~★SAIL AWAY ★~

I’m sitting here, in the living room, watching the Festival de Viña 2007 (Los Tres are on stage now)… I’ve been downloading wallpapers the whole day, because the VTR connection is still not working and we can’t play Maple (yup, great way of screwing our last days of summer break… -_-) and I downloaded this program that changes the wallpaper automatically every once in a while. So I needed wallpapers to use the program. Of course, I got carried away and dowloaded gigas of images… xDBut I found myself having so much trouble finding wallpapers… Personal fansites have virtually disppeared from the web and, apart from blogs, everything is fulled of this huge sites that hold a lot of stuff together, that require a membership and that try to have a bit of everything. And that amazed me and, at the same time, gave me a weird feeling.

On one hand, I’ve read a lot about the whole “web 2.0″ concept and all and I know that the internet is changing and that now the idea is to fill it with websites made by the users and for the users, with personal content added by people who cares enough for a certain subject to do so (kinda a Wikipedia style… Not in vain almost websites have turned their old databases in wiki-style pages, editable by their users). But then, I miss personal fansites like Aya no Weiss Corner or Staykas’s Saint Seiya Database. Those were the truly, original, most complete source or information, images, multimedia related contents for almost anything you wanted. Now, of course, you can read a lot about an anime or artist, read a lot of personal opinions and drooling in blogs and all… But try to find wallpapers, Winamp skins, fanfics or anything like that. Apart from a lot of fake, porn websites, you won’t get too much. You’ll stumble into sites like Anime News Network or any other super-website of the kind, with a lot of info regarding cast, staff, story, number of episodes and stuff… But no downloadable material, no material to customize your computer or your life with the anime/character/band you love.

On the other hand, I felt really old. I mean… I’m not one of the new generation kids who’ve grown playing online games or playstation. I switched from the Atari 800XL to my first multimedia PC and to the internet, back in 1998-1999. Since then, my life has been filled with the internet and it has become an important part of my life. Most of my best friends are from abroad and I talk to them only through internet, I write my thoughts in the internet, I drool about my favoritet things here… I don’t know. Whatever you want to think of, I do it. I study, interact socially, have fun, get bored, drool, hate, argue, live in the internet. For the same reason, I’ve seen how it all has been mutating from the internet I met back in 1998 (when I was barely starting to get the most basic glimpse of what Internet was) to what’s today. And in spite of me being part of this new web 2.0 and in spite of how much I may like some of its new stuff, I gotta say I hate that part of it. I miss the personal websites coded in simple HTML (no PHP, XHTML or whatever other diabolic acronym you can think of… @_@), with a lot of info and stuff for the fans to rejoice. Cause no matter how much you need it, there’s more to a fanatism than information. You need stuff to show off your love and to fulfil your need of desperatedly showing to the world that you love this or that. You need you music player to have the shape of your favorite anime bishounen and you need little icons that show the faces or scenes of your favorite series. But this new web 2.0 leaves those stuff out of fills them with restrictions (like the one I found in AP, where you *HAVE* to contribute with your original artwork in order to download the wallpapers and scans they have… OR you can always *DONATE* through Paypal and gain immediate access to everything… -_-) and it sucks. -_-

And yeah, I felt old cause I’m probably one of the only people I know that must be wishing those old, bad looking, fan-made websites to come back and take over those super professional websites we can find now everytime we google something up. :/ But I can’t help it and I can’t help remembering that old Spanish saying, that always proves to be sooooo true: TODO TIEMPO PASADO FUE MEJOR.