Multiverse > metaverse

Haven't posted in a while, but things have been going pretty well.

Started at a new job that I really like.

Trying not to feel guilty about letting my writing here slip.

Guilt isn't going to change anything. This was an experiment in creativity and it's working.

My D&D group is back to playing weekly

I feel more creative than I have in a while. I’m working on a side project. I am doing good work at my job. I'm creating a new D&D world. All in all, I'm feel much better.

And that's a win in my book.

That's not, in and of itself, a bad thing.

All people are reflections of the world around them. Can there even be a self devoid of others? How do we define ourselves if not in relation to those around us?

Lately, I've been trying to behave more as a prism.

We read something and regurgitate it. We see a trend and we copy it.

Taking in the light around me and splitting into something new. Something colorful.

I don't know if it is working. Perhaps I, like a talented counterfeiter, continue to produce better and better copies, fooling myself that I am creating something new.

I'm not even conviced it matters.

But the act of being prismatic makes me feel better.

And I am convinved that that matters.

So many people present themselves as mirrors.

The epidemic of modern reality is that, for many people, the self stops at reflection.

I spent some time this weekend at the beach.

I thought I'd bring some back for you.

Listen to the waves

I've written a few things using Multiverse now and I wanna start a document with my best tips and tricks :) I'll update this as I learn more and as the multiverse evolves.

Stickers

If you're looking for good stickers to use on your writing, check out the Giphy sticker search. It's as easy as changing the link to have a `-sticker` on the end of it:

https://giphy.com/search/magic -> https://giphy.com/search/magic-stickers

These gifs all have transparent backgrounds and look nice on here!

Links & basic styling

I wanted an easy way to do links in Multiverse blocks, so I put together a small bookmarklet to handle that. The bookmarklet will convert a highlighted text box into some HTML and place it on your clipboard - then you can just highlight all the text in the original block and replace it by pasting. You can do markdown links and basic styles like italics and bold.

To get the bookmarklet, visit the page below and drag the link below to your Bookmarks Bar.

Get the Bookmarklet

Don't know markdown? No worries, just check out this cheat-sheet! It's pretty simple :)

Markdown Cheatsheet

More to come!

Hey, welcome to my weird internet place.

I'm wuz the bit warlock.

Lately I've been getting into plants.

Is it possible to be nostalgic for a time you don't really remember? I was born in '94 and I don't remember a ton about my childhood. I'm technically a 90's kid, but more in spirit than anything else.

Outside of that, I'm on a quest to find what I miss about the old days of the internet. Trying to be more creative. I'm doing it here.

I'd love for you to join me.

he/him

bi

I'm a software engineer, dungeon master, and web creator :)

I'm in the process of de-"design"-ifying my personal site. I also have a digital garden/grimoire that you can find here.

It's little more than an idea for now, but it's one that I can feel growing as I begin this journey to find a part of the internet I feel I've lost.

For a while now, I've had the idea of creating a podcast of all the wonderful things on this weird wide web.

I'd love to sit down with another human and discuss all the strangeness that abounds with such limitless creativity. Kicks' Taia777 [1] post has once again got me thinking about the concept.

The format would be freeform, just two people talking about something beautiful and how it makes them feel. Perhaps something like Caring into the Void [2] - a favorite podcast of mine. Or maybe something different, who knows.

[1] : https://www.kickscondor.com/taia777/

[2] : https://podcasts.adorilabs.com/caring-into-the-void/?cid=RW2jmG6qqJEfbQYD

In 2008(?), my mom was at the hospital for some routine stuff. She was waiting in the lobby and happened to catch a segment on ABC on some strange thing called Myachi.

She bought a few for me and my siblings and gave them to us the following Christmas. My siblings (much older than me), were not all that interested, but for some reason, they found a spot in my brain and refused to leave. I took them everywhere. I'd go to theme parks and bust them out, showing off some moves and talking to anyone that wanted to hear about them.

It looked something like this

#WOWIMYOUNG #THATQUALITYTHO

85 views • Jul 18, 2009

I've been feeling nostalgic lately. The web these days is so big, yet so small. It's nothing like my early experiences with the internet. Those were defined by a niche hobby and a small web community.

WowBB was nothing like today's internet. It was a chaotic web forum, not even the best option for its time. It was full of security vulnerabilities (more on that later). But it had a strange charm - old pixel art icons and emoji, links for AIM and IRC, and a simple web interface for admin management. The marketing page for the site had a Miami Vice "Test Drive" image and a 3d folded image of the software.

In short, WowBB was perfect.

* STWAKOJ : Spread the word and keep on jamming. A common phrase on the forums and a marketing strategy for the toy itself.

I joined the forums about a month after I got into the hobby with the username MyachiRevolutionist. 14-year-old me had grand illusions of getting involved in something and changing things up, kicking off a new golden era (or at least making a name for myself). I guess somethings never really change.

I'd spend hours on the forums, chatting with people, getting to know the moderators/Myachi Masters, people hired by the company to STWAKOJ*. Over time, I started helping out on the forums. The community grew and more mods were needed, so I worked to delete spam, keep the peace among the (fairly young) community members.

I started a "shop" for people to request custom avatars and I made them gifs in free photo editing software. I made custom emoji, usually editing some existing emoji to make what I wanted to add. I did bad video editing for my trick videos, badly overlaying low res videos with titles and The Killers songs.

At one point the forums got hacked. I didn't know it at the time, but it was the first instance of ransomware I'd ever see. Some random person broke into the site using a vulnerability in wowBB and "extorted" the site to add his ads to every page. He locked things down for a bit, but I managed to get his contact information and emailed him. I wasn't any older than probably 15 at this point, but I told him what he wanted to hear. He wanted his ads to stay up. I told him we would keep them up if he could tell me how he broke the site. He told me, I locked him out and deleted his ads. I think he just wanted someone to know how talented he was. Relatable.

I learned PHP to make changes to the site. I hardened the server to make it less vulnerable to attacks. I decided I wanted to get into Computer Science because of jred.

Many of the posts I made there have been lost to the ether. Many of the friends I made I'll never speak to again.

The company doesn't exist anymore as much as I can tell. New "handsack" companies have sprung up (I've just bought a Flop Ball, to see what the community is like today).

Beautiful.

We build websites that all look the same.

I keep looking for that feeling of community I had back then. Perhaps I'll find it here.

We make posts on one of 5 apps, half of which are screenshots from the another of those apps.

There isn't much more to the story. I became a software engineer. I still have some of my Myachis. I've reached out to the relatively small handsack community on Reddit, but I can't help but think that we've lost something integral to the web.

The OG forum members grew up and went to college. The domain expired. Today all that is left is a few pages archived on the Wayback Machine. I've pulled as many images off of there as I could. They are the ones you've seen through this post.

The new website they built sucked. It was very "Web 2.0" - basically a very specific Facebook groups clone that worked terribly and lost all of the character the forums had.

In the end, the site shut down shortly after the company paid a ton of money to get a "official" community application built. The management of the company pushed out a bunch of the Myachi Masters and the community started to slow down.

I learned there was an online community - an old wowbb forum setup by some of the people in the community where people posted trick videos, chatted with other hobbyists, and made up new moves.

www.flopball.com

I don't know what to do with this.

I've never been the most creative individual.

Perhaps this space is a place to try and change that. A place to slow down, a place to practice, to create. Without caring too much about what it looks like or what the "point" is. I don't know, but it's worth a try.

Well, that's not entirely true. I've always loved creation - the act of making something new, but I'm limited by a lack of patience for practice and an ever-widening set of interests.