘normal’ as things were, Cameron couldn’t get through a day without wondering, what if she wasn’t ever ‘ready to talk’ about everything that had happened with the realtor, with Simon, with her entire relationship with Donna over the past ten years? She wasn’t usually really asking, on most days, she worried about this instead of really considering it. She wasn’t even really sure what she was worrying about when she asked herself about this. It was a knee-jerk thing she did that she couldn’t help.

Over one of their regular dinners, Bos had asked her, “Well, that’s a good question. What would happen if you two never have that conversation?” Eyes narrowed in bafflement and slight irritation, Cameron had said, “I don’t know? I’ve never thought about it?” Bos had responded with a fatherly but gruff, “Well think about it now, then!” With minimal effort, Cameron imagined driving to Donna’s house to write code and eat various kinds of takeout every night until they were in their 80s. She knew that it wasn’t realistic, but it sounded incredibly appealing. It maybe sounded perfect.

For some reason, Cameron was afraid to say this out loud, even to Bos. She admitted that it wouldn’t be the worst thing, for things to stay as they were between her and Donna. “So then there’s no reason to worry,” Bos said. Pointedly, he added, “No need to borrow worry, get all worked up over a hypothetical conversation.”

Which made sense. So why did it feel like something was still bothering her?

The next day, Cameron got up, got dressed, and went to a bookstore.

Cameron had become a reader in Tokyo. She’d been too anxious, too full of nervous energy to enjoy it as a kid, and even a good story with an interesting lead couldn’t soothe her the way that taking apart and reassembling a computer always did. She’d gotten into the habit of visiting libraries and bookstores, mostly because Tom had given her a strict ultimatum about how she needed to get up, get dressed, make their bed, and go outside every day. The result was that she’d spent a lot of days sitting in libraries and cafes, where, if nothing else, she managed to significantly improve her Japanese reading comprehension. Sometimes Joanie sent her new paperbacks from California, and she’d usually devour them in a few days; they were one of the few things she’d regretted losing in her move back to the states. Books became a sort of security blanket, an escape that gaming and game design couldn’t be anymore, and reading became Cameron’s most reliable method of self-soothing.

She had anxiety about accruing too many books, especially after having gotten so attached to the Joanie volumes, so Cameron also finally got a library card from her local branch, and got into the habit of stopping there whenever she was out. She didn’t need to buy books, she just needed to always have something to read, a novel or essay that she could grab when she started to worry about ‘things with Donna,’ and a place to go on days when her trailer felt too small, and sitting outside, or weeding her flower beds wasn’t enough of a distraction.

On her third bookstore trip, Cameron went to a large chain bookstore that she’d been to with Haley. Feeling strangely lonely, she wandered through the same sections they’d browsed, the magazines, the bargain books, the art books, the science fiction section, where Cameron stopped to look for a short story collection by Ursula LeGuin, but didn’t find it, and the cookbook aisle, which had become Haley’s favorite section of the store. Cameron looked idly at the cookbooks in stock, wondering which aisle she should try next, or if maybe she should go somewhere else altogether. She turned around, and then she saw it, in the next aisle — a copy of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.

Fried Green Tomatoes had been one of the movies that Cameron had gone to see at one of the few theaters that showed English language movies in Tokyo. She’d gone by herself on a rainy afternoon after yet another battle in the cold war that her marriage to Tom had become since her last COMDEX trip, and then she’d gone another time, and another. She managed to find a vhs copy, and watching it had become another kind of security blanket, like the books, a weirdly comfortable space that felt like going home, even if temporarily, even if Cameron had never actually been to Alabama, or had fried green tomatoes. She put it on when she couldn’t sleep, when she got sick, whenever she needed background noise to make household chores and tedious bookkeeping-type work tasks go more quickly. She’d worn out her tape, another thing that had been either left behind in Tokyo or in the dumpster behind the Mutiny/Calnect/Comet office, but hadn’t known that it was based on a book.

Cameron took a giant, slightly frantic step across the aisle and grabbed the book off its shelf. It was from a more recent printing, it had the actresses from the movie on the cover. She flipped through it, and went straight to the end, and saw that there were recipes in the back, for the titular fried green tomatoes, both milk and red eye gravy, cornbread, biscuits, snap beans, creamed corn, pork chops, fried chicken…Cameron’s stomach growled, and she suddenly realized just how hungry she was. She decided to buy the book.

