Reflecting on things
Wow, an update. Yep, it's not an illusion!
I've been thinking lately about why I don't update my journal more, and why I don't do a lot of 'people' things online anymore, as opposed to the 'geek' things I do do. I've been online since about 1995 I think, although I thought things like chat rooms were too childish back then. Then of course I got into bdsm. I had one of those dial-up accounts (you know, with the modem, and the cool... well back then it was cool, sounds, and the really fast 24,400 bps speeds...) with unlimited access. New Zealand has always had free local calling, so unlimited dial up accounts have been around forever. But when I got into bdsm, I discovered that munches were way too far apart, and IRC was the way everyone communicated in those days. So my online usage went from 15-20 hours a month to 250+. That's at least 8 hours a day, more on weekends. You can tell I was living alone. I would get home from work by 5:30, and be online until 2am, chating, posting on forums, I would even cook dinner while the monitor and keyboard sat on the end of the bench with the occasional burst of input from me.
It went like this for quite a while. People in the scene knew immediately when I got involved with someone. The gossip of course shot round the scene like there was a high speed optic fibre link just for kink people, but they already knew something was up because I wasn't online. I also knew who was online, what time they came online each day, where in the world they were and when the sun rose in their part of the world, what days they were at a night class, or what days they had custody of their kids, I knew when they were not themselves, and I knew when they were bursting to tell some secret.
At some point all this changed. I think it changed slowly at first, after a few years I just needed to recharge, I needed to get out, and I had just come out of a winter full of sickness. I had spent so much time up late at night, getting less than four hours sleep, and I have this image stuck in my head of a bitter winter where I refused to heat the house cause I was so broke, that I spent evenings in a sleeping bag in front of a computer, typing away to people who had no idea I was coughing my lungs out because it's hard to shake a cold when you body's running on empty.
Summer came along, and seeing as I lived in the country just out of Auckland, I started going for long walks in the equally long evenings. I even started dropping in on friends that I hadn't seen for ages, and hanging out doing things I really enjoyed. Of course I had trouble reconciling the kink side that was now so familiar with friends who varied from really cool tell-them-anything to friends I somehow never knew were homophobic, or had some other trait that just didn't mix well with who I was anymore.
Now I have trouble getting onto irc, IM, or simply posting on here. Even mailing lists that I used to be so involved with are sadly neglected. With the lists, some of it is just finding nothing new being discussed (there's only so many times you can discuss what a bottom/sub/slave is without screaming) , but some of it is just burnout. I find it hard to spend as much time online doing the things I used to do, although I can spend hours configuring a sasl authentication backend for an imap server, lost in my own world.
I feel like I've come full circle, only the world changed while I was away. It all used to be IRC and email lists, but everyone has moved onto web based forums and blogs. I think the emails that arrived in my inbox used to prompt me to reply, and IRC used to be very alive and happening, whereas it is now often full of lurkers and annoying "23m slave for sexy blonde mistress" spammers and "Hi, wanna chat? check out my homepage http://twatgirl.com".
So I don't know if I'll ever get back into things as much as I'd like to, but it's kinda cool looking back at where I've been...
I've been thinking lately about why I don't update my journal more, and why I don't do a lot of 'people' things online anymore, as opposed to the 'geek' things I do do. I've been online since about 1995 I think, although I thought things like chat rooms were too childish back then. Then of course I got into bdsm. I had one of those dial-up accounts (you know, with the modem, and the cool... well back then it was cool, sounds, and the really fast 24,400 bps speeds...) with unlimited access. New Zealand has always had free local calling, so unlimited dial up accounts have been around forever. But when I got into bdsm, I discovered that munches were way too far apart, and IRC was the way everyone communicated in those days. So my online usage went from 15-20 hours a month to 250+. That's at least 8 hours a day, more on weekends. You can tell I was living alone. I would get home from work by 5:30, and be online until 2am, chating, posting on forums, I would even cook dinner while the monitor and keyboard sat on the end of the bench with the occasional burst of input from me.
It went like this for quite a while. People in the scene knew immediately when I got involved with someone. The gossip of course shot round the scene like there was a high speed optic fibre link just for kink people, but they already knew something was up because I wasn't online. I also knew who was online, what time they came online each day, where in the world they were and when the sun rose in their part of the world, what days they were at a night class, or what days they had custody of their kids, I knew when they were not themselves, and I knew when they were bursting to tell some secret.
At some point all this changed. I think it changed slowly at first, after a few years I just needed to recharge, I needed to get out, and I had just come out of a winter full of sickness. I had spent so much time up late at night, getting less than four hours sleep, and I have this image stuck in my head of a bitter winter where I refused to heat the house cause I was so broke, that I spent evenings in a sleeping bag in front of a computer, typing away to people who had no idea I was coughing my lungs out because it's hard to shake a cold when you body's running on empty.
Summer came along, and seeing as I lived in the country just out of Auckland, I started going for long walks in the equally long evenings. I even started dropping in on friends that I hadn't seen for ages, and hanging out doing things I really enjoyed. Of course I had trouble reconciling the kink side that was now so familiar with friends who varied from really cool tell-them-anything to friends I somehow never knew were homophobic, or had some other trait that just didn't mix well with who I was anymore.
Now I have trouble getting onto irc, IM, or simply posting on here. Even mailing lists that I used to be so involved with are sadly neglected. With the lists, some of it is just finding nothing new being discussed (there's only so many times you can discuss what a bottom/sub/slave is without screaming) , but some of it is just burnout. I find it hard to spend as much time online doing the things I used to do, although I can spend hours configuring a sasl authentication backend for an imap server, lost in my own world.
I feel like I've come full circle, only the world changed while I was away. It all used to be IRC and email lists, but everyone has moved onto web based forums and blogs. I think the emails that arrived in my inbox used to prompt me to reply, and IRC used to be very alive and happening, whereas it is now often full of lurkers and annoying "23m slave for sexy blonde mistress" spammers and "Hi, wanna chat? check out my homepage http://twatgirl.com".
So I don't know if I'll ever get back into things as much as I'd like to, but it's kinda cool looking back at where I've been...