![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Hypnotized by the internet
Oct. 3rd, 2007 08:51 pmI've spent a fair bit of my sudden free time being hypnotized by the internet lately, and it is giving me intense nostalgia for being 16.
I was one of those 16 year olds who played Dungeons and Dragons, hung out on IRC channels, read lots of brooding Romantic poetry (fare thee well/and if forever/ still forever/fare thee well), mainlined genre novels as if they were a new kind of injectable drug, and spent an inordinate amount of time reading the nifty.org archives. Which I suspect was the 1990s queer equivalent of reading a lot of fanfic, though I'm not sure. I also spent a lot of time drinking tea and discussing philosophy, and a lot of time riding around in boys' cars while we listened to either techno or classic rock (they weren't my cars, or we would have been listening to some other kinds of music). And sitting in basements while boys played with electronics. That kind of thing. Standard nerd/geek of the 1990s really.
Anyway, I do need to take a deep breath and return to reality one of these days. Not that my normal reality is all that real, being mediated as it is by a constant stream of text (I read while I walk, I read while I eat, I read on the toilet.... almost the only time I'm not reading all day is while I drive to/from work). But I think I've been spending way too much time being pleasantly distracted by the drift of the internet and not enough time cleaning the house and working out. It's fall. I should be taking long walks and pretending to compose musicals or something. (I love to compose fake musicals... especially long aimless recitative stuff.) More analog, less digital! Record albums instead of YouTube, that sort of thing. We'll see how it goes.
I was one of those 16 year olds who played Dungeons and Dragons, hung out on IRC channels, read lots of brooding Romantic poetry (fare thee well/and if forever/ still forever/fare thee well), mainlined genre novels as if they were a new kind of injectable drug, and spent an inordinate amount of time reading the nifty.org archives. Which I suspect was the 1990s queer equivalent of reading a lot of fanfic, though I'm not sure. I also spent a lot of time drinking tea and discussing philosophy, and a lot of time riding around in boys' cars while we listened to either techno or classic rock (they weren't my cars, or we would have been listening to some other kinds of music). And sitting in basements while boys played with electronics. That kind of thing. Standard nerd/geek of the 1990s really.
Anyway, I do need to take a deep breath and return to reality one of these days. Not that my normal reality is all that real, being mediated as it is by a constant stream of text (I read while I walk, I read while I eat, I read on the toilet.... almost the only time I'm not reading all day is while I drive to/from work). But I think I've been spending way too much time being pleasantly distracted by the drift of the internet and not enough time cleaning the house and working out. It's fall. I should be taking long walks and pretending to compose musicals or something. (I love to compose fake musicals... especially long aimless recitative stuff.) More analog, less digital! Record albums instead of YouTube, that sort of thing. We'll see how it goes.
