Café Kontra

A Surfer History

I’ve tried, with minimal success, not to have any sort of net presence. It’s a fairly easy feat for a lazy git who boils inside for hours on end and then runs out of steam as soon as the cover of the pot is lifted, but surprisingly hard for a meddling git who can’t leave well enough alone. One ends up with a vicious cycle that involves creating various usernames and passwords in a flurry and, after a brief affair with words, photos, and other miscellaneous objects that can be represented in a string of 1s and 0s, promptly forgetting them.

This is why, after deleting an awful Fanfiction.net account, neglecting my Friendster account to the point of oblivion, letting my Hotmail e-mail address rot, and delegating numerous YahooGroups to web-only mail, I have started a friggin’ blog and started posting at groups again, whose mail is now received in my now-very-active Gmail.


Not having a net presence is hard for a person who knew what the Internet was before her classmates even had PCs. I remember the first time I surfed; it was in my mom’s office, and I was holding one of those ludicrous Internet Yellow Pages or some other book of a similar persuasion. The book had descriptions, too, the kind of cheery, mind-boggling claptrap that made you choke. I was entranced, and spent my whole after noon randomly opening a page and looking at each kitschy or demented or just plain normal site. I visited many sites from the “yellow pages” but I can vaguely recall only one: it was about frogs and had a yellow background and a sad-looking image of a green frog on the main page.

Pretty soon I was an active participant of several clubs for kids over the Net (you know, those sites with names like KidZone and such); I even had my own column in a newsletter. It lasted all of two issues, I think. Back then there was a list of kids with profiles, their likes, dislikes, hobbies, whatnot, and you e-mailed anyone who you thought was interesting and exchanged a few chirpy messages with them before forgetting to reply and then forgetting your newlost friend altogether.

Web design and even San Serif fonts were practically nonexistent; sites had solid-colored backgrounds, tables, and, well, Times New Roman. I developed web aesthetics a wee bit later in my life, which was why the horrible marquees and the blinding colors were not only tolerable, but were something that escaped my notice (almost) entirely.


People still used ICQ and IRC(and they still do, albeit less of them. Face it, IM is more convenient; maybe that’s because it’s easier to use and usually consists of contact whom you’ve actually met face-to-face, but probably because its acronym has fewer letters), which for me lasted until I was in high school. Yes, for a short while I was chatter, and I could spew acronyms and shortcut lines with the best of them.

There was a time when some people made a small fuss over the self-proclaimed future of chatting, which consisted of a site with virtual rooms and chatters who had avatars. Time had an article on them once, but I forget the name of the place (The Palace? Was that it?), which doesn’t really matter because that obviously went nowhere.

Those were the days when, after meeting someone in an mIRC chatroom and getting past all that a/s/l nonsense by introducing myself as someone from the Philippines I would quickly type, “Do you know my country?”, which was a habit developed by someone who’d been asked “Oh really? Where’s that?” much too often. Once, after a guy I was chatting with assured me that yes, he knew of my country, we talked about trivialities and he subsequently told me I was tall for a Filipina, which was … unnerving, in so many words (I was 5’3, which was tall then for my age but still). Those were the times when, after telling an e-pal (which was like a penpal, only we got each others letters faster and was probably why I got tired of replying) that I ate spaghetti at McDonald’s she would reply: “They have spaghetti there?” I could practically imagine her big blue eyes widening. Probably such encounters stoked the beginning of any nationalistic fires I harbor today.


E-groups were all the rage as well, back when Yahoo hadn’t bought them yet. My poor email addy, which was provided by my then-ISP iConnect, was flooded by mail from all sorts of groups (but mostly it was that Evangelion group that had 500 messages a day). Hell, I was even active back then. I read all those messages (well, a great deal of them, anyway), if you would believe. Needless to say, that was a bit of a short stint; I don’t think that anyone who loses focus as easily as I do can stand five-hundred-plus-plus messages a day.

Google didn’t exist then, either. The search engine I always used was Alta Vista, although occasionally I used Lycos. I don’t remember ever using the Yahoo search engine. I had a short love affair with the Ask Jeeves search engine at ask.com, but that died, as all things do.

One of my first encounters with Google was when my cousin used it to search for Sailor Moon websites. He checked all those sites, one by one, and what stuck in my mind was the fact that he reached all the way up to page 20 and was disappointed to find that there was no more “Next”.

Coincidentally, while searching idly for my name and my old email address on Google (which is currently the only search engine I use now), I stumbled upon the old EVA mail archive, and saw one of my old, childish, naïve posts and experienced a sort of shock run through me. Afterwards, I felt a strange feeling of nostalgia.

Since we’ve gone some way from the path, let us follow this sidetrack a little further: According to Milan Kundera, “nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.” I have no idea why I should have a yearning to return to old-and-often-senseless mailing lists, but I suppose the concept goes down a bit further than that. Things are simpler, the less you know, and there weren’t so may things to worry about, like web savvy and Netiquette and, well, how sensible messages are supposed to look like.

Chain letters were still passed on, sometimes, in the hope of a little magic.

I eventually lost my old groups when I lost my old email, which happened when I lost my old ISP—iConnect had been bought by inter.Net, and, well, transitions aren’t always smooth. I lost my email when we shifted (forcibly) to an inter.Net account, and along with that all those groups and things. That was when I said goodbye to Eudora and Outlook. For a while Edsamail was popular with the people here, but I never used it. Edsamail reminds me of the texting phenomenon: it started out free, then had a rate of one peso (for Edsamail, it was P1 per day), and was eventually flooded by ads.

