I knew these days. I was younger than most of you guys were, but I knew them, although from a slightly different point of view. I never really knew TFN, but I did see many fanfilms (oh my God, Duality), mainly because I got them from my brother's folders. I think I'll always regret not being more in the SW fanfilm universe like some of you guys were, but then again, I was younger.

I got into all that enough to go full nostalgia when I read your post. Doing stuff with After Effects for fun, lightsaber tests and all. I can't remember how many times I watched Ryan's little videos, trying to do the same kind of things - giving a cup of coffee to my clone, cloning my cat, going bananas with a lightsaber - well, an aluminum stick, but hey, it was the same to me. I made my own hilt too when I was 17.

I guess the thing that makes me the most sad in all this is that I never really had friends who were into that same kind of things. I was kind of a lonely teenager, and that may be why I never really got past these little AE tricks. I'd only dream of making a real fanfilm (I still do, actually).

I got into stop-motion too, after seeing amazing Lego shorts on the Internet. I made lots of stop-motion videos with my Lego and my little webcam, editing them with Vegas Video. I still have some of them on my hard drives, I think.

Now I'm in studies that use that kind of software. I'm in this state where I'm starting to see After Effects, Photoshop etc. from a professionnal point of view. It's weird, really, but it makes me remember just how much I love VFX and what they mean to me, how they relate to my younger days. I get the same feeling when I remember how I came to know DiF - through Ryan. Him, again. I owe this guy some beers, really.

And gaming? Oh yeah. Countless hours playing Counter-Strike, sometimes online, sometimes with a friend. We even had LAN parties at my high school. Steam was barely born, it was unstable, we hated it. I like to remember how it used to be like, as now I think this is one of the greatest things that ever happened to PC gaming.

Which brings me to Half-Life. The most amazing game I have ever played and probably will ever play. When it came out in 1998, I was 9. Jesus. I didn't have a PC back then (and just look at how many nine year-old kids already have their PC/console now). My dad would let me play a bit on his computer, and I tried Half-Life. So yeah, I was 9. Scientist bodies bursting into bloody pieces. Had some nightmares. Some years later, I got my first PC - I think I was 12. Not connected to the web, of course, and it remained like this for a while. But when I could go on the Internet, I'd read tutorials about making maps for Half-Life with Hammer (which was, at the time, called Worldcraft), and I'd spent countless nights making maps for HL, trying to recreate that special atmosphere I'd loved so much visiting Black Mesa. I did this for almost a decade. Now and then I still open up Hammer again and take a look at my old maps. Between actually playing HL and making maps for it, I think I spent thousands of hours on it. This is insane. I still play it from time to time. This 15 year-old game never gets old. It never will.

It may look like I'm getting off the subject, but I'm not. All this was always related to my experience of the Internet at that time. There's a popular french website which is dedicated to tutorials - programing, making websites, etc. - and it was popular back then mosly for its level-making tutorials. No Youtube, no easy file sharing; people would show their creations on the boards, give each other advice. It was my first forum, too. Online social interactions. The very beginning of my existence on the web. Forum boards were the true way to meet people you had similar passions with. My MSN contacts were mostly people I knew online only - which was subject to arguments with the parents, as you can imagine. They were wary of it, and took great care for me to go step by step with it. But what I experienced on those forum boards had meaning, and nowadays when I see people caring only for Facebook, actually saying forum boards are useless now, I wish I could go ten years back.

Remembering all that stuff has a great nostalgia feel to it. I'm overwhelmed by it right now, which means, vidina, that you succeeded in making your thread about it. Damn you.

But it also raises a very fair point about the state of the web at the moment. It's getting bigger and bigger, always making information become easier to get, and that's as much good as it is dangerous. Dangerous for the web itself to become meaningless.