shortly after the introduction of the World Wide Web some clever people said hey, what if instead of lots of different web sites there was just one site, a “portal” if you will, that contained all the news and information and entertainment you might want? and we told those people to fuck off and die because their idea sucked shit, so they went away and added comments and rebranded it as “social media” and we couldn’t get enough of it.
Opened in 1998, I’ve been working on FantasyAnime.com for the past 23 years! Uuf, it doesn’t feel that long. I’ve had people message me saying, “Wow, you’re still online! I used to go to your site when I was in middle school.” - and then my hair instantly turns grey 👴
In this article, I’m going to talk about my experience maintaining a fan site for such a long time. I’m also going to reminisce about the early days of the Internet.
I think it’s really funny….that I’ve seen younger internet people say this freaks them out……….and that they just see it from “old people” on the internet……but when I was a teenager online…….we thought a bunch of ellipses…….were the way to recreate natural-looking speech through text……I don’t know why that is……..but we thought it was what looked friendly and casual…….like we thought there had to be punctuation to break up the flow of our text…………….but any other kind of sentence punctuation was too abrupt and therefore read as hostile………..It’s just an interesting little quirk of internet language evolving that I still think about a lot……….
I’ve only ever seen scattered isolated episodes of Buffy and Angel but reading about Buffyverse and the discourses around it made me realize that the past 20 years of media analysis have simply been footnotes to late 90s/wary 00s Buffy fandom message boards
I’m so old I remember when the .jpg/.gif distinction was about modem-era filesize, color palettes, and suitability for clean computer-generated vs. busy natural images, not motion
Say how old you are on the internet without saying how old you are
Here’s mine:
gpoy
napster
WWIV
log off, I need to make a phone call
See this, this is how I know we’re age-compatible
Not the age in my bio?
What if I’ve been secretly dyslexic this whole time and never realized it said you were in your FOURS? It could be code for number of stages the polycule has spread. I can’t take that risk. I must find the truth through dial-up.
That explains why it took so long.
Internet Relay Chat
webring
Atari 2600
You’ve got mail
I hear there’s rumors on the, uh, internets, that we’re going to have a draft.