And so I trashed all those mail clients and shifted to webmail—first Hotmail, then YahooMail, a rarely-used UP WebMail account, and then finally Gmail. I started collecting groups again, filling up my inbox with unread mail from YahooGroups (I haven’t tried Google Groups yet, but eventually…).


After networking with all sorts through the many-fangled ways that the Internet offered, one developed an urge to create—what else?—a personal website. My first website was created by using a primitive editor called Claris HomePage 2.0, years and years and years ago. Yes, that was it, they were called homepages. My homepage was yellow, I believe. With little flower graphics at either side of the header. I talked about myself, my family, my interests, hobbies, and more about myself. It was a standard homepage, with a personal gallery that never took off and a family profile that was never finished. I suppose it doesn’t come as any surprise that I scrapped the site eventually, and that later, when I tried creating a personal site called Obsessed (it was hosted at xoom.com), it never even got off the ground.

Ah, right, xoom, along with his pals geocities, angelfire, tripod, and the numerous other webhosts that multiplied like rabbits all over the web-O-sphere. Of those ad-ridden behemoths only geocitites seems really alive, nowadays, although I wouldn’t really know, of course. It was only good ol’ HTML on those hosts; it was some time before all those other letters jumped in, letters like PHP, JSP, XML, XHTML, and all their brethren. It was a strange world, one that was full of slashes and hard-to-memorize URLs.

High school provided some inspiration, though. The advent of high school provided the discovery of Moyra’s Web Jewels, a discovery I had made only then even though the Jewel Mines were open two years prior. It was a whole new world, almost, and although Moyra did may different designs, it was her jewels that fascinated me. I remember being particularly enamored with a collection called “Xenorococo,” a beautiful interface that wrapped text around intricate, gem-studded, unmistakably golden curlicues. Another favorite was a set called Alien Gold, which, as the name suggests, is … gold. A pattern emerges.

What this beautiful collection of hand-painted gems started in me was my digital art mania, which continues to this day. It was the Web Jewels that (indirectly) introduced me to previously-Fractal-Design-and-then-Metacreations-and-now-Corel Painter and all the wonderful things it could create. It started me down that road of graphics, web design, and (digital) art for art’s sake.

One of my first ventures into web design, which was the website of my high school newspaper, was a bit of a flop because I tried to do something like Xenorococo, only not so ornate and in silver and black. The result was … ok, I guess. I’m pretty sure the layout was replaced in a hurry.

Eventually things like minimalism and CSS and web standards and Flash happened to web design, but I ignored them dutifully for the longest time before finally trading opulence for cleanliness and practicality.

I haven’t quite got the hang of it, even now; I probably wouldn’t be a successful web designer or graphics artist because, too often, I do what I want with a design instead of what a customer wants. When I designed the site for the online newsletter of one of my organizations, well … let’s just say I did it in hot pink and apple green, which probably blinded just about everyone that visited (I still maintain that the colors were nice).

I’m enamored with Digital Art, though, its difference from web or graphic design being that you create not for other people, but for yourself. Is that a selfish world view? I don’t know. Much of art is self-centered, anyway; when you write or paint, it’s usually for yourself. Art isn’t a team sport (except in very rare cases).


Remembering my surfing history, I can’t help but marvel at the progress we’ve made. I had a lot of web-related (mis)adventures along the way; I did try my hand at internet shopping, buying a complete Escaflowne VHS set with all four OSTs free, but the delivery was too expensive and took too long, so I never really, erm, took to it. I opened accounts, closed them, talked to digital personas and forgot them over and over again, and constructed many ephemeral personas that I destroyed repeatedly once I had enough of the fakery.

When I was an active member of the Pinoy Otaku ML (which was in the iConnect days), I had a number of these personas, mostly depending on who my favorite character was at the given time. I was Kaika, I was Kansas (which is not the name of any character I know of, but it's too long a story and I’m tired of typing), and so many others until I realized I was tired of it and just became Jael. After that I never used any other name in any of my other web-related undertakings. Since then, whenever I wrote fanfiction or replied to email I was, simply, Jael.


For some time I did try not to have any sort of web presence, since I was getting a bit fed up with it. I was tired of updating things. It was too much work. Besides, a deeply personal creature does not benefit when people who actually know you in person see the trash that come forth from your brain. And so I deleted my Fanfiction.net account, left my Friendster account to practical oblivion, let my Hotmail rot, and delegated dozens of YahooGroups to web-only mail. Yes, I said that, will say it again, and, wait, have said it again. I also deleted a certain fanfiction site at Tripod, in accordance to what I did to my xoom account some time before.

Now I have a blog, am a member of a group blog as well (although I haven’t posted—yet), and, although I wouldn’t exactly call myself a presence, there is a slight clue there, a rustling of the leaves without wind.

My dear, the main characteristic of a cycle is that things come around.


And so this blog, which is a glorified homepage, when you think about it. You have a profile and journal you can pour all your egotistical little ramblings into.And so I write, how long I do not know; until the next cycle sets, and rises again, perhaps.

We probably have nostalgia to blame. You always want to go back to where you started.

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I just realized, you remember a lot more when you force yourself to think back.

This entry owes its length not only to the sheer volume of my nostalgia (although I’m sure I have forgotten a great many things), but also to the fact that I have not posted anything new in a dozen days. The surest way not to have any net presence is not to have an Internet connection, which is precisely the case in my house right now.

Why I persist on writing as if I was talking to an audience I do not know, since this blog is of no use to anyone but myself.

In the meantime, this serves as an extended apology. Or punishment, you be the one to choose.

posted by Jael @ 12:40 AM