Jul/072
I are huge exhibitionist nerd
Today I want to talk about how old school blogger I am. Although, a few years ago, I never would've referred to myself as a "blogger". I kept an online journal. Blogs were for losers who couldn't stop linking to articles in the New York Times because they were so boringI ; online journals were about our LIVES. So fascinating, we had to upload them for others to read.
Anyway, despite the fact that you see three posts here, I have a dark history with documenting my life on the Internet for strangers to read. It is the most stable, consistent thing in my life and every time I have tried to get away from it, I come back, even when it's in the form of "restaurant reviews" on Yelp.
So, let's take a trip! I don't know where my "archives" are (ie, a CD I burned a few years ago) but thankfully, I have Archive.org to help!
1. /SoHo/Studios/2058
Ah, Geocities. The first! The way Geocities assigned addresses was by putting you in neighborhoods and of course, I picked SoHo. Although why I picked a studio instead of a loft - I will never know. This was 1997. I started writing because I went on a date with this guy who told me he didn't like me the next day. Vincent Bellecour, you are a dickless motherfucker.
2. /members.xoom.com/strbybrn
My little online journal grew, so I moved it to this site. Nothing on archive.org except a re-direct page. that one i'll have to dig up because its where my stuff lived during my junior year of high school and it has some hilarious melodrama involving this fool. And you can see how much of a huge nerd I was about the debate team. My finest moment? When an opposing team's coach said I should "be on Law & Order". Damn right!
3. /members.xoom.com/dilatory
A crucial part of the online journal experience is starting to feel suffocated by your audience and feeling the need to go elsewhere. I think the real reason is I was reeling from the fact that Stefan (fool linked above) totally broke my little 16 year old heart and I didn't have enough money to get a haircut. Most of those links don't work except for the links page, where you can laugh at all of the corny webrings I was part of. I remember how important that stuff was to me, to the Yelpers, being rejected for a webring was akin to having someone delete your compliment. It STUNG!
4. oberlin.edu/~md
When I got to college, I made the extraordinarily stupid mistake of hosting my journal on my college server. My roommates (3 of them) hated the fact that I wrote about them online and they had a "Real World" style house meeting with me and one of my roommates said I was SLANDERING her. So, because I am a respectful and nice person, I basically stopped speaking to them for the rest of the semester and stopped eating lunch with them, which is the biggest insult you can give a college freshman, so needless to say, we did not keep in touch.
I try not to discuss other people in my online writing too much because of that incident although I doubt it would matter too much now. Fuck, 90% of Yelp would probably be deleted if you weren't allowed to discuss other users in your review. But, that was 2000 and "blogging" (or online journalling) wasn't something anybody did except huge nerds like me. I bet all those bitches have active myspace blogs right now, slandering up a storm.
5. wannabejournals.com/~valency
So, at this point, I had to move my journal somewhere. This was the year 2000 and the free server hey day of xoom.com & geocities was essentially done. My friend Anna had purchased a domain and offered to host me on it, which was awesome but I was really busy and not updating that much so she would give me weird guilt trips about not writing in my journal and then I just didn't pay. I don't need that kind of pressure!
6. nothingfeelsgood.org
I had my own domain for a while. That was fun. Archive.org has a pretty good capture of the stuff I wrote on this site, so I'm just going to link to it and let you play there. I started using livejournal in 2001 and continued to use it until the end of last year.
What I haven't mentioned is during the entire time I've had these various sites, I always had "side projects". In high school, I had these crazy angsty entirely separate websites with tons of horrific poetry and in one case, black and white photography. In college, I was totally obsessed with email, so I would make little websites consisting of snippets from my outbox. It was always for things I wanted to say, but just didn't feel like writing in my main site, because of the people who were reading or it was just..separate. It never occured to me to just keep it offline, the answer was always another site, another journal.
So what I'm saying is I can' t express myself without the Internet. What of it?