Current mood:	late greats of the internet
Current music:	Feist- "So Sorry"

"Welcome to JORGE'S OFFICIAL PERSONAL WEBSITE THING"
Geocities, the web-hosting giants of the late-nineties responsible for a ridiculous amount of Hanson fan pages, is shutting down soon, effectively wiping a big chunk of internet history (and horrible animated gifs and oversized, multi-colored font) off the world wide web. I have to admit, I felt a tinge of nostalgia as I read the news. The very first few pages I frequented were hosted on Geocities. Sketchy-looking personal websites with enormous, blocky text and frames-- Frames! What a controversial concept. And they'd let you choose-- you can see this website with frames or without. I would always choose without-- the "standard-to-widescreen" fallacy.

I had a Geocities website. Shit, who didn't? And like everybody's, mine was sloppy and ridiculously colorful and had an enormously long and complicated URL. I remember the hours it took me to put together the most basic HTML code to get my Dragon Ball Z fansite up and running and gather the record-shattering 48 visits it eventually got (45 of which were probably my own). My super-high-speed 28k dial-up modem hard at work.

This all got me thinking about those days-- the dawn of my internet usage. The crazy innocence and wide-eyed sugarshot sense of wonder and astonishment of it all. I very distinctly remember my neighborhood friend showing me his new computer with internet connection. I remember him showing me a website where you could chat with people. Chat with people! Strangers from other countries! And they were all so interesting and had so many stories and were so interested in what I had to say! I remember thinking, "if I had one of these things, I'd be chatting with friendly strangers all day!".

When I finally did get my own internet access, I spent hours upon hours on those chat rooms. I made some good friends there on the topical rooms-- mostly anime-related. Dragon Ball was, of course, an obsession of mine at the time, so I sought out all I could find. I joined my first few mailing lists-- this girl, Sarah, from my hometown, had a Dragon Ball fanfiction website and introduced me to all her friends from places like the United States and Belgium, and they'd just exchange crazy e-mail messages about Dragon Ball every day. One day I actually met Sarah, effectively making her my first net-to-real-life contact.

It wasn't long after that I started losing interest in Dragon Ball and had an epiphany-- this internet thing is pretty anonymous, right? I could just lie about who I am. And so I started creating online personas and joining message boards and mailing lists as all these different people. Johnny, a 22 year old punk rocker from Syracuse, New York. Mike, a wealthy businessman in search for true love. Sue, a female asian-american weight-lifter. And I made many friends with many of those different personas. To this day, I still talk to some of them if I log onto my old AIM account-- small talk. "Yeah, man, I got married", "Yeah, dude, still jamming with the guys". I don't have it in me to let them know I've been lying to them for over ten years.

All these people I've accumulated and talked to and been over ten years. This blog will turn five years old in a couple of months. If it were to be wiped off the map like Geocities is about to be, I'd be pretty devastated. And sure, their Google caches may live on-- but that's a mere photograph of what once was, filled with unclickable links and broken pictures. It's sort of scary, in a way.

Now I want to find my old Geocities website, but for the life of me I can't remember the URL. Why the fuck did they have to make them so long and elaborate?