Welcome to a few new recruits since my last edition of this very infrequent newsletter, in which I wished everyone a happy new year, which should give you some idea of how regularly I'm managing to get stuff out. Better to leave 'em wanting more (is almost nobody's online content strategy these days)! Speaking of content strategies, what kind of fool sends out a tech newsletter on a Saturday night? This one. Onwards.

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I think it is safe to say that the signs were always there with me. Even before we had the internet I still found a way to be terminally online. I refer, nostalgically and with a fond little smile, to Teletext.

Looking at my subscriber list and the names I recognise, I am fairly confident that I don't have to explain what Teletext is to most of you. If you are unfamiliar due to age (we are talking about the mid to late 1980s here) or geographic persuasion, you could search to find out what it is. But even better, and I think you are all going to like this, you can actually have a go https://zxnet.co.uk/teletext/viewer/.

Happy New Year to you all, my slowly growing little tribe of subscribers. Thank you kindly for your nice comments about previous editions of this sporadic missive. Today I am reminiscing about Flash and celebrating the purest and most wholesome pockets of the Internet today. I started writing this in mid December when discussion of advent calendars was actually relevant, but maybe if I can get it out by Twelfth Night, it will still be just about festive....

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At Christmas I find myself susceptible to a level of twee that I wouldn't countenance at any other time of year. And so, in this uncynical mood, when the annual Jacquie Lawson Advent Calendar arrives at the beginning of December it gives me genuine daily joy and even brings the occasional tear to my eye. For those unfamiliar with the work of Jacquie Lawson (JL from here on), she specialises in cutesy animated e-cards, often featuring animal escapades (particularly with her own labrador, Chudleigh). The illustration and animation style is distinctive, soft and gentle, and as far as I can tell, never changes.

The unironic wholesomeness feels quite out of place in much of the modern internet, which I like to believe Lawson is completely unaware of; ignoring social media, oblivious to the "discourse", just plugging away out there making festive cartoons about robins. This year's calendar made me want to go in search of the Wholesome Internet, of which, more in the next section.

Hi all, it's been a while. But then I did promise that if nothing else, this newsletter would be erratic.

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Back in the mid 1990s, When I wasn't lurking in the X Files Usenet groups, I was learning how to build websites for myself, hand coding HTML in Notepad (a basic text editor). I would do this by finding websites that did things I liked, look at the source code, reverse engineer it and adapt it to my needs.

Hello, slightly larger group of subscribers! Thank you for reading. In this episode of Old Internet People I have gone Way Overboard. Last time I promised a piece on Usenet, newgroups and The X-Files, and it turned out like, well, this:

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Note: where I link through to examples of fan response, especially on hashtags, I am not responsible for NSFW content or spoilers! Click at your own risk (athough, also, don't get your hopes up, there is unlikely to be anything that exciting…)

I thought this would be an easy one. My intention (as previously mentioned) was to write a little reminiscence on life in the X-Files newsgroups on Usenet in the 90s, something short and sweet. But then (appropriately, given the subject matter), I went down an internet rabbit hole, through academic theories of fandom, the origin of "shippers" and contemporary examples in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. To me, this was digital anthropology treasure and I couldn't resist having a really good dig around for it. And so, several weeks later, I seem to have written an essay on the changing nature of internet fandom instead of a snappy newsletter post. Later and longer than expected, but hopefully richer for it...

Hello to my so far tiny number of subscribers, I appreciate you all so much and send you sparkly joy and gratitude for this coming week. Welcome to issue #1 of Old Internet People.

In case you missed the newsletter descriptive blurb, a little recap. In "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language", Gretchen McCulloch classifies those of us who were hacking clumsily around the net in the 1990s as "Old Internet People". The description resonated, even if the name rankled. So I have run with it, and will be using the newsletter to reflect on the internet as was, as well as the internet as is. (If you want to know more about me and my background in this area, there is a summary on my website).

Despite the framing device, this has absolutely nothing to do with weddings.

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