A BIT ABOUT ME

A repository for my fragmented memories of growing up in the era of the early Internet. Mostly covers the period from 1997 to 2004. I’m prone to bouts of nostalgia and can easily spend way too much time replaying good times from years past.

SPEED ROUND

• Born in Bangladesh, 1985. Settled in Canada, 2011.
• Favourite site on the Internet, circa 1998: Maniac Joe's WWF News Website
• First song downloaded on Napster, 2000: Bone Thugs n Harmony - Thuggish Ruggish Bone
• Studied Econ in uni, work at a nonprofit

MEMORY TIMEFRAMES & FRAGMENTS

• 1990-95
  A 3-month trip across the US, early 1993. Cold winter mornings doing PE exercises at a field in school, 1991. Staying up all night for the final of World Cup USA '94, then going to bed at half-time because the Brazil-Italy game was unbearably boring. Finishing 2nd in school student rankings in 1995, a feat for which I was awarded a Famous Five book anthology. Big fan of Enid Blighton books, Archie + Tintin comics and cricket.
• 1995-1997
  Cable TV arrives, we no longer have to put up with state broadcaster TV and it’s 2PM-11PM air time. I now have access to cricket games all over the world, and believe you me, I'm watching as much as I can. Singapore-based MTV Asia and Hong Kong-based Channel V are duking it out to be the leading provider of English-language music in Asian markets. 2Pac and Biggie die. I have an older sister, so unbeknownst to myself, I'm becoming quite the boy band expert.
• 1997 - 2004
  28.8kbps internet, then broadband in '03. Y2K, Daria, Napster, WinMX, MSN Messenger, Limewire. I become obssessed with shoegaze as a genre and the Jesus and Mary Chain as a band. I dismiss the Strokes as media-engineered hype, until 'Last Nite' and '12:51' finally turn me around. A golden age when the Internet was still mostly fun and weird. and had yet to become an over-commercialized, monopolistic shell of its former self.

These memories of a simpler time are fading fast, and I don’t have them written down anywhere. Considering that these memories aren’t particularly important to even me, it seems like they might be gone forever in a few years’ time. So why not put em up here? No one’s ever actually going to see this.

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