Invasion of Privacy: From Blogs to The Old Facebook Account You Used to Play Dragon City

Hello y'all, welcome back! ⭐⭐⭐ This time I wanted to talk about what we let others see and learn about us online, and about how we are willing to share parts of ourselves to the world; even sharing a bit too much at times. 

Adam & Melody, apparently

As I was looking through older blogs to find inspiration for mine, I found a large array of diverse content. Mom blogs, abandoned modern art projects in the form of a blog, and inevitably, Sonic fanart (in the form of a blog). Regardless of the type of content, everyone with a blog or any sort of social media presence is sharing a part of their identity for a countless number of people to see. 

For example, there was this guy Adam, he had different blogs for different things: song lyrics, pictures, a digital diary, and then there was one blog of his in particular that made me really sad because the entries were all meant to be "letters" for someone. 

In "the melody letters", Adam writes to Melody (Eve? We don't know her), originally with the goal of "sharing something with her that she already knows". Here's the last entry of that blog. 

dear melody,

a few reasons today was good. one; you saw me at my most relaxed. two; you saw me as i am with a good friend. three; i realized what you are to me.

i want to apologize. not because i think i've done anything to upset you, but because i need to let you know that i've upset myself. i started out with slow in mind, and for the most part, i've been that way. i feel i've been to touchy. i feel i've been to much to soon. and i also feel that i've worn myself out. don't get me wrong, you are still a friend, but i think it's time for me to take a step back and relax. again, i don't know if you're reading this still. i don't know if you know that it's updated each time i can't sleep. even if you don't read it (then this is of no consequence) it's therapy for me. right now, the windows are open. my curtain is up, and my alarm is set for 0900 so i can go and have my dentist tell me i need to take better care of my teeth. then on wednesday, i'm up at 0800. i'm happy.

adam

Adam's blog: "The Melody Letters"

This is really sweet, and timeless, I think (except for the dentist part, a Victorian child wouldn't be able to relate to that, probably). If we’re being optimistic and assuming that this guy wasn’t a total obsessive nutjob, then this is really touching! If you know me at all, you know I’m a fiend for handwritten letters. Bonus points if you know the difference between "to" and "too".

Mind you, the last entry date in most of this guy's blogs is somewhere during the year 2001. That's 21 years ago! I wasn't even born yet when this guy was Shakespearing his way into Melody's pants! I'll probably never find out what happened between him and Melody! Well, maybe I could find out by just emailing him, but I think it's unlikely that I'll get an answer. 

If anyone of you does find Adam and gets an answer out of him (them? her?), please let me know. Please also tell me how Adam looks like now vs how Adam looked like then (I picture Adam at his prime as an almost hairless Kit Harrington). 

This but with less facial hair and slightly less hot

Adam probably didn't expect that some 19-year-old in the year 2022 with nothing better to do was going to be nosing around his blogs. Which is very telling of the level of permanence that our digital footprint has. 

JuegosDeChicas.com

Unlike Adam, I am not used to sharing *too* much of my identity on social media. I mean, only recently have I started to open up more. In fact, if you really know your Ximena lore, then you probably know just how much my parents are against the use of social media. Sure, they both have their own Facebook profile, but they rarely share anything personal or compromising; my mom's profile picture has been the same since probably 2010.  They advised me (a kind way of saying that they threatened to burn me at the stake if I disobeyed them) to not get involved with social media throughout my childhood (I didn't follow their advice). 

If you really REALLY know your Ximena lore, you might know I was a bit of an influencer when I was like 9. I had like two hundred followers (friends? moots? oomfs?) on my juegosdechicas.com account (girlsgogames.com). I don't remember much about what I did to attract such a large audience (for a 9-year-old), but I remember that strangers would read and react and answer to what I posted. They all loved me.

How girlsgogames.com looked like 10 years ago, thank you Wayback Machine.

Anyway, one time I was posting on my profile or whatever, saying I would be going out of town for a while: I was straight up trying to tell everyone where I was going, when I was leaving, and when I was coming back. I didn't have my real name nor my age anywhere in my profile, but if any of those people had had the conviction of doxing me, they probably would've been able to do so. I don't think a nine-year-old has any fucking idea of what a VPN is. And the computer my parents let me use back then was my dad's old computer that froze every 30 minutes and had no antivirus (much better alternative than the tiny pink laptop in my grandma's house that first took an hour to start and then froze every five minutes). For some reason, my parents caught me in the middle of writing my post, and you can guess what happened next.

