Late Night Thoughts (07/26)

Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you. It’s so weird, really, when you think about it. One day, you’re sitting around in your mid-20s thinking, “Man, life sure is weird”… And the next thing you know, You’re sitting around in your mid-30s wondering where the hell a decade went.

I mean, I guess it’s easy to see where some went. A year of quarantine, almost two if you want to get technical¹. Even then, I was filling my days with as much work as I possibly could. First, building things and helping to move hardware at the theater. Then starting up rehearsals for the first show I could get my hands on² just to keep myself busy.

That’s what it’s like, sometimes. I feel like a shark: The moment I stop moving, I’m going to drop dead in the water. For all I know, I’m already dead and just haunting these places for lack of anything better to do. It’s kind of grim and nihilistic, really, but I try not to think of it.

Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you.

I don’t really know what I set out to do with my life. Certainly, I’ve always had a calling towards programming and software development was one of my major talents growing up. I remember picking up a book from the elementary school library about programming in QBASIC, and then finding out that my father’s old work laptop had a QBASIC interpreter installed as part of the standard Windows suite. Ahh, Windows 3.1— Before the world knew what an Operating System should be. Just a GUI that you could exit by clicking “File \(\rightarrow\) Exit” and get straight into Command Prompt.

I remember playing some of my favorite games from that prompt: Rescue Rover being the one that stands out the most. cd \Games\Bubba and then type the command start to run. Who knew that, 27 years into the future I would be working in a terminal writing about working in a terminal to construct a post that I will send to production from a terminal?

My mother used to log into CompuServ forums and dial into niche BBSes as I got ready for bed. It’s absurd to think that, in all honesty, the beeps and hisses of a dialup modem were like a lullaby to me. The computer room was downstairs, directly under my childhood room, so the static and tones would echo up to me. Like a lot of people who came of age in the early internet era, I can recite and gesture along with the tones, hitting those sweeps and clicks like a secret handshake.

I still love that sweeping stutter after the static changes pitch even if I don’t know exactly what part of the standard it represents. I think it might be the probing signal after the DPSK burst. You know the sound: the one that sounds like Neo being pulled out of The Matrix?³

When I was in my early teens, I wanted my own website. I remember asking my dad how to set one up: it seemed so cool. And I also remember him asking me what I wanted it to be about. Being the nerd that I was, I said “anime” which, of course, prompted him to warn me: “I don’t know, some of that anime stuff can be pretty adult…”

Jokes on him, I’m currently feeding a large set of danbooru/gelbooru hentai into a VQGAN to see what sort of truly cursed horrors I can generate. Because, truly, I am a benevolent God. Not simply content with teaching a computer how to feel, and pretty accurately depict, despair… I’m driven to teach it how to share that emotion with the world.

I remember my friend showing me The Matrix for the first time. Back before we knew what we know now, before the world really started to fall to shit (or at least before we were old enough to recognize that for ourselves). Back before “trans” was part of the common vernacular, and before we could even consider presenting The Matrix as a story of the Wachowski’s personal joruney. Back when it was just a cool dystopian story about the cyberpunk future. More importantly, I remember falling in love with that movie⁴. It was so gritty, and techno-cool, and of course I wanted a long trench-coat. (which of course my father also had an opinion on the dangers of being a white loner teen at school in a trench-coat⁵).

But something about Neo asleep at his desk, and the terminal lighting up with a message… That’s the cyberpunk aesthetic I live for. Green terminal, blinking cursor, text only chat rooms… IRC-punk: If it’s not already a thing, I’m claiming it. Far better than the Johnny Mnemonic virtual-reality dystopia⁶, though I’ll take a happy medium and keep working on my Cyberpunk Bar VRChat world.

Around about the same time, I was a kid in the wild west of the internet. Where you’d never know if you were downloading “Zelda” by “System of a Down”⁷ or if it was going to be another “Linkin Park - In The End.mp3.exe” trap. Back when browsers could access your physical hardware⁸ and we didn’t know what sandboxing was, or why we should do it. Back when you could just log into a forum and hang out with complete strangers. Before facebook and SSO connected your real identity to the child on the other keyboard.

Honestly, it’s a little scary to think about now, as a 32 year old who has zero desire to talk to teenagers, what types of people they must’ve been on the other side of that forum post. Hell, I remember turning 13 and convincing some 31 year old woman to send me a lewd picture over AIM. In retrospect, totally not a cool thing for her to have done. Shit, how weird is it to think of these people as being in their 50s now. Or: how weird is it to stalk Facebook one day and find out that: the guy who used to be your best friend in the world is now married to the girl who was your first online girlfriend? Like, real-life married.

I mean, I guess it’d be weirder if we all hadn’t been cruising the same forums back then. So it’s not like they didn’t know each other, it’s just weird to think about how things like that actually happen in real life. But I’ve gotten off topic: the whole point was that there was an IRC chatroom I spent so much of my childhood on.

#digital-anime on the cyber2k.net server. I wonder if anyone reading this would have been there, or would have remembered me. LostintheMatrix, or LitM… It’s unlikely, but again: I did just mention how Exi and Luna got married. And I was talking about Damien earlier. And in some other post on here (I can’t remember where) I remembered Spreegem⁹. So maybe if I throw a couple more names in here, it’ll get picked up on a google search by anyone else remembering the good/bad old days. ChronoDesolator (who was a friend in my early adventures into the occult).

Eh, unlikely, but worth a shot.

Ah well, I’ve rambled so far off topic that I probably can’t find my way back, but there’s plenty of jumping off points in here should I decide to expand on any of the topics. That’s what I get for stream-of-consciousness writing at 2AM.