MOC12: Day 30 - Connecting Through Technology

Journaling:
I was 14 when I coded my first very simple website, in 1998. A bunch of my friends had "homepages" too and it seemed fun. From the very start I was into it because of the design aspects - getting to choose whichever colours and fonts I wanted and combining them into something fun - what's not to like?! (Of course, the website only looked exactly I wanted on our own family computer as I didn't think about the fact that other computers didn't have the same fonts installed or the same screen resolution, ha ha!)

Very early on we started writing daily "updates" in our "internet journals" as we would call them. This, of course, would later be known as blogs, although we didn't know that at the time. It was through these journals that I got to know other people my age from all around Sweden, who had their own websites and journals. We started reading each others journal updates, and writing messages in the guestbooks we'd have on our websites at the time (commenting on each separate journal entry was not a thing yet). From there we started chatting via emails or on ICQ.

It was so much fun to get to know people from other parts of Sweden, who had different lives but shared interests with me. And oh how happy I was in the summer of 2000 when I got to go to Stockholm and meet three of my friends for the first time! After that we visited each other every year, or more. We went to music festivals together and talked about culture, politics and feminism. To this day I still credit those friendships with much of my taste in music (and passion for it!), and even more importantly, I built the foundations on what are today my core values partly on these conversations with them We still send a few emails per year, checking in which each other. I'm so, so grateful for those early "internet friendships" - that were also very much real life friendships.

Supplies:
Some Bunny Loves You: Misc Paperie by Rachel Jefferies
Wheels and Hills by Sahin Designs
Lighter Mornings Paint Transfers by Lynn Grieveson
Handwriting Transparencies by Paula Kesselring
Hampton | Mixed Media Botanicals by Rachel Jefferies
Look Deep into Nature: Volume 1 | Mixed Media Artistry by Rachel Jefferies