never had a tamagotchi
I was snooping around other people's website and found this one, where the owner shares their collection of old gifs/pngs they had saved from the 90s/00s. I recognized a bunch of them but also the things they represented. The beaded bracelets with words, the plastic bands showing awareness for whatever cause, the flip phones, the early neopets, the tamagotchis. It filled me with nostalgia, of course, but it also reminded me how I've always lived vicariously.
I've never had a tamagotchi or a Discman or a Melissinha. So I played with other kids' tamagotchis during recess and had a normal pair of shoes and recorded radio songs on a cassette tape and listened to it on parents' old knockoff Walkman. I was taught that those things weren't important to have and today I don't mind not having had them, but it's a weird memory from that time. It's people pointing at that stuff and going "remember that? it was fun"; well, I do remember it, as to if it was fun... I'll take your word for it.
We had a family PC with dial-up and that was enough, I guess. It was what I needed to read and write my Harry Potter fanfiction, message strangers on the Pokémon website chatrooms and play with dollmakers. The internet was very exciting and I forgot about tamagotchis pretty quickly once I got home.
I was always the little shy girl on my street, the one who liked books and was kinda weak on the limbs and the whitest kid on the block. Always stood out but nobody really messed with me. But I also never blend in very well with my extroverted, sporty neighbors. That's not to say I didn't have friends around me, I did, but I never quite fit. Getting the internet at home was like discovering the world was bigger than my school yard and my street. It really was a big shift in lifestyle for my 11-year-old self.
And here we are.
Updates
- I've created a status.cafe page where I also embeded my imood. It's funny remembering imood: you'd update your mood like, twice a day if that. Now you can post every single second of your mood on social media. Crazy.
- To get away from Amazon stuff, I've migrated my Goodreads to StoryGraph. It's not perfect but it'll do.
- I've read Falling Bodies by Rebecca Roanhorse and... I don't think I liked it very much? It's my first Roanhorse read.
- I'm officially launching my unfinished website (lol). Go check it out!
- I don't know which alias to go by on the internet. I'd like something bilingual or at least easy to remember the spelling in both English and Portuguese. Hashtag bilingual struggles.