I don't want this blog to be another one of those "huh durr da internet is dead" posts so I will try not to repeat what
has already been said many times. But, those sorts of posts do hold some amount of truths. I am in my 20s, so
I cant say that I got to see the "Golden era" of  what the internet is meant to be, but I did get to see the last bit
of its existence. I have been online/on computers since I was very young. I would use my family's Emachines PC we
got from Best Buy somewhere around 2002 to 2004 I think. I would use to play games and go on sites like eBaums world
and things like that. And obviously youtube when ever i discovered that. The first OS i used was Windows XP. And we used
that until Windows 7 came out in 2009 i think. But i dont believe we bought a new pc, and thus Windows 7 until 2010 or so.
And i continued to use windows 7 up until 2021 when my new motherboard could no longer support installing the OS.
I was pretty upset to say the least, and around this time is when steam announced they will no longer support 7 either.
So either way,  my hands were tied on the matter. I hated the way windows 10 looked. Ever since i first saw it in 2015 or
when ever it released, i didnt like it. At the time, as much as platforms like tiktok think that the ""Frutiger Aero"" look
want to make you think it was universally loved, by the time windows 10 came out a lot of people were getting tired of it
because it was a popular design language with companies ever since PCs could handle rendering such GUI. But i was
actually part of the crowd who always liked the way it looked. I was never a fan of minimalism. I was angry when my father showed
me the new iOS update that introduced the at the time, new minimalist look. That's not to say i never liked any thing minimalist,
as objectivly speaking the GUI design of windows 9x is minimalist, and at one point when i used windows 7 i would use the
"classic" theme or what ever they called it, but i didnt really do it for the looks, i did it to squeeze a bit more FPS out of my
Integrated graphics. I suffered through using windows 10 for around a year, before i thought to my self "I wonder if i can use
themes on this" since in previous windows versions you could install custom themes. NOPE. Windows 10 doesnt allow it.
So i started to look for ways around it, and found a lot of different options and attempts. This is around when i first saw that
"frutiger aero" word. I never knew this style had a name, so i thought i could be saved from the boring windows 10 GUI.
This all matters, because a big part of my enjoyment of my computer is the looks. if the GUI or anything else on it does not
look appealing to me, i will not enjoy using it at all. So i was very happy to find many options to customize my OS with third
party software and patches. But in discovering this, i found a very baffling group of people online. There were so many people
who were being "nostalgic" for all of this old tech. Which at first, i thought it was cool, because ive always been into old tech.
Probably because of my parents still having their old NES and similar consoles from their childhood. But these people very
obviously never used any of this stuff they were claiming nostalgia for. Not only did they know literally nothing about any of it,
but they were completely too young to even have used any of it. Granted, im too young to of used NES consoles when they released,
I sort of inherited the memories from my parents by them keeping it and playing it with me,  but these people didnt have
that happen with the things either, because they have not even used a computer outside of school before 2020. Their entire
life online was on a iphone. Now, i could understand if they jsut liked the way this stuff looked. Because i do agree that it all
looks a lot better than modern garbage, but they will literally call it "nostalgic" and try to mimic it. And then claim they want
"the old web back" as if they ever had experienced it in the first place.  Like i said earlier, i wasnt around for the golden era,
atleast not  for any meaningful part of it, but i did get to at least experience a pre social media driven internet, before everything
was on the same 5 websites, and 100% a pre normalization of the interent. But these people got neither of these things.
I only got my first smart phone when i was in highschool, and it was like, an iphone 6 or something like that. and i hated the thing.
I always wished i could of gotten an older phone/non smart phone because i just thought they were pointless. I didnt want to be able
to browse the interent, because using the internet on a phone sucks ass, and i dont use social media or play games on it so
it was way oversized for no reason since I didnt use it for any of the smart features. I liked smart phones when they first came out
but that was because they were novel, and also way way waaaay smaller. And around this time, people thought you were weird, or
a geek for using the interent beyond social media. But after covid, everyone and their mothers got a PC. Now its totally normal to
use the internet on PCs and all that, and social media only got bigger. Everything is giga performative now because of it.
And for some reason, these people (normies) decide that pretending to remember stuff they just learned about is the coolest thing ever.
And the reason why this is even an issue, is because now people think the way the internet used to be was better because it
"looked cooler" or what ever.The issue is NOT looks. Sure thats part of the issue, at least for me since im so heavily influenced by the
visual appeal of my tech for it to be enjoyable, but the entire nature of the internet is changed now, and for the worst. Everything
is centralized and retarded.  And THAT is the issue. And even when these people realize that everything being on the same 5 websites
is a bad thing, their response it to just replace them with 5 more websites. The discord ID situation is an example of this. Instead
of switching to decentralized platforms, they look for 1:1 discord alternatives. Which will always have the same issues as discord, because
they are all centralized. And another thing, is the culture of the internet. Now days everything is for attention and all that. People think that
the old internet was like, some crazy war zone where it was non stop nbombs and all that, and others think it was a magically rainbow
world where no one was ever mean. It was neither. It was just free. There were places that were nice and didnt have a very big toxic side
to them, but then there were other places where it was like a warzone. Every place was different. Because it was all hosted and owned by
people. Not companies. There was less surveillance online and not everything was an ad. The solution isnt to use to go on tiktok
and post "frutiger aero olderbrother core edit" with some retarded music over it. Its to get off tiktok, make a website, and support
other people doing the same. It's to stop using the same 5 websites for everything. Granted, i am guilty of that. I still use youtube,
because unfortunatly i ahve not found other places that have allthe kinds of things i like and want, but i try to use frontends that
are hosted either by my self or third parties other than google as much as i can. I'm still on my decentralization journey , as im sure
we all are. Since theres always more we can do, or improvements we can make to our current setup. This being said though, i have
gotten into making blogs and all that (as you can see by reading this lolol) and im planning on making the switch to Linux soon. Currently
i am running a giga modified version of windows so its not as big of a privacy concern, but theres so many issues with this shitty OS that
are just out of my control, and no way i can fix any of them. So I plan to switch to Debian or Devuan (probably Devuan, ive used it before
so im familiar with it). From what i can tell, all the games i play regularly will work on Linux, and if need be i can always just dual boot.
It's a real shame, becuase as aids as windows is, its been my digital home ever since i started using computers. I wish it wasnt such a
terrible and evil OS. Because i cant lie, I will miss it. I will always make returns for memories, but probably with legacy tech, since a hobby
of mine is using old tech and such (typed all on a 20 year old Microsoft Ergo elite). At some point i want to learn more about how computers
and code works, and eventually learn to code my self, so that i can start making my own solutions to problems and doing projects and such.
as i think that should be a goal for everyone wanting a decentralized approach to computers. I am just a retard and lazy and have not gotten
around to using it. I think this is my longest blog yet, and ive ran out of things to write so if you are still reading, thank you. I recently
got around to adding RSS to my site (finally) so if youd like, feel free to add that to your feed reader. I'll have more stuff coming out soon.
I have recently fully switched to XMPP away from Matrix, so I would recommend anyone reading this to do the same thing. If you
use disroot you can use that for XMPP which you can see mine in the footer.