angel dust neo

july 31, 2023

today's mystery of life: why do i feel consistently more anxious at this job where i'm treated better and have less work to do? the world may never know...

i've spent most of the day working on finding dolls and pixels from old websites on the wayback machine. i like doing this, but honestly, it is a bit depressing at times seeing just how broken down these sites are. there's so much of early internet culture that's entirely lost and that hurts. i remember looking at a lot of these sites (or ones like them) as a kid and thinking about how when i was a bit older i'd be able to run a website like them. where are all these people now? are they still "online" or have they been assimilated into the "real"? ('first life,' mom calls it, to seperate from second life.) i guess if they did it's not a bad thing - i can't say the real world is bad - but it does feel a little lonely. like i've been left behind. i don't know if it's a 90s kid experience or universal or just me, but it always felt like i was promised a future that didn't exist; technology changed so fast growing up that no one could predict what things would look like when i was an adult. i guess that's why retrofuturism appeals so much to me.

one of the things i found while hunting was a collection of little dolls/sprites dedicated to 9/11. i was in second grade when that happened - i didn't really see much of a world before it. as an adult, so much of that "innocent" patriotism is... somewhere between charming and creepy. if something like that happened nowadays, you know it'd be a meme, there'd be discourse, the critique of the american condition would be so much more forward. maybe it was then too, and i was just too young to understand. i know everyone hated bush, but i didn't know why.

i'm killing my tamagotchi uni. there's no pause button, and you can't take the battery out because it's rechargable. so i turned the sound off, stuffed it in a drawer and am trying to ignore it until it dies. honestly, i have a lot of object empathy, so i feel really bad about it. i know it's just code, but... but... it's even on generation 3 - that's another tama's baby! i'm sorry. i wish i could hold a pillow over your face and make it quick.