i know it sounds weird. but listen to me for a moment, ok?
back on myspace (from what i've read and seen), everyone had funky usernames, glitzy profiles, stats showing what song you were listening to and close to it. you could post a mood or a current status as "i'm smoking in the graveyard listening to this band while drinking this can of piss" or whatever. it pops up along your user on MSN what you're listening to. You were active and i mean literally. You payed attention. It wasn't just a chore. It was a lifestyle
like, i grab a can of pipeline punch (or strawberry dreams if i'm feeling spontaneous) maybe like every friday or so after school, walk home listening to vocaloid or metal or nightcore on my mp3 player with my wired headphones and face the 3 degree celsius temperature with my gothic jewelry and my black smokey eyeshadow makeup all while hiding in my rammstein hoodie.
if that's not like something a typical alternative myspace user would do on their day then i don't know what.
i'm not saying i'm trying hard to be them. i'm stating how as an alt person, i've noticed this "pattern" between the now of my time and the past of one i've never lived, or were just born for it, sometimes even wishing to be apart of it.
i love scene and emo to bits, yes, but it's not for me. i like comfort over style. i do own a chequered belt with square black and pink studs. i've considered doing raccoon highlights. i want snake bites. my bag has patches and pins handsewn. if anything, i'm not emo, but more a metalhead cross between a goth and an anime otaku with the odd sprinkling of scene and emo here and there. i think. take it as the accident that created the powerpuff girls anyway :P
i'm also not saying discord is the same. god no. i'm trying to say that without comparison to the past, we are living a life where we are doing some, if not most of the things they did back in the 2000s. we chat silly things. we customise the best to our ability on our profiles. we post little status notes ever so often. it pops up on your profile what you're playing, what you're listening to.
this is simply our generations version. it is not repeated vertabim tradition, but in a way it is our unique experience. we, as a generation, are experiencing it differently. just remember 2020. yikes
i can't really put it into words, but i think in years to come when we are all old, we will chat about discord and its discourse and laugh and reminisce in the times we all had. discord could shut down its servers eventually, withering out into nothing but only staying alive by its name on our lips in conversation and its regime left as a softly imprinted memory on our minds, yet that will soon disappear too
we will speak of it like how the myspace and msn users are retelling their stories. can you see it too?
this whole spiel was brought about because i sought something -- no, somewhere -- to simply send a message or two in a slow conversation about horror movies. nothing else. Looking through disboard it made me realise that we are like the scene kids and the emo ones and all of those gorgeous, fantastic creatures of rebellion against the norm looking for eachother. We use servers like how they used xanga (or some other platform don't attack me i'm still learning). It is like history is repeating itself.
but people think we need to "live like the 2000s" to truly live like the 2000s. using a ds and an old flipphone is cool, don't get me wrong, even if you genuinely like to use it, but we're not meant to go back in this sort of thing.
our iphones and samsungs are the blackberries and nokias. the switch 2 and the ps5 are the psp and ps3. Yes, i agree before you even start, that our modern tech sucks so much ass it might as well be a colonoscopy exam, and that the overconsumption and short attention spans are destroying it all. I agree. We weren't meant to be like this, so... "impatient" with things that shouldn't even require patience. you shouldn't be getting angry at a 20 second ad but unfortunately we are because this is what the internet is now :/
enough of that random tangent. what i'm trying to convey is that if our generation had myspace, we would be using it as much as we use discord. we yearn for connection. for expression, and this is the closest we can get to it. if you look closely enough, the same internet styles and cultures from then are still alive and well now, just under a different watered down name because people are obsessed with the word "core" and the romantazing pinterest shows (not shitting on pinterest, just take everything with a pinch of salt)
i think our generation is so caught up in living like a time of the past that they don't seem to notice some of that very past is in the present with us... just a little different.
I honestly believe we, the alternative people, are the same as those in the 2000s, yet in our own individual way. Same time, unplanned, just a different font :)