If you are reading this, I finished a project that lasted a few months in my hands: I finally have a new, made-from-scratch blog / portfolio for all gaming and writing things that I love to do as a hobby. Yes, it's simple, there is no ads (and never will be), but I made it as my little space in the web and I'm really happy with it.

But when I look to the web around me, a old-fashioned collection of texts seems way off? The internet nowadays is more of a never-sleeping market, whose main products are your screen time and your data. Short videos need Subway Surfers gameplay so people can actually pay attention. A Google search is more of a minefield and you probably get what you want in the page 3, what would be unbelievable some years ago. And, of course, the constant thought of "is this made by an stealing-content AI?" will be asked forever until the end of time.

I used to see people discussing about how this late capitalism stage we live on forces you to transform your hobbies into business and work... but the Web is so strange that, sometimes, engagement is way more valuable than money. Win the social media algorithms just to connect to people, even if you don't want to make profit from it, is obligatory.

Doesn't impress me how much closed spaces are becoming for communities everywhere. If you wanted to find a place to talk about a subject some years ago, you would probably find an open, searchable forum, or even a e-mail group. Today, the best you can find is a Telegram group or a Discord server, that will be lost forever as soon as these companies go bankrupt in the future.

I didn't take so many months to program a simple blog. I really did it in one month, including a lot of the new articles. All of this time was trying to understand why I'm on the internet. I never really remember a time in my history that I wasn't online, but what this means to my adult self? Why bother to craft a special space for me in the middle of digital hell? This is the result of it.

Born with an e-mail account

I was born in August 1998 in a countryside city in Brazil. According to scientists (and Wikipedia), I'm a Zillenial: mostly I have dual citizenship in both generations and I'm both allowed to appeal to nostalgia AND be asked to fix my aunt's Instagram account. The tiny difference here is, when most of Gen Z started their lives with a mobile phone, I learned to type in a desktop keyboard before writing on paper.

People always get sad when I said that I never had cable TV or a video game console during my childhood, but I was really privileged to have access to computers and internet since I was born. Yes, it was a old computer with Windows 98 and a dial-up connection to be used only in weekends, but this is my oldest memory that I can remember. Me, as a toddler, sitting in a high chair, looking at my dad using the PC.

In a way or another, I grew up with the Web. When I was a little child, I got my first e-mail address, learned how to create account on sites for children. Every weekend, when I logged the web, the first thing I was obligated to do was download the Norton Antivirus update for my dad. I loved to browse freeware download portals, because I would love new games and applications to experiment during the week. It was also my first time experimenting with web page design: I used GeoCities, I just tried Microsoft FrontPage non-stop like it was MS Paint.

Imagine a time that everything on the web was static websites and the only thing that a viewer could change was a visitor counter, a world where your Favorites browser folder was a treasure to be saved for generations. A time when a famous Brazilian TV host could try a musical career and his flagship song could be having virtual friends. If I was older, I would probably would been a IRC user, but the only thing burned in my mind is my dad's ICQ notification sound.

(some old sites that I had during the years, from top to bottom, left to right: (1) my first GeoCities website that I did with my dad circa 2004; (2) my most serious attempt to create a humor blog in 2011; (3) the rebranding I did for the same site on 2012, drawing by Mitsujii; (4) a portfolio link aggregator that I did in 2016 when I tried to be a freelance writer)

And then, the internet started to change, and me too. As I started to enter my teenage years, the Web 2.0 started to really becoming a reality. I remember photo sharing sites becoming famous (like Fotolog, really famous on Brazil), and then the social media started to appear. I know that MySpace was the hot thing overseas, but here in my country, we LOVED Orkut. Did you know that for some time, Orkut was only really used by Brazil and India, and all the operations for the site have gone to Google Brazil? Even now, for most millenials, that pink logo is THE symbol of our 2000s Web.

Well, and then, everything happened!? Facebook starts taking over everything, YouTube gets a lot of traction and makes video sharing a true reality, Twitter just explodes and became the new sensation. During this process for us in Brazil, Orkut was really famous yet, and there's a lot of humor blogs, just creating first-generation memes and reposting cool videos from other humor blogs. I tried a lot to be part of this, maybe with a dozen different blogs and some YouTube channels. No, you cannot watch my teenager vlogs or I'll need to kill you.

Looking back, I really lived in the internet all of this time. If it was healthy, I can't say, but I definitely did. Most of my hobbies at the time was doing something in the computer, probably on the web. My favorite game as a child was Club Penguin! It's strange that children nowadays just are born with a smartphone in the hands — and I had a similar, but so different infancy. That's why finding my way on the internet is not just doing a hobby or creating an account: the Web is a integral part of my history, and my online persona is an important part of me.

Finding a digital identity

During all this time, I was just a kid with internet access doing kid stuff. Trying things, copying the trends. I never had any success or fame, probably because I was literally copying the blogs I read or the vlogs I watched. But starting in 2011-2012, I started writing about games for real in the Web, on sites way bigger (and more successful) than anything that I could do alone.

And, for years, I never stopped (all of them are in Portuguese, but if you want, I listed them as part of my project list). I started to get some followers in social media just because I was writing about games in a medium-size portal, and that was it. It was, at least, original articles! (Progress!) I was in high school during this period, and the internet was already algorithmic and more centralized from what I used to.

