a brief subjective internet history shall follow belowhttps://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1445631895698505728 …
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shlonglor, to the best of my knowledge, invented the concept of Smurfing on Kali, which was sort of a battlenet before battlenet his crew got too well known, so they would play with variations on "[X]Smurf" as handles to surprise and stomp randos
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1996: my mom gets tired of me asking for SimCity2000 and tells me that she'll get it for me if I read Moby Dick i read moby dick that summer and my mom has a week of peace we get a windows 95 machine with a pentium chip (I think 120MHz) for $1700
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the way you ordered computers and parts in this period (as far as I know) is you would get a giant catalogue called PCShopper that was entirely ads selling hardware. it was sad to see it get thinner and thinner, later my dad gave me a budget and let me pick out everything myself
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1997: my first MMO, Subspace amazing game. sort of like spaceship bumper cars where you also shoot bullets and bombs. could play in an arena with hundreds of others over dialup--really a feat
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i also make my first web page, crafting the html by hand host it on angelfire its about Final Fantasy 7, composed entirely of stolen jpgs and featuring a nauseating wavy blue background my mother gets a sense that a separate Internet culture exists and it makes her nervous
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also this year, my city is destroyed by a flood and i watch a live webcam of the river from 300 miles away it may not have been _that_ live; i think it uploaded a grainy still image every 5 minutes
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the ubiquity of video content today is jarring when i think about it the older web was a much stiller place. I wonder how the change has affected us
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1998: i am desperately lonely at middle school. at home i play Diablo and hang out in some high schoolers' chat trying to understand their drama i read cnn to try to understand what is happening in the balkans in real time. my interest in the world has been kindled by Durant
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im using GameFAQs at this point as I've found out about emulators. i start jrpgs with final fantasy i on Nesticle this sort of project was what internet misfits were up topic.twitter.com/nd0u5xF9se
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"want to play in the best-in-class emulator for NES games? just double click this deez nuts" this is the kind of incredible energy internet culture had at this pointpic.twitter.com/w8rXHbPSvq
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2001: i remember newgrounds videos from this era. alex chiu was a popular meme. he sold aura magnets that granted the wearer immortality napster had been broken on the wheel so i think i was using kazaa to get music you could also see more architecture creeping onto the web
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2003: shit is getting real. i think i open a facebook account. i know it wasnt launched until 04 but i distinctly remember having a fb account in fall '03 its mostly freshman using it to hook up did you know pokes still exist on facebook?
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i take my first programming class (c++ for scientists and engineers). it is also my last programming classhttps://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1289968183575642112 …
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2005: i have discovered blogs. i don't know how but they are hot shit. Instapundit and sullivan are big but matty, ezra klein, mcardle are rising stars. others whose names are lost to history. i discover marginal revolution around this time and also add an economics major
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2006: what's up with this robin hanson
@bloggingheads is new and hosts all the cool kids. the talks are actually fairly good, and totally amateurish. the format had barely been invented.Show this thread -
idea. iron law of media: a medium will begin bad, get better for a while as people figure it out, then get worse over time as people get better at exploiting its formatting properties for parasitic ends
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i don't remember when things started getting weird. facebook seemed omnipresent but not yet banal, livejournal tilted into tumblr at some point. i briefly had a twitter account in 08-10. it was a bunch of locals and we would simply coordinate where to get shitfaced after work
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the latter was silly but also represented the first time i was part of a community that substantially existed online it felt much more casual then, there werent all of the ingrained convoluted social conventions we have now and of course less functionality
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i wonder whatever happened to all of my old email accounts probably lost to time. i certainly dont have the credentials.
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email addresses seem the real form of Internet identity. everything else is built on that at this point changing an email address feels like a change of character
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End of conversation
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