She looked up at the shelf where she’d found it, vainly hoping that there was some kind of Fried Green Tomatoes series, and at least 4 other novels about Ruth, Idgie, and the rest of the Threadgoode family and Whistle Stop Cafe staff. Instead, she saw the placard announcing the section: LGBT Themes. Confused, Cameron looked back down at the book, had there been ‘lgbt themes’ in the movie? Did they mean Ruth and Idgie? A tiny voice in the back of her brain said, Of course, Ruth and Idgie. Cameron felt the most bizarre combination of surprised panic and overwhelming relief. It was like making it to the next level of a game after days of trying, only to realize that the next level would be harder, but that it was okay because that was made the game worth playing. She took the book up to the register and paid for it before she could talk herself out of it.

She wound up reading the first 100 pages in one sitting, and would have gone farther, if she hadn’t had to stop and make herself breathe. At 80 pages, the book finally described Idgie, Cameron’s favorite character in the movie: “Some people are like that, you know…run from you, won’t let you love them.” “She wouldn’t let anybody get too close to her. When she thought somebody liked her too much, she’d just take off in the woods.” “But when Ruth came to live with us, you never saw a change in anybody so fast in your life.” A few pages later, Idgie was charming the honey out of the oak tree for Ruth, and eating a picnic lunch with her, "happy as anybody who is in love in the summertime can be.” A few pages after that, Idgie was pitching a fit over Ruth’s decision to marry a man from her hometown, and then she was crying and drinking and carrying on, living down at the river for the next five years with a well-known prostitute that Idgie’s brother had wanted to marry. And all of it made sense to Cameron, even more than Idgie had made sense to her all those times that she’d watched the movie.

The passage that had really gotten to her was from Ruth’s perspective, though: “When Idgie had grinned at her and tried to hand her that jar of honey, all these feelings that she had been trying to hold back came flooding through her, and it was at that second in time that she knew she loved Idgie with all her heart….she had never felt that way before and she knew she would never feel that way again…. She had no idea why she wanted to be with Idgie more than anybody else on this earth, but she did.” Lying on her bed, in her pajamas, in her trailer parked out in the middle of nowhere, Cameron thought about Tori Loman, her first friend, her only real childhood friend, who she’d wanted to be with at all times. She was never happier than when she was at Tori’s, she stayed at her house as many nights as the Lomans would have her. As an adult, it had been easy to think that of course she’d loved visiting them; she’d hated being at home after her father’s memorial service. But Cameron vividly remembered playing with Tori every day after school before her father had been redeployed. She remembered telling him, “Tori is my best friend, she’s my favorite person after you.”

Cameron pushed that out of her mind and made herself read a little more, but she couldn’t concentrate. She closed the book, and holding it in her left hand, she reached for the cordless phone where it sat on her nightstand. She started to dial Donna’s number, but when she realized that she had no idea what she would say. She didn’t know how to tell Donna about Tori, either. I wish I knew what to say to her about Tori, Cameron thought, unable to imagine how that phone conversation might go — hey, did I ever tell you about Tori, my friend who I used to play house with? And how I didn’t realize I was playing house with her until Joanie pointed it out to me? As soon as she thought this, she realized how badly she wanted to say exactly that to Donna.

That was when Cameron decided that she needed to quit reading for the night, and put herself to bed.

#needed another night off to regroup/do household chores #this one got away from me too which is a sign of writerly fatigue #i will be fine but pls pray for me just the same #also i picked FGT for a v specific reason here but we'll talk about that another day #femslash february #femslash february 2019 #cameron howe #donna clark #donna emerson

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blatherkatt · 8 years ago

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The Goddamn Deluge

@notedchampagne (i cant promise i’ll get to these as quick as i got to this one but the dialogue started writing itself and here we are)

“Hey, do you think it’s possible to build a boat out of books?”

