Not sure I’d want to moderate it, and I don’t think my instance allows random communities.

I tried to have blogs back in the day. People were not terribly interested, and the prospect of having to cultivate being-known so that anyone will see the thing I found unpleasant. It’s strange to think how many people are very driven to promote themselves. Self-promotion feels dirty, and writing for no one feels foolish.

I saw a television episode on Youtube once where a guy went back because there was the girl he didn’t get when he was around 17. She had been so built up with the glow of memory, but then seeing her again with adult eyes, she was like a kid to him. Pretty girl, but someone whose memory he could move on from now.

Maybe Back Then would be less of a nebulous, mysterious thing to think over if I had photos or video from back then. No photos or video? Must have been real horse-and-buggy days.

I was fascinated by Usenet, having grown up so isolated, but I was too scared to post. I was at university, and I think my biggest fear was that fellow students there would see my posts and take them as an opportunity to bully me.

I’m old enough to have experienced some of the analog days, but we were too rural and poor for me to participate online.

I read an article in some magazine back in the day where the author talked about using email, and it did sound so amazing. And then when I eventually had internet access, yeah, when I traded emails with someone in Italy, mind-blowing. I thought the internet would make everyone outgrow small-mindedness!

I suspect cloud storage would have sounded old-fashioned and "mainframe" at the time.

Ah, moving…there was a moment in my early teens when we could have moved, and I sometimes wonder how that could have opened up my life. Of course I didn’t know our finances and had little grasp of what was going on with my mother psychologically.

I haven’t seen it. I usually need a very strong reason to make myself watch something with Robin Williams in it, but I’m more open to it than seeing Jim Carrey, or especially Adam Sandler.

Been accumulating books from little free libraries but not started reading any. Brought my sourdough starter back to normal. Tried letting cinnamon rolls rise overnight. Looked into Mastodon but it doesn’t appeal to me at all.

Thank you for being welcoming.

Even though I was too poor and rural for internet services, I am old enough to remember the analog days, and this is very interesting what you're saying about the narrow perspective and then broadening it.

Like I remember the nightly national news on television and accepting it in the way of a kid who's bright but hasn't seen anything of the world very far from his house. Maybe the wider world seemed like something that happened only on television. Whatever Tom Brokaw said seemed like probably what was happening out there.

But I think I would have expected at least a Southern cop to fuck anyone over whom he didn't know, and we knew that cops liked to sit at the bottom of a hill with an unexpected speed limit and ticket the public all day.

I can remember being a little bit aware of adbusters in the late 90s (IIRC, they were trying to sell something called black spot sneakers, and I kind of suspected they were just being like any company except with different rhetoric), can remember seeing that there was some company called Loompanics (I think) that sold every kind of crazy book. I knew that alt.2600 existed, but I didn't really understand it.

But, beyond that, I don't think I recall the broadening as clearly as you do. There was probably a good bit of waking up that I didn't do until the 2000 election happened, saw how the people around me regarded it, etc.

I've never heard of Spin! I'll watch it now.

Lemmy’s format just kind of sucks for discussions and visibility. If you comment on a post from a year ago, you can expect that to not been seen by anyone ever.

Yes, that is very irritating.

The more classic forum format is better for discussions because replies bump the thread up to bring new attention to it.

Too bad they’re not very active, to the best of my knowledge.

Also a lot of people just don’t give a shit about random people’s random thoughts

Yeah, it’s true. I remember the stereotype of Livejournal, which might be before your time, of being teenage girls telling you what they had for lunch. They could be accused of tending toward narcissism. Me, when I want to communicate, sometimes it’s that I want to point something out, but sometimes it’s driven by a wish to socialize.

Thank you, that was careless of me. I intended to refer to before dial-up internet came along for ordinary people.

Thank you, I didn’t know about goodoffmychest or general.

Yes.

Hmm, I have had olive oil be a bit peppery…but I can get that from pepper… Sometimes people talk as if good olive oil is a life-changing experience, but… I think of the day when someone insisted to me that plain fat, like a hunk of fat from a piece of meat, was supposed to be tasty to chew and eat by itself intentionally. (He was enough older than me that he was giving me some dad attitude as if I were simply wrong because I was younger.) I’d never guessed someone would want to do that. But that was his taste perception somehow.

I don’t think I’ve ever perceived crayon smell.

Did you have to spend a lot of time fending off weird, dorky guys?

Tried a little isopropyl alcohol, and it doesn’t seem to have any effect. I’ll consider getting some goo gone.

Thanks!

I didn't really write what I meant in my mind. I meant before dial-up internet came to the public and they were using those other services.

I grew up in the rural US, and my family was acquainted with a family who lived in a neighboring state and had a summer home nearby.

They were so exotic, yes. Just looking at a car with a plate from a different state was a novelty. I wish I’d been bold enough to talk with them myself, but then again my mother probably would have discouraged it.

When I was first working, my officemate was from that state, and I was kind of impressed that he’d made the globe-trotting jet-setting move of coming to a whole other state. (No, I’d never been to another state myself at the time.)

I do remember the pre-internet days, but we were too poor and rural for me to buy a modem and dial into anything.

I always kind of wished I had a pen pal back then. I was so lonely. I was looking for clips from Big Blue Marble a while back (a children’s television show I just barely remembered seeing once or twice), and there was something about pen pals being part of the show, and it made me feel all over again like oh if I'd had a pen pal back then! Although my life was so dull I might have struggled with what to write about.

I read an article in some magazine where the author talked about using email, and it did sound just mind-blowing to have a larger world than your mother and your father and the television.