Although I survived the aftermath, I was forbidden from ever logging back into the godforsaken site. They thought pedophilesgogames.com was the problem (I never knew of anyone who was groomed on girlsgogames.com, but who knows?); think again, Mary. I was also messing around in Bitstrips, Stardoll, and Facebook (Pet Society and Mall World). Besides, of course I kept playing girlsgogames, I fucking loved Shopaholic and that one rollercoaster game. But after that incident, I eventually stopped posting stuff on my profile. 

Uh-oh, that wasn't very social justice warrior of you

Years passed, and we reached the prepubescent Ximena arc. A period in history characterized by overplaying Five Nights at Freddy's songs, a personal obsession with a particular ninja turtle, and an ever-increasing suspicion that maybe everyone hates me. I started posting a bit more and with more confidence, even though only like 7 people (at most) saw my posts. I mean, not a lot of people knew I had social media to begin with. Mainly, I shared memes and art related stuff. 

Y'all, I was going to sit here and tell you all about how I was an unproblematic queen because I never bullied anyone, and I was so certain I had never posted anything that might compromise my future career on reality television as a real housewife of Winterfell (this might be a bit of a reach), but then I went back and looked at one of my old profiles and... I was slightly wrong. There was a post that bothered me so much that I just deleted it. That post does not define me. Also, I forgot all about me having online friends! I feel really bad about forgetting about them. There was a great deal of misogyny in our conversations too, yikes, I know (it gets better though! Give the world beyond your screens a try. Go outside, talk to people, touch some grass, thank me later). 

In my defense, I was 13. I'm better now. The internet raised me, and we all know the internet is not the best parent. Which is one of the reasons why I developed an ambivalent attachment with Mr. Internet. I don't trust it enough to be completely honest with it, but whenever I have a question about anything, you best believe I'm asking the internet.

You know this doesn't apply only to Google searches, fellas; it also applies to people. Just like I scoured through plethora of blogs and happened to stumble upon Adam's blog, I (and others; I would argue, lots of people, even you) scour through plethora of pages to find specific information from specific people. This ability to research and find stuff about others on the internet is regarded by some people as a valid qualification to be hired by the FBI. You know all the memes or TikToks that are about some girl wanting to find out more about some guy she met, but she only knows his name, and then her friend suddenly has a comprehensive list of all the people he has ever made eye contact with. If only we put the same amount of energy into finding peer-reviewed sources.

Meme illustrating what I just said (is that Priyanka Chopra? I'm pretty sure it is)

And well, according to the first resume I ever made, I have a passion for research. When I had nothing better to do during my afternoons as a middle schooler, I would dive into Mr. Facebook to see what I could find about my friends and acquaintances, and people who never have and never will know me (Oh but I DID, in fact, have better things to do. If I had started some online business and had devised a proper plan to succeed in high school instead of doing this type of shit I'd probably be in Yale or something). 

I know a number of my readers will be able to relate to this, because I know y'all are nosy benches and that's completely fine! (I think; we've normalized it enough). It's only normal to want to know about other people, and you can do it from the comfort of your home; no awkward conversations nor having to remember anyone's name. 

It's strange to me, because at the same time that we want to be able to access information about others, we don't necessarily feel compelled to disclose information of our own. We are entirely responsible of everything we decide to post on social media and the repercussions of what we share. Or are we? I don't know, I'm not a scientist. All I know is that what once was advertised as an opportunity to connect with our loved ones and meet people has become the birthplace of Adam's rizz, girlsgogames.com, and discourse I could never picture happening in real life (there was a woman who randomly texted me "What's you issue with Gilles de Rais???" like bro?!?).

Having said this, have fun on the internet y'all. Remember that no one here owes you full disclosure. Think twice about what you make public about yourselves. Make the most of your time here and try to avoid recording yourself crying. Oh god I have to talk about the whole concept of recording yourself crying at some point in this blog. Maybe. Also, sorry for taking so long to post this, these past two weeks were very hectic. For now, I bid you all farewell with a Katya Zamolodchikova quote:

"In Facebook, you are the product." 

She said it! Not me! Don't @ me Mark Zuckerberg, please.

🪐 Maybe it will get better, maybe it won't! Thank you for reading regardless! 🪐

-X