having fun online
hi friends, long time no post. sorry for neglecting this newsletter for so long. i can’t promise not to do it again. in fact, i can promise i will!
one of my goals for 2026 is to be offline as much as possible and dramatically reduce the amount of time i spend looking at screens (outside of work, which is unavoidable for the time being).
i’ve been thinking a lot about how we have collectively normalized screen addiction to a disturbing degree. i told addie last week that when you see someone scrolling tiktok while driving, for example, it’s easy to think, “i’m not addicted to my phone, THAT person’s addicted to their phone” but i don’t know many people who are exempt from this. i’m not.
it’s normal to never think about or examine your relationship to technology and the internet, but i’m examining mine. i’m tired of feeling like my time, energy, and attention are being stolen from me. i want to spend those on other things.
in the past i’ve hesitated to unplug because i feared i’d never know what was going on if i wasn’t on social media, which has been somewhat true (as far as local events and happenings), but that’s a consequence i’m willing to accept in order to reclaim my attention span and all the space in my brain currently occupied by stan wars and dril tweets and the internet’s main characters over the years that i could use for literally anything else. if that sentence means nothing to you, congratulations.
i feel actively disgusted on a daily basis by the way social media is at this point designed to keep us angry and isolated and trick us into thinking we’re actually connecting with other people as we grow angrier and more isolated. i want to connect with the people i love and cherish consistently, not leave their messages to languish in the void. i want to stop thinking in shitposts (although i’m not sure that habit can ever be broken; the name of this newsletter is proof). when i die, i won’t die wishing i had consumed more content or posted more. i’m confident that i’ve done more than enough of that for this lifetime, in fact!
so: inspired by the most recent blindboy episode (in which he goes on a trip down memory lane about his own early experiences online), here is a brief history of my relationship to the internet that no one asked for. read if you want my lore.
neopets.com
in 2004, i was introduced to neopets by an elementary school classmate. i am convinced this was one of the top 10 most pivotal moments in my life because neopets ultimately:
- made me gay,
- made me emo,
- influenced my career (like many others, i was led to a career in the tech industry because of neopets), and
- got me hooked on the internet; more specifically, the thrill of chatting with strangers on the internet, which i’d consider my first taste of social media.
i spent most of my time on the message boards (specifically the avatar collector boards, for those familiar — who knows why that ended up being the place). i don’t know how i got to the message boards or who showed them to me, but i know i wasn’t supposed to be able to access them at age 10. lying about my age to get on the message boards is, in fact, the reason i can’t recover my account.
neopets was full of formative experiences, good and bad. it’s where i made my first internet friend, who i continue to be in and out of touch with to this day. it’s the first place a grown man was weird to me online. it’s where i first heard fall out boy and motion city soundtrack and — perhaps most importantly — non-binary icon hikaru utada. and it’s where i first learned to code, which then led me to myspace.
myspace/xanga
myspace was a brutal website. it’s where i bullied someone for the first and only time in my life, which, as i mentioned in my first-ever newsletter, cost me home computer privileges for a year — but, honestly, i was bullying someone who bullied me. does reverse-bullying exist? it’s also where i “dated” a catfish account that used a photo of alex evans (IYKYK).
my best friend crystal and i had a freewebs site where we shared myspace layouts and pixel art and AIM icons we’d made. it was called fizzlepop and it was exactly what you’d expect from two wannabe scene kids in suburban pennsylvania who listened to too much my chemical romance.
i started using xanga once i recovered computer privileges. up until recent years, i was never good at consistently keeping a journal, but i posted general angsty bullshit into the void on xanga near-daily. i tried livejournal, too, but only xanga really stuck.
