first entry

I really am not good at this stuff and never have been. Anything that requires technical know-how is something that's been slipping from my grasp the older I get. I'm always down to learning how to do things as my knowledge is mostly learned from fucking around on my own or were taught to me decades ago in school. I feel like a caveman most of the time banging my stone club against my scary space-age computer.

Right now I kind of feel like I'm in the position of whoever would be making his own basic baby HTML Geocities page. To be honest, I sorely miss that era of the internet. I miss when the internet felt less centralized, invasive, and anyone could just make their own basic web page or website. You could just have a single color background, a horizontally-scrolling text marquee, some lo-res gifs of flaming skulls or Pikachu balancing itself on top of a Poke Ball or the dancing baby. Guestbooks, webrings, all that stuff. This didn't even die out immediately as social media became more popular. Anyone who is old enough to remember MySpace can attest to how customizable social media was at one point. Twitter even used to let you upload custom backgrounds and animated gif icons at a point. This might've been because things were being streamlined for mobile experiences over desktop computers, but I think that you don't necessarily have to remove freedom of customization entirely. Tumblr still exists despite all odds and even though they prioritize the mobile/dashboard blog experience, you can still customize your own blog theme and view other peoples' graphic design and web design monstrocities.

This feeling seems to be shared with everyone I know over 30. Everyone I know under 30 as well—the FOMO that my Gen Z friends feel towards that era of the internet is very understandable I feel. Not saying it was perfect, but it's preferable to the state of the internet today. A lot of them have been carrying the torch and making personal websites of their own or archiving any old content online that they can find.

I was trying to archive some stuff from Livejournal because it felt like any time it could wither away like other sites. I'm pretty sure the active userbase of LJ is presently probably in the double digits outside of Russia. Apparently it's going down finally this year, so it was a good idea for me to start combing through to find anything I wanted to save. My old LJ account is long deactivated, sadly—I used it often back in high school and migrated over to Tumblr officially in 2010 with my LJ friends. A lot of old communities I was a part of are still up, but they're flooded with broken images from defunct image hosting sites (or Photobucket holding them hostage) and link rot. Around that time, people started using Imgur to host images in lieu of Imageshack or Tinypic and a lot of those images are still up after 15+ years. I used to deactivate my accounts all the time when I'd stop using them and I'm kicking myself now for doing that because I'm finding myself wanting to look at stupid things I drew over 15 years ago. At the time, I felt embarrassed by my older, worse art, but now I actually want to see them to compare to how far I've come. Don't be like me and make that same mistake because you will want to take a look back at your old art.

I don't even know what the point of this was. It's been on my mind a whole lot lately because I find myself feeling grateful for the friends I've had who've stuck with me for almost 20 years or who I lost contact with but still embraced me when we found one another again. I also found out that a friend of mine I had lost contact with had taken his own life around 7-8 years ago. When I found out, I felt shock and guilt immediately—I felt like I should've been there for him and I wish I had been. His Flickr and YouTube accounts are still up, so I'm going to download his photos and videos to preserve and back them up. I felt very depressed because I wanted to tell him about my visual novel project I'm working on, which I knew he would've loved. Since I cannot show him that, I'm going to put a minor character in based on him and his fursona: a goat photographer who specializes in taking concert photos. I'll miss you, Ian. I'm so sorry that life ended up distracting me when I should've been there for you.

I don't want this first entry to be entirely somber, but I'm trying to at least see some silver linings. I've been able to do that mostly because my antidepressants actually have been working. It's still hard and I'm still depressed, but it's been keeping me from being crushed by the weight of everything at the same time. I just wanted to write something and this I guess is a good starting point.