Hi hello welcome to this week’s Friday Open Thread! How many greetings can you pack into one sentence for me it’s three.
How are you this week? How’s it going over there? For me it’s — actually, listen, sometimes you can construct this full complete narrative of everything in your life and where you’ve come from and where you’re going and sometimes your to-list is just scribbles now and you can’t even remember what you did even though it was a lot and what even is life and all those retrogrades are finally over and feelings exist and isn’t that inconvenient and who even can remember to eat and to breathe.
Anyway where do people put that? I guess that’s what private twitter or a journal or therapy or bars or healthily engaging with and releasing thoughts are for but also I just want to talk about LiveJournal so this is as good a segue as any.
All those thoughts that didn’t make sense that now people would just subtweet or repress or make lengthy instagram captions about? That was what LiveJournal was FOR. That, and porny fanfiction. And trying to encapsulate a complex hormonally driven emotional state with the emo track de jour. And learning basic css or making friends or gossiping or whatever, I don’t know, mostly I wanted the porn and to recap my model Ontario parliament experiences and let my eight friends know that I wasn’t gay probably I just had a lot of feelings about a girl who was, also other girls but whatever, and I only wanted to be gay because she was which meant I wasn’t really gay and wait I didn’t mention a lot of feelings no you must be mistaken.
Was this also how people used MySpace? I was not allowed on slash was irrationally afraid of MySpace.
As well as LiveJournal, in elementary school I had a succession of Geocities websites themed loosely around an appreciation of tigers and fairies, in the mythical sense, though not together. I’m pretty sure both featured Enya-esque MIDI tunes on autoplay and prominent excerpts of “Tiger, Tiger,” a poem that I deeply misinterpreted as a child. What I did not have in elementary school? Friends. (Okay I was not cool enough to use Geocities it was Homestead, I give up now, bury me in MIDI files.)
This week I don’t want context. I don’t want care (except for each other). I want you to put enough of your week in here or that one nagging thought or honestly that one killer fanfic ship you actually really wish you’d jumped on board with or that song that’s stuck in your head or that thing you wish you’d said that you feel like you can set it down and finally breathe. Or I want to talk about your past internet selves. Vintage screenshots encouraged. Past usernames practically mandatory. Who were you when you were that person? Who are you now?
I also want your current mood and music, because, y’know, LiveJournal.
Current mood: I want a martini so dirty it’s actually just an unopened jar of olives.
Current music: Dance, Dance
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