it's fascinating to me how there can be huge difference of experience even within a generation. Like I'm a millennial and i was definitely a tech/nerd kid with pretty much unfettered access to the early internet (my dad was really into tech kind of early so maybe that makes me a little bit of an anomaly but my partner's parents definitely weren't tech people and he had a similar experience). So it was interesting to listen to this podcast about enya and have other millennials say things like "oh it was the 90s so we couldn't download music yet". and i'm sitting here like, "maybe for you, but i was sitting tidy on my absolute HOARD of midi files" (most of which were enya or clannad songs tbqh like i remember "lothlorien" and "bard dance" being absolute gets) . Like what else would you have as the background music in your geocities page?!? also sometimes i'd just sit around and listen to them, tinny sound quality be damned, i was a happy little dragon*. we were all so proud of ourselves when we figured out how to embed those midi players so you couldn't see them when you loaded into the page (which could be a little bit of a curse if you chose your bg music poorly so it got annoying on loop and it could not be actively stopped by the end user) . i'm sure part of it is privilege/access (my homelife kinda sucked but my parents did give me pretty free access to tech things so i was able to escape into fantasy worlds) and the ability to connect to the internet for sure- that podcast has an irish host so their experience is probably a little different from mine in the US but still. it's interesting to hear from i guess? more mainstream millennials who apparently weren't trying to get their grubby little hands on every bit of code to improve their dragons of pern/petz fanpage so they could be one of the "cool" kids...
as a further aside, sentimental garbage is generally pretty enjoyable and i rec it (the host has the most infectious laugh i've ever heard, i think i might like it partially just for her cackle) but i really disagree with the guest in the enya episode's that enya is only music to fall asleep to (i definitely spent many hours drawing to it). I also appreciate that enya just used her money to be elusive and buy a castle w/her cats , like wish more successful artists would do this instead of being public shitheads on social media/etc, like ideally they'd not be shitty humans and do good with their fame but the neutral quiet enya option is always open to you.
*tbh i think the early days of the internet were kind of formative to my habits, like i absolutely love assembling a library of cool things and the early internet was very much like that where you'd need to assemble a bunch of resources to piece together your cool geocities page (and later your own website that you'd hand coded in html. and there was a whole aspect to creating a library of knowledge you learned from other users like css/javascript to get a cool looking cursor or a cool fire effect. Which I realize seems cringe-y now but was the hotness at the time lol). the evolution of the geocities fan ring pages was livejournal and it was the same sort of things but with better music quality files, etc (tho there was a less of a drive towards displaying your individuality as a person with how your page looked since it was more like tumblr where a lot of the backend was done alread) . i'm still like this with fonts and brushes. def miss the sense of community those sites gave me tho (you get a bit here on tumblr still but it's def not the same intensity)
