Finn, Poe, and Rey stand on a cliff observing the ruins of the old Death Star, several kilometres out to sea.

The Old Web

I don’t have a copy of my Geocities site, or any of the incarnations of “Tederick’s Home Page” (as once it was known) that precede the millennium. None of that old blog material is posted online anymore, either; partly for Very Good Reasons* but mostly because transcoding it all would have been an enormous chore. In the 21st century my blog has been hand-coded HTML; a (slightly) more aggressive CSS-based, sub-PHP repository; a Movable Type database; a Tumblog; and I feel like I’m forgetting something.

*Perhaps a post for another time: you bet your ass there’s plenty of my 2000s web personality and real-life mindset that I am much more comfortable not having on the public record; or at least, having it a few Internet Archive searches away from findable. Yeeeeeeesh. Twentysomething me had some learning to do.

Now the blog is powered by WordPress, and dumping all of the above into WP is two interns and a grant more trouble than I can be arsed to bother with. But if I could somehow surmount my own discomfort with my evolution as a writer (and as a human being), I do allow that it would be something to see all of that material in a straight line; everything from “second-year film student Matt, posting about Star Trek: Voyager in a Geocities neighbourhood” to now. And also, that there would be some value in that, too, in the preservation of the internet as it once was, which is a thing that, far from being written in ink as many people like to quip, turns out to be as transient as nearly any electronic medium we’ve ever invented.

This piece reminded me of that. It’s about Ursula K. LeGuin’s similar chunk of the Old Web, similarly defunct, similarly coded in a non-future-friendly way, back when having an internet site was more of a hobbyish endeavour, a zine about one’s own life that one published mostly for the fun of publishing it.

I recall vividly a friend asking me, repeatedly and for years, why I posted a blog. What was the animus driving such a public narration of myself. (That particular friend had a hard time with the “why” of things, broadly, so I’m sure there was a legitimate bafflement driving the question.)

But I never really had an answer. Never had one years later when my psychiatrist started asking the same question — he was 70, and “a blog” (though I was not actively keeping one at the time) must have been equally if not more so baffling, albeit from a different direction — and, more importantly, he kept asking why I didn’t read the comments on my column at Screen Anarchy back in the day. Wasn’t that what it was for? To put my ideas in the public sphere and generate a return of conversation?

Little did he know, of course, re: reading the comments. But the actual answer (perhaps fortunately for me) has always been: I never wanted to read the comments. I never wanted to know what anybody thought, in response to anything I’d written; most days, honestly, I never wanted to know anyone had read any of it at all, even though I probably would have been equally, paradoxically sullen (and still am) if they do not. It all still happens. I get the occasional message from someone who has read something I wrote — and I will occasionally muster up the decency to post a link to one of these things on the social media platform of the hour, and get hearts and “yays!” back in return, confirming receipt — and the queasy feeling in the bowels returns, every time. What is that, I wonder? A discomfort with being perceived? Why make myself perceptable, then? My friend’s question, from the early days of my blog, remains relevant.

All I can say is that there is a way to organize my thoughts and my sense of my self that has always seemed to fit easily within this framework, along with a few others (Twitter, before it sucked) online. This was perhaps best exemplified by the home-grown, personal web site, coded by hand, with which I started; not this show-room floor I have now. That first site wasn’t just a blog; it was a repository of miniature fan sites (and some not so miniature) that I could use to articulate, to myself most of all, my own whimsy. A section of the page that catalogued every canonical appearance of the character Jasper on every episode of The Simpsons (until season 13, when I gave up)? Sure. A detailed — and sort of bananas — fan site for the Nazi interrogator character from Raiders of the Lost Ark, including a list of fun facts, the second of which was “he looks like my Uncle Paul”? You betcha. An entire legion of photos of customized Star Wars action figures, diligently designed and modeled and painted and photographed by hand? Gods, I wish I still had all of that.

I seem to be using the phrase “by hand” a lot in this post, and that’s really what it felt like, electronic though it was. It felt shopworn; things went wrong. It all felt fragile; precious. A piercingly digital era — mini-DV digital camcorders and pre-YouTube video streaming options — that somehow feels analogue in retrospect.

The internet was different then. We were five years out of “the information super-highway” branding, and five years away from Facebook and YouTube. We watched the first of the toxic fan shitstorms online, and the site that created it (and thought, relatively, nothing of it, because we were privileged idiots). I didn’t even use RSS feeds, although some of my readers did. I just went to a series of bookmarks — other blogs and personal pages that I enjoyed, some of which were by people I knew personally, most of which were not — and checked for updates. It was easy, and it was strange, and it was neighbourly. We were all figuring out the language, the etiquette. I pissed off some people and didn’t understand why, or they pissed me off for reasons that shouldn’t have mattered, and I held the grudge until I didn’t. I cold-emailed online mutuals and asked them if we were actually friends (we were!), and girlfriends would pore over my archives and ask me question about one-off comments I’d made four years before. Sometimes J*ss Wh*don rolled through his own message board just to stroke his own ego, or I’d go hide out on the AICN threads to be a girl where no one noticed or cared. The wild, wild west. Nothing connected to anything else except by choice. You chose to go there.