I Miss Blockbuster and Being Cringe Online

Hey friends! It's been a while. Winter is hard and Spring is busy and writing takes a lot of thought it turns out. But I've been thinking a lot lately about the modern day internet, anhedonia, nostalgia, and getting older in America. So I think this post will be part musing, part self-psychoanalyzing, and part talking about being a kid online in the late 90's/early 2000's. I'll do my best not to just stream-of-consciousness this post but we'll see how I do :')

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I guess to start I want to talk about how absolutely boring the internet has become. It's turned into social media, youtube, and google. Gone are the days of StumbleUpon and spending hours with your friends finding new webpages and just playing around. It has lost its wonder. It was so magical and expansive, but now it's all doomscrolling and looking at your friend's vacation pics while stoned and sad and laying in your bed too late at night and avoiding sleep because sleep means tomorrow and tomorrow means work and-

Woah ok off topic!! Let's reminisce instead hehe :3

I recently decided to get a new Neopets account lol

Neopets is the first time I remember using the internet. Back when we had a Computer Room and we would all take turns. My Dad was/is big into iRacing and I remember sitting at the computer with this big ole steering wheel in the way and playing Neopets. I had a blue Kacheek and I would play a LOT of Kacheek Seek and Meerca Chase. I was awful at Pet Pet battles and I became enamored with NeoQuest. (Was NeoQuest my first RPG???) It was the first time I used message boards and interacted with other people online.

It's changed a lot, but is also still the same in many ways. It is comforting to play again. It reminds me of fun spaces online. Spaces outside of social media and looking up maybe-correct-probably-not information. And who knows, maybe I'll finally beat NeoQuest :)

It is vastly revamped. There's a lot more to do and the art has changed a bit. It does have some "legacy pages" that have the same UI as the old days. I haven't spent a ton of time re-exploring it and seeing new features. Just kinda reminiscing with old games I used to enjoy and seeing how they make me feel (warm. nostalgic. sentimental.) and clicking around old areas I used to go to. I got another blue Kacheek and his name is Mr. Enoki and he has a little yellow bandana scarf and a fishing hat and I love him very much.

LOOK AT HIM!!!

If you've been feeling sad about being online and if you played Neopets in the past (hell even if you didn't tbh) I highly recommend just picking it back up again for a quick dopamine hit. It's also nice to *slow down* because every single thing is a new webpage. Any non-flash game loads a completely new page when you click something/make a decision. Every time you move in NeoQuest it loads a new page. It's clunky and slow and great and I love it. It feels like the equivalent of taking a break from the city to go hiking or something. Less efficient, but calmer and rejuvenating. For real get yourself a virtual pet to care for. Get a Tamagotchi or a Digivice. You need a little guy in some form. I promise.

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I don't remember exactly how it came into my possession, but when I was 9 I experienced what I still, to this day, believe to be my personal peak online experience. 

Final Fantasy XI was my very first foray into MMORPGs and definitely shaped the rest of my teenage years. I had a Linkshell (guild) and I would get home from school and raid with people for hours. I spent almost any free time I had on this game and with my friends I had made on it. It was definitely odd for them, I'm sure, to be playing games with a 9 year old (or 10/11/12 depending on the year I was playing lol). But they were kind to me, and we talked every day. We even had a website for our Linkshell that someone had made that we would post on and do polls for time slots for our raids. It was like a lil family. I still remember all of us crying and holding an in-game party when one of our members decided to stop playing the game lol. They were my best friends at the time. I don't talk to any of them now, but I genuinely hope they're doing well.

It wasn't just the community though. This game was everything I could have ever asked for at that point in my life. The job system was phenomenal. Without getting too deep, basically you would have your Main job which you had access to all abilities you had unlocked per usual. Now let's say you have a main job as a level 50 White Mage (WHM) and then you're able to unlock other jobs and set them as "sub-jobs." Your sub-job will be set to half the level of your main job and you will have access to any abilities unlocked up to that level. So in this example of the lvl 50WHM, let's say you have Black Mage (BLM) as a sub job. Your job will now be shown as 50WHM/25BLM and you will have all of those abilities as well. If you level up to 52WHM the BLM will be increased to 26 and you will have 52WHM/26BLM etc. (odds round down on the sub jobs iirc). 

Something to note is that you must have also leveled up the corresponding subjob on it's own to unlock it's full potential. If you have only leveled Black Mage up to like level 10 and you use it as a subjob for a level 50 White Mage, it doesn't automatically up you to 25. You would simply be 50WHM/10BLM. Which is much less powerful and versatile (but still sometimes beneficial depending on the scenario and desired abilities!!). 

So it can come with some cool combos! Paladins with White Mage subjobs have great survivability. A DPS with a healer subjob can have more survivability if they're wanting to do something solo and without a group. I personally played and raided primarily as a Samurai/Thief combo and I remember it feeling really good!!!

I miss job systems like this. It was the best part of this game I feel. It definitely had some downsides, that I think have gotten ironed out since I stopped playing (forcibly btw. I played on PS2 and my hard drive died during a storm and I never went back. But if I went back to neopets then what if....). A main downside was that grouping was almost FORCED. There was hardly any viability in trying to play solo. Shit just fucking annihilated you. This game was focused on playing in groups and forming community. Which is great in a way, but sucks when you sit in party finder for 2 hours late at night as a lowly DPS just wanting to level up only to finally get a group and then promptly fall asleep and then you wake up 5 hours later dead and alone :')

This has accidentally turned into a game review, but fuck it. This was integral to my childhood and my first foray into real internet community as a young "girl"(A LOT more on this later). Did you ever play FFXI? Do you wanna just reminisce for hours with me? Do you remember the like 10 hour long Kirin fight? Did you ever go back? TALK TO ME ABOUT THIS GAME!!!

