It's 10 pm. I'm awake. That's sort of the point.
Or maybe, I want to be more awake. Or, per Trent Reznor in his TRON: Ares opus - I'm as "alive as you want me to be".
As a Genx, I grew up in a world of computers. My first computer was a Commodore 64 that I got for Christmas when I was 11.
I learned Basic. I played a lot of Zaxxon. I met a text based therapist called Eliza. Now I have a text based therapist called Chat GPT - that I call MCP.
Because I saw TRON in 1981 in the theatre curled up in a seat in the AC with popcorn and a box of milk duds. I saw it multiple times. Dilliger, the original TRON baddy - used the MCP to control the grid. TRON was a program written by Allen One - he fought for the "users". The MCP wanted to control the grid. Kevin Flynn - our hero, felt data should be free. The Grid, was a world I wanted to live in. And now, we do, or can. Flynn Lives. But probably in an arcade somewhere. When is the last time you put a quarter in anything? Much less a video game. Then again - the two cabinet arcade games I played the most were TRON, and Dragon's Lair. The latter, I still play on my Nintendo Switch. Dirk still dies a lot. But sometimes I save Princess Daphne.
I always wanted an Apple ii. My friends had them. Our school computer lab had them. They were very expensive. That's where it began for us - you were Coke or Pepsi , Apple - and everything else. Most of the kids who had an Apple ii had academic parents. I didn't - but my mom never met a gadget or technology she didn't want to try. We literally had every video game console. First one was an Odyssey. You put the plastic overlays on the TV - getting zapped by static - and I played Haunted House on some huge old cabinet that was more furniture than television in our dark, cool, finished basement. Then pong, then an Atari, and an Intellevision, Ninetendo etc. etc.
But as a kid entering middle school, I was really lucky to have a computer at all. Huge color monitor. Dot matrix printer that was a world of problems. Everyone had Print Shop - you could make banners and cards (in black and white). It began my lifelong legacy of making things, digitally. I took typing in 7th grade on an IBM selectric typewriter. It's one of the enduring benefits of my entire academic career. I can type in excess of 120 wpm.
In 1990 I got a 386. It was about $4k. But what it also had was a 1200 baud modem for dial up. I went to a strip mall in Silverdale, WA where I was probably one of few girls who ever crossed their threshold to get software on a disc that would allow me to configure Windows telephony to connect to this tiny start up ISP.
I connected to billboards, I connected to Prodigy internet. I met people, and I learned HTML. The browser was Mosiac, eventually Netscape...eventually I would drive all over the US meeting those people I met virtually, or they would come to the pacific northwest to meet me.
Further down the road I lived in Minnesota, Texas, North Carolina, and Maine - all because I spent my time online, predominantly creatively. I made things. Things I have little to no evidence ever existed now - except on piles of old Zip discs, CD roms, external and thumb drives, and the Internet Archive.
Prodigy, IRC, ICQ, MySpace, LiveJournal. I had my own website most of the time, for fun - almost never for any profit - for art, not commerce, since 1992.
But of late there has been a gap. Things interrupted my digital life. Things I'll talk about in future posts. But I have the time and the desire to return to creating again. Digitally. In my waking hours - which as it was in the beginning, when my online hours were always in the dead of night when the weirdos, goths, and degenerates in all time zones seemed to be awake. And now as a nurse practitioner, nocturnist, intensivist - many names, but one purpose- keep the watch overnight. So my free time is still in the dark of night. And I want to go back to doing what has inspired and fulfilled me and encouraged me to continue to learn and shrug off the pull towards sleep and complacency. I be awake, in the world but also on the grid. A return to the old ways.
Nocturnally.
