What’s this? I’m trying to blog once a day for 50 days! Inspired by Forking Mad and Lou Plummer.

Do you have any good or bad stories from your relationship with social media or Internet communities?

My first Internet community that I participated in (barely) was the QBasic forums.

I posted a few programs under the terribly embarrassing xXlennonboyXx moniker - you can see the index page of the forum on the Internet Archive. The original posts are - amazingly - still alive albeit after several ownership transfers. I got some feedback but didn’t follow up much. The person with the handle KristopherWindsor that left comments for me, I remember being extremely talented - they wrote some really impressive stuff that got posted on that forum.

A few years after I posted that, I remember going back to the forum and seeing a memorial page for iorr5t - the forum admin, Mac. Mac had died. It wasn’t my first experience of someone on the Internet dying, but I remember that it hit me pretty hard.

On a related note, in the very early YouTube days, someone named jackthevideoguy uploaded QBasic Nerd which I still think about sometimes.