Ah, there he was. Karkat had been wondering when Dave was going to stop by with his weekly tradition of the annoy-Karkat-at-his-desk-job-at-the-library-with-stupid-questions-game. He was…a little early, though, actually; not often that he stopped by on a Wednesday. Karkat didn’t bother looking up from the romance novel he was reading to answer, just cooly turned the page. “Not one that floats for more than the time it takes for the pages to get soggy. Why the fuck do you want to build a boat?” “Have you looked outside, dude? This shit is fuckin’ biblical.” That made Karkat blink and look up. Dave was…soaking wet, holy shit. Karkat had vaguely noted earlier that he could hear the sound of rain on the roof, but now that he looked out the window…yeah, wow, it was coming down in sheets.

“…God dammit,” Karkat muttered. “Fuck. I didn’t bring an umbrella, the news didn’t say anything about this, my shift ends in twenty minutes…”

Dave snorted. “Bro, an umbrella would not save you from this. I am telling you, man, we finally did it, we pissed off Mother Nature and she is doing her best to fucking drown us.” He was shivering, the poor bastard, but managed to talk right through his chattering teeth, because of course he did. Not even the biblical Deluge could dare to stop the neverending flood of horseshit that came from Dave Strider’s mouth.

Karkat marked his place, closed the book, and rubbed at his temples. “Okay, well, we’re gonna be here until this lets up, I guess,” he said. “Just…hold on, I’m gonna see if we have a towel or something so you don’t fucking freeze to death.”

“Can I borrow your phone? Don’t think my cell is gonna be doing great right now, and I’m supposed to hang with John today, gotta let him know I’m probably gonna be late,” Dave said. Karkat looked at Dave’s dripping hands, then back at his face.

“How about you let me find that towel first, and then I let you use the phone,” he said.

“…Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.”

When Karkat got back from digging the cleanest towel he could find out of the janitor’s closet, Dave was trying to wring the moisture out of his jacket right onto the fucking floor. Karkat would’ve been madder about it if there weren’t already a growing puddle where Dave was standing. Guy really did look like a drowned cat.

“Here,” said Karkat, tossing the towel at Dave. “Dry yourself off as best you can, I’m gonna see if there’s any coffee left in the back room.”

“Check for —”

“Dave, we don’t stock apple juice at the fucking library, I promise you there won’t be any.”

“That is fuckin’ attrocious, my dude. What is this, the stone age?”

“It’s a fucking library, Dave, we don’t usually allow any drinks around the books and the coffee’s supposed to just be for the staff. Just…try not to get hypothermia and die in the time it takes me to make two cups of coffee, alright?”

“I make no promises.”

Karkat rolled his eyes and moved to the back room. As annoying as Dave was, at least he was better than being trapped in the library alone, he thought. The guy’d always been sort of a nuisance, but in a weirdly comforting way. He filled empty, lonely silences with words.

Not that Karkat was lonely. The books were plenty of company. Yeah. Not lonely at all.

He came back out to the receptionist’s desk, and there was Dave, sitting on the desk, still pretty damp, chatting away on the phone.

“Forget the measly little cats and dogs, dude, it is raining five circuses, eighteen wildlife sanctuaries, and the entire contents of the San Diego Zoo out there. Shit is fuckin’ bananas, and I ain’t got the appeal, you get me? No, dude, I was out there for two fuckin’ minutes and it went from drizzle to drowning in half a fuckin’ second, I’m already wetter than your mom’s — okay, okay, but the point is it’s wet as fuck and cold and I’m hiding in a library ’til this lets up, so I’m gonna be fuckin’ late. No, I don’t know when I’m gonna get there, dude, literally look out a window and you tell me. Fuck, you’re the one with a better chance of checking the news, actually can you tell me when this is gonna let up? Like, check the fuckin’ weather channel, let me know if I should be stocking up for winter here?”

Karkat sighed. “Hey, asshole,” he said, nudging Dave hard, “Stop dripping on my work space.” Dave slid off, flicking a cheerful middle finger at Karkat, and accepted the drink Karkat handed him.

“An hour? Fuck,” Dave said, his attention back on the phone. “Alright, well, I’ll try and get there as soon as this lets up, man. Yeah, catch ya later.” He hung up the phone and shrugged helplessly at Karkat. “Welp, we’re gonna be here a while.”

“I figured,” Karkat said. “Now what?”