Suddenly, creating a thing by myself became a stupid idea, you know? Why bother to start from zero when I can just write in other people's spaces? That little amount of visibility — that I never had until that point — was enough to fuel my impostor syndrome. No one would follow what a stupid boy like me, I was just lucky to get a way to write and be known about this.

And, at the same time, I was starting my major in Computer Science. I'm really grateful that my university was public (and public colleges in Brazil are free for students), but I needed some money to get food and a place to live in a bigger city. Writing became also a way to help my parents to pay the bills and try to get a diploma at the end of this.

In a matter of years, that little child that sees the internet as an infinite playground was gone. I was just a recent-promoted-to-adulthood human being, worrying about money and entering in a spiral of low self esteem and burnout. I got some bucks doing copywriting for enterprise blogs and a really clickbait-y mobile app portal, but it was this. In some months, I started doing research and getting some money for that, and then getting a job as a web developer.

And then, I think I never understood what I want from the internet anymore. Besides like, being a "common" (but chronically online) user. For a person that created stupid projects in a monthly basis, it's a little sad. I know that, well, I was an adult now, with a job, responsibilities and mental fatigue, but something was missing. My internet persona was missing.

(one of my old board game prototypes that I failed to develop fully)

I kept writing for a lot of different portals, writing alongside really talented people, but I never was really happy with what I was doing? In just some months, it always became a mechanical, soulless job that I was doing for free to someone. Even when I tried to be a "board game designer" for real during the pandemic, I started almost a double work shift and the impostor syndrome attacked in the first refusal from a publisher.

Even this domain name, gabtoschi.com, was already home for three or four different websites in just a couple of years. I woke up and decided that a new blog will solve my creative problem. In a week, I had found a template in Google, modified some CSS and called it a day. Never updated or wrote anything until the next epiphany. Ad infinitum.

Growing up with the internet taught me how unhealthy was transform all of your feelings and opinions in social media big data. I simply can't share everything that I am as tweets or stories, it doesn't make sense to me. Somehow, I need to find who I want to be in the internet, what my creative outlet would be. In some ways, I want back the innocence, courage, sincerity and trust in my own ideas like I had as a child.

My new cozy webplace

At this point in my intimate reflection, you understand what I decided that would be my creative outlet. This website, made from scratch, by myself (with a great help from my wife). No more templates (for the site and for me). This whole text isn't just about to present it to you, but remind me why I had this in my mind for so many months.

I like the idea of creating a internet persona, for real. A version of me that I'm comfortable to be public and forever preserved on the Internet Archive (or a Russian database). I feel safer because my life and my family is preserved, and I can be connected with people all around the world from my home. That TV show host wasn't that far away, if you think about it.

The first thing that was really clear to me was understand that the internet is a hobby, and not a job. I already have a job — that is creating internet pages, don't even start to argument. Doing those things needs to be just for fun, to be silly, and not another pressure to get results, or engagement, or profit. I already have a lot of capitalism in my head every day, and I cannot choose (again) to have more.

But why? This was getting me for real. If not to be famous, or getting money, why create a blog to write nowadays? If I want just to put something out from me, I can talk to myself in the shower.

Then I realized the only thing that the Web never failed to me: getting people together. I have friends that I talk monthly (at least) for a DECADE. Some of them I would invite for my marriage (and I actually did). There's some people that I meet through messages and video calls that are more next to me than most of the kids I studied together, every day, for 8 years.

So, yeah, I will create a blog to talk about things that I like and find other people that also likes those things. I would love to have someone to talk, in detail, what is the better Club Penguin minigame, or how interesting is this Nintendo DS hidden gem only released in Japan. Or even, something that I already did a lot in other outlets, just talk about good games and help other people to find them! That's a nice goal, and I love it.

I think that writing is a good way to outlet ideas for me, personally. Not just because I do this for 10 years now, and I'm mostly comfortable to do so. But because I'm the master of starting projects, losing the heat and stopping them completely. If I can, at least, write about my attempt, maybe I can have more of the personal satisfaction that I'm looking for.

And also, it's so good to not be attached to a big company's platform nowadays. Yes, I'll probably need social media to find these people, but I don't need to worry that YouTube will delete my channel when I'm sleeping. Or that a social network that I could have invested time and effort would be bought by a stupid person and starting to crumble in front of my eyes. My content, my space, my control.

It's so fun that, for so much time, I was looking for a way to describe my internet persona. A web developer? A gaming-related writer? A game designer? And then I found three words: curiosity, creativity and chaos. Doesn't matter exactly what I'm doing: if I'm curious about to learn, creative enough to do something and chaotic enough to have fun, I'll be good.

Welcome!

That's it. At the end of the day, I just need to be more like myself as a child. There's no stupid ideas, there's no stakes. I always had fun in the internet, and I'll do again, but as a person that lived more, learned more and knows how to do more. And if you liked it, I would love to connect with you, through my articles, reviews, projects or stupid tweets.

If you just read something and want to comment, talk! Are you a content creator that wants to chat and maybe do something together? Get in touch! Are you a gaming developer/publisher/PR agency and thinks that I would do a good review of your game? Send me an email!

No pressure, just vibes. It feels like a new part of me is alive again, and I'm just so excited to have fun with this strange place again. Wish me luck!