Sunday 1 February 2015

Beautiful Zelda


The internet is a blessing and a curse.  The blessing is that it brings you into contact with other people.  The curse is that it brings you into contact with other people.

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I got the internet in 1997.  April 1 1997, to be exact.  Make of that what you will.  I went into the Hanley branch of Dixons and bought a Pentium 100 PC on credit.  That same day, I also bought “A People’s Tragedy” by Orlando Figes and the complete works of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.  As I said, make of that what you will.

I got the lot home somehow, and managed to fix up the 33.6k modem.  That was all we had in those days.  You hooked it up to your home phone and not only hoped for the best, but were charged 4 pence a minute for the privilege.  And if you were (slowly) downloading anything, your connection was cut and you had to start again.  Laughable as it may seem in this age of streaming video, instant news and Skype the majority of your time in the 1990s was spent waiting for pictures to load.

Because the bandwidth was immensely limited back then, we had to find other ways to communicate.  We didn’t have forums, and had to subscribe to something called “Usenet”. This predated the World Wide Web, and was basically a hierarchy of servers, called “newsgroups” you could send messages to, both new and in reply to others. It worked, in a basic way.  Though I’m sure kids today would be as incredulous as we were when we were told TV used to be in black and white.

My major hangout was a newsgroup called “alt.games.creatures”.  The subject at hand was a game called, yes, Creatures. Apparently based on artificial life and intelligence, it consisted of sprites of cute little furry animals walking around, bouncing balls, and saying things like “bub bibble”. In retrospect, I think the game’s creators simply put a backstory in place to make it seem more complex and engaging than it actually was.

Anyway, I talked to other players on this newsgroup, and there was some kind of community going about it.  I even did my own website about it.  Microsoft Frontpage and Cooper Black were my best friends back then, and if nothing else I’m grateful the Wayback Machine doesn’t seem to have taken snapshots of the WWW that far back. I’d never live it down.

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Probably to my misfortune, around this time I was introduced to a program called ICQ. This was a novel (at the time) internet instant messaging service.  Most of the people I was in contact with on alt.games.creatures were signed up to it.  I had conversations with many people on it.  Attention seeking teenagers, pot-smoking New Zealanders searching for their birth parents,  Finnish web designers, people with cancer from Sheffield.  I talked to them all.  Whether I should have invested what I laughably call my emotions in such people is another matter.

The two people I was closest to on ICQ were Lis, a mature student from Cheshire and Emily, a teenage girl from Elmhurst, Illinois.  Talking to both at the beginning was a struggle, as both had self-esteem and mental health issues.  But eventually we formed some kind of bond and, despite the fact I never physically met either of them, they were my closest friends.

Lis was a problem case.  A student studying potato blight, she suffered badly from depression and was in constant dispute with her mother.  We talked of many things.  Software piracy, chocolate bloom, the perils of being isolated and single in your early 20s.  Despite the fact that, in her words, she “preferred women”, I fell in love with her.  It was terrible, and it got in the way of our friendship in the end.  After one particularly catastrophic argument, she told me “Learn to think of someone else but yourself for a change”, and cut me off.  We rarely spoke after that.  We tried, but it was never the same.

Emily was different. She only communicated with me in one word replies for a couple of months.  I’d like to say I saw something behind her terse and taciturn nature and persevered thus, but in reality I was so desperate for friendship back then that I took whatever was on offer, no matter how unsatisfactory.  She was resolutely immature, as should be expected of a 16 year old.  Emily’s main rejoinder whenever I said anything was “Meh”.  I detected a certain lack of interest in life in general.

Eventually, she opened up too. Despite her obvious low self-esteem, she proved quite the flirt.  Possibly she was surprised that any male would be interested in her, even a self-admitted 22-year-old basket case from across the Atlantic.  I even made plans to go and see her in America.  Like many things in my life, it didn’t happen.  Looking back, I’m glad it didn’t.  It could never have matched up to what I imagine it could have been.  She eventually broke off contact and went to college.  I haven’t heard from her in nearly 10 years.

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It’s now 2015. None of us are young any more.  Lis is 40, and Emily is 31.  I’ve not been in contact with either for many years.  I last heard from Emily in 2006.  We exchanged a few emails via her Livejournal, which mainly seemed to concern The Sims 2.  Lis, well, I sent her a Happy Birthday email when she was 38 (I remembered it as her birthday is the day before mine).  I never received a reply and left it at that.

The lesson I learned here is that, despite what I say, how long I say it for or how much personal  information I exchange with people, I can never be really close to them.  I cannot give them what they want.  In fact, the ease of communication the internet provides is more of a curse than a blessing.  It does enable you to write what you could never say out loud, but that doesn’t mean what you actually communicate to people is either sensible or healthy.


I should never have hooked up that modem,  to be honest. I should have stuck with the Orlando Figes book and the Bonzos.

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