Alright, in all honesty, it began with Perez Hilton.
I know, I know, it’s a vulgar thing to say. Honest, but vulgar. Perez is going through IT right now and I respect his need for privacy during this time, but the nostalgia for those early halcyon days of The Internet overtook me completely. Your girl spent a disturbing amount of time on his website absorbing his content in between classes at Wichita State University (go Shox) in the early aughts.
Listen, I’m old. Be kind to me.
My hip could shatter at any. moment.
Anyway.
Where was I.
(Give Auntie a moment)
I haven’t thought of the fellow in a long time. A decade? Was it more? But for the longest time, I was sat in my seat, his blog open on my Windows XP machine, and I was probably commenting.
Probably.
The early Internet was fun. And seeing Perez’s name in People recently reminded me of a very specific point in time where life felt carefree, smack-dab in the window between 9/11 and the 2008 Financial Crisis. See, Millennials found solace in the in-between, wherever we could, and mine? Mine was in the pink bosom of pure celebrity trash.
Aaaahh, smell that trash. *sniff* Fantasy by Britney Spears.
How lush.
Anyhow, it was while I was browsing his site on the Wayback Machine that I decided to check in on my old LiveJournal. And from my old LiveJournal, I discovered – happily, I might add – that my first domain EVER was also preserved, archived, for the entire world to appreciate (maybe). And that, my friends, that was the catalyst that sparked one of my most ridiculous purchases:
A domain from GoDaddy.
“I want to self-host a BLAWG!” I screamed to my husband, the very Lord Blake.
“Oh, no problem babes!” he chirped.
“It’s gotta feel like it did back in THE DAY, babe, it’s gotta be just for me, it’s gotta be indie,” I may have said.
“You can set up a GitHub repository and self-host from there!” the Lord Blake said.
Yeah okay no I don’t want to do that and have a separate laptop running my server 24/7, imagine the electric bill.
I went with WordPress. Obviously.
So that was a long, drawn-out way to say that nostalgia brought me here, and by God, nostalgia is going to keep me here. See, I miss aspects of what I suppose is colloquially referred to as “the old Internet”. Where everything was a little rough around the edges. Where we just jumped in and made of it what we wanted to make of it. I was brought up during the peak of LiveJournal, and that’s the specific hit of nostalgia that I think I miss the most. I miss logging in and wildly posting whatever came to mind, algorithm be damned, appearance be damned, what mattered was the here and the now and the space between your fingers and the keyboard.
You hit post.
There was no worry about “oh, how can this reach the optimal audience?” or “oh, will the algorithm like this?”
You hit post.
I want to build a place where I can just hit post.
So if you are reading this, welcome! This is my little corner of the Internet. If you’re not, no harm done. How could I know? This is a place I want to carve out for me, my stupid blog, for an audience of me, myself, and I.
But should you happen across this, hello, and I hope you enjoy the ride as well.
Let’s turn this nostalgia into something fun!
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