“The fuck are you even supposed to do in a library to kill time?” Dave complained.

“Read, dumbass.”

“Oh, yeah, sure, I’ll just go and rub my damp hands all over the fuckin’ books, great idea,” Dave shot back.

“Oh,” said Karkat. “Right. Uh. I think there’s a television around somewhere? Like, it’s not hooked up to any actual channels, but we can watch movies on it and shit.”

“We could build a killer book fort.”

“No.”

“You are no goddamn fun, dude. Do you at least have like. Fuckin’ Bill Nye? If we’re going to be watching shitty library movies, at least give me some proper nostalgia with it.”

“I think so?” Karkat said, stepping out from behind the desk. “This way, maybe. They’re probably over by the kids stuff.”

A few minutes of blessed almost-silence passed, broken only by Dave’s quiet muttering, which Karkat didn’t dignify with a response, and the sound of Karkat’s own footsteps. Then, suddenly:

“Wait, holy shit, dude, are those fuckin’ VHS tapes? Oh my god, how fuckin’ old school is this place? Older than my mom.”

“Older than your — oh, fuck you.”

#davekat #homestuck #dave strider #karkat vantas #homestuck fanfiction #longpost #fanfic #fanfiction #oneshot #katt does a writing #and then dave forgot to go to johns house because they spent like 3 hours watching bill nye #john was cool about it and got dave back later with some silly prank

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kidsviral-blog · 6 years ago

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How I Grew Up On The Internet

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/how-i-grew-up-on-the-internet/

How I Grew Up On The Internet

The internet is IRL. It always has been.

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I started navigating the internet — really, the earliest versions of social media — early in my life, and before most people even really knew what the internet was. I was 11 when I first logged on in 1993 — I’m 32 now — and I’ve spent the ensuing years invested in online communities at least as much as I’m invested in offline ones. I never understood there to be a clear line between the two. Before I ever even had a cell phone, I used the social web to document and reflect on my offline life. I’ve met wonderful people online, connected in much deeper ways to the friends I had, and I’ve used dozens of networks and platforms to figure myself out. The internet hasn’t been a way to escape, it’s been a creative outlet, a friend, a documentarian, and a tool that has made my real life better, cooler, weirder, and more fun. For me, the internet isn’t some distinct virtual universe, it’s just one part of the real world.

This is the history of my first 20 years online. It’s a happy story.

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When I was 9, my parents chose to homeschool my older brother, Mitch, and me out of frustration with public school. I had just finished third grade and he, fifth. We were both doing fine academically, but my mom felt like our personalities were changing. My brother often came home from school depressed, and we started to complain about things like reading that we had loved before. Mom and Dad hated the focus on standardized testing, and felt that our teachers didn’t appreciate the creative curiosity they treasured.

A couple years into the great homeschooling experiment, we moved temporarily from Austin, Texas, a hippie college town with a growing secular homeschooling community, to Arlington, Virginia. I missed home and I had trouble making new friends in the Christian homeschool group there.

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My brother Mitch on our Macintosh computer in the mid-’80s.

That was when Mitch told me about BBSes (Bulletin Board Systems) and saved me from my boredom and social isolation. BBSes were local networks where we could read and write on message boards, chat live, and play games. We were lucky enough to have the magic formula: a PC, a 2400-baud modem, and a second phone line. My dad had always been fascinated by gadgets — he’d bought us our (and the!) first Macintosh in 1984, when I was just two years old. The iconic modem sound that began any trip to my favorite BBSes still makes me feel urgently stoked. That sound means I’m about to arrive at the best party ever, and I still get to wear my pajamas.

I tried a few BBSes, but I quickly became devoted to one in particular called “International House of Kumquats.” IHOK was run by a chill teenager who went by the handle Surrealistic Pickle. I felt at home there. Everyone was young and smart and cool and they immediately became my friends. (Since the BBS was on a local phone number, I knew we all lived in the D.C. area.) I never really thought much about the fact that we had “met online” — the concept was too new to feel dorky or taboo yet.

