Waxing Nostalgic (ft. old man woes) · 3:50am Aug 21st, 2022
Fair warning for anyone looking for story updates here: there aren't any. My life and my muse have only just started to cooperate with me again as of yesterday. No, this is just some good old fashioned stream-of-consciousness rambling, befitting of the time and place I've spent a good three or so hours paddling through.
See, I used to have a Newgrounds account way back in the day, created in the class of 2007. While the account itself has long since been purged, even my young and dumb self had the incessant need to archive literally everything he'd made over the years he still used that account, preserved for my perusal to this very day. See, before I became a card-carrying horsefucker, I used to be a dabbler in the ye olden Sanic fandom, in the days of godawful recolours and horrendous script-format stories. I sat there for a good while, Just flicking through the accounts I remembered of the folks I used to hang with, writing horrendous - and I mean that in the most flattering, nostalgic sense - stories, using OCs left and right, and just having a merry old time, the collective autism of our tiny bunch proudly on display for the whole world to see. Even if that world was only, what, ten or twenty people? On a good day? It hardly mattered to us back then. It was our world and our oyster, damn it.
I didn't even mean to reminisce about my old account, is the thing: I was just drawn to it naturally from rewatching old Flash movies, and Super Mario Bros. Z coming up on that list just brought all those memories screaming back. Even today, Alvin-Earthworm's old sprite animations kick all kinds of ass. Seriously, it's to the point where I'm not even sure why he's remaking those Flash movies in the first place; there's not much broke there that needs fixing, and the quality and soul of the original just shines so damn brightly, especially considering the years it was made.
While I've never been the kind to look back on my old works and "cringe" - I've always accepted my old stuff as a product of it's time and a welcome metaphorical photograph of my earlier years - it really makes me realize that the Internet as a whole has really, really changed since those times. And I don't mean for the better.
Sure, the Internet was a much smaller and wilder place back then, and I'd argue that it was precisely for that reason that it was so fucking great to be part of in the first place. But it was also, first and foremost, always positioned as a supplement to our otherwise normal realities. At the end of the day, you could turn your computer off and just go for a walk outside, and end up missing a lot of nothing. But since, I'd say, the mid-2010's, that began to change in a pretty dramatic fashion. The Internet was now an extremely integral part of our day-to-day lives, even a part of our political processes. Until, come today, where you're more or less required to be plugged into the big, bad machine in some way, shape, or form.
Maybe this is just the pre-Snowden privacy nutcase in me re-emerging once again, flopping itself in everyone's face like a good old fashioned meatspin link. Maybe I'm just an old man by Internet standards, totally out of touch and fretting over nothing. But I can't help but feel, really deeply and sincerely, that the next gen of young and dumb expressive types, as beautifully autistic as they've always been wont to be, are getting a way worse experience in the field of expressing themselves.
Just think of how many Interwebs credos of old aren't being observed anymore; "never put your personal details online" came to a real swift end once data harvesting became the money maker for <insert large tech company here>, now didn't it? A lot of us oldfags know better, sure, but what about the new players who don't know any better? This doesn't seem like such a big issue at first until you take into account another old Interweb tradition that hasn't gone away either: the lost art of trolling.
I actually don't give two shits about trolling in principle. I've trolled, I've been trolled, it's a normal part of the 'Net, and it is what it is. But it was always this limited-scope kind of thing, like a small fishing village taking their little boat out to sea and fishing for a few bits of lulz to feed their families with. But with the Internet exploding in headcount, combined with the "unholy Triforce" of Reddit, Twitter and Discord - particularly their userbases - being a thing now, I really do believe that if lulz were like fishing, we're in the "widespread, ecology-destroying overfishing" stage of trolling right about now.
And I don't know about you, but I prefer to support local when it comes to my shits and giggles.
But seriously, it wasn't until I signed up for Fimfiction and started digging through the various groups here every now and then that I was reminded of this big paradigm shift in how the 'Net works. Seeing group forum posts and the occasional random user's spergy blogposts just brings this warm, fuzzy smile to my face, the kind I haven't gotten in a long time. A real "just like mom used to make" kind of experience, even if I mostly play the observer to these kinds of things nowadays.
If you really wanted to trace this big ugly fuckoff paradigm shift back to a concrete point, you could almost certainly trace it back to the Tumblrgeddon; the exact moment that this old-school blogpost style went the way of the dodo. All because Yahoo just wouldn't let their userbase coom in peace.
Wow, holy shit, I really ran off the rails for a bit there, didn't I? From Newgrounds to Sanic to Snowden to autism to Tumblr. It's like my average Wikipedia trek or something!
I guess the overarching point I'm trying to make here is that God damn it, I miss that old Internet. I miss never giving a shit about who saw my charmingly horrendous shit at the time. I miss the days when intrusive banner ads and pop-ups were the biggest risk online, and not massive companies selling your data straight to the feds, and God only knows who else. I miss when people gave a hilariously disproportionate amount of a shit about meaningless stuff, without ever backpedaling on it. Or worse still, waxing "ironic" about it later on as if it wasn't their genuine, heartfelt feelings on their pet obsession. I miss the days when trolling was a small and lulzy cottage industry, and not the monstrous industrial machine it is today.
But above all else? I miss how free things used to be back then.
I guess I'm just sad that our next gens of spergs-in-arms are getting their feet wet in an almost certainly objectively worse Internet than the one I started sperging out in.
So thanks Fimfic, for bringing back a taste of the old times. And honestly, a big thanks to good ol' Newgrounds as well, for never compromising on their "everything, by everyone" motto. Right down to preserving just about all of their old site data, BBS and all.
Anyhow, thanks for reading my random scream into the void. I'm off to go watch the rest of "There she is!!" now, probably follow it up with some challenge runs on YouTube. Maybe type up some actual horse words for a change. Who knows, maybe in a few years time I'll look back on this post and reminisce about my frame of mind then, too?
I fucking hate the fact that "The Internet is Srs Business" went from a joke to a commonly held attitude.
5680985
For real though