Internet Origin Story
Hello and welcome! Make yourself at home. [Turns on coffee pot.] I'll tell you a story about how this blog came to be.
In elementary school, in the early 2000s, my friend Madeline and I crept into the computer room on a mission to seize the Internet.
The assigned "computer room" designation was only rhetorical. There was an unspoken knowledge that the computer room really functioned as my father's office, where the sacred object of the desktop belonged to and was carefully guarded by my old man.
Or maybe it wasn't. He didn't lock the door or anything, but back then, my father seemed to share the same secretly authoritative qualities of the CIA.
Anyway, before that, our association with the Internet was a clunky, gray, dial-up box in my grandmother's West Texas small town, where we would travel for camp during the summers. Suddenly, the world wide web was in the midst of my own house. Our first activity was to see what websites were out there. We would do this by typing anything we could think of into the search bar and adding ".com" to the end of it. The first inappropriate thing I ever saw in my life was trying it with "thongs.com." [On a quick search, it seems that this site no longer exists, but imagine a frightening HTML page with an enormous picture of a woman with banana boobs, wearing a thong.
After the thong thing, we felt guilty and scared. The Internet heist ended there, but my fascination remained. Finally, when the computer's divinity dulled, I pursued every possible avenue: AOL Instant Messenger, LiveJournal, Xanga, Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogspot, Myspace, Reddit, name it. Anywhere I was able to blab on and on, I did. In a way, I developed my own cringeworthy webring. I used my real name on a few blogs but also really loved the anonymity of it all. This was before "branding yourself" online was the THING. I liked longform blogging as well as tinkering with HTML and CSS.
In high school, I joined Facebook and Instagram. Even back then, I felt annoyed these sites weren't customizable.
I went with the crowd for years and years, but never found the satisfaction I felt during those early days. I continued longform blogging around the web and felt sad seeing friends flee our personal websites for the micro-blogging platforms.
Fast forward to being an adult. I'm an author and a mom and a college professor. I have a lot to say, not that any of it is important ha ha, but the microblog thing never came naturally to me. Eventually, I adapted to Twitter but battled with the character limit and never garnered much of a following. I beat myself up seeing my peers and other authors slay on microblogs, being all polished and character count savvy or whatever. I hate to admit it, but the in-your-face presence of these services did impact my self esteem and, honestly, I forgot how much I enjoyed blogging in the first place.
Then, Elon Musk bought Twitter. I was a stan of his before that, by the way. I tried to keep up but felt lowkey bad about myself because everyone left, my feed reeked, and everything looked the same. "Bluesky!" I thought. Same story. Everyone looks the same and everyone's either selling something or complaining. "Threads!" I thought. Then, what the hell is happening there?
Deflated by it all, I pulled the plug on my Twitter and resolved to cut it out with the account signups. I was like, "I'm a grown woman. Can't I learn to do what I enjoy lol?" I consulted the hallowed archives of my blogs. Every username I could remember, those with currently active domains, I read. I did not pull every post, or even close to every post, due to a lot of it being dark and depressing or embarrassing. But!
I did archive some, and I will continue writing into it here.
My Second Post
January 14, 2025
This is another blog post. You can duplicate this content-box structure to add more posts to your blog.