The internet seems really lame now. I wonder if in fact Prince was right when he said "The internet is totally over." I mean Prince is like...insane, but I feel there is a shred of truth in his statement (it was said over him not allowing any digital distro of his music because of piracy.) In some ways, the internet's improved, but it's no longer, like, "fun" anymore, if that makes sense. It's overall gotten much more USEFUL in recent years. IE, filesharing is no longer even needed when you can just google "song title mp3" and get pretty much any music you can think of.
Anyway, this new internet has got me like, sad a bit. It makes me feel old at 20, too. I don't know, what triggered this was I remember a website from when I was a kid, probably in about 2002, animeart.com. It had real media clips of like every anime OP and ending ever, and tons of pictures. I'd have my dialup AOL, and would just love it. I looked today, and the site was gone. Obviously. There's youtube now. But still, it made me sad, to see sorta a childhood memory like that gone. When Geocities went down, I felt really sad, and I still do feel sad. I remember when I was a kid, I'd just spend hours and hours looking on geocities sites learning about anime, reading fanfiction, looking at fanart, and then seeing a random mp3 or videoclip as a complete goldmine. I mean now things are easier, sorta, and maybe it's just nostalgia factor on my end, but I really miss the "old" internet. Less people on it. Like, I much preferred the old "geocities" kinda web structure, everyone got their own little crappy website you could do ANYTHING on, and now it's been replaced by Facebook and whatever. I hate how centralized it's all gotten.
I don't know, I'm 20, but it makes me feel sorta...old? Thinking about such things. The way things used to be. When you're 20, you usually don't think of the way things used to be. But, the internet used to be "fun" and now I just see it as the magical appliance where I get music. As of late, I've been finding it hard to really "connect" online even. I think part of it was, a big constant in my life was one forum/website, well actually 2. First was Gundam.com, and second was AnimeX.com, sister site where lots of Gundam.com members migrated to, I probably was on Gundam.com since 2002, and AnimeX since 2003 (If anyone on here was a member of one of those sites, PM me please!) but AnimeX dwindled and just died, I guess. It was one of those sites where it was really like, members only. New members never seemed to stick around very long, so it'd eventually be the same like 20 people posting everything ever. I can't say it was a terribly "friendly" board, but I don't know, it was a constant in my life, I mean I went from 12 year old to maturity, on just that one board, and it's just weird thinking of constants in your life like that going. I think that's what makes me mad above all, all the things that used to be constants are no longer there, no more of the old geocities Dragonball Z websites, etc. Also, I really do believe LOTS of useful knowledge was nuked when geocities died, I mean the archive.org caught a lot, but for example, for the 80s jpop group TM Network, and the 90s jpop group MAX, I could find no information at all, until I was randomly looking on the archived geocities, and I pretty much found more info than anywhere else online about them.
The geocities sites were really great, as they weren't about social networking, they just allowed you to talk about stuff you thought was neat. I feel like the internet "back in my day" was more about stuff, and now it's ALL social networking. Where before, you could just make a nice sorta one way communication site about all the things you liked, now it's facebook, myspace, argh.
I don't know, I guess the internet is a really useful appliance, but I just don't find it nearly as "fun" as I did as a kid. How'd you old folks deal with your internet changing from the starting days, of BBSes and the like? Any of the "wow, things aren't like they used to" similar to what I described?
I don't know, I'm not like, crying over this or anything, but it is sorta emotionally distressing in some ways, seeing all the things changing around you, and things that used to be constants just gone. Heh, if I can find my PS2, maybe I'll watch some Patlabor, to remind me of better times. I don't know if this is terribly the right forum for this, I mean, it is emotionally distressing sorta. It just feels so...weird, on this new internet. That, and I've lost a lot of online friends over the years, it just distresses me now, to see something I used to "love" just morph before my eyes into something unfamiliar and alien to me. Maybe I'll look at this post in the morning and think what I wrote was stupid, I just got kinda down about this today, as I didn't have much sleep, so working out was out of the question, and it was too rainy out for me to wanna go outside, so in the house all boring hikikomori like today. I guess I try to put myself out of the house to sorta not deal with this new internet, where everything is all social networking now, everyone is "connected" and everything sucks. Ugh.
27 Jan 2012, 11:26 pm
