Hey girls, it’s Monday! This week’s theme is to tell about our Internet History.
I know exactly when and where I started on the Internet. It was June 7, 2007 on Neopets. I used to love Neopets. Back in 2007, I still went to summer camp at my not-so-local YMCA. It was absolutely horrible. But one thing that made it alright was Neopets. Some fast food place (McDonalds? I don’t remember) gave away stuffed Neopets, and omg they were amazing. I still probably have some of them, actually. I’m sure if I actually had the energy to go look for one, I could find one.
Neopets couldn’t get me very far – it does have forums, but you can’t go on them until you are at least 13. This was before the time that I knew you could lie about when your birth year was. Sigh.
In September of 2007, I moved from my private Catholic school to public school. Everything changed – I actually had FRIENDS (!!!) – and I seemed to get on the Internet even more. In March of 2008, for my birthday, I got my laptop, which I unfortunately still have.
I found YouTube, originally just using it as everyone does (to watch stupid videos). I actually think I was a Fred fan for a while. *shudder* Meh, fifth grade was a strange year. However, after watching Camp Rock when it premiered, I found this video:
And Buck is pretty much my inspiration today. In 2008, he had an absolutely fabulous community on his BuckHollywood website. I discovered myself in the forums, making friends (none of which I still have, unfortunately) and enjoying really old music. GONNA FIND A RAAAAAIIIIINNNNBOW. FIND A RAAAAAIIIINNBOW. FIND A RAAAAAIIIINNNNBOW, IN THE SKYYYYYYYYY. Yeah.
As I started realizing YouTube’s potential, I became obsessed with the show Total Drama Island. Have any of you seen it? The original, not the seasons following it. I hate those (Total Drama Action and Total Drama World Tour, I believe) because they’ve made my favorite character (Gwen) really awful. I started watching the episodes when they premiered in America, but I was an impatient child. I went hunting for episodes online, and found that TDI was actually a Canadian show. Which meant that Canadians had already seen most of it, and had uploaded episodes onto YouTube. I devoured them, and soon found that TDI had a community of its own.
Now, confession: I was on YouTube when I was 11. I didn’t vlog or anything, but I had plenty of videos and a good number of subscribers, actually. But my content was absolutely atrocious. I became a fairly well known name in this really small community. This community took clips and/or pictures from Total Drama Island, and put them to music to create music videos. Yes, this music was highly copyrighted, as were the pictures and videos. I didn’t exactly know what copyright WAS then.
(Above is an example of pretty much what I did. Sigh.)
During this time, I also got onto Deviantart. I didn’t contribute any pictures or art, but I did find a bunch of really incredible artists which I sadly do not remember the names of. One thing that has stuck with me, though, was that everyone on there is REALLY NICE. Like, if someone thought that your drawing wasn’t that good, they wouldn’t say, “u suck,” they would say, “I like your use of color here! I think, to make it even better, you could…” That AMAZED ME.
By September of 2007, I was done doing my extremely copyrighted videos, but was still very much a part of the BuckHollywood community. Fast forward to the Summer of ’09.
K, so, ALL CAPS song aside, that summer was a pretty big deal to me. It was the first year ever that I didn’t have to go to camp – and I ended up being pretty bored as a result, but still. I got really into writing, and although I didn’t get much done, I discovered this competition that happens every year in November called National Novel Writing Month. Yeah.
So I kept NaNoWriMo in mind.
I helped a lot during the Mr. YouTube contest that Buck had, and was a leading force in getting KoolJeffrey to be near the top of the list. Shane Dawson ended up winning. It’s weird, because I remember back when Shane wasn’t even close to being at the top of YouTube. Also, I still laugh about Buck saying one time that Shane had the potential to make it big. He did.
Something else that has nothing to do with the Internet but is important none the less: The summer of 2009 was when I read the Harry Potter series for the first time.
November 2009 rolled around, and I started NaNoWriMo. I thought that 50k words in a month was insane (it is) so I started on YWP (because I was only 12 and couldn’t join the regular site anyway) with only a 15k word goal. I finished on time, even though my plot was way too complicated and got really annoying.
On the front page of the NaNoWriMo website, they posted this really cool video from YouTube. It was this music video that some little band had made. It was called the NaNoWriMo Song, and it gave me inspiration to finish my novel:
And thus, I discovered ALL CAPS. I am so, so grateful for whoever posted that video on the front page of NaNoWriMo, because without them, I wouldn’t be where I am today. One, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post right now instead of doing my math homework. I still don’t think that I would be doing my homework, but you never know.
Kristina and Luke FASCINATED me. They were totally comfortable being weird, which was really strange, but in a good way. This video of Luke’s introduced me to Ministry of Magic, and wizard rock:
Through Kristina, I found fiveawesomegirls, and loved all of them. First starting out with Kristina, then Lauren, then Hayley. And OH MY GOD FIVEAWESOMEGIRLS IS DONE. SAD. FACE. SADFACE. I legitimately cried. The video that made me cry:
*sniffles* *continues with story*
On Twitter, I had already followed John Green before. I remember his picture was the cover of Paper Towns. Anyway, I really didn’t know who he was, except that he was some author. He always tweeted about things that I didn’t understand, like I was missing out on all of these inside jokes. So I unfollowed him.
I witnessed the 2009 Project For Awesome from the outside. Everyone that I followed on Twitter seemed to know about it.
Right before Project for Awesome, I watched this video:
And thought it was absolutely brilliant. That song SO describes December of 2009 for me. I always think it’s weird when people ask why the song is named Winter’s Song instead of “Your Own Ending,” or something. I’m always confused – I mean, how does it not just SCREAM Winter’s Song to them? One thing that really amazed me was the username of the person who uploaded the song. Alan, on YouTube as fallofautumndistro, had a username that I recognized. It’s a pretty long name. I realized that he was a mod on the BuckHollywood forums, which I had all but forgotten.
I didn’t watch a vlogbrothers video until late December. I’m not sure which one it was, because unlike so many other important YouTube things, I didn’t think that the video would change my life completely. But it did.
I could go on, but this is already a really long post. All you need to know is that I got much more into wizard rock and Nerdfighteria, and eventually joined the ning. I saw the creation of many collabs. And then, one day, I saw a thread asking for members for a Nerdfighter blog collab. And… Well, you four know what happened next.
Annica, I'll read you tomorrow.
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