Tag: Internet

Quote of the Day – 11102025

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Personal Reflection:
Regret has a peculiar way of lingering — not loud, but constant, like background static. You can’t touch it, but it hums underneath the day. Auster’s words cut close: We are haunted by the lives we don’t lead. The choices we didn’t make, the versions of ourselves we left hanging in the doorway. We tell ourselves we’re fine with how things turned out, but every now and then, something stirs — a half-remembered song, a familiar street, a name we don’t say out loud — and we feel the ghost move again.

We don’t like to admit it, but we build entire lives out of what we didn’t choose. Every decision erases a hundred possibilities, and those absences don’t disappear — they follow quietly behind us, a shadow of what might have been. Maybe that’s what nostalgia really is — the ache of parallel versions of ourselves still trying to be born.

I think about the person I might’ve become if I’d stayed, if I’d gone, if I’d said yes instead of no. But every alternate life has its own price tag. Even the ones that look golden from this side of the glass would’ve demanded a different loss. Maybe the haunting isn’t punishment — maybe it’s memory’s way of reminding us that every path costs something.

And sometimes, the hardest ghosts to face aren’t the lives we never lived — they’re the parts of ourselves we abandoned along the way. The ones we outgrew too fast. The ones we silenced for approval. The ones we dismissed as weakness when they were just unguarded.

We are all haunted, but maybe haunting isn’t a curse — maybe it’s a form of tenderness. Proof that we’ve imagined more than we could live. Proof that somewhere inside us still believes in what’s possible. The trick is not to banish those ghosts, but to listen to what they’re trying to say: that life is not a single straight line, but a chorus of unfinished songs.

You don’t have to live every life to be whole. You just have to make peace with the ones that never happened — to thank them for showing you who you could have been, and then keep walking toward who you still might become.

Reflective Prompt:
What unlived version of yourself still lingers at the edges — and what might happen if you stopped mourning them and started listening to what they’re trying to tell you?

Post-Its, Index Cards, and the Lies the Internet Told Us

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Daily writing prompt
Do you remember life before the internet?
View all responses

DAILY PROMPT RESPONSE

Let’s clear something up: I’m not ancient. I didn’t walk uphill both ways to school with a torch in one hand and a stone tablet in the other. But I do remember life before the internet — when knowledge didn’t come from Google, and “cloud storage” meant checking the weather.

And while I’m no technophobe clutching a rotary phone, I’ll be damned if I don’t feel a certain warmth for the messier, more deliberate days of analog life.

Because if you lived it, you know: the world before Wi-Fi was a beautiful mix of struggle, discovery, and sweet, sweet chaos.

The Pre-Digital Grind: Slower, Messier, Real-er (and Honestly, Kind of Glorious)

Back then, learning wasn’t convenient — it was a full-contact sport. If you wanted to find something out, you didn’t just type it into a search bar. You hunted it down. You geared up with a sharpened pencil, a library card, and a suspicious level of confidence in the Dewey Decimal system.

Our tools? Index cards, neatly filed in metal boxes that clanked with authority. These things weren’t just for notes — they were blueprints for your thoughts. And when Post-its hit the scene? Absolute pandemonium. You could stick your brilliance on walls, mirrors, textbooks, your little brother’s forehead. Revolutionary.

But then — we hit the next level.

You know they make index cards with sticky stuff on the back? Yeah. Like Post-it Note Index Cards. Peak innovation. The greatest invention since caffeine and sarcasm. I remember showing one to a younger coworker — their face looked like I’d just handed them an alien artifact. Meanwhile, they were frantically making phone memos, taking screenshots, and praying their phone didn’t die mid-download because they forgot their charger. Again.

Let’s not forget the royalty of the supply cabinet: binder dividers and document protectors. If you put a sheet in one of those, it meant business. That page wasn’t just homework — it was a declaration of organized excellence.

Sure, it was clunky. Sure, it was slow. But you remembered things. You paid attention. Because you had to.

The Digital Era: Glorious, Addictive Chaos (Also, Kind of a Scam?)

Then came the machines.

My first laptop had a whopping 20MB hard drive, and we thought we were basically astronauts. All the information in the world? Right there. At home. On a screen. With a printer! No more photocopying worksheets or begging the bank for quarters. We were living in the future.

Until the printer ink cartel got us. Suddenly, ink cost more than the damn printer. One cartridge and your bank account was in critical condition.

And then — the so-called upgrade: DSL. We thought we’d arrived. Fast internet! Until we realized it was basically Dial-Up Deluxe™, just with slightly less screeching and slightly more disappointment.

