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I first used the internet in 5th grade, around 1992. A friend introduced me to MicroMUSE, a social, “educational”, text-only MUSE — Multi-User Simulated Environment — where users could log on and chat, build “rooms” and create “objects” (out of words) and move freely throughout, interacting with whoever or whatever they came across. We all had character names, and mine was “saturn” — chosen to match the planet and the car brand, and consciously made lowercase. My MUSE friends were from all over the world, and I would spend hours of my free time over the next few years online, talking with them and exploring and adding to this world — usually via the black and green-text screen of my parents’ old PC kept in my dad’s office in the basement.
The internet has always been a very multi-dimensional and accessible space for me, I think largely because of my movements and creations in MicroMUSE. Since nothing was visual, you had to describe it and, thus, imagine it — a fact which made me both a better writer and someone who believes in the potential of all things, written and visual, to spark unique and potent imaginative responses. Bright digital green will always make me think of this specific type of endless internet expansiveness, and its possibilities.