(Tho of course you could've meant multiple people on that one lol)
Because of the Boston/NYC stint I always kind of mentally pictured you with what I think of as an East Coast vibe, with darker and curlier hair and maybe an edgier dressing style and then when I met you I thought "Hey I could've gone to high school with her!" (barring time displacement) which makes sense because you're from Kentucky and I went to high school in Tennessee.
People have more power to mediate what image they present of themselves.
Well, this was what was so liberating to weird kids like me who got online in the late 90s, especially on platforms where everything was text-based and icons and graphic style hadn't come into play yet and the only thing you had to present was a catchy username and the power of your own words. Suddenly being short and acne-prone and clumsy and unsure of how to take jokes just didn't matter and basically the key to success was impulse control and knowing when not to hit the send button... and then you could hang out with all these cool characters with names like Reverend Bleech and Pierce Inverarity and Jahweh and The Velvet Elvis, who presented as their own constructs. Seriously, it was like taking a magic pen and drawing a cartoon portal into another world and I don't know that people who've grown up in a post-Facebook world can experience it in quite that way.
I got a spouse and some lasting friends out of that scene (I married Pierce Inverarity), because we DID encourage meeting one another on my Usenet group. But the constructs were hella powerful and years later I still think of this guy who grew up and got married and has a kid and Facebooks with my husband as my old buddy Bleech.
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Date: 2017-10-22 03:00 pm (UTC)(Tho of course you could've meant multiple people on that one lol)
Because of the Boston/NYC stint I always kind of mentally pictured you with what I think of as an East Coast vibe, with darker and curlier hair and maybe an edgier dressing style and then when I met you I thought "Hey I could've gone to high school with her!" (barring time displacement) which makes sense because you're from Kentucky and I went to high school in Tennessee.
People have more power to mediate what image they present of themselves.
Well, this was what was so liberating to weird kids like me who got online in the late 90s, especially on platforms where everything was text-based and icons and graphic style hadn't come into play yet and the only thing you had to present was a catchy username and the power of your own words. Suddenly being short and acne-prone and clumsy and unsure of how to take jokes just didn't matter and basically the key to success was impulse control and knowing when not to hit the send button... and then you could hang out with all these cool characters with names like Reverend Bleech and Pierce Inverarity and Jahweh and The Velvet Elvis, who presented as their own constructs. Seriously, it was like taking a magic pen and drawing a cartoon portal into another world and I don't know that people who've grown up in a post-Facebook world can experience it in quite that way.
I got a spouse and some lasting friends out of that scene (I married Pierce Inverarity), because we DID encourage meeting one another on my Usenet group. But the constructs were hella powerful and years later I still think of this guy who grew up and got married and has a kid and Facebooks with my husband as my old buddy Bleech.