My first PC was an old dell optiplex running Windows 7 that my father stole from his workplace in the chaos of his whole department getting shuddered. I convinced him to let me have it so I could play his collection of old PC games. Age of Empires II, Star Wars: Dark Forces, Daggerfall, some real classics. It was a weird machine with some kind of coprorate proprietary software on it that restricted a lot of it's functions, including the ability to factory reset. My father somehow still managed to put parental restrictions on it too. He really wanted to make sure I could only play video games and nothing else.

With the help of the computer at the public library, a stolen USB stick, and some snooping around in my old man's password book, I managed to install firefox onto my optiplex, and suddenly I had the whole internet at my fingertips. I was neglectfully homeschooled and spent literally 10+ hours a day browsing the web for most of my teenage years. My tech illiterate mother was easily fooled and my mostly absent father took far too long to catch on to what I had done.

I crept through all kinds of websites big and small. I saw so much art, read many unhinged conspiracy blogs, played many pirated games, listened to much pirated music. I contributed too! I would write poems and roleplay on forums and make surreal photoshop edits.

I used to (and still do) hear constantly about how whatever you post on the internet stays there forever, but that's really only true for the mainstream websites. So much of the content I created and the internet that I grew up on is just... gone. Memories, art, friends, my entire teenage identity, all lost to time. I can find scraps of it here or there, but for someone who was as chronically online as I was my footprint is astonishingly small.