Internet Nostalgia

I think I was about eight years old when my parents first bought a computer. It was a heavy, light gray colored machine and came in a gigantic cardboard box that my dad rolled into the living room on a hand trolley. It wasn’t connected to the internet yet, but my siblings and I fought every day about who got to play a videogame first. It sounds quite unbelievable to me now, but we actually had to keep a logbook of our time using that computer and we were only allowed to do so an hour and a half a day, which is incredibly short when you’re playing the Sims or building a theme park on Rollercoaster Tycoon.

As we got older and my parents got internet, my older siblings lost interest in games like Rayman and wanted to chat on MSN with their friends. I recall that they agreed with their friends on a certain time to go online (always  8.30 p.m.), but I wasn’t really involved in this. To give you an idea, I had an e-mail address that included the names of all of my former pets and my bed time was at 8.15 p.m. Seeing that my siblings all wanted to use the computer at the exact same time, because that’s when all their friends would be there, they had heated discussions in the hope of getting their way. Most evenings, I would lay in bed and I would hear my sisters screeching and my brother grunting in response, until my dad grew tired of their argument and declared that if they couldn’t agree peacefully, nobody would get to chat at all.
I myself spent my time on internet playing games like Bubble Shooter and Ping Pong and building one of those kid’s websites. I owned a Dutch one on what was called “Kindertent”, on which each kid had a profile and space to put images and messages in bright colors and ugly fonts to their “viewers”. Mine consisted mainly of screenshots of the Harry Potter movies that had come out by that time and quotations by my favorite characters. Today, while remembering this, I was feeling nostalgic and decided to go and look at the web design of an eleven-year old me, but instead of Potter pictures and awkward notes I was lead to an error page that read that my website had been removed due to lack of use. This made me feel strangely sad.

Beside my “Kindertent” profile, I was really into an online game called Horse Tycoon. This was basically a website where you could breed and train fake horses, post on the forums and constantly work to update your stable. The plus side of this game was that I can still see the difference between way more horse breeds than necessary for somebody who as nothing to do with horses in real life.
During that same time period, I also had a MySpace page and hung around in the chat box of a children’s news website. It sounds really dorky and it kind of was, but I found it quite awesome and enjoyed talking about the local news. Also, the website was supervised, so every time someone said “shit”, that word would be substituted by a vegetable. This quickly resulted in hilarious messages like “Broccoli is healthy” and everyone would know what it really said. Well, it’s a lot funnier when you’re thirteen.

In the few years before Twitter and Facebook became popular, a lot of my school friends and I had profiles on a Dutch predecessor of those websites, but without the apps. It was a site called “Hyves”, where you could post unflattering photos, update statuses, “poke” and message people and acquire as many friends as you possibly could without resorting to sending friend requests to your teachers. That last function of it was quite important, because your friend count was visible in parenthesis any time your name was used. Because of that, it became a bit of a competition as to who had the most friends. If you had less than, say, twenty friends, you were considered to be kind of a loser.

Then Twitter and Facebook took over and brought gigantic improvements. Around this time, I also started to get interested in YouTube. My hour and a half time limit had long been lifted, which was convenient, because I devoted hours of my time to watching YouTube videos . At first, I wasn’t really aware of the community aspect of the website. I just used it to watch deleted scenes from the Harry Potter movies, viral videos starring babies named Charlie and illegally uploaded clips from crappy theater recordings of Wicked. The first real vlogger I came across was a YouTube musician by the username of JennaAnne1026. She had a steady group of followers and posted videos regularly. I started subscribing to different vlogging channels, until through a related video suggestion, I found Hank Green’s awesome song “Accio Deathly Hallows”. It had been uploaded two or three years before, but I liked it enough to explore what this Vlogbrothers channel was all about. I found out about Nerdfighters and Nerdfighteria and John’s books and DFTBA. I learned that the internet could bring people together do decrease world suck. I understood that this was something completely awesome. Over the next few months I made the pilgrimage of watching every single Vlogbrothers video and got into the Nerdfighter community. I pretty much stalked their channel ever since and found other awesome channels in the process.

My use of the internet hasn’t changed much since, so I guess that’s the end of my internet story. Best wishes and don’t forget to be awesome.