I miss the old days on the internet.

I miss Windows XP on a modest setup, still having plenty of fun and not really feeling limited even by a computer that's a few years old, I miss being creative and somehow managing to enjoy myself even on a slow 56k connection (though I got annoyed when people played games and I couldn't join, apparently)

I miss customizing Windows XP, I miss learning about hardware and things I didn't even know were things, I miss playing around with new operating systems and learning about them.

I miss the age of discovery.

I miss when the internet wasn't an aggressive creature.

I'd go so far as to say it was up to 2012 I really enjoyed. Shit hit the fan that year in a few ways for me. It had its ups and downs, I guess, but family dying and the beginnings of the aggressive internet came that year.

For a few years I've been trying to stay as low-profile as possible, lest I say one thing and have people rush me for it. I probably have no reason to worry about this, and if I'm saying something harmful I'd at least hope someone would pull me to the side and try to explain what's going on.

I just don't really have anywhere near as much fun anymore.

I don't know how much work's contributed to this. I mean, it certainly cuts into hours where people I enjoy the company of are floating around, but it doesn't seem fair to me to blame work for all of my issues. A lot of them started even before that.

I wonder what spurred this on tonight. Perhaps the fact that I, myself, caused alarm by joining a thing, and I was so taken aback by it that I just couldn't form a coherent sentence.

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYYdQB0mkEU">Here's one of my fondest memories of 2008, one of the peak "old" years I was talking about.</a> A friend sent me music over AIM every once in a while, and I generally listened to everything a lot because music was hard to come by - money was tight, and 56k prohibited a lot of downloading. Rush immediately clicked with me from the very first few seconds of the song, and he sent most of the rest of the compilation over. There were a few other songs (Far Cry from Snakes & Arrows being one of them, as well as a little bit of Filter's stuff), and a few other things I downloaded at points in time on the internet, but I think this one might've been the most memorable, most impactful on my current musical taste. A friend did send me The Number Of The Beast over MSN one time, too, and that became one of my more listened to albums. Shame he never sent over any Dream Theater, though I dunno how I would've reacted to some of their longer material. I did find a cover 
of Erotomania I was sent, and probably played, but it never clicked until I'd already heard Dream Theater and gotten into their stuff, probably 8 or 9 years later.

There's still a few big musical discoveries I've made. Amorphis, Arch Enemy, and Metallica are probably a few of my more notable gateways into more music as of recent years. Probably not quite as impactful as what I've mentioned above, but they certainly opened me up to stuff I'd previously not looked at because of others' opinions. (Looking back, that was kinda dumb, and I never <i>was</i> that bothered by the style of some of these things. Maybe I just hadn't heard the right stuff yet. I dunno.)

I've been typing this thing way too long and I'm rambling so it's time to sleep

I get nostalgic too easily, to sum it all up. Holy long entry.