The average age of people on the board was probably about 16, while I was only 12. “Star Shadow,” my earnest choice of an alias, was a dead giveaway that I was the youngest person on the board. Still, I fit in fine. The kids on IHOK shared my enthusiasm for the band They Might Be Giants and we discussed them constantly, dissecting lyrics and debating best songs. We also talked about our lives and anxieties, we made up recurring inside jokes, we quoted our favorite movies and TV shows, and recommended books. We developed real friendships.

Within a few months, Surrealistic Pickle made me a co-sysop (system operator), the official duties of which were slight enough that I don’t actually remember what they were, but I still listed it on all of my teenage resumes. It was the first time that anyone had put semiprofessional faith in me, and it was done purely because of the value of my contributions, without a thought given to my being a girl, a weird homeschooler, or an actual child.

When my mom first agreed to let me meet my friends in person, she dropped me off at the National Mall but then parked a few blocks away with a stack of books and an eye on our activities. Looking back, I’m amazed that the teenagers from the board didn’t tease me for my mom literally watching over us, and I’m equally grateful she was open to the idea at all. We couldn’t share photos on the BBS, so the first time I met my board mates IRL was the first time I saw them at all. That part seems weird now, but it didn’t feel strange at the time. We already knew each other’s sense of humor, feelings, opinions, and personalities — the rest was just wrapping paper.

A few months later, I went to my first ever show with my BBS buddies: NRBQ and They Might Be Giants (obviously) at Wolf Trap in Virginia. The Kumquat crew were splayed out on picnic blankets on the grassy hills. They were Manic Panic-ed, glasses-wearing, and trench-coated teenagers who probably didn’t fit in at high school. They were all, more than any other quality, ridiculously nice. I thought they were the coolest people in the world.

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Cool “Lion King” button + Slurpee T-shirt.

I was having an awkward adolescence. I liked talking to my parents way more than I liked anyone my own age. I wanted to have deep, intelligent conversations about my interests, which were Disney animated movies (I collected Lion King merchandise), horses, and cute boys. Not, for the most part, things that grown-ups actually wanted to talk to me about.

Luckily, Prodigy existed. Prodigy was a dialup service that predated widespread use of the World Wide Web. Like its competitor, America Online, Prodigy contained multitudes: shopping, news, weather, games, advice columns, and more. I was only interested in connecting with people, so I used the live chat, email, and discussion boards.

I joined a message board where other girls like me had invented an elaborate role playing game for made-up horses — we each “owned” dozens of fake horses, gave them names and attributes, and pitted them against each other in entirely arbitrary competitions that were just decided by whoever was running them. I kept my horse files in a giant binder full of descriptions like this:

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People who I tried to explain the game to didn’t understand it at all. It wasn’t until I was introduced to the concept of fantasy sports a decade later that I thought maybe this all wasn’t as strange as I feared.

I was even more involved with the Disney Fans Bulletin Board, which was populated mostly by grown men and women who retained their interest in all things Disney well past the age when most people grow out of it. I loved them. Many of my DFBB cohorts lived and worked in Orlando, just because it meant that they got to go to Disney World whenever they wanted. To me, they were living the ultimate adulthood dream.

I got so involved with the Disney board that I was eventually given a “job.” The job paid me in a free Prodigy subscription and one free t-shirt. My title was “Teens Liaison,” and I did just that: liaised with other teens. Although most of the community was much older , I developed raging crushes on the handful of boys my age. I can still remember, in fine detail, a photo one of them sent me of himself dressed up as Prince Eric for Halloween. I had several Prodigy flirtations before I had figured out the slightest thing about talking to boys I knew offline. We talked about our feelings, which was impossible with the teenage boys I knew in “real” life. I was myself with the dudes of Prodigy — open and honest and weird — and they liked me for it.

I eventually met my Prodigy friends in real life too. My parents planned a trip to Disney World, mostly for my obsessive benefit, and let me bring my best friend, another homeschooler named Kate. I dragged Kate and my mom to a meetup dinner with the DFBB group at a fancy Disney-themed restaurant. Almost all of the attendees were closer to my mom’s age than to mine, but we had fun anyway. I got a purple tie-dyed DFBB staff T-shirt that I wore proudly to the park the next day. Soon after our meeting, people started to leave Prodigy for the wider world of the web, and I followed.

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Editing my “Lady and the Tramp” fan site with a stack of Disney encyclopedias, 1995.

