Missing blogging. And missing something else, too.
Checking back in over here because I miss older internet that at least kinda sorta functions the way it was intended. I miss some old friends that I don't really know how to reach anywhere other than tumblr.
Recently went checking on old websites that my friends and I made while in high school. We're Very Old People™ so our old websites were on REALLY old free hosting pages, like Geocities, Tripod, and Angelfire. All of those pages are gone now. And as it turns out, my old Angelfire page that I updated actually relatively regularly for about four years through high school only just recently poofed, as Angelfire disappeared not all that long ago in the grand scheme of things. I feel really dumb. I wish I had archived it. And even then that might not have helped because Angelfire requested all their pages be removed from archive.org.
The only good news is that a bunch of people who REALLY, REALLY, REALLY hate me archived it on other archive sites while attempting to document me only to mock me. Truth be told, in the end, they did me a service. Because my website when I was, oh, 16 years old-ish in the early 2000s was extraordinarily harmless. And it's worth keeping a history of those things.
I feel blue sometimes. I think about my friends from that period of time. I think about big plans we made, about how we were going to make a web comic together, how I was going to be one of the two main writers on it, and another friend was going to be the artist. But we were dumb kids and did dumb kid things. I remember I unintentionally hurt the artist friend's feelings. I started hanging out with theater kids after I joined theater, and I made her feel like I was embarrassed to be around my old friends. And then our dream of making a goofy sci-fi/fantasy web comic based on silly turn-based RPG tropes never came into existence.
Actually, it briefly did come into existence, through only the artist, who then started working on the idea solo. It really was nothing like what our group effort was supposed to be. And in the end, it sadly didn't get very far anyway. And I feel like a lot of things were not going so well for her at the time. And I hated that I was just one cog in that wheel. I hated that I let her down in quite a lot of ways. Even over 20 years later, I hang onto some of those early concepts for what we wanted to turn that web comic into, and I get really sad that they don't exist.
And so, every so often, I think about writing that old 20-plus-year-old idea. Is it a book? Is it my own web comic? I'm not really sure. But I think about what it was going to be when we were teenagers, and then I think about how I can implement those ideas into some better formed ones now that I'm an adult. And I want to draw those ideas, but... I'm not a particularly good artist. Once in a blue moon, I can knock out something halfway competent, or fun, or funny. But let's be real. That artist friend of mine, even when she was a teenager and before she went off to art school after high school, she was better back then than I am even right now. I think if I draw a comic, I will draw it out of necessity, not because I think I was ever anywhere close to as good as she was. Not by a million miles.
That third friend who was also part of the group and on the project, she and I still talk occasionally. We still follow each other on Bluesky. We still talk about some familiar things. A lot of things about her are really still familiar and the same. I don't know if my old friends think of me that way, that I'm still the same old me from over 20 years ago. But this other friend, I think she's still REALLY similar to what she was like all that time ago.
But that old artist friend, I'm less sure about. She and I have also once in a blue moon talked to each other, crossed paths in real life again at one point. I think she mostly decided that all the stuff in high school was long gone and not to be dwelled on. But it's funny, I dwell on it a lot. All these years later and I feel bad about it a lot, all the time. I guess it's because I am always longing for the project that we talked about coming into existence that never ended up happening. I really thought it could have been fun and special. And maybe now at our age it would be really juvenile and stupid. Yet despite that, I yearn to see the branch in the universe in which that creation among three nerdy teenage girls was allowed to live, and I hate that I'm in the universe where it doesn't. Even if it had ended up weird and cringy, I just wish it had lived. I just wish it had existed.
So I keep thinking of a version of the story where I can let it live and exist, and give those teenage girls from the early 2000s something that turned out to be real. I so badly want to write that. Even if it's bad, even if it sucks, even if the art is shit, I want it to exist. I feel like I owe it to those kids from back then to make it real.
It will probably have to be a little bit different than it was back then. The names will have to be a little different. The designs will have to be a little different. But still. I think somehow, with enough time--somehow, my old friends, who don't even know that I think about this so, so often--I want to make the world we imagined live and breathe.