You had to buy TV seasons one at a time. Like a peasant. Like a scholar. Like a monk. You didn’t “binge.” You acquired. You waited. You put 24: Season Two on your Christmas list and acted grateful. A man owned Family Guy Volume 1 and that was his personality.

I miss:

The guy who ended every argument with “’nuff said.” No explanation. No evidence. Just verdict.

“Buffy season 5 is peak TV. ’Nuff said.”

The DVD review economy, where some man named Todd gave “video quality: 4/5, audio: 3.5/5, extras: 2/5” to Smallville: The Complete First Season and you read it like scripture.

People saying “teh” on purpose.

People saying “pwned” and believing it still hit.

The phrase “epic fail” before HR departments found it.

Forum signatures with three anime quotes, a Metal Gear Solid codec screenshot, and a userbar that said “Proud Firefox User.”

People who wrote “I can haz?” and were not immediately executed.

Every website having a black background, tiny gray font, and a skull somewhere.

GameFAQs posts where a 14-year-old wrote a 90-page walkthrough in plain text, drew maps with ASCII, and became more useful to society than most consultants.

The “under construction” GIF. The little man digging. The website might never be finished. Neither was the soul.

People saying “flame war” instead of “discourse.”

People saying “troll” before it meant a guy with politics. It used to just mean some goblin saying “PS2 has no good games” and vanishing into the swamp.

People typing “IMO” and “IMHO” like a little hat tip before saying something insane.

The phrase “your mileage may vary.” This was diplomacy. This was civilization.

The phrase “don’t feed the troll.” Ancient wisdom. Now everyone hand-feeds the troll with a silver spoon and calls it engagement.

The forum guy with 28,000 posts who somehow moderated a Dragon Ball board for free and acted like a provincial judge.

People getting banned and making a second account called the same thing but with _2 at the end.

The entire culture of “first post.” Empty. Stupid. Sacred.

Flash animations where Mario said “shit” and everyone thought comedy had peaked.

Newgrounds as a toxic landfill of creativity, horny teenagers, stick fights, sprite cartoons, and some of the funniest garbage ever made.

Homestar Runner existing like it was broadcast from another dimension.

People discovering YouTube and uploading 240p videos called “funny cat falls off table LOL” and somehow it was enough.

The old YouTube comment box where every discussion became:

“fake and gay”

“lol”

“song name?”

“FIRST”

“this video is no longer available”

AMVs set to Linkin Park. Naruto. Cloud Strife. In the End. Always In the End.

Guys making tribute videos to Sephiroth with Evanescence and meaning every second of it.

The word “random” as an entire personality.

“I’m so random lol XD.”

And she was. In a way.

XD.

Not ironic. Not post-ironic. Just sincere sideways laughter.

People typing “roflcopter.” We should not have survived this.

Every forum having a guy whose avatar was either Vash the Stampede, Sephiroth, Alucard, or Jack Sparrow.

The phrase “win sauce.”

The phrase “this.” before “this” became Reddit punctuation and lost its awful magic.

The guy posting “/thread” after his own opinion.

People using Photobucket to host essential images, then every old forum becoming a graveyard of broken rectangles.

The little red X where a picture used to be. A whole civilization buried under bandwidth theft warnings.

Angelfire. Geocities. Tripod. Sites that looked like a schizophrenic bulletin board but had better information than modern SEO sludge.

Fan sites with names like The Ultimate Simpsons Archive that actually were ultimate.

Webrings. You could go from a Sailor Moon shrine to a Final Fantasy VII theory page to a guy’s anti-IE manifesto in seven clicks.

People writing “Best viewed in 1024x768.” A command from a dead empire.

People caring which browser you used. Internet Explorer was shame. Firefox was honor. Opera was autism.

Winamp skins. RealPlayer. QuickTime. DivX codecs from God knows where.

Downloading a trailer and watching it in a window the size of a postage stamp.

Waiting six hours for a 700MB AVI called LOST.S02E04.HDTV.XviD-LOL and praying it wasn’t mislabeled.

Kazaa and LimeWire giving the family computer spiritual diseases.

Every file called “Linkin Park - Numb.exe.”

People warning each other: “Don’t click that, it’s a screamer.”

Screamers. Truly evil. Pure 2000s internet. No monetization. No brand. Just a demon face and a ruined afternoon.

The maze game. The car commercial. The sudden face. The betrayal.

“Rate my setup” threads where the setup was a CRT monitor, a PS2, a stack of burned CDs, and a chair from the kitchen.

People building entire identities around owning the extended editions of Lord of the Rings.

A guy saying the Blade Runner five-disc set was “essential” and everyone nodding because it probably was.

People reviewing DVD menus. Menus!

“Nice animated transitions.”

We had time then. We had standards. We had nothing.

Buying The Simpsons season boxes shaped like Homer’s head and pretending this was acceptable shelf design.

TV-on-DVD collectors acting like librarians of a lost monastery.

No one complained that Star Trek: The Next Generation seasons cost a car payment. They just said “finally, season 6 is out.”

People saying “I’ll wait for the box set” and meaning a literal box.

The old Netflix red envelopes. Queue management as a moral discipline.

Message boards where you recognized everyone and hated half of them.

Forum beef lasting eight years over whether Majora’s Mask was better than Ocarina.

Console wars with actual illiterates producing strangely durable arguments.

“Sony fanboys.” “Nintendrones.” “Xbots.” Beautiful taxonomy. Crude but clear.

People saying “M$” as if they had uncovered the Rothschilds.

People calling GameCube “kiddy” because it had colors, then going home to watch anime and play Kingdom Hearts.

The word “kiddy.” A dead insult from a simpler race of men.

Entire forums dedicated to arguing whether Zelda was for children, while everyone involved was 23 and unemployed.

People saying “graphics aren’t everything” with religious conviction.

People saying “gameplay > graphics” like it was carved into Sinai.

People saying “rent it first.” Renting games. A lost sacrament. Blockbuster as temple.

Cheat Code Central. IGN boards. NeoGAF before everyone learned law-firm language. 1UP. Gamespy. PlanetHalfLife. PlanetQuake. The old web had planets.

Every review score mattering because there were fewer of them and everyone was stupider in a more intimate way.

“I give it a 9.2.”

Not 9. Not 9.5. 9.2. Science.

People making top 10 lists with no SEO slop. Just “Top 10 Badass Anime Swords” and an ugly banner.

Fan fiction sites where everyone wrote with maximum sincerity and minimum shame.

DeviantArt comments saying “kawaii!!! fav’d.”

The word “fav’d.”

People using LiveJournal moods.

Current mood: melancholy.

Current music: AFI.

Away messages on AIM that were either song lyrics or emotional hostage notes.

AIM profiles with cryptic initials and “you know who you are.”

MSN Messenger nudges. Yahoo Messenger audibles. Digital harassment with whimsy.

People asking “asl?” in places they absolutely should not have been asking.

The whole internet feeling like a mall food court after dark: teenagers, weird adults, bad lighting, niche stores, and nobody’s parents paying attention.

It was uglier. It was slower. It was dumber. It had pop-ups, malware, broken image links, fan shrines, DVD fetishists, forum cops, codec packs, ’nuff said guys, and men spending real money on Angel: Season Four and calling it a must-own.

But it had people in it. Weird people. Specific people. Not brands pretending to be people, not SEO farms pretending to be answers, not engagement machines pretending to be communities. Just some guy with a terrible avatar telling you the Farscape DVD transfer had edge enhancement.

And honestly?

He was right.

’Nuff said.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5875832&forum_id=2Firm#49950917)