my mother was a very flawed and insane human being. my feelings on her are complicated. but i have a sort of nostalgia for the stuff she taught me about the internet when i was a puppy.

she taught me that, when i sign emails, i should sign it like this:

~*~*~* forest *~*~*~

specifically with the tildes and asterisks. i think she also ended it with a 'blessed be', as she was very much wiccan. i think that's a nice thought.

she also taught me never to give out information online. lie as much as you can. you never know who might be asking.

she taught me how to color my text on yahoo messenger. her messages were always a beautiful gradient of teal, purple, and magenta. i think we as chat users could learn a few things from yahoo messenger.

she taught me how to use netscape. god forbid you have to open internet explorer for anything. when netscape lost support in 2008, i tried the 'flock' browser that they recommended, but it sucked so bads that i just went back to my unsupported netscape. i didn't stop using netscape until sometime in 2010 when i got my first laptop, upgrading directly from windows 98 to windows 7.

my mom taught me unintentionally to always back up your passwords and not to use a browser's auto-generated password. we tried logging into neopets together and we had to weed through 50 different saved passwords to figure out which one was right.

she also taught me how to play games on yahoo, like text twist and bejeweled. she showed me how to play myst, and showed me the sky on my date of birth from the observatory. i thought the chair for the sky chart looked a bit like a dentist's chair.

she also taught me how to boot up games in MS DOS mode on the old 98. she also taught me not to download suspicious exes online. our windows 98 computer was riddled with them for a long time, rendering paint entirely inaccessible due to a deleted .dll file.

my mother taught me to save images that make me happy into their own folder for private viewing, like some sort of hoard. i had a folder i would save pictures of pokemon into. i used to also save images for my twin sister's folder as a 'gift'.

lastly, my mom taught me that the internet is always changing. i still can't find her old yahoo group archived on any website. if anyone remembers doves_as_pets_and_friends, feel free to reach out. but i think the age range of neocities is skewed towards young adults.