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Sat.Jul.01.2006

5:24 pm EDT        96°F (36°C) in Shorter, AL

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Again, I have to admit I don’t have much real news to pass along, but I figured I wanted to add an update for a few reasons: (a) I’ve never done one from Alabama before; (b) the temperature today is the highest I’ve ever recorded here; and (c) if I want to get any more than eight updates made in a month, I probably should start fast like I’m doing on this first day of the month.

Yesterday, while I was sitting around in Georgia waiting to take off for my Opelika, AL delivery, my pokings-around on the ‘Net took me to several sites I regularly frequented several years ago, through the magic of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. What is truly amazing is that basically all of these sites, which were maintained by people I first met upon coming out in summer 2000, were completely gone from the Internet by 2003! It seems that very little of what I remember being online back in 2001, certainly within the realm of personal web sites and the fore-runners of today’s “blogs,” is still around.

I made a lot of entries in late 2000 and 2001 that talked about certain people I knew online, with a few of whom it can be said I even went as far as having a “fling” for a short time. My one long-time loyal reader may remember, among others, this mention of a friend from California named Eric; the last valid version of his site found by the Wayback Machine is from October 2, 2000, and even by following some journal links, nothing has been seen from him since May 2001. This entry I made here on February 5, 2001, mentions another guy from Vancouver, BC; the Wayback Machine shows nothing at all from him since January 18, 2002.

I recall one young man from Texas through whose site I met at least a few people I still know today. He went by the name “Chris M” on his site, although I have heard since then that that was a pseudonym he was using for online correspondence. He seemed to last the longest of any of them, but even his site disappeared after this November 23, 2002 snapshot, and the journal therein ceased to be updated in the spring of 2002. He ran a webring called Gay Teen Dudes; although I have now aged out of its 14-to-25-year-old target age range, I still do get an occasional hit on my site from there, as evidenced by my raw site logs.

To the 16-year-old crowd that thinks LiveJournal and MySpace are the main reason to use the Internet, 2001 and 2002 are ancient history. MySpace had yet to even come into existence, and LiveJournal had at best a cult following then — the vast majority of personal journals were found on individual web sites, not on large journal portals. This site may be one of the few places where you will still find a personal journal off of LiveJournal or MySpace, but this 26-year-old codger has made the concession to modernity of cross-posting all of my updates here to LiveJournal.

One of these times, I may sit down and write a much longer entry about my 2001-04 disappearance (more or less) from the ‘Net, but I have too much other shit to do tonight. That will wait for another time.