Connect with us

Journal

Fumbling Towards Forty: The Internet

Published

on

Do you remember the first time you went on the internet?

Fumbling Towards Forty: Prologue

The Internet: In the Beginning

It wasn’t just the internet. I had no interest in computers as a kid. A computer seemed dumb to me. I had my Super Nintendo. I had a VCR. The computer was neither of these things. It couldn’t play movies and all the videogames looked inferior to my SNES. And even if they looked better, they were controlled by a keyboard and mouse, or the ugliest controller you could get your hands on. It made no sense to me to ever have any interest in when I was a kid.

I remember after church on a Sunday back when my dad and I would go we went to his friend Jordan’s who didn’t just have a top of the line computer but also had the internet. I remember it was around the start of the O.J. Simpson trial in late 1994, early 1995. I would have been nine turning 10. Why would I remember such a detail?

The first website Jordan showed my dad and I was called “Judge Ito ate my burrito” and it was a list of jokes related to the O.J. Simpson trial. This was my first experience of the internet. It had jokes.

The next thing I remembered on a time I went to visit Jordan was he went to a website where you could kill Barney the Dinosaur. It would have Barney and you would pick a weapon. Then a few seconds for the site to load. And then Barney would be bleeding because you shot or stabbed him. I was 10 years old seeing this. It’s okay I grew up fine. I wish I could find a picture of it now but Google search is now terrible.

(Side note, remember when we had like a dozen search engines to use? I used to use Metacrawler because they claimed they were using ALL OF THE SEARCH ENGINES to find your results. Back before high speed it would load a website telling you all of the sites it was using to find your result. Good times. I also used AltaVista, but also used AstaLaVista, which was for Warez and cracks and hacks.)

After those visits to Jordan and his super computer I still wasn’t hooked on the internet or computers. My dad didn’t get his own computer until around 1997. I do however remember prior to that my elementary school went to the local library and we had a day where we could all go on the internet there. A lot of kids were using it to see how they could get around the security filters to find naughty websites. I actually remember the website I went to. It was on Geocties and it was a site about Final Fantasy VI. It had animated GIFs of moogles and it’s why when my dad did get internet with a 28K modem one of the first things I wanted to do was build my own website.

I built a website in Geocities. I remember it had a lime green background. Later on I actually bought my own domain name and hosting and had a website where I used to post hot girls and say mean things about high school teachers. How I never got expelled I’ll never know.

The Internet: Wrestling

At one point we had Windows 3.1 and a 28K modem. All I could play was Klik and Play games people made because nothing else would run from stuff I could download with the modem. But then we got a better computer and got a 56K modem. The better computer had Windows 98. Now I could actually go to more websites. It was around that time I found The Other Arena for pro wrestling talk. I also found out about e-wrestling, but you can read about my experiences on that here.

The Other Arena is basically where I learned there was a bigger world in pro wrestling. I was 12, maybe 13, and there I was trying to have conversations with men and women in their 20s, 30s, even some in their 40s, who had already experienced pro wrestling for decades and had been talking about it forever, some had even been talking about it online for over a decade at that point. Bulletin board systems and such.

I was a silly child with silly opinions trying to swim around these sharks. The fact they never booted me out forever is either a testament to their patience or laziness. I learned more about pro wrestling from John D. Williams than maybe anyone. On more than one occasion “jdw” gave me a, “Now listen here son you don’t know shit” talk. One of which was when I thought around 2000 that Triple H was one of the best wrestlers alive. He gave me recommendations of matches and wrestlers to watch and basically sent me on my way. I could have just called him slurs (I was 15 and it was the year 2000, trust me, slurs were on the internet. I used them. I’m not proud of it, just the times) and vulgarities but instead I took the time to hunt down the matches he gave me. I used mIRC to find people who would let me download the matches from them. I watched tons of matches from his recommendations.

My love and preference for Toshiaki Kawada definitely comes from him.

It’s funny to talk about because here I am in 2024 and while I’m not on a message board I definitely still spend countless hours talking pro wrestling on Twitter and Discord. I was doing this when I was a teenager. And yet here I am, fumbling towards forty, and I’m still doing this.

The Internet: Girls

I think about the things I used to spend a ton of time on. I was a frequent user of picture rating websites like FaceTheJury. I had a Something Awful forums account and got banned a few times (thanks to Tomer Chen for all the times you paid for me to go back. A true pal) but at least I made a couple friends out of it. I did a podcast for a while I would rather not talk about. I was the founding editor of the wrestling department on Last Word on Sports.

