I feel like some curmudgeon who’s always romanticizing the Internet of the 2000s, but come on, social media is a scourge, and the dead Internet theory feels increasingly real. People just used to do whatever on the Internet back then, and there are sites that are still being talked about today. And there were so many different websites you could stumble upon* and end up bookmarking and visiting regularly.

That’s why it’s always nice to see something that doesn’t quite follow whatever the rules are for having an online presence. Just take a look at GAKHED.

Now, did I conduct thorough research into this 20-year-old guy who’s making heartwarming animal videos set to music that I think he created himself? Naw. I’m just winging this.

Anyway, I’m on YouTube a lot, and his video “will you remember me?” came across my feed a while back and made me stop and watch and feel a little sad thinking about my aging dogs.

And then not long after, “dandelions forever” showed up.

And then there’s his website. It’s hosted by Neocities and I’m pretty sure veterans of the Internet will chuckle when they see it.

I don’t know the guy, I haven’t followed him that long, but I really love what he’s doing. His videos are short! They don’t follow the let’s-make-movie-length-videos-bwahaha thing happening on YouTube these days (though I really wouldn’t mind watching hour-long videos of animals with chill music)!

And let me mention his website again. He’s 20, which means he wasn’t online during that time of the Internet and probably just likes vintage online aesthetics. So cool. So whimsical. I don’t know if all this is authentic or if he just knows he can garner some interest because of what he’s doing, and I don’t care, I love it, I need to see more of this type of energy from people online, and I think it’s a good reminder that you can really still do whatever on the Internet.

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_{*God, I miss the extension.}

It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon, I’m still working on this website instead of my deadlines today (the remote freelancer life, amirite), and I was trying to figure out what intelligent, insightful thing I should be writing for this blog, so I decided to go to Dooce.com, a blog I haven’t visited in quite a while, and see what Heather Armstrong is up to these days.

I used to visit her blog a lot in the 2000s. I loved how raw and open her writing was. And she had a huge impact on blogging; everyone knew what getting Dooced meant, and she was a mommy blogger and making sponcon long before influencers were even a thing.

I saw that her last post was in April 2023. That didn’t seem strange at first, because a lot of bloggers from the 2000s are usually found on Instagram or Substack these days.

And then I Googled her and found out that she died in May 2023. It’s a gut punch to read about how it happened.

I don’t have an eloquent belated tribute for her. I was just a very sporadic onlooker in her life and someone who hoped to write about life in a way that’s half as authentic as she did. I hadn’t kept up with her the way I did decades ago, so I don’t know about any controversies she might have been involved with, so I will just remember her as the pioneer that she was.

I started blogging in 1999, back when blogs were still known as weblogs and online journals and Blogger was cutting edge. It was so cutting edge I was afraid of nicking myself and thus opted to just manually update and reupload HTML pages on my personal website, wherever it was hosted. My online heroes included Christine of Maganda.org, Claire of Loobylu, and Heather of Harrumph and Jezebel (which incidentally became one of my favorite websites in the 2010s, though it was completely different from the site Heather ran). I wanted to be as creative and as good with words as they were, and thought that whatever I wrote deserved to curl up and cry in a corner when compared to what they posted.

Eventually, I found a community of fellow online journalers, and many of us made our way to Livejournal, which used to require an invite from a friend before you could join. Once I received that elusive invite, I proceeded to vomit all over my journal and most likely caused eyes to weld to the back of heads with all my drama.

Once I started working, the urge to blog tapered off, and when I wasn’t looking, blogging exploded. People were cultivating loyal readerships and making money from blogging. Soon, food blogs, travel blogs, shopping blogs, beauty blogs, parenting blogs, green blogs, gadget blogs were everywhere. I wanted to have any one of those and often regretted giving up blogging.

Trying to figure out my unique niche (ew) and worrying about being cringe have forced me to stop blogging for years. As I got older, I realized that, truly, most of the time, you’re the only one who gets in your way, and you just end up doing absolutely nothing, and life’s really just too short to keep yourself stuck. So here I go again.

Earlier this week, I briefly attended the book launch for Raissa Robles‘s book Marcos Martial Law: Never Again held at Balay Kalinaw in UP Diliman. Noel Cabangon performed “Bayan Ko” before the main discussion with the panel, which featured Robles, Roberto “Obet” Verzola, Senator Rene Saguisag, Pete Lacaba, Bonifacio Ilagan, and Dean Ronald Mendoza of the Ateneo School of Government, began.

The attendees, to my dismay, were mostly older people, with a smattering of younger ones, which to me only highlights the idea that younger people are becoming less and less interested and aware of what happened during the Martial Law years and why it all remains relevant today. Alan Robles moderated the discussion, and one of his first questions was about why people seem to have forgotten all about the atrocities during Martial Law and how it’s possible that Bongbong Marcos has a very strong chance to become vice president. I think the panelists got it right when they said that no one was ever really held accountable for all the wrongdoings during Martial Law. Nobody was arrested, nobody was tried and jailed, and the Marcoses were allowed back in the country a mere handful of years after they were kicked out of power.

Aside from justice not being served, I believe another key factor is that Martial Law was never really discussed in depth in schools. I don’t remember any detailed information being taught about those years, only that Marcos was in power for a very long time. In fact, I only learned the truth about Martial Law when I was in college through a very excellent documentary entitled Batas Militar. I can’t say for sure whether history isn’t taught properly to children because people don’t think children will understand or that such details are too much (too disturbing) to handle. And then there’s the perpetual refrain that learning history isn’t necessary and the all-too-common attitude of brushing unpleasant things under the rug and pretending they never happened. As a result, you have people who never learn from their mistakes.

