CAUTION
TURN BACK WHILE YOU STILL CAN
Just kidding! I'm not exactly sure what's gotten into me. Well, actually, there's a reason I'm feeling especially Geocities-rific for this particular journal entry: I'm designing this page on my recently built Windows 98 computer!
I've been waiting for this moment throughout most of my adult life; I grew up on Windows 95 and 98 but never really had a chance to live out the full experience of this operating system until now. There were various brief dalliances with 9x operating systems in my 20s and early 30s, from dumpster dives to failed emulation experiments. This, finally, is my first honest-to-Beelzebub Windows 98 PC installed from scratch with all the bells and whistles.
The machine is a bit overkill for '98 era tasks, rocking a Pentium 4 with a Radeon 9200, a 128GB SSD and waaaayyyyy too much RAM. It's got a SoundBlaster Live card, and though it may be a less desirable OEM variant, it still sounds fantastic coming out of some JBL Platinum Series beige-colored speakers and it should get the job done for most things I need it for (not SoundBlaster 16, apparently). It's got USB 2.0 ports on the back and a snappy DVD drive for I/O-related needs. I even installed a network card with Wi-Fi support(!!!) but it's probably not going to get much use for a variety of reasons.
All this combined with other retro computing finds from this year (Gateway 19" CRT monitor, IBM Model M keyboard and Microsoft IntelliMouse) makes me feel like I've got a premium late '90s computer experience for the first time...maybe, ever. Back then, I never had a powerful graphics card for gaming. I never had a tiny fraction of this storage space for the metric fuckton of multimedia files, games, archived software, anything that could be useful on the computer. I never even had a surface level understanding of what made this stuff tick, nor anybody else to show me the way.
Now that we're here, I can already envision the ways that having this machine around will make my life better. A mostly offline PC with comparably few distractions and all kinds of simple, accessible software will make both creative and productivity-related tasks a breeze. This space where the retro computer takes up residence has become my default at-home writing zone after a prolonged period of rearranging, mostly due to outside factors. If I'm not feeling up to getting any work done, it's still a great place to have a bit of fun; I can easily play all my favorite CD-ROM games from my childhood in addition to other contemporary favorites. The cool thing about this setup, though, is that working on stuff actually feels fun.
The distraction thing makes sense, but I'm still not as clear on what the difference is when it comes to the enjoyment of creative tasks as opposed to using a modern Windows machine with a high-resolution widesceen display. If I had to take a stab, this simple fact that keeps coming back to mind: less is more. Since there's not as much to do on here, my focus stays where it's at. The usual impulses that guide my hypnotic muscle memory-like use of a modern computer simply aren't there.
An old computer like this one is not necessarily a portal to other realms, rather an extension of the one in front of us. I'm convinced much of my psychological problems stem from overuse of the internet; you and I were not meant to take in this much information all the time. I am frequently disturbed by the things I see people talk about on the web, if they are even people to begin with. The rise of fascism in this country has seemingly emboldened a bizarre sect of terminally online zealots to spew out a neverending stream of the most callous opinions I've ever been exposed to. My gradual shift toward small web alternatives like Mastodon, Neocities, less mainstream chat applications and the like has been a positive development over the past couple of years, but I still find myself having to rely on sludge-infested attention economy sites for other purposes--often coming to regret it.
Here, though, nothing's stopping me from being myself. I can do whatever feels natural in the moment without any amount of outside influence trying to manipulate me into a specific course of action. I can stick a bunch of animated GIFs in the middle of a journal post because I feel like it. It's great, you should try it!
Outside of all this, life's pretty much been business as usual. It's nice to have all this extra time to myself, even if much of it has been characterized by the same kind of short term wheel spinning that took place during recent months. July is almost over, so that means I'll quickly be back to working my second job a few evenings a week for the next 10 months. As autumn gets closer, the main job will also begin to ramp back up. I don't think I've wasted my summer or anything, it's actually been pretty good by my standards. I just feel a bit guilty about certain big picture things I haven't been making time for, yet again.
In a way, this 98 computer marks the last sliver of my long-lost youth I can finally get a grip on, the final piece of my collection I need to feel complete. While using this archaic operating system from a bygone era, I can actually start to take some more steps forward as a person in 2025. I can sit here and bust out a creative project like this in an evening, and leave wanting to do more the next day. I no longer feel like I have this distant albatross weighing me down, this unfulfilled experiece sitting around in the corner of my life. Getting the computer up and running took weeks of continuous effort and focus, it took putting the building blocks together into something I can be proud of. Whatever happens next, I can look back on this process and feel inspired. I'm capable of more than I give myself credit for sometimes. It is actually possible to take back some of what makes us who we are in the face of increasingly less hopeful circumstances. Little by little, we can break free from what holds us back if we just hold on to a clear-eyed vision of a better future.
