...got you for 18 years
A Facebook friend posted (on his wall, not to me), "Thanks for the birthday wishes!"
I didn't remember wishing him a happy birthday nor did I recall seeing the Facebook birthday notification, so I checked when his birthday was. March 25.
March 25... my Neopets account's birthday. NSynca's birthday! Ahhh!
Now years, they go by quickly. There are just a handful of dates that you can point out over the last 18 years where I could tell you exactly what happened on that day.
But 18 years (and a few days) ago, Allie and I were on my dad's computer, using Windows 98, on Compuserve dialup with Internet Explorer, searching through the manually curated Yahoo directories for Pokemon sites... when we came across Neopets. I created an account, and Allie followed a few days later with her own. I named my Chia pet NSynca, because NSync as a name was already taken. These were the days before Google, before high speed internet, before Chrome. Before browsers had tabs. Before you could search the web for any information and verify rumors so you believed everything people wrote on their Neopets pages. When fake news was a thing, before fake news was a thing.
I think one time, we read that once you leveled your Neopet enough, you could 'explore more worlds' and we thought that we would one day unlock a Pokemon like multiplayer world, where we could walk around with our Neopets and battle them and see our colorful world in 3D.
Sometimes it takes these milestones for one to really reflect back. What a crazy 18 years, eh? I can't believe my Neopet is technically an adult, when I don't even feel like a real adult sometimes. Ooh high school was kind of a mess, but I actually have that mostly documented in LiveJournal. College... a blur of good & bad decisions, and some decisions that were definitely mix of both. Post-college - I think mostly luck & Vegas. Now technology is such a big part of our lives, we've had huge social victories and huge setbacks, high speed internet is pretty much a life nisessisty, children have to grow up way too fast when they have to worry about how to be safe at school instead of thinking about how to scrape together enough quarters for that Charizard card.
And NSynca is still a flat image after 18 years, and went from being a male Chia to a female Jetsam. Anyway, I'm pretty sure no one uses LiveJournal anymore, so I'll have to bug Ben about getting my site back up so maybe I can write again...
I didn't remember wishing him a happy birthday nor did I recall seeing the Facebook birthday notification, so I checked when his birthday was. March 25.
March 25... my Neopets account's birthday. NSynca's birthday! Ahhh!
Now years, they go by quickly. There are just a handful of dates that you can point out over the last 18 years where I could tell you exactly what happened on that day.
But 18 years (and a few days) ago, Allie and I were on my dad's computer, using Windows 98, on Compuserve dialup with Internet Explorer, searching through the manually curated Yahoo directories for Pokemon sites... when we came across Neopets. I created an account, and Allie followed a few days later with her own. I named my Chia pet NSynca, because NSync as a name was already taken. These were the days before Google, before high speed internet, before Chrome. Before browsers had tabs. Before you could search the web for any information and verify rumors so you believed everything people wrote on their Neopets pages. When fake news was a thing, before fake news was a thing.
I think one time, we read that once you leveled your Neopet enough, you could 'explore more worlds' and we thought that we would one day unlock a Pokemon like multiplayer world, where we could walk around with our Neopets and battle them and see our colorful world in 3D.
Sometimes it takes these milestones for one to really reflect back. What a crazy 18 years, eh? I can't believe my Neopet is technically an adult, when I don't even feel like a real adult sometimes. Ooh high school was kind of a mess, but I actually have that mostly documented in LiveJournal. College... a blur of good & bad decisions, and some decisions that were definitely mix of both. Post-college - I think mostly luck & Vegas. Now technology is such a big part of our lives, we've had huge social victories and huge setbacks, high speed internet is pretty much a life nisessisty, children have to grow up way too fast when they have to worry about how to be safe at school instead of thinking about how to scrape together enough quarters for that Charizard card.
And NSynca is still a flat image after 18 years, and went from being a male Chia to a female Jetsam. Anyway, I'm pretty sure no one uses LiveJournal anymore, so I'll have to bug Ben about getting my site back up so maybe I can write again...