Yet another factor is what is now called “EDSA fatigue,” which is being used to describe how people feel about People Power nowadays. What was once a celebrated event is now either widely mocked or ignored. It may be related to the fact that People Power and EDSA are always associated with the Aquinos and not with the Filipino people anymore. Nobody is saying that Ninoy Aquino didn’t play his part or that Corazon Aquino was an inspiring figure at the time. But recognition of their roles has reached the point of reverence that it’s difficult for some people to view People Power and the Aquinos as separate entities. Therefore, anyone who’s unhappy with the Aquinos, be it Noynoy or Kris, tends to become annoyed with the family and, by extension, People Power. The discussion has become nothing more than red versus yellow, Marcos versus Aquino, Martial Law versus People Power.

And because many people don’t know what happened during Martial Law, even those who lived through it and saw nothing more than carefully planned order and progress that masked the grimy truth, you now have a nation that is fondly looking back on that time. Now you have people who are confusing truth for propaganda and who don’t realize that their criticisms against the government would have gotten them imprisoned and/or tortured during the Martial Law era they praise and long for today.

The formal announcement from the event organizers through One Direction Philippines came on May 19: the boys are indeed coming to the Philippines on March 21, 2015 for a concert at the MOA concert grounds–and tickets were going on sale on May 23. Cue the outrage. The ticket selling date came much too soon; many people couldn’t scrounge up the money in three days, and the concert’s practically a whole year away. Couldn’t they start selling in December or some date closer to the concert itself?

I suspect they couldn’t: I imagine One Direction’s management wants to make sure that bringing the boys here will be worth it and that tickets really will be sold. They needn’t have worried or doubted the 1D fandom in the Philippines. As early as 2 p.m., May 22, people had already secured their spot in the line, ready to pull an all-nighter. The number of people lined up grew throughout the night.

TJ, Macy, and I couldn’t line up earlier, so we were there at 5 a.m., at which point the lines were already so damn long. Long story short, Macy and I were inside the Arena’s lobby a little before 10, and we got inside the Arena Bowl before 2. We thought we were home free until we noticed that the line wasn’t moving at all. It took ages before it started inching along with some regularity, and we finally got our tickets–though not the VIP ones we were hoping for—after 5 p.m.

Fucking 5 p.m.

Meanwhile, outside, people were suffering in the heat, tempers were rising, tears were falling when people heard that some tickets have already been sold out. TJ reported that there were some scuffles and a lot of crying kids and angry parents.

All in all, it was an experience that I will never repeat and I will never do for any other band or person ever again. Buying a concert ticket shouldn’t have to take more than 12 hours, but I’m pretty glad we were able to get good tickets anyway—made the +12 hours worth it.

What the One Direction ticket selling organizers got horribly, horribly wrong

The biggest mistake they made that I can think of is being unprepared. I can’t say they underestimated the crowd; they said in their announcement that 15,000 people are expected to show up at the event. If they’re expecting that many people to show up, they should have ensured that they have enough people to control the crowd and guide the people. In addition, there shouldn’t have been only eight fucking counters inside the Arena Bowl and the concourse for the other tickets. I kept saying, “Two rows of 10 or 12 counters! One row on two sides of the arena! Don’t make people form a snaking line! Make them queue at each counter, and if they can’t fit yet, then that’s when the others should wait as part of one big line!” One dad was even saying that cash and credit card transactions should be separate, which makes more sense, because cash transactions are faster.

They also should have limited the maximum number of tickets per person to two, not five. Less chances of the tickets running out, less chances of scalpers buying up as many tickets as they can. Apparently, scalpers would immediately sell the tickets the minute they exited MOA Arena; VIP tickets went from P17,800 to P21,000–P23,000.

Another mistake is that we didn’t hear from the organizers. Inside the lobby, there were sporadic announcements about ticket availability, and then someone announced that they were requesting management for a second show. After that, we didn’t hear from at all. It would have been moderately reassuring if they would show up occasionally to tell the crowd why the lines weren’t moving and what they plan to do to make everyone’s lives easier.

What the organizers will probably get wrong the day of the concert

They’ve already made a mistake by choosing the MOA concert grounds. It’s a flat, level surface, and people with the cheaper tickets will not be able to see anything much from where they’ll be sitting. According to a comment on the 1DPhil page, “magkakariot” if they just use the monobloc chairs. It’s very likely that many people will be unhappy. Why pay any amount at all if all you’re going to see are people’s heads or their backs?

One thing I think they can do is to create elevated seats for the people in the back, giving everyone a fair shot at getting a look at the boys. I don’t think that’s very likely, however. BUT. SM can construct an entire building in a year. A seating section in 10 months shouldn’t faze them at all. And make sure they’re proper seats that people can’t dislodge and throw at the organizers. Get the fuck on it, people.

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Over at the 1DPhil Facebook page, there are more than a few people saying that of course the VIP and Diamond tickets were sold out first, because it’s only the rich kids who aren’t real fans anyway who are snapping them up. To that I say, that’s completely untrue. Blame the scalpers who would go in in threes and buy five tickets each. Aside from those assholes, based on the VIP/Diamond crowd I saw yesterday, it was a mix of happy hardcore fans—who were seriously unhappy ¹ to know that the tickets they wanted were gone—and parents and older relatives who are doing their best to get tickets for the kids in their families. So enough of the rage at the “carrot fans” and “fake fans.”

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Many thanks to Macy for just being so cool in line and for urging me to go on when I felt like walking the hell out of there. But most of all to TJ for waiting outside for us in the heat and the crowd even though I know he was thisclose to losing his shit and was angry about the whole situation the organizers put everyone through.