Scratching the Surface

[roadrunnertwice]

So. Early in that recent series about my ill-advised renovation project, I mentioned that, until I'd recovered from my brain amoebas or whatever, I had wanted to paint the room orange. And when Emm (emmling/kamonohashi) and Laura (roler) read that, they were both immediately like "Oh Jesus, it's fishhead.jpg all over again." And it recently occurred to me that there should definitely be more people sharing their horror.

Okay. Google has blessedly forgotten about all this, and I am DEFINITELY not saying how to find it over at the Archive, but listen: I used to have a... PERSONAL WEBSITE. On my ISP's five megs of web space, because I'm sure Geocities and Angelfire were nice, but I wanted a URL with a tilde in it. No I do not remember why that mattered.

For reasons I do not want to get into, it was VERY important to me that this website's background be a childishly-drawn skeletonized fish against a baby aspirin orange backdrop. This was the very soul incarnate of my internet presence. THE FISH SYMBOLIZED AUTHENTICITY, PEOPLE. The fish abides. Abided. Serenely. Until I eventually decamped for LiveJournal.

The motherfucker looked like this

and it was glorious.

And so now you know what that was about.

---

In other news, we had a thunderstorm in Portland tonight, and it was pretty badass. Reminded me of Minneapolis, and made me half think I should scurry down to the Acadia for a pint and some warmth and a good view down Franklin of the retreating clouds and lightning.

'Course, the Acadia moved down to Hiawatha or something, after I left. Who even knows what's the place in Stevens Square these days. But still.

Comments

[roadrunnertwice]

I will never get tired of realizing just how goddamn old I am

Oh my god, me neither. It's amazing to me (and quite humbling) that I've still got folk from that point in my life dropping in to say hi. (Thanks, by the way. *hugs*)

...It is also amazing to me that you remembered enough of the URL to find that thing! It's like a treasure map... except then you dig and it's just a cache of annoying Teen Nick. (I've got the whole site as a tarball, but haven't worked up the courage to actually read it in years. I probably should! Teen Nick wasn't really too awful, just insecure and kind of pathetically eager to please and probably in terrible need of a hug and someone to tell him everything will work out fine.)

[fozwalla]

Shucks ... I'm a slave to nostalgia, always have been, and I'm disappointed that my group of #fret/GIA Livejournal friends all stopped posting (including me, so I'm definitely part of the problem). But you know, people grow out of old interests, get busy with adult life, with being wage slaves. Livejournal itself lost its popularity long ago, regardless of all that. And Dreamwidth doesn't seem to have taken off as hoped, partly because being an alternative to Livejournal no longer really mattered (an alternative to something people don't use anymore anyway?), and the call to arms a couple years ago for people to switch to Dreamwidth from LJ was confusing and off-putting. All of a sudden a bunch of your friends list mutinied, and asked everyone to come along or they wouldn't see their updates anymore, except you had to sign up for this new thing, remember a new password, blah. Livejournal itself instantly became less appealing, since people effectively lost big chunks of their friends lists. I have to wonder whether that whole episode did more damage than the other big thing around that time, which was the explosion of Facebook. Feeding your vanity was way easier there, and people just couldn't help themselves. Posting there is really frictionless since all it asks of you is tweet-like updates, and people can easily give you ego boosts (Like! Like! Like!), whereas LJ was all about big thoughtful posts, and others couldn't stroke your ego as easily with comments, because, you know, tl;dr. Which brings us back to the issue of busy adult lives, etc etc. A whole lot of things hitting at once, perfect storm.

Haha Teen Nick. I actually didn't dig through your site, just glanced at the CC section. And all I remembered of the URL were two random words, which I plugged into Google, which worked. Just luck.

Do people really outgrow being eager to please and needing reassurance? I sure as hell haven't.