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.

My Brother was mean (My Internet story)

Okay, so I feel like I need to begin this post with a short story, which doesn't involve the Internet but began my experience with computers.

I'm not quite sure at what age my family first got a computer, but I do know that my brother (who's quite a bit older than me) bought himself a computer long before we had one. I think I was around 6 or 7 at the time, and it was quite a momentous occasion. The computer used to live up in our attic room which I used to always have an aversion too (it was where the monster used to hide at night). Anyway I used to watch my brother play games on it quite a lot, most of which were quite violent and probably not very suitable for my young eyes to view.My parents never used the computer as it was my brothers and so I used to knew more about it, so one night when my brother went out for the night and he accidentally left it on, I was asked whether I could turn it off. I didn't know how to, and I didn't want try playing around with it to work out how because computers were "for big people". I was also terrified that I would break it. So I cried all night, because I was worried that it would break if it didn't get turned off, and that my brother would be cross at me for being rubbish. So I always had a weird kind of aversion to computers after that and have always been scared I would break them - although I've grown out of it somewhat now.

So getting on to my Internet story. I didn't really get to use the internet much when I was younger as only my Dad's computer was connected and he was always doing "serious grown-up" stuff on there (although even then I'm sure he spent a lot of time playing solitaire and space pinball). When I did get to use the internet, it was a slow dial-up affair at 15 minute intervals, because my parents weren't made of money. I'm not quite sure what I used to look at when I was very young, but I'm pretty sure it was mostly to do with looking up cheats for the sims a game which I was completely obsessed with. This hasn't changed much in adult life either really...

Once the Internet was more widely accessible and affordable, I was allowed on it some more. Although I'm not entirely sure what I did, I know a few websites/games I was very much into were a 3D lego game (cutting edge graphics), a Willy Wonka game and a recycling game on the BBC kids website. Oh and dinsey. How could I forget disney?! Actually mentioning the Lego website, there's another mean big brother story there. When I was a bit older (again not sure of the age), shortly after we first got broadband and I was finally allowed to go on the computer for any length of time, I spent a few hours playing the Lego game. I came downstairs and my Mum asked me whether I'd had fun. I replied "Yeah it was good, but there's this one bit of the level that's a right b*****!" This was an expression I'd heard my brother used earlier that week when referring to Tekken (the original one). I'd assumed it meant something was hard, but judging from my Mothers expression, it meant something a bit more than that. When questioned, I blamed a kid at my school for saying that word, because I used to think the sun shone out my brother's backside and I didn't want him to get in to trouble.

Moving on a few years to when I was a teenager, and along came the first social network I was part of Bebo. Although I didn't really understand the point of a social network, and I didn't used to have many friends on there (because I was a bit of a loner). Although I was very pleased to be able to customize my own page and distinctly remembering searching the terms "pink" "butterfly" "love" and other such things to try and find the like perfect background. Around this time I also set up my own website with my "big sister" a friend also called Alison. This was around the time when creating a website was "totally cool". The whole of the page was dedicated to how similar we were; we both played clarinet, our favourite colour was purple, we both had a defect in our right knees to name but a few gems. I also set up a neopets account and aspired to have a faerie coloured Uni, an ambition which I am sad to admit I fulfilled last year (I did have a sabbatical of several years though). There was also many internet search engine mishaps around this time - a particular one involving my brother having to explain to me what viagra was comes to mind.

OMG LOOK AT ALL THE PINK SPARKLES. Its lk sooooooooo prettyzzzzzzz!

The summer of my 14th Birthday, I was uprooted from my home in South London to move to Countryside in the South West. As we moved during the summer, I didn't know any people my age, so had an extended amount of time to spend on the internet. I then began being involved in I-am-Bored.com. I used to look at every damn post on there, sometimes several times. This was when I discovered things which went on to become internet memes. I also watched lots of odd videos on Albino Black Sheep. This my internet habit up until near my 16th Birthday.

Youtube happened. I mean, yes youtube had been around for a while, and I'd been on it before, but my youtube life began. To cut a long story short, I started following Charlie Mcdonnell, and everything spiralled out from there. For the long story, please refer to my post entitled "Once upon a Time".

This brings us pretty much up to date. I still watch a lot of youtube videos, look at cute cat photos and play games every now and then.

If you made it this far, then congratulations, I'm aware this blog post is quite long. I apologise. I also apologise on the lack of recent posts, I had some personal things going on and a 3rd year maths degree is difficult. Anyway enough with the excuses.
I'm aware that I've not really had much time to read other people's posts for a while now and haven't read new peoples introduction posts, but I will be doing that at some point this week, I promise!
In the mean time, feel free to ask my any questions, and if anyone wants to have hear more of how mean my brother used to be when it came to computers and the internet, let me know and I'll divulge.
Until next time DFTBA :) xx