I made my first website in 1995, when I was 13, and it was dedicated to my favorite movie, Lady and the Tramp. It started with a short introduction: “I’m here to provide the major source of Lady information on the World Wide Web.” The page included an archive of tiny photos I’d been able to dig up or scan, random facts I’d strung together from my collection of Disney books, the title of the movie translated into several other languages, a character list, quotes, and the movie’s credits, transcribed from my own VHS copy.

I taught myself HTML to make the page, borrowing books from the library and reading tutorials online. Once I made the Lady and the Tramp page, I was hooked. I started expanding my website to include biographical information about me, terrible things I’d written, pictures of my friends, and more.

By 1999, the earliest date that the web archive has for my site, it was basically a magazine. It included:

A 14-part “about me” section

Thousands of words devoted to describing each of my friends. Example: “Lots of people will tell you that I’m obsessed with Dorothy and you might say that’s true — I just happen to think she’s one of tha most beautiful, funniest girlies in that whole wide world. :-)”

Pages devoted to my opinions on religion, animal rights, curfews, Bill Clinton, and legalizing marijuana

A list of reasons that you should go vegetarian

A description of my imaginary perfect boyfriend, Jimmy Tony

Dozens of poems I’d written

My “future encyclopedia entry,” including the career description “writer, artist, entrepreneur, animal handler, actress, philosopher”; the titles of several of my future books about Shakespeare and hip-hop; details of the company I would found someday; the many books I would write; and my partnership with my imaginary husband Jimmy

A daily journal cataloguing the mundane details of my life

Book reviews

Comics I made with Photoshop

“Summer’s Spiffy Sendable Celebs,” a collection of about 30 e-postcards I made of my favorite celebrities

Capsule reviews of every episode of Dawson’s Creek

Commentary on my favorite songs and a list of my favorite CDs

A “shrine” celebrating Ani DiFranco

A collection of my favorite jokes

Desktop photos of celebrities and animals that I’d edited and made available to my “public”

An elaborate, multisectioned fan page for the character Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, including artwork, personal essays, historical information, and more

A lengthy acknowledgments section that thanked AltaVista, my scanner, my entire extended family, friends, and all of my pets

Making websites was my primary mode of self-expression throughout my teens, and it was also a huge part of my mostly autodidactic education. Over the years, my family’s approach to our education had grown increasingly radical, buoyed by the writings of “unschooling” proponents such as John Holt and Grace Llewellyn. I chose what to focus on and how to spend my time based on my goals, with fairly minimal oversight from my parents. My website became an obsession, and I had all the time in the world to devote to it. Most of the other creative things I did — drawing pictures, writing bad poems, and composing essays — were in the service of making a cool-as-hell website.

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A version of my website layout, featuring a dog I found on the street and kept for two days.

Although my site wasn’t part of any specific social platform, there was an informal but intense network of teenage and young adult women doing the same thing I was, and we joined web rings, made link lists, and sent each other fan mail. I kept up with tons of other website makers, almost all of them women: from JenniCam to one gothy girl who I only remember as “Calliope.” I learned from them. I studied their source codes for HTML tips, copied their brooding photography styles, listened to bands they mentioned in passing, started taking moody selfies like theirs, and tried hard to impress them with endless tweaks and new features on my website. To some extent, I lived my life with my website in mind — do it for the dot-com! — but this was a good thing: It made me more creative, thoughtful, and adventurous.

Creating my own elaborate websites about myself was outrageously, hilariously narcissistic in hindsight. But building my own sites gave me the ability to tell people who I was in a way that I could control. It also allowed me to look at myself in a positive way, something that was missing when I looked in the mirror. I liked the me I was on the web. I still do.

I’ve always wondered about the assumption that our online personas are more fake than our physical ones. I often feel awkward and nervous in real-life situations; I almost always feel like I’m saying the wrong thing and am unable to articulate what I really think and feel. Online, I have plenty of time and unlimited space to consider what to say and how to express myself. It’s an advantage that makes me feel more like myself, not less so.

