me in 1987 - star trek the next generation RULES, this show is doing things i've never imagined, i love it
a bunch of wierd nerds for the last 30 years - wow s1 of tng is ROUGH compared to the later show
me for 30 years without regular access to rewatch the older episodes - well i have no reason to doubt them, i was six when farpoint aired
me now, going back and loving s1+2 for how fkn WIERD they are compared to how formal the structure of the later seasons became - man what the hell, i was right the first time, this absolutely rules
i'm still trying to refind a goncharov edit i saw years ago where someone recut that japanese trailer to tick tock by kesha, unexpected song choice but it meshed shockingly well with all the clock imagery and the inherent fatalism of goncharov's story
someone did another one to clocks by coldplay and it was maybe too obvious, kesha's nihilistic party girl vibe somehow captured the goncharov mood better than andrey brooding to melancholy piano riffs
thinking today about all the social media sites i have lost over the years
2018/9 to today - twitter
cause of death - a robber baron having a midlife crisis, or maybe a multi level marketing scheme of authoritarians aligning to take down a protest hub
what we lost - a reliable, expansive feed of traditional Wierd Internet, breaking news, esoteric discourse, and minor celebrities who might actually follow you if you had a good bit of humor or outrage go a bit viral
2010 to 2018? - instagram
cause of death - facebook buyout, the algorithm, monetization
what we lost - started as a nice way to share pictures, then it became very difficult to see your actual friends pictures under all the Content, then they pivoted to video (stories aka snapchats), then they pivoted to video AGAIN (reels aka tiktoks), now they've somehow pivoted to video YET AGAIN and buried your friends reels under an avalanche of reposted tiktok Content, if they havent all been shadowbanned anyways for only posting pictures
2008 to 2018/9 - tumblr
cause of death - yahoo, digital gentrification, a legitimate need to clean out all the csm that went really badly and ended up breaking everyone's trust
what we lost - a full decade of community building of all the quirky independent artisinal discourse this site became known (and then maligned) for, leading to the last three years of twitter users whinging endlessly about tumblr bs while i'm all "why are you booing us, we're right!" bc this is where we were radicalized and twitter is where trump happened
2000? to 2015? - facebook
cause of death - nazi apologia, maga regulatory capture, broken ass algorithm, pivot to video, "it's meta now", etc etc
what we lost - it started as a fun simple way to keep up with your family, and friends from hs and college and old jobs, and to share cat photos and baby photos. it ended up as a radicalization vector for turning your grandparents into far right trolls.
2003ish to 2005ish - my movie critic friend luke's web forum on his personal site
cause of death - actually i don't remember, it might still be there, oops. but probably hosting fees vs just moving to facebook
what we lost - a fun little community of luke, me and some of his other internet friends, some of his irl friends, and his cool irish uncle, plus random angry strangers, just talking mostly positively about movies. it was a good vibe, felt like working at the movie theatre again
1999? to 2002? - killingmachines
cause of death - hosted on a server in my brother's office, which died and killed the archive and also nuked the code, which, will definitely happen to someone's mastodon instance in the next 3-6mos, oops
what we lost - a budding community of us and our friends and also a bunch of early internet randos i never regained contact with but still remember fondly to this day
1999 to 2001ish - the raving toy maniac "toy buzz" forums on toymania dot com
cause of death - hosting fees, the internet changed, my group had already aged out like two message board generations ago as we graduated hs, etc
what we lost - being yelled at for going off-topic unless we were hiding our conversations in replies to old posts way down the board, a community of like minded toy nerds who absolutely believed that scalpers were an organized cartel ruining the hobby for everyone else, the naivete of the late 90s dotcom era, getting to watch week old posts and reply chains slowly disintegrate as they fell off the bottom of the page, getting to append NT for no text to posts where you put your whole short reply in the post title so no one needed to click through to that post on slow-ass dial up connections. but also, the pure anticipation we all felt for the star wars prequels in the summer of 1999 when all we had was a trailer, a promise, and a MOUNTAIN of merch on the way
1995 to 1999 - email
cause of death - too much god damn email
what we lost - a manageable amount of primarily non-spam email. 95% of what email used to be is just what facebook became, and twitter perfected it, becoming what email could have always been but never got to
