The Folkmoss Logs

growing old on the internet

I was thinking about what to write here as my final post for the year. I managed to get 3 posts per month out since I've started this blog, which is in itself a sort of miracle -- I haven't been able to write consistently in... years (pre-pandemic years!). Yesterday I still hadn't made up my mind about what the hell I was gonna write about, but then something happened.

An old friend, from an old RP forum I used to roleplay in when I was 13-14 years old, found me (through my listography page, of all things!!!) and reached out. And that led me through a whole new rabbit hole of nostalgia-driven browsing on the Wayback Machine. You see, I'll be 36 next year, which, judging by my family's medical history, puts me past the halfway point of my life. Of that time, I've been online since the year 2000 via weekend dial-ups to present-day smartphone life. That's almost 25 years sharing my life on the internet, one way or another... which is a lot.

I know kids today come out of their mother's womb with a smartphone dangling from their umbilical chords and will have their whole entire lives recorded online, but this is different. When you're the one behind the keyboard, you're the one deciding what to say and do and share online. I remember my dad sat next to me the first few times I accessed the internet and joined online chatrooms, but after he saw I'd learned my way around the Pokémon website and other kid-friendly spaces, he'd pretty much leave me alone. I had free reign inside that screen. And then I discovered mIRC (don't ask me how, I don't remember) and so much more going forward (a left those kid-friendly spaces).

I don't have anything recorded from that time, it's all pretty much lost. Those were the "tempfiles" era of my online existence. You won't be able to find anything of me and believe me, I've tried. Between mIRC chatrooms and Brazilian discussion boards about Harry Potter, there isn't anything left.

But then, at the ripe age of 13, I discovered about blogs. And that you can still find.

Digging around that old RP board, I found my old blogs from when I was 13-16 years old, and oh boy. What a weird time to be alive on the internet. It was mostly me complaining about school and talking to a "char" (tho I didn't know this word back then) in the middle of my blog posts, which was common for teenage girls to have on their blogs -- a sort of alter ego with whom you'd talk to while writing about whatever it was you were writing about. It was really funny encountering this because I had absolutely no recollection this was a thing back then, and reading through my old online friends' blogs, I could see the same style of alter-ego char on their own posts. What a weird writing fad. And it's all there, on Archive.org, for the world to see, the writing of these Brazilian teenage girls in the early 2000s.

Am I the only one who finds this absolutely bonkers? At least I didn't have a Flogão (Brazil's version of Fotolog), so there's no photographical remnants of my teen self online to be found. We didn't do RL photos on blogs back then. Thank you, teenage low self esteem!

And now I'm 35 and writing a blog post. There's no alter ego talking to me here in the middle of my text, but somehow, it all goes back to little "nanajiloh" (my screen name back then) sitting in front of the family computer typing up super short posts about how unfair her geometry teacher was.

And this very post and others on my current blog may also be saved on Archive.org, and maybe another 25 years from now, a 70-year-old folkmoss (my present-day screen name) will rediscover them and go "isn't this bonkers?".

Happy holidays, everyone. See you in the future.

Updates

General updates

Life updates

#blog #eng #nostalgia