Friends! Happy birthday!!!! I understand that it’s probably not everyone’s birthday, but yesterday was my birthday, and I love wishing everyone a happy birthday around this time. This way you can’t say I didn’t wish you happy birthday this year because I just did! Happy birthday!!!!!!
This week has been weird. I wrote a little, there was a terrifying rain storm that knocked out my power for over twelve hours, I cleaned a little, and I woke up a year older, which is always so fucking weird. Aging has a way to get me thinking about the past, as a professional Internet Gay, I found myself thinking about some of my previous social media hangouts.
Pre-Facebook, I spent most of my time on Myspace. I’m not gonna get into it because it honestly fills me with SUCH embarrassment, but I did write about it for Autostraddle, so if you wanna see what kind of obsessive teenager I was, feel free to read about it. I also only very recently gave up my Tumblr account, which I honestly loved, because I accidentally got into an argument with a bunch of 14-year-olds. Like, actual, living, 14-year-olds. Not to be obnoxious, but whatever happened to algebra homework?? Anyway, fighting with teens felt unproductive, so I left. What can I say, I’m a Gemini who loses interest in things very quickly and drops them even quicker. I’ve also had Facebook for far too long. I recently found a post from a week before I turned 16. Who let me use the internet then???
But y’all! Do you remember ASS?? ASS stood for AutoStraddle Social and was a social networking thing we experimented with on the site a few years ago. It was so cute and fun! Me and the folks in my cabin from A-Camp tried really hard to make a cabin group but never figured it out. I recently looked at my profile and realized the last time I changed my status was when ASS was a real thing! When was the last time you looked at your Autostraddle profile and all the multitudes it contains? You should do that now. You should update your status and tell me what you changed it to! I bet someone worked hard behind the scenes to make sure you could do cool fun things like tell us your favorite book and TV show.
So what was your first social networking site? What is your favorite website that’s fallen out of fashion? What do you miss about the early days of social media? I miss when Facebook statuses used to start with a verb, so it’d be a sentence: “Al(aina) is feeling like a boss.” It was fun. Or maybe you don’t ever use social media and never have and just want to tell me about your week? That’s also a very cool prospect that I’m excited about. I can’t wait to hear about anything you want to tell me!
Happy Friday, friends, and happy birthday to you all!! Now let’s talk about ASS (and other social media networking sites).
