Topic: Remember Me On This Computer.

When I created this account back in 2000, as a 20 year old, full-time graphic designer looking for a fun community to help me advance my skills and have fun together, it never would have occurred to me the bittersweet pain that comes with loading up this bookmark every couple weeks. We had a world-wide-web that was bursting with opportunities for expression and communication. We shared server space with each other, set up blogs, played Photoshop Pong, wrote tutorials for interesting procedures, and did it all without a farming for "likes" or for the purposes of "content creation."

I've not loaded Photoshop for any period of time for more than a decade, now. Really after 2007 or so I was fully focused on being a LAMP stack developer--the design would be handled by someone else. I still came back here, checked the pulse of Doc's Asylum. Even now, when I don't do software or design, and just narrate audiobooks for the blind, all day everyday--I stop by to find a few morsels of nostalgia to feast on.

Through the years, the number of new posts dwindled. A few a day, then a few a week, then a few a month. We're probably at a few (if that) a year now, and that's fine. This site isn't a person, it's not living, we don't have to give it human characteristics. When the digital disease progresses and the DNS inevitably stops resolving to this server, I will be sad, but not for losing the Asylum forum itself, or the url, or the garish color scheme. I'll be sad for losing this little connection between me and all you inmates out there still periodically checking in. I'll be sad to no longer have those nuggets of connection with those we've lost, through the years, to mortal disease.

I miss the Old Internet. I know it's not gone anywhere, but a lot of the people did. We got sucked into the various pools the tech life set in our way. If you're still out there, if you're still occasionally checking in here and wondering what happened to the world we used to know, I wonder if this original source of Internet community that I encountered back in 2000 could spur something else twenty-six years later.

I wonder what that could be. Do people even imagine such things anymore? Do the ad revenue and the sponsorship deals and the product placements and the vertical market integrations matter so much more than speaking truthfully into the void and being heard?

I don't know who will read this. I can't predict that even one of the names I remember (or, even, have forgotten) from so long ago will spot it. It's just one of the few digital domains I still feel overwhelmingly comfortable in. And so I am speaking into the void, seeing if there's a conversation to be had.

Much love all--

-S