A sea monster, you pay 50p and you see the sea monster. This got me thinking, this small fishtank, full of dirty water and plastic fish is probably overlooked for the most part but somebody must profit from it. I keep wondering who gets all those 50p's, how many people pay to see the sea monster? I didn't have the right change so I missed out on it. Next time I'm up north I'll keep 50p aside and hope I'm not funding something sinister. Also, further out towards the countryside, where dogs are allowed in pubs, there are llamas (or alpacas). I saw them, I briefly passed a field with several llamas and tried to work out how they ended up there.
Tomorrow is the start of my latest Cannabis tolerance break, which will hopefully go better than recent previous attempts. I'm totally opposed to turning down free weed, as a matter of principle I will smoke when it is offered. But for the next few weeks I'm unlikely to be around weed, unlikely to be able to afford weed and feeling like I need to break the routine again. I've got that intense, mindblowing high to look forward to, after a month without a single bowl you smoke up and it hits you like a train. And smoking big, pure green joints, walking down long, unlit countryside roads in the middle of the night is definitely worth experiencing.
So, weed and blackpool aside, I got thinking about Internet nostalgia earlier. The amount of information we share online, we portray ourselves through blogs and profiles and most information and media we distribute is removed and updated over time, but occasionally some of it becomes a permanent fixture of the Internet and is beyond deletion or modification. Embarrassing forum posts, myspace profiles from 2004 and so on. I also considered how close communities can be torn apart when webmasters decide to throw the towel in, in the case of totse, and the first board I ever posted on 'Tomb of Carpathia'. ToC was an obscure, unofficial Cradle of Filth board populated by black metal fans who were more at home on this isolated ezboard forum, than they were on the official and far more closely monitored official alternative.
I met people through ToC who are close friends of mine to this day, other individuals remained in contact too, but upon deletion of the forum the community, its culture and unique inside humour were gone for good. As far as I'm aware, no archives exist and nobody backed up any threads. I find it hard to imagine the Internet will ever exist in the form it did ten years ago, the sense of belonging to a particular group and community, of keeping something significant alive is gone. Internet use is now based solely on ego, and creating an idealised version of yourself online and promoting it tirelessly. We promote ourselves for feedback, comments, likes and any other meaningless reassurance, creativity and effort are entirely optional. The death of geocities and so many messageboards and BBS systems marked the end of an era. Social networking now dominates and previously strong, thriving communities fell apart from the inside.
I feel I'm now looking to the past in my general Internet use. My prior reluctance to use Facebook has become flat out refusal and most my time online is spent using Zoklet, (which came into its own upon the end of Totse) and a handful of chan imageboards. This blog is a sideline whilst I plan and design a potential homepage, another personal alternative to the seemingly monolithic Facebook, which now overshadows every aspect of the Internet. The online world has took a turn for the worst, I just hope Internet nostalgia and a genuine want for life, creativity and community online will allow the survival of sites such as totse.info and zoklet. It is wrong to feel Zoklet is just the aftermath of the golden years, if anything the smaller scale, and increasingly closely knit nature of such communities is a positive progression. There's something defiant about their survival in the increasingly cold and corporate climate of the present online world.
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