012: She don't look like that no more

I've been thinking lately, among other things, about the early days of the internet. Specifically, my early days on the internet, before I was swallowed whole by its massive gaping maw.

I would've been about 10 when we first got it. I remember being shown Webcrawler by my brothers and being told "anything you want to see, you just type it in there." I used it, primarily, to find Star Wars content, having just seen the pictures for the first time (in re-release form.) Then came e-mail, and later ICQ and message boards.

I remember when I was about 12, in Grade 7, being welcomed into the tumultuous world of wrestling opinion boards. Oh God what a horrible, life-scarring scene. I had made the decision about a year earlier to abandon the real world and live my life on the internet. I had been a half-smart, charismatic kid, although one who was prone to outbursts. The internet made me even more anti-social, and for a while affected my ability to actually interact with others in person. And here I was, a kid of 12 trying to match wits intellectually with all the shut-in high school and university types on those wrestling boards. Looking back, it's completely unbelievable that they could've taken anything I had to say seriously, but I was well-spoken for that age and managed to fit in decently with, and get positive feedback from, these guys who, looking back, are sort of the forerunners of today's Cracked.com-type writers (one of the biggest names from back then went on to found x-entertainment.com, a site that, though revolutionary at the beginning, has seen better days.) They're the forerunners, but they're mostly what got cut away by the Darwinian process. They didn't have what it took. That includes me.

One of the first guys I wrote with, back in Early 2000, when I had just begun my "Magnus" identity that I would stick with for nearly 2 years before I final outgrew the dying scene, was Chad. He was a year or two older than me, from Oklahoma. We had a similar sense of humour, but he wasn't around much since he actually had stuff going on in real life, both for better or worse. According to his stories -- which I have no choice but to believe -- his mother had died when he was young, and his dad died while I knew him, of a snake-bite in the Amazon. Yeah, it's tough to actually believe, but I'll never know the truth. I had no reason to doubt him and he never hinted that his stories were in any way fictional. Anyway, he moved on past the scene, which was probably for the best: the entire premise was that a collection of sites (with names like Explicit Wrestling, Lethal Injection, Hate, and mine, Disturbing Behavior) ostensibly created to cover Pro Wrestling but in actuality served as a sounding board for petty feuds, in jokes, self-promotion, oversexualized ramblings (we were after are mostly young males) and assorted observations about the world around us. Mostly though just dicks and rambling.

If I had the kind of time and energy that I had back then, as well as the potential audience (there were a lot of people floating around each others' boards) I could rig up a really sweet site. But alas. I actually do have more of a potential audience thanks to ComiXtreme, but my time and energy is infinitesimal. I don`t have the extra effort to put into rambling about things people might actually care about, hence SWP: where I can come when I please to ramble to no truly intended audience about things only I should be interested in. DB was actually the prototype for SWP as far as I was concerned. I takled about any fucking thing without even the level of self-awareness I currently use (which is admittedly not even a 100% level.) I was convinced that whatever I had to say, people would dig. When I think back about some of the pointless shit I foisted upon the internet between the ages of 12 and 14... well, it's not all that different between the pointless shit I've been foisting upon the internet since I was 17. But at least now, I don't have a readership to consider. When I write for an audience now, I write for an audience.

If you're wondering what prompted this flight of nostalgia, I was just trying to remember the phenomenon of internet friends. I still have some internet friends, people I write with and interact with on CX, but I don't put as much of my consideration into them as I did on Chad and others from that time. When I got to high school, I started coming back to the real world, although I didn't really arrive until grade 11, by which point the Op Board scene was beyond dead and buried.

When I started this blog in 2004, my only recurring visitor/commenter was a girl named Coral. I think she was younger than me, and she was from California. One day, after a few weeks, she disappeared, never to be heard from again.

I flew off on this flight of flashback because of something that happened recently. I was browsing FailBlog last week when I came across an amusing Win, a screencap of an Omegle Chat (this one) and, because I have tried Omegle, and am absolutely frightened of it, (yet at the same time fascinated) I posted it on my Twitter. Remarkably, the originator of the win, the anonymous female correcting her conversational partner's grammar, a Welshwoman from South America who shares my last name (and thus will henceforth be referred to as "Cousin Pixie") found my reposting of it and now we, like, talk on Twitter, and she's reading this. And I think that's cool, how random that was, so I thought I'd address it.

It's been a busy few days. My new computer arrived on Wednesday, which was quick considering I ordered it Monday night. It works really well, I'm particularly impressed with the keyboard, which is something I'd been looking to replace before my entire computer went up. My general discomfort with my keyboard was one of my major obstacles to producing new writing. This keyboard, flat and muted, is a lot more fun to type on, although it keeps slipping into Multilingual keys, which turns my apostrophes into é's. I don't get it -- there's contractions in French. C'est l'amour and all.

I was thinking recently (this morning) about a script I started writing back in Grade 12. It was a manic pixie dream girl script, which if you're unaware, was defined in Nathan Rabin's AV Club review of Elizabethtown: "The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family." The uber-example of the MPDG is of course Garden State. Some of my favourite movies are actually subversions or deconstructions of this trope: Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, even Annie Hall, which predates many of the most prominent examples.

I'm not sure to what degree my script played it straight or messed around with it, but my opinion of the project has worsened over the years. It certainly started out cliche enough. A would-be writer is stuck doing greeting cards, in a relationship with a domineering businesswoman. She breaks it off with him, which inspires him to get back to real writing. It is only after that occurs that he meets the manic pixie. I hadn't even written up to the point where they begin the relationship. I don't remember the way things were going to go from there, but as I recall, the relationship was not going to go all that well, and they probably weren't going to end up together in the end. Sketching it vaguely like that there's some potential, but the particulars weren't all that strong.

It's one of two things I ever remember writing about a writer. I try to avoid that because then it just seems like you're writing about yourself, and what does a writer mean to a regular viewer anyway? Writing isn't an everyman job, and for whatever reason, I'd rather have the everyman angle. Adaptation, I loved. I have this sense that, to your average consumer of media, writing is an abstract process that they don't really care about. Plus, we have enough people trying to write nowadays, myself included. We don't need to go glamorizing it. To write a story where the character's greatest conflict is writer's block, seems a bit self-fellating. I don't mean to judge, though: especially with the internet, writing (as an activity) is a very prominent past-time. It's just my own hang-up.

The other thing I ever wrote whose character was a writer was a bit more detached, although it still deserves some revision, to the point where the next draft may not even feature him as a writer. It is the last story of my collection, which I wrote in advance so I'd know where I was ending up. The main character is a university-aged would-be writer who is actually a fast food jockey. He over-analyzes his past relationship with a woman he intends to meet up with at a party. That story actually serves as the basis for (the first draft of) my next play, although I've drafted and re-drafted it to the point where the two, despite sharing a title, don't resemble one another.

As you can tell, I'm thinking a lot about writing lately. We'll see if anything productive comes of this.

Keep on rockin
-Scotto