AIM
does AIM count as social media? i guess it was a kind of social platform? anyway, i mostly wanted to say that my parents forbid me from using AIM. my dad was a software salesman who i now realize knew embarrassingly little about computers at the time and who had an enduring belief that i’d immediately blow up the computer with viruses if allowed to chat over AIM. i had an account that i’d log into at my friends’ houses and later discovered the browser version of the app to use at home. my parents eventually learned that i unfortunately was always going to do what i wanted to do. all in all i probably spent more time making custom icons and pixel art for AIM and posting them on iconator.com (anyone?) than i did actually chatting on AIM.
tumblr
i swear being on tumblr from 2010-2013 was the last time i actually had fun on the internet. i’m still friends with people i originally met on tumblr. i was never part of fandom tumblr or “aesthetic” tumblr although sometimes i wish i was just for the bit. i posted music (including my own! what a time!) and talked about my life and ran a photo blog where i shared mostly film photos i took at shows.
my then-bandmates and i also ran a very silly tumblr account called doublespeedemosongs that weirdly ended up connecting me with many friends and whose premise was ganked by a certain emo band for profit (again, IYKYK). i thought it still existed but i just looked it up and it appears to now be home to a blog full of “god images” so… god bless.
i left twitter in 2022 after years of being a very active tweeter. i intended to take just a month-long break from the app, but the month came and went without notice. i was offline for two or three months before i even thought about it again. i didn’t feel like i’d missed anything, and i was incredulous that i’d ever actually wasted emotional energy and time being upset about something someone said on twitter dot com. that i’d ever let it spill over into my daily life! imagine!
after gaining a bunch of followers it wasn’t really fun anymore. i missed joking around with the tiny audience comprised only of people i knew who i could count on to understand my tone and general sense of humor. sometimes i miss having an outlet for my silly little jokes, but it was easy to leave, and i’m glad i got out before the whole X rebrand.
instantgraham
i became a more active instagram user upon my exit from twitter. i tried to joke around there but jokes landed differently there and that made it extremely unfun.
from the end of 2023 into 2024, i was glued to it. i could never have imagined the casual violence of witnessing a live-streamed genocide between ads and photos of vacations, parties, the fucking eras tour, etc. every day i’d wake up and see the worst thing i’d ever seen. every day a new horror somehow worse than the last sandwiched between smug white influencers trying to sell me something i don’t need. i believed i had a duty to witness. i still believe that, too, but i also had to learn that doomscrolling endlessly through violence and disaster and sobbing alone in my house every day is not the same as intentional witnessing.
my therapist suggested that i dedicate intentional time to engaging with the reality of those horrors and that perhaps if i stopped looking at my phone first thing in the morning i would feel less helpless. she was right. i also remember visiting a public mourning site for victims in gaza for the first time and feeling the slightest shift in my despair in the company of other people who were equally devastated and grief-stricken and at a loss for what to do. i miss having that collective outlet for public mourning and displays of grief. i’m still grieving and i allow myself to feel it, but i’m not completely and hopelessly rendered useless by it.
while i no longer remain glued to my phone in the same way, instagram remains an attention sapper, a Doom Machine, a window into the lives of people i don’t actually know and shouldn’t care about, and a source of overwhelming stress as it makes me overwhelmingly available to everyone i’ve ever known in my life and makes me feel obligated to Perform a specific version of myself. (two things in this life i truly hate: obligation and inauthenticity.)
on/offline
i have a complicated relationship to the internet — like most people raised alongside or on it, i bet.
it’s a crucial social space for disabled people, especially in the pandemic era, but it can be so unbelievably toxic in ways i can’t even begin to get into. when you’re chronically online enough and feeling isolated and marginalized in various ways (all of them valid and real and amplified by the algorithm™️), it’s easy to fall into a combative bad faith inventing-new-guys-to-be-mad-at mindset. this is absolutely something i fell prey to in my twitter era and i’m glad i can acknowledge and reflect on it from a different place now.
before i sign off i’d like to offer honorable mentions to omegle, where i saw many things i never should have seen as a teenage “girl” and which never should have been allowed to exist, to vine (RIP), the funniest ever app which i might still be on if it continued to exist, and to email, which is the future.
in conclusion:
now i’m going to touch grass!! xoxo