Ashtoreth Hostility's Journal

Today I was sad to discover that the webpage which listed a number of University of Florida VAXers is no longer up. I'd forgotten a friend's username, and wanted to see if any of the names listed were hers, to refresh my memory. But the page is gone. My past is eroding.

I had assumed that this sort of socialization, based around a local computer system, happened at any good-sized university of the period. But the admittedly narrow range of information I pull up tends to suggest that this only happened at a very few universities, my provincial (in computing terms) state school being one of them. Our little subculture may well have been as special as it seemed to us at the time, which is why it's especially sad that so many of us have shaken it off and vanished into unseen lives.

I've thought about this. Back then, an interest in computers was esoteric; it was something you had to make an effort to be involved with, and there was a particular profile of the kind of person who used them. It's quite possible we were part of the very first purely social use of computer networks. Some of us were programmers, some took computer courses, but many of us majored in something else entirely, and only got onto the system in order to socialize. I'm sure there was socialization among programmers before we came along, but we might have been the first group where most of us had no legitimate reason to be on a computer. :) Now it is overwhelmingly the other way around; most people who use computers only use them for social reasons.

For me, there is a roughly linear path between there and here. Vaxing locally led to mu*ing on the Internet, and then to fandom; our net-based slice of fandom changed the direction of fandom at large, and then the Internet changed everything else. Then, of course, the Internet became something unrecognizable to what it was initially. I have to admit that I don't care for it much anymore.

I would go back. I suspect that isn't healthy to want, but I would.

A couple of days ago I was walking through a parking lot I frequently cross, and there, in the corner of the blacktop, was an orange, entirely intact and unbroken. I thought about how, at least in northern climes, oranges were once a delicacy of the very wealthy; a commoner would have wept with gratitude, were one unexpectedly dropped into their hands. In Victorian times, an orange would still have been regarded as a rare extravagance; a single orange might be given at Christmas to good children. But this one had been discarded, so indifferently that its owner hadn't even bothered to smash it. Which is not unusual. Oranges are commonplace in the west, even in the middle of winter. It's no trick to ship produce halfway around the world in a matter of days, even hours. There is a cost to this, beyond monetary expense. I guess seeing the orange in the parking lot got me thinking about waste, about how much waste we engage in. It's always the little things which make the larger issues easier to grasp.

I didn't pick up the orange, of course. I couldn't eat food I found in a parking lot. Maybe someone else did.