i've posted before about growing up with dial-up internet. something i feel that has been lost in the conversation about how slow it was to use is how much you had to want it, when it comes to what content you were going to seek out online. sure, plenty of people (me included) spent hours letting pages they didn't care about slowly load bullshit as they waited, but in general, it was such a timesink that you had to be at least invested in the idea of wasting time if you wanted to 'mindlessly scroll'.

there were lots of things i thought were worth my time back then: hannibal x clarice mvs set to tatu songs. the world of parle productions. terrible naruto fanfiction (not linking for that one, the examples are numerous and you can seek them out yourselves). one place i spent a lot of time was on the lolita side of the internet.

i was never a lolita myself (poor, fat, living in the canadian countryside, the idea of figuring out a shopping service a nightmare to me), but i was obsessed. i think that part of 'healing my inner child' may at some point result in me buying a dress. i owned (and still own + collect) issues of the gothic & lolita bible, both english and japanese, i read the egl livejournal threads, behind the bows, and when i found the blog of australian former lolita milkyfawn i fell head over heels.

her blog is still up, and reading it is a good look into blogging in the 2010s. i spent hours, probably, reading her blog, waiting patiently as the full-size photos loaded so i could admire her co-ords in all their glory. her leaving lolita was a personal tragedy for me, matched only by the deletion of the youtube channel of fashion + thrifting vlogger curbside fashion. (if anyone has archives of the curbside fashion videos i would love to see them).

my lost media obsession isn't some spooky kids tv show episode, it's the videos of the twenty-somethings i wanted to be when i was fourteen. i'm older now than either milkyfawn or curbside fashion were when they left their respective parts of the internet. i don't begrudge them leaving, but i miss them.

in some ways the thing of growing up with youtubers as the people you look up to is that there are two ways that turns out: they become extremely famous and begin living a life far beyond what you can imagine ever finding for yourself (zoella, dan and phil, charlieissocoollike), or they quit, leave while they still have a chance.

in that case, perhaps 'former youtuber' is a bit of a scarlet letter i'm branding these two with. i don't mean it to be; in the same way i'm extremely glad whenever i see the 'retired actress' phrase in the cameron diaz wikipedia entry (i like charlie's angels a normal amount and am not attracted to both drew barrymore and tom green), 'retired/former youtuber' is a good sign to me. it can be a phase, something you pick up and put down, even if during it the passion and effort was entirely real. nothing is all or nothing.

i'm prone to get nostalgic over stupid, little things, but a good kind of nostalgia. the kind where i come out the other side with a bit more self-knowledge, perhaps a bit kinder generally. this blog post was intended to be a 'damn i miss milkyfawn' entry and now it's become whatever the hell this is.

i think the fact is, writing to no one in a format this simple (staring down the html window makes it even a simpler interface than that of blogspot back in the 2010s) made me think about the bloggers of my teenage years and early adulthood, how things have changed. how places like neocities are helping to keep those same things afloat. sure i could put all of these thoughts on tumblr but the posts there do have a character limit. i personally have yet to find it but i'm sure it exists.

and moreover, while i don't have a lot of followers there, i have some. and the site is still community-facing enough that things can get commented on while still in their infancy. posts sometimes arrive premature, needing a little more milk and honey to grow into good, strong, wholehearted opinions. posts are almost always first drafts, and we're just sending them out into the world to be seen and critqued by everyone in that state. it's the most insane way to approach writing just about anything, to be honest.

so this space, this space that is more secluded, not a walled garden but a park on the outskirts of town, is more comfortable. and in this way, familiar. and i can say and write the things here that i wish i had been able to write as a teenager so scared of their own shadow that baring any part of the human soul was a harrowing concept. i've been writing things on the internet in some form or another for over a decade, and this has brought me right back to where i was back then. only now, the internet loads things a little bit faster.