Have I gained anything from my time on the internet for so long? I do type quite fast. When I took computer assisted reporting in college it made me realize I am very good at finding things online for people. It makes me seem smarter than I am just because I can find things to reference very quickly. At a speed which makes it seem like I remember all of this stuff. You got me. I’m a fraud. I just look it up real fast.

I have made a lot of friends. I’ve met people, a lot of people. I used to meet girls in my teens by hitchhiking or buying a train ticket. Leave early, meet up with them, and then just figure out my way home. Only once did I stay with a girl over night, and that’s because she already had her own apartment. She was cool.

I used to fall in love with these girls who lived far away from me. And yeah, I got catfished a few times. How can you not when you’ve been online this long? Does it mess with your expectations of women and relationships? Yeah, I can admit to that. I used to be in high school sitting by myself wondering why I didn’t like anyone near me while I had a dozen girls talking to me over AOL Instant Messenger.

And MSN Messenger.

And ICQ.

And Yahoo! Instant Messenger.

I was on all of them at one point or another. Jesus.

The Internet: Addiction

After this nice trip down memory lane it’s good to ask if I have an internet addiction.

Absolutely.

I fight with it all the time. The worst part is that it’s not like I can get away from it. I work a job that’s online in front of two monitors. If I ever stop doing that job it’ll be because I work for myself and if I work for myself I’m probably still in front of a computer. The writing I do on my website is likely what’s going to lead to what would be me being self employed and self sufficient.

At some point in my life, all that time on the internet manifested itself into a mutual agreed destruction of me. I’m on the internet too much but I can’t get off the internet because it’s the best way for me to make a living.

There’s definitely ways I want to cut down on my time on the internet and it usually starts with the dumb box we keep in our pockets. I am on my cell phone way too much to the point where it’s second nature to just have it in my hand at times. And I hate that. That’s something I want to eventually grind down to only using when necessary. I spend too much time on it before bed and too much time waking up.

As for sitting in front of a computer and just doing work? I used to do a lot of that. I don’t do it as much as I would like to get to doing it more. And that’s a tough thing to balance between internet addiction and internet work. Like I said, mutually agreed destruction.

The internet isn’t real. But it’s also real. I saw someone say that we used to go to the internet to escape the real world and now we go to the real world to escape the internet. Fuck off. For me the internet has barely changed. Twitter is just a giant message board where instead of sections and categories and various message boards, there’s just one post and we’re constantly posting on it. Discord is just a chat room service. Facebook is kind of like taking all of the websites and mashing them together but also adding an Instant Messenger to them. That’s all I see in these things.

I have a hard time saying if the internet is getting worse or better, or if there was a good time and a bad time. Things were certainly more secret before social media, where you had to find a lot of the bad stuff. It wasn’t pushed in front of you. Go ahead and create a Twitter account and follow absolutely nobody and see what the Twitter timeline pushes at you. So much is now paid to influence you. That stuff is scary, but I also think the secret stuff has a way of getting you as well.

When I was a teenager, especially high school age, I was really getting into secret societies and early Alex Jones Prison Planet stuff. Bohemian Grove videos. 9/11 conspiracies. All of that. I didn’t have someone push it on me. I found it myself. And then I found pick up artist guides and men’s rights activism bullshit. Even into my early 20s I was complaining about friend zones on Livejournals and was just feeding myself a lot of gross miscalulations of what it means to be a man and what it meant to attract women. The only reason I got out is because I had good friends. Women who respected me enough to educate me, and I wasn’t so far gone that I actually listened.

What I’m getting at is a lot of the things young people experience now? I experienced as well, and I didn’t have social media algorithms to get them to me. I found it myself, and I had to get out. So I don’t think things were better back in the day and they are not better now. They just are.

I do think the internet could use some returns to websites and private communities on message boards. Not because I’m nostalgic for it (I will forever have a website) but because I think we shouldn’t be shackled to just a few social media website sinks and instead have the community square and also our own little things. Maybe Discord provides that but I wouldn’t mind for something less connected to someone else’s network.

The Internet: Everybody! Everybody!

I guess I’ll end the only way I can. I still watch Homestar Runner almost every day. You have no idea how great it is to just throw a Strong Bad Email I’ve watched a hundred times on because it’s like six minutes of jokes that still pop me. It’s a great way to go point A to point B. “I can get the dishes done to email 182: Business trip” I’m so happy they still make one thing a year for us old people. Wait, I’m an old person now? Good god I just spent a trip down internet memory lane. I said I got online properly in 1997. That was 27 years ago!

Fumbling Towards Forty. Am I really losing the youth vote?

AWAW Aaron Wrotkowski 2024