what the old internet means to me!

now, i want to preface this by saying i was born in 2007. i don't think i can say i truly experienced the era of the internet i yearn to revisit the most.

this isn't to say i never saw it, i did. i've known how to use a computer since i was 3, but, being 3 and not. like. 14. or even like. 11 or something on the internet at that time, i feel like doesn't completely qualify me to not be considered someone with borrowed nostalgia.

that being said,

over the past year or three, i've come to really REALLY like the old internet. stuff from i think the mid-200s to the mid 2010s. it's something that genuinely gives me so much serotonin and i can't really explain why. two of my favorite things at the moment are windows 7 (in general) and sonic (also in general, but ESPECIALLY games around the adventure era and such. there's a reason why my profile is themed after it!)

it's also partially the reason i collect consoles. it's mostly because i want to play the games they have to offer, but part of it is because it's just SO COOL owning devices from those eras!!
(it's also partially nostalgia, the only "retro" console i have right now that i didn't actually experience while it was still being supported was the psvita, because no one had a damn psvita. i played on my older cousins' psps a couple of times, though.) it's even extended to consoles i didn't experience, like the dreamcast!

although, i've kind of always been into retro consoles, ever since i was at least... i wanna say in the second grade? (although "retro" meant something a little different then than it does now!)
my biggest fixations were the n64 and dreamcast. i thought those were THE. SHIT. i used to make controllers out of paper and then pull up games and pretend i was playing. i would spend hours just. pretending i was controlling games like ridge racer 1 (while watching a longplay on the tv), or even things as simple as the dreamcast menu.

(although, that was kind of helped by that time i found a dreamcast vmu in my grandma's car once. i don't know how it got in there, but i held onto it for years and thought it was the COOLEST.)

my mom's stepdad (who i usually call my papa, don't remember how that started) used to have this pc on windows xp. i loved it. i played a lot of roblox on there, lol.

my uncle bought his old house off of him. i might ask if he still has the pc or not.. might be a long shot, but it'd be cool to get it back.

this era means a lot to me. sites like spacehey and bitview (check mine out!) are so cool to me. i've gone out of my way to download extensions and stuff to make websites i use (such as youtube and twitter) look older. i yearn for skeumorphism and just generally a time on the internet where everything was. worse? kinda? hehe.

when i finally get around to building a pc, i'm going to theme it after windows 7. and i'm gonna play half-life ALL NIGHT. 

thank you for reading. :D