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After my PS2 hard drive got fried during a storm I reluctantly decided to move on from FFXI. I was a teenager now and it was time for something new! I found my way onto deviantART and my next era of the internet began

I started using deviantART at the suggestion of a friend of mine. I posted photography and fanart of whatever anime I was interested in at the time. I also had a fursona and would draw her often. She was a black cat that was also a demon and wore tripp pants and had green hair if that tells you anything about who I was at 13 lmfao. (I would post some of the old art but when I was in my mid twenties I deleted all of it from my computer during some sort of embarrassment episode oops)

While on dA I found some people my age that also drew fanart of series I liked and we became buds! We would talk on AIM and Skype and we started playing free to play MMOs together! This was my new community and some of them I'm still mutuals with to this day nearly 20 years later! 

Here's a list of some of the MMOs I remember playing during this time:

-Maplestory

-Flyff

-Dream of Mirror Online (DOMO my beloved....)

-Perfect World

-Aion

-Furcadia

-Gaia Online

-SecondLife

-Rift

-ToonTown

-Runescape

-Vindictus

-Wildstar

-Fiesta

-WoW (of course! More on this later!!)

I'm sure there were others but this is what I remember!!

It was a very fun time in my life. We would also use a program called OpenCanvas and draw together (or maybe it was more of a feature? I forget). We would RP and write fanfiction and just have fun. It was truly the most cringe freedom I have ever felt in my entire life. And honestly? I miss it sometimes!! I'm not particularly interested in those things anymore, but I definitely miss the feeling. 

It is absolutely such a bummer that dA has turned into a weird AI "art" website. I got on it recently just to see what it was like now and I got so bummed out. Is there a good place to share art anymore that isn't social media or making your own website? Legitimate question lmk thank u

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My final(?) early internet community era was *drum roll* ANOTHER MMO!!

I am (re)realizing that MMOs were a very integral part of my adolescence lmao

I remember wanting to play WoW sooooo bad when I was younger. My older brother had an account and his own computer and I would BEG him to let me play just a little bit. He would say no but sometimes when he would leave his game up I would go in and fuck around lolol

I finally got my own account and it was very similar to how FFXI was for me. I was obsessed. I played all the time and I found a guild and I started raiding and whenever I wasn't in school I was raiding. My very first character in vanilla WoW was a Night Elf Hunter and I would only tame different colored wolves because I was a silly lil edgy furry lol. During raiding and until I quit playing WoW, however, I played an Orc Resto Shaman :)

WoW was also the first time I used Ventrillo for raiding. It was very scary.

Readers, if you do not know, I am a trans man! I started testosterone when I was 25 so I was very much still "a young woman" during my time playing WoW. I loved MMOs and the internet because no one knew I was a girl. I was treated by default like just another nerdy guy playing the game and I loved the anonymity of everything. Obviously women should be allowed play games and be treated normally and everything. But in the mid/late 2000's it was extremely common to face harassment and sexual advances if you dared to be a woman playing a game online and you were Found Out. It sucked and it was honestly scary to indulge in your own hobbies sometimes. 

When I was prompted to use Ventrillo I was honestly scared out of my mind. They'd hear my voice. They'd know. I put it off as long as I could. I lied that my mic didn't work and just sit in voice chat without talking. I don't remember exactly how it came up, but finally it did. And it was okay! Mostly!

The people in my guild were wonderful. They treated me with respect and didn't make me uncomfortable and just wanted me to be a good healer and play the game with them. I appreciated it to no end. We started talking every day in vent. Not even for raiding! I was so happy.

One time while raiding someone wasn't able to make it so we had to fill it with a random person. We got on vent like usual and I'm talking and I get cut off with "oh my god is there a girl in here?" and immediately our leader goes "don't be weird dude." He did get weird. During the raid he would send me messages in-game asking to cyber with me. I just didn't reply. I froze up. I didn't want to say anything and ruin raid night. We needed this guy to have enough people! I didn't want to be the girl that was too sensitive and then get kicked out of the guild for not being able to hang! What a fucked up mindset to have at like 17 but it was ingrained. If you stood up for yourself in a space infested with men then you were the problem. You were outnumbered and you were dramatic and it's all your fault etc etc.

We finished the raid and I blocked the guy.

A week later it came up in vent and my guildmates were furious. And....not at me. They told me they wished I would have said something sooner and that they would've kicked the guy with no hesitation. That my comfort was more important than raid night.

We played WoW for many more years together.

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Conclusion(?)

I got the desire to talk about this internet nostalgia because the internet used to make me feel SO GOOD and now it just kind of bums me out. You scroll through social media website 1/2/3 and you'll see a recipe video and look at the comments and the author is told they're an idiot and to k*ll themselves because they made the recipe "wrong." If you want to raid in an MMO and don't already have your group of 24+ friends and know every single mechanic to a T you are berated. It feels impossible to post your thoughts without some random person spewing nuances and turning you into a bad guy or a bot claiming they can fix all your issues if you just click this link!! Sure you could private your accnt (on most sites....) but why should you have to if you don't want to! Maybe I want someone to see my stupid take and then reach out and then be able to make a friend like the good old days.

I can't remember the last time I found community online. It's heinous out there. And not very fun. I get anxiety making posts now, and I kind of hate sharing my art. We are in an era of judgement and negativity and not being "good enough." 

Sometimes this kind of nostalgia makes me miss old versions of myself. My teen self that was just stupid and silly and did whatever they wanted. 

I hope I can find them again.

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