Now? We’ve got fiber, cable, and cellular that can stream an entire Marvel franchise while running a Zoom meeting and auto-ordering cat litter. And somehow… we still don’t know anything.

We skim. We scroll. We “save for later” and never come back. Half the time we can’t even remember what we were looking for in the first place.

Honestly? It was easier when you had to look things up, take notes, and engage with information like it mattered.

Still Here, Still Learning, Still Stocked on Toner

Despite all the apps, all the AI, all the tech that’s supposed to “do the work for us” — I still research every day. I still use highlighters, different colored pens, and yes — I have a fat stack of index cards. My smallest flash drive is 32GB, and I buy toner in bulk like it’s a controlled substance.

Because some habits aren’t outdated — they’re battle-tested.

I remember the world before the internet — the slow wins, the rough edges, the analog beauty of it all. Just like I’ll remember this world as we bumble into the next one — the endless updates, the algorithmic everything, and the existential dread of accepting cookies you never wanted.

But me? I’ll still be taking notes. On index cards. With tabs. For “random rants,” “stats that prove my point,” and of course, a dedicated section for “Sh*t Talking Points.”

Because there will come a time when someone younger, fresher, and more deluded will roll their eyes and say, “Okay, boomer.” And I’ll be ready.

Color-coded.

Because maybe the future isn’t about going faster.
Maybe it’s about not forgetting what made the ride worth it in the first place.

I’m not that Damn Old

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Do you remember life before the internet?

DAILY PROMPT RESPONSE

This is sort of a tricky question. It’s tricky because a version of the internet has been around since the 60’s. However, this version of the internet, wasn’t available to the public. To be honest, only the select few even knew of it existence. Now, the version that this prompt is properly referring to became public in late 80’s. I already a working adult, so I remember the beginning of the transition well.

I also remember life prior to this transition. In the age of technical ignorance, things were quite simple, but very time consuming. We did things by hand. In the 80’s we had computers, but we did not have hard drives or cloud storage. Instead of carrying a flash drive in my pocket. I carried a library card, bus pass, and a floppy disk stuffed between the pages of my notebook with my stories in it.

Search Engines

In the pictures below represent what we used for research before the internet. We had ideas scribbled in our notebooks or index cards. We spent hours going through these drawers of cards sorted by subject and author. We would read passages from several books trying to narrow down the subject matter.

We would spend time in these shelves trying to find the perfect passage for your research. It usually ended up learning something that you never intended to learn. Often, it reshaped your entire direction of your research. So much time spent going into the new direction, only to scrape it because it just became too big for the parameters of your paper. Your notebooks are filled with information to be researched another time.

My Uncle taught me a coding system for notes that I still use today. I found an old notebook from high school and it had so many notations on various subjects it was crazy the stuff I researched back then. There were theories in there that were so far off, but there were a few that I wished I had the notebook during developing a few theorems. It would have saved me some time.

Streaming Services & Cloud Storage – YouTube, Netflix, and alike

We went to the movie theater and watched matinee because they were cheaper. Face it everyone was poor as hell back then. Well, at least everyone I knew. We had negatives from the photos we took nearly organized in boxes. No one got hacked and private information wasn’t exposed. At least, not by a stranger on the other side of the world.

We sat at uncomfortable desks watching dudes that talked funny telling us how we supposed to think about what we just read written by a dude that his last breath three centuries prior. We had talking ponies named “Patch” telling us not to take candy from stranger. We passed notes under the desk and scribbled the names of our crushes on our notebooks.

We read actual books until our eyes burned. Bookbags filled with pens, pencils, and erasers. Plastic bags with zippers held our sanity and security. It nothing like your pen running in the middle of drafting a paper. Your hands start to ache, and your stomach is growling. Your nowhere close to being to finding what your were looking for. We expressed our thoughts within the pages of these notebooks. For aspiring writers stories begin to blossom from the words of others. It funny how that happens sometimes.

It’s almost like its a part of the writer’s job is to inspire other writers. I don’t think this thoughtful gift is intentional. I think it happens somewhere in the act of telling the story. Often, I wonder if my work has done this for another writer. Then, I decide it’s not important. It’s not something I need to worry about. It will only get in the way.

There was a certain freedom to writing before the internet. Just you, your thoughts, and your aspirations confined in the binds of the notebook of the time. You hope you have written something people want to read. You hope you wrote something that will make a difference for at least reader, even if that reader is you. Sometimes we write something that absolutely doesn’t belong in the thing we are writing. That sentence that appears out of nowhere, but man you know you have something special. I miss writing before the internet. I miss portions of life before the web.

Yes, I remember life before the internet. I recognize how much it has helped so many people, but I’m cognizant of the fact it has also destroyed so many.