Hello, World!

I used to spend a lot of time on the internet. I still do (we all do), but today’s internet isn’t somewhere you go like it was then.

What I mean when I say I spent time on the internet is that I used to spend time on forums and blogs. I have always been interested in things, and the internet was the place to be for those who were interested in things. Whatever the topic, forums and blogs worked together to share anything you wanted to know. Some blogs got big enough that they turned into forums.

The first example of this that I remember was in the summer of 2004. On summer break from middle school, I was playing Pokemon Fire Red and searched the internet for cheat codes. I found a website with all of the cheat codes for any game and clicked through the header pages on the site: home, cheats, news, reviews, and finally forums. I found my first forum. Clicking around the forum, I found a thread where a group had invented a text-based Pokemon battle game. Each post was a turn, back and forth, sometimes over days, until the battle was over.

I made an account and started playing. At the bottom of each post, a poster would have a signature. Different forums had their own unique cultures for everything, signatures included, but on this forum, signatures often contained links to other threads like this one. Links to other text-based games, collaborative rpgs, or wherever else they liked to spend their time on the forum. I followed these links to other active threads and participated in those as well. I ended up visiting and posting on that forum almost every day for the next seven years.

By the time I was in high school, the internet was moving more and more to facebook. Rather than go to, say, miniclips.com, I installed, say, Pacman on my facebook page and played there.

By the time I was in college, things had moved on from facebook in the browser to instagram on the phone.

And now, long after the college, the internet is solely a place to consume, no longer a place I contribute to. Until now, I guess. So hello, World!