Being someone who has a particular neuro-proclivity to recall and remember a lot of things from the past, I often get sucked into these member-black-holes of things long past. Unlike most people though, I have a fairly well-documented log of much of the past ~twenty years through writing website blogs in my early websites, Livejournal, WP blogs, and social media, namely Facebook and Twitter. It’s probably not enough for a Dyson Sphere to reconstruct my psyche long after I am gone, but it helps fill in a lot of the gaps in my memory that tend to be dampened by my AD4K. Despite that, there are some missing holes in that archive that were lost when my primary machine’s HDDs died in 2006 and I did not have good backups. The plus side is that I lost most of anything related to my ex and old friend group from that time, but the minus is I lost much of the photos I took from our IRC con gatherings at Otakon and ACen.

This latest round of the members comes from a Discord server I am part of along with a handful of other Aniverse IRC folks. As best as I can tell, I joined Aniverse IRC for #megatokyo and its off-shoot, #rafters, sometime around the fall of 2001. I would have been a senior in high school at the time, roughly a year after my parents divorced, and two years after we had moved from the midwest to the northeast. Much of my writing, journals, blog and news posts, and other media at the time was highly chaotic, and very deep in what would be the cringe to today’s kids. Teenage angst, a lot of delusions, and being lost deep in the anime and gaming sauce. I was most certainly crutching on online spaces at the time because my real life spaces were dismal and falling apart. I had a group of friends I started hanging out with at the time, all members of the same Japanese club in high school, but as record seems to suggest, the “IRC Crew” came first.

Iterating over all these names, and the names of so many others, invokes various memories from that time. Most were uneventful, as most conversations and transactions were banal, probably about anime or gaming, or of some trivial life nature. But others got into the mud sometimes. To this day I often question how I got into arguments over the internet with basically strangers, but it did happen a few times. One of the more fascinating things about this era of communication was that apart from IRC and perhaps AOL or Yahoo chat rooms, communication was very decentralized. AOL/AIM was not the first one-to-one communication protocol, but it endured past ICQ and MSN Messenger at being the most popular. I would easily have 4-8 tabs open each night talking to people one-on-one, asking how their day went, shooting the shit, and trading what we’d call memes now. IRC expanded upon the chat room concept and allowed for many people to talk in the same room. Yet unlike a lot of the spam-fest Twitch or Youtube chats you see how, IRC channel chat was always fairly neat, readable, and scrollable. Most people had logging turned on so they could read the past history of what they missed, or just keep a record of their conversations. I had lurked among those Aniverse channels for probably a few weeks, understanding how it worked, and slowly working my way into chatting. #rafters (nee #megatokyo-rafters) was a bit of a clique channel for cool people that I somehow stumbled into, though I don’t recall how. But lurking and observing enough to just start engaging as if I were one of them from the start, I recall a couple people actually asking if I had always been there from the beginning. I had not, though I did slip in and become a regular right as they transitioned from MT-R to just R. Somehow I just became a series regular.

Twenty years on, I often look back on those days, and it’s a mix of emotions. On the whole, I fucking miss those old IRC days, as I kind of miss that whole IRC-BBS-Forum-Web1 era of the internet. It always felt more alive, more wild fucking west, more interesting to be a part of. We were constantly pushing boundaries, finding weird dumb ways to do tech things, share content. Everyone ran their own web server off a shitbox Pentium 2 or 3 running Red Hat or Debian Linux. I actually don’t like to oldfriend or edgelord all that often, but I regrettably will always be a Web 1.0 stan compared to today’s shlock. Obviously I partake in the social media and cloud-computing-galore as anyone else in IT and tech would, but it’s always felt cheap and plastic to me. Like it or not, social media and the act of oversharing our information has created an ecosystem of having too much information, too much detail, too much news, too much opinion, basically there is just so much information out there that our brains are either ignoring most of it, parsing it for whatever we deem relevant and discarding the rest, or rapidly processing and discarding it. That’s why news cycles are short. That’s why tragedies and awful world events are forgotten next week. There is just so much out there, accessible to a hundred times many more than twenty years ago, that it’s impossible to iterate upon all of it. So most people don’t.

And I guess that is kind of the crossroads I’ve been reaching with my own internet presence. I’m long past the point of no return on my terminally online status. Most of it is for work, but a lot of it is just comfort food. It’s where I go to decompress after my ASD child screams into the void, or the users I call my other children sack me with a bunch of last-minute IT issues at the end of the day. I think back on those old days, and I had just as much work and worry then, but at the end of that slog, it was watching new crazy cartoons from Japan, discussing them online with people, and having crazy conversations. I miss that shit, and I know it’s unrealistic of me to think that would endure forever. Those people all moved on eventually and made their own lives. I guess I am just sad that ethos cannot be replicated again for a new generation. Or perhaps I am just not acclimating to what the new ethos is, one centered around Discord, TikTok, and other platforms.

That’s a whole other mid-life crisis, I suppose.