its 4am on xmas eve and im on my stupid little phone remembering roleplaying forums. remembering a time when the internet used to be a place you could hang out. i had less insomnia then, but i stayed up into the wee hours of the nights on those so maybe it wasnt that different after all… and tumblr is really not a replacement for forums- forums used to be a PLACE. sure you felt the same serotonin boost when someone responded to your post but it was because they were engaging with what you said and responding. it wasn’t the hollow like/reblog/retweet/comment shallow type of engagement; someone had to put in work. and if it was a roleplaying board which, for me it wasn’t, that meant they were probably responding in character, furthering the plot… forums used to be a place, literally, a bunch of boards that were places within the world you built, and then maybe a couple OOC boards… you could advertise your world to get players on a more active hub where people went to find such things, another forum, and you could get other resources even, templates and graphics… i learned how to use photoshop in those days, and the skill people churned out back then was crazy… i wonder if those people are in advertising, or are digital artists now… and the writers! the writing.. we all wrote paragraphs and paragraphs of the stuff, building our worlds and characters… to be fair, lots of horrible writers. lots of terrible writing. we were all teenagers. but i hope some of us still are writing.. i often wonder what happened to the people i used to be on some of these boards with. cus you’d get a group, yknow, you’d have a group you vibed with, whose writing and characters you liked, and you’d travel the net, the forums, the boards, with them same 2-3 people.. im still friends with one of those people, like friends the way you are on instagram, heart reacting to stories and liking their posts.. but the internet is so different now. i don’t really know her anymore and we don’t really talk either. i used to chat with folks on msn live or AIM but those don’t really work either. chats like that went the way of boards. it was all swallowed up by social media, and its not the same. social media isnt the internet, not like it was. facebook, instagram, twitter, bluesky.. these are all places where you either know everyone and its some kind of weird pageant to prove how cute and cool and awesome your life is now, or a pvp zone where you fight a bunch of random nazis (bc that’s what twitter is now and to be fair frankly always has been) or hope that enough people care about your shitpost that you get enough serotonin to feel good about yourself for a brief moment. and tumblr.. well its not really much different, though tumblr and discord at least try to be some amalgamation of what the internet used to be, but with these new annoying qualities. and the spam! everywhere is spam! spam messages, spam accounts, spam spam spam…. boards didn’t have that kind of spam. boards were, or could be, a quiet place, a place you could hang out. that internet is dead now though.
turnnoffyourmind
kianamaiart
theartofmadeline
areudirty
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