Chas Andres' Blog

Ever have one of these? I sure did.

Like many in my generation, the internet grew up around me.

My dad, unsurprisingly, had a home computer before my birth in 1985. I don’t remember much about it other than the fact that it had a black screen with green text and I never got to use it.

After that came the first in a long series of Macintoshes, one of which ended up on my desk by the age of 8. By that point, it was 1993 and the little square Mac was almost ten years old. I named it “Caveman Computer”, and it required you to hit it on the side over and over while it was turning on or else it couldn’t find the hard drive.

Caveman came with a whole pile of floppy disks, each of which had a bunch of games. There was one where I had to drop a man out of a helicopter and hope that he landed in a horse drawn cart full of hay. There was another where I had to beat a bunch of aliens in billiards. There was, of course, the venerable Oregon Trail. I spent hours switching the disks around, playing game after game until I had seen as much of each of them as I could. I even fired up a copy of Hyper Card, and tried to make my own games for a while.

Of course, Caveman Computer did not have a modem. It did not even have a phone jack where one could attach a modem. Hell, the modem I had ever even seen was my dad’s 14.4 that was sitting underneath an old rotary phone in the basement. He had gotten it from his office a few years previously, no doubt in the hopes that we would one day get a home internet connection, and it had collected dust ever since. When I asked him what it was, he told me that you could use it to connect your computer to another computer far away. To me, this meant that it was some kind of cool, illegal hacker tool, so I loved it even though I didn’t really understand it.

A few years later, our house finally connected to the information superhighway.

My dad had purchased a new computer at this point, and it came with a brand new 28.8 kbps modem. We hooked it up to a phone line, put in an AOL floppy install disk, and after a few moments we heard a soon-to-be-familliar bedoo-bedoo-bedoo-whrrrrmmmm-shhhhhh-SHHHHHHHH noise that signaled our connection to the world. A little egg-timer next to the monitor ticked down the first of our 50 free hours as my dad and I typed phrases into the search bar and read whatever pages they sent us to. After a while, we discovered what I now know is called a MUD: a Multi-User Dungeon, the clunky, text-based forerunner of today’s MMORPGs. This one allowed you to navigate different rooms of text – some containing other users! – and type in commands to move around. I think the end goal was to be some kind of space trucker, though my dad never let me play long enough to find out.

Still, it was revolutionary. For the first time, I could type something into a box in my basement and broadcast it for anyone in the world to read.

The following years were basically a series of arguments over whose turn it was to use the phone line. My dad’s old computer moved upstairs and became the family computer, which mostly meant that it became my computer. We upgraded from a 28.8 to a 56k, and eventually to dedicated line and a monthly plan. For Christmas in seventh grade, I got an iMac and had my own internet connection in my room for the first time. With WiFi still years away, my dad wired our whole house with Cat-5 Ethernet cable so that a port to the internet could be found in any room we wanted. By eighth grade, I was communicating with my friends on AIM for hours each evening, talking about anything and everything in a series of 3×4 windows scattered around my desktop. This, I guess, was the start of my experience with what is now called social media.

My first blog entry was posted at 6:01 PM on December 21st, 2003.

I was actually fairly late to the blogging game, at least compared to most of my female friends who had Livejournals and Deadjournals since Middle School. Of course, these were people who made the switch from a physical journal to a digital one. Since I had never kept a diary, (a big regret of mine) the idea of chronicling my day seemed a little bit alien. But since this was a time in my life when I didn’t have too many friends, so the idea of sending my thoughts out into the aether was a romantic one. What if the person who I most wanted to read my thoughts (some idealized fictional woman, naturally) was hanging on my every word? (Ironically, this turned out to be somewhat true. In the early days of my blog, Emily was reading every entry and hoping that I would drop some kind of hint about liking her. And, of course, the catalyzing moment that got me and Emma on our first date happened in a blog entry three years later.)

I can certainly trace my desire to be a screenwriter – and, it follows, most of my personal and professional decisions of the past several years – directly back to how much I enjoyed writing my in my online journal. My passion for writing mixed with my long-standing passion for filmmaking, and my chosen career was forged in that furnace. I have written over 600 pages of journal entries to date, though my updating was always sporadic and usually correlated with the amount of personal connection I had with someone at the time. This usually meant that if I was in a happy relationship, I would talk with them for hours instead of writing. When I was single or in a frustrating relationship, I would post damned near daily.

Over the past two years, though, I haven’t kept a personal blog at all. The best I’ve been able to muster was a vow a few months back to update my old Livejournal every single day.

I lasted two days, and the second day just had a post with me saying that I’d make sure to do a real update the following day.

I will not promise daily updates now, but I will say this:

I am going to be updating this blog as often as I can. I miss having a space online where I can write whatever I want, and hopefully elicit some kind of interesting discussion about what I have to say. As I am currently in a happy, long term relationship, I am going to have to buck my own trend and save some thought and inspiration for the rest of you. I may not post every day, or even every week, but I will try to post whenever I have something interesting or funny to say.

Bookmark this site, and follow me on twitter if you can (@chasandres). I will tweet my updates as well, so that you will know when I’ve written something new. Feel free to leave comments, if you wish, asking me to write about something you want to hear. Generally, an idea from a reader is all I need for inspiration.

Otherwise, welcome back to my blog! It’s been a while, friends.