If you were a kid at school, you are probably hoping that your parents drive you home at a speedy rate, as if they are a Beaver Creek Airport Car Service. When you reach home, you quickly take off your school uniform, have a shower, eat, and sit on the chair to turn on your computer.
The Internet is waiting for you, and you feel more impatient as Windows XP greets you on the screen of your monitor.
That was how I likely felt in 2008, and I was only in sixth grade at primary school. The following recalls will be based on what I remember so far, and I may not give out too much details besides browsing memes, news and so on, but just significant enough to develop my character.
Listen to the voice of a nostalgic netizen.
2008-2009
I actually started using the computer in 2007, but only to play games. It wasn’t until 2008 that I actually surfed the Internet by myself, and the child that was YouTube defined my first experience. All I did was watch a ton of ghost videos thanks to my older brother, and though some were too scary to watch, I still had a blast.
That same year, I was introduced to online flash games, and I played some repetitively. Except for Bloxorz and an official Nickelodeon online game where you play as Spongebob preparing Krabby Patties, I don’t exactly remember what else I played. But I do remember Stickpage.com.
Stickpage roped my interests when I watched from ghost or weird videos to stick animations in YouTube. They were the bomb, and were one of my favorite time wasters in the Internet. They were also the first instances where I was exposed to adult and edgy humor.
I didn’t understand some, but I still got a kick out of it. Stickpage also has stick animations and games, and I played them religiously.
There was also another stick figure website, but it was mainly geared for adults due to swearing and violence. This was StickDeath, and sadly the website was no longer active. You can still find some of their animations and playthroughs of their games in YouTube or archive.org, but it was sad to see it gone.
Speaking of mature content, I don’t think I am surprised to remember how many I stumbled upon them as a kid before I moved out to my current home at the end of 2009.
You have Happy Tree Friends, an online animation series that looks like a kid’s cartoon but is basically Final Destination with cute cartoon animals. As a result, you have accidents (or murders) and a box of gore, both defying the laws of reality for the sake of entertaining ultraviolence.
There was also extreme metal music, especially metalcore, which I headbanged to but didn’t really get into heavy metal music until my middle school years.
The last months of 2008 and the entirety of 2009 was when the Internet became my lifeline. I used to have a YouTube channel to make stupid, poorly animated or edited stick figure animations to join the fad. Now it was deleted, which I don’t know if it is still a good thing to do.
I may feel nostalgic, but cringe would also wait for me if I hadn’t deleted my own channel in the late 2010s.
Besides browsing YouTube, I also got into MySpace. I didn’t have an account but my cousins, who were living with my family at the time, used to browse MySpace often. The self created pages, the emo songs and imagery, many of those define MySpace in the late 2000s.
If you are wondering whether you can explore old MySpace again, there is a treat for you. In 2020, a website project called Spacehey was created to capture the feeling, and it functions as an actual social media website too. Now you can recreate your edgy, MySpace phase in the site. Have fun.
The 2010s
2010 was the day when I started playing PC games, as well as learning how to pirate them. It was also the year when I truly got into heavy metal thanks to Iron Maiden’s The Trooper. They remain one of my favorite bands of all time, and I cannot imagine what other band would rope me into heavy metal music.
Metal music also convinced me to learn to play a guitar, and after mastering the basics, I got my own Ibanez and an acoustic to play with. Although nowadays I listen to a variety of genres, metal is still one of my “staples” in terms of musical taste.
2011 was the year I used Facebook, and would continue to do so until 2015. I also no longer found ghosts as scary as I thought thanks to creepypastas. Creepypastas in its early days were the best if you want to spook yourself, and I was terrified of them.
I also got into anime starting with “Hayate The Combat Butler” in Animax, and there, my long life interest in anime sprouted. In my teen and diploma years, I was a total weeb and thought that Japan was the best country ever.
In later years, I thought wiser, and also found that the 80s and 90s OVA anime look much more attractive, something about the detailed drawings and use of colors that built their old aesthetic charm. Watching OVAs is also an equivalent to B-movies, so don’t take all of them seriously and just have fun.
Besides, the most notable development in 2012 is that I also got into My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. 2010 to 2013 were what I considered the brony fandom’s golden years, and 2012 was its peak. I didn’t have the words to express what made the show so attractive, but I did watch the first few seasons.
The show finished in 2019, and now MLP is in the fifth generation, this time in CGI. The fandom is still alive, though I hadn’t caught up full with it, save for some clips. I got to know the new five main characters as a start.
Fast forward to my college years, the Internet became more streamlined than ever thanks to smartphones. With the Internet in my hands, I can browse it anytime I want.
After deleting Facebook, I moved on to Reddit and have been stuck there since. 4chan is also my go-to place because if you are lucky, you get to see anons making threads that you will laugh at like an idiot, no matter how toxic the boards are.
The Internet is always a place of sunshine and rainbows and at the same time, a dangerous landmine. One moment you are seeing funny memes, and the next you are looking into the grim reality. Wars. Dystopian moments like riots. Diseases. Crimes.
They can make you lose faith in humanity, and during my depression period, I did at one point. The Internet convinced me that everything in the world sucked and it’d be better if the nukes destroyed us all.
Thankfully, I got over that thought as I realized that there is always light in the tunnel, and it is just as plentiful as the darkness. I shouldn’t dwell in both for too long, for I can enjoy the wonders of life, yet I must be aware of its misery and exercise caution so I do not accidentally fall into the darkness and be trapped in it, if you catch my drift.
In other words, life sucks, but deal with it and keep pushing. What is special about humanity is that no matter how much we have to suffer, we still endure and make progress anyway, and now here we are, still breathing and thriving.
It is our perseverance that pushes us to move forward to the present, and we know that no matter the odds, we can make it, even when many unfortunately do not.