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On Dec. 7, 2000, the day I joined LiveJournal, I was 18 years old, living with my parents in Austin, jobless, ecstatically in love with my first boyfriend, and spending almost every waking second with as many of my friends as possible. My crew was comprised of other homeschooled teenagers with the same excess of free time that I had, resulting in us spending so much time together that we complained about missing each other when we were apart for two days. I documented every mundane moment of that life and the years that followed on my LiveJournal, eventually falling off but still occasionally updating until 2007.

My journal is still up, hundreds of thousands of words detailing the first seven years of my adult life, and it’s full of hilarious contradictions. I was clearly leading a blissful adventure, experiencing a new “first” practically every week — my first relationship, my first apartment, my first road trip with friends, my first full-time job — but I constantly write as if the weight of the world is on my shoulders: “Life has gotten so misplaced. I don’t even know what I’m doing, just that it can’t be like this forever.”

I was also so unaware of how dang corny I was being all the time. I would write about “candy magic” and my “yummy” days and being ��so full of joy.” I think I’m a pretty earnest and even cheesy person now, but I’ve got nothing on my 18-year-old self waxing poetic about every single silly thing under the sun that day. Some parts of it make me wish I still had the ability to be so sincere, but other parts make me think I must have been the most annoying person on earth.

I shared more on my LiveJournal about my thoughts and emotions than I ever did in verbal conversations. I masked my feelings with humor and being loud in “real” life, but I was able to share my neuroses on my LJ. My best friends were reading my journal, and writing in their own too, so it wasn’t like it was a secret — when we weren’t busy hanging out and having fun in my room, we were talking and fighting and sharing our lives, all through words upon words upon words on our computer screens.

I’d write about politics or religion, about trying to understand people who disagreed with me, about the anxieties and delights of my first relationship, about the bands I was discovering and falling in love with. Most of all, I wrote about spending time with my friends, and about how much I loved them.

“I’ve just had one of the most fun-packed days of my life! This will be a long entry but it may actually be worth reading becuz there was so much weirdness today:

“Rachel and Dorothy and I stayed up ALL night last night, being goofy and bitchy and farting and just being completely delirious and silly. At 8:00 we went to Flips, and soon thereafter down to soccer.

I went to soccer and was loud and delirious and singing, and then we went to Schlotsky’s and had great conversation. Then Rachel left and I almost cried cuz she was so fun and I’m gunna miss her so much. But then I went to Flips and they were funny over there. And then I went to meet Isaac after work! And I was dressed so cool and in such a good mood, and we walked around.”

My friends’ journals have largely the same tone: documenting our lives in incredible, mundane, ecstatic detail. This is mostly a practice that seems to have been left behind on the present web, where at least most people are self-aware enough to know that others aren’t interested in an outline of their everyday lives. I guess this is a good thing — I’ve naturally grown up and become smarter and more self-aware since my LiveJournal days, and reading my writing from that era causes my entire body to seize up in embarrassment. I’m also so incredibly jealous. I look back at these entries and I read someone who was completely, 100% unafraid of being herself. I can’t think of anything more remarkable in a teenage girl, and I’m grateful that LiveJournal was a place where I could be me: purely, ridiculously, perfectly.

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I was still blogging when I first joined Flickr.com in August 2004. For five years when everything else was changing — I left jobs, moved four times, broke up and restarted relationships, got a cat, and met my best friend — Flickr was a stable and integral part of my life. Flickr was focused entirely on photographs, and those pictures were all there was to it. You were judged not by your cool list of interests or your clever status updates, but by the glimpse into your actual life that photos provide. The present analogue is Instagram.

Still, before I even had an iPhone, Flickr flipped the tables for me. Instead of the internet being a thing I did when I wasn’t ~living~, Flickr became a way to keep track of all the cool stuff I was doing with my time. And there was plenty to keep track of — the time when I started using it a lot was also when I started drinking, dating, and traveling, and met most of the friends who are still my crew today. My Flickr photos are packed with boys I had flings with or unrequited crushes on, parties, late night video game sessions at my ex-boyfriend’s house, my new best friend’s hands folded around a beer at our favorite bar, and lots and lots of elaborately artistic selfies taken with my DSLR’s timer function.

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Cute boys with cats uploaded to my Flickr, 2004-2005.

I looked at Flickr a lot. My friends who were on it uploaded all of their photos too, and it was a way to reflect and reinforce all of the things we were going through together. Looking back at my early uploads or my favorites list is as evocative as listening to an old favorite song. It’s easier to remember things that you regularly look at photos from, and as a result, the years after I joined Flickr are genuinely much clearer to me than all of the ones that came before.

When I browse Flickr now — it still exists, but active users have dwindled away since Yahoo started making changes after it acquired the service in 2005 — I’ll come across a photo of an ex-boyfriend hugging a cat or a good friend drinking coffee or a bunch of co-workers dancing in someone’s apartment, and I can hear and smell and feel everything in that frame. Flickr isn’t a window into my “internet life” of yore, it’s a window into my life-life. Maybe they are the same thing.

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Typical Myspace selfie.

Although it was preceded by Friendster, which was used by me and a handful of my friends, for me Myspace marks when the concept of “social networking” became mainstream. It was the first time that the energy and excitement I felt for the internet was shared by almost everyone else my age.

There were so many Myspace things that came and went with the platform. The entire concept of having a “top eight” friends will always haunt people of a very specific age and remain completely meaningless to everyone five years older or younger than us.

And the Myspace selfies! I used Myspace photos to exert a control over my appearance that I’ve never quite felt like I had in real life. I’d carefully apply makeup I never wore in public, borrow my roommate’s jewelry, and have an entire selfie session in the sunshine just to achieve the perfect new profile picture.

Most notably, we made music for each other on Myspace. Getting musicians and their fanbases online must have been a strategic push for the company, but it felt completely organic. It felt like one day some band got on Myspace and made it big, and then the next day everyone on earth opened GarageBand for the first time.

Countless friends put music up on Myspace, so after joking that if I had a band I’d call it Premade Bears, I made a profile and I made some songs. For one of them, I borrowed my roommate’s 5-year-old son’s tiny miniature guitar and locked myself in the bathroom, strumming along to my imperfect country-ass voice singing about having a thing for a younger dude. For others, like “Stay Sweet; Don’t Ever Change,” I arranged some generic beats and played some keys on my laptop while sort of lackadaisically rapping about having a crush in the summertime.

There was no future for me in these weirdo amateur tunes, no shows to book or albums to release. Lily Allen made it big on Myspace, but most of us weren’t thinking about scale. I worked at a bookstore, doing events and making displays. I had designs to do something more with my life, but I wasn’t ever going to be a famous musician. Still, I made something I’d always wanted to, and I shared it with my friends. That was cool. Before Myspace, making music and getting people to listen to it seemed hard and complicated. During Myspace, it was the easiest thing in the world. Our old Myspace photos and cliquey top eights were a little silly, but making tunes for each other was a truly sweet, cool thing we got to do and I am grateful.

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When I joined Facebook in 2006, it felt at first like the other social networks — a secret club for me and a select few to share our lives together. I didn’t quite get the point — most of the action was still on Myspace for the first couple years, and the wonkiness of Myspace’s customizable color scheme felt way more me than the clean, boring blue and gray on Facebook. And then Facebook grew. And kept growing. And now it remains the only network mentioned here that’s frequented by my entire extended family.

As evidenced by the teens who’ve left Facebook for other less mom-supervised networks and apps over the last couple years, being on a social network with everyone you’ve ever known is sometimes less fun than the alternatives. I mean, it makes sense: The last thing I want to do in real life is gather every friend, former co-worker, family member, and ex-boyfriend in one giant room together.

That said, my own mom is by far the coolest part of my Facebook experience. My mom uses Facebook with the same delightful, contagious joy that I used early BBSes with. Every Friday, she posts nature photos from the ranch where she lives with the hashtag #FieldNotesFriday. Rumor of her excellence on Facebook has spread among my group of friends, and I occasionally get a text from another pal asking if it’s cool if they request her.

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A typical Facebook update from my mom.

Social networking is associated with youth — naturally, kids who grew up with the internet are more comfortable adapting to new social networks. But in the next couple decades, those same kids will be the parents crashing the party. If my mom is any indication, that could actually be pretty great.

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I joined Twitter just about as soon as I heard about it, in early 2008; by that time, I was joining pretty much any social network that came onto my radar. When I first joined, my tweets were approximations of Facebook statuses.

is going to start using twitter.