photos from 2004
the verge's allison johnson recently asked "where did our 2004 photos go?" and i know exactly where mine are: they're on my computer. i'll share some that i think best show the essence of what my life was like in 2004.
this 19-year-old angel (me) had no idea that in three years the iphone would be invented - also that she'd graduate college during the beginning of the great recession. haha.
two years before this, my sophomore year of college, i went halfsies with my dad on a nikon coolpix 2000. a couple years later he got a free one by collecting enough newport cigarette barcodes, which is insane but not as insane as the suede jacket (rip) he also got! FROM SMOKIN! sadly, it was inside his station wagon when it blew up.
i was the friend who takes photos everywhere. most of the photos i took were of my friends, but for their privacy i won't share those. as for where i shared my photos, i was a fotki and livejournal girly. my then (and still) internet-savvy pal aiko introduced me to both.
during semester breaks where i couldn't stay in the dorm, i rented a room out of my dad's coworker's house. this sounds insane, because it is. those with a keen eye might have noticed a road flare on the floor. i am realizing now that i may be leaving you with more questions than answers with this post.
i also owned a binary clock from think geek (rip), which was an online store where you can buy t-shirts that say diabolically dweeby shit like "there are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who know binary and those who don't."
i knew binary and i loved blue led lights. they had only been invented a decade before so devices with blue lights were kind of novel at the time. here's a good video on how the blue LED came to be that my friend dustin shared recently.
just so you know, i didn't own "those who know binary" shirt. i owned the one that said "no i will not fix your computer."
if the binary clock didn't give it away, i was a student of computer science with a minor in economics. which one of those classes don't seem like they belong? "rap and rock" was a culture class that covered my music elective requirement. i really enjoyed and naturally did very well at that class, but it was not my first attempt at a music course; my first was introduction to piano. despite the name, i was the only person enrolled who had not been introduced to piano and my teacher clearly was annoyed by me so i dropped it.
i never learned piano, but i never stopped challenging myself!
although i was a computer scientist, i was first and foremost an artist. this photo was probably for a livejournal post lamenting algorithmic analysis getting in the way of my social life.
data structures and algorithms are pretty universal classes that are actually challenging, so students who have survived them (often barely) tend to use such topics as a reason to be bad at interviewing software engineers and to gatekeep "real developers" later in their careers.
this may be the stupidest photo i took in 2004. i hope you know that i do push myself to be vulnerable on this blog, this photo making the cut is a key example.
i liked data structures and algorithms because i was good at them, and i had a good professor. but those exams! they were some of the toughest of my undergrad experience. i think the only harder class for me was physics 2. are any of you smart but remember having a hard time with physics? sound off in the comments down below (jk i don't have comments on this blog).
not only was i an artist and computer scientist, i was also the dorm building's resident boxed-hair-dyer. i think that one night a girl saw me doing my hair and suddenly i had a room full of ladies asking for my help. who would've thought that doing my dad's wife's highlights from age 12 would do such wonders for my college social life.
my shirt says gpukids.com (wayback machine link) which was an "interactive website" for kids to learn about energy from one of the new jersey gas and electric providers. my dream at that time was to make a living building educational websites for kids just like gpukids. these days, i think the kids should be building those sites (working at glitch was me successfully course-correcting).
this photo, obviously, was taken after i gave myself the dye job in the prior photograph. that's me in mudd jeans, giving my computer monitor its own dye job. if you're concerned about the computer, well, you're wasting your energy - i built that cursed thing from like 2 different computers i got from my dad's wifes's cousin's husband's office that they were throwing away. and if you're concerned that i was using a dorm building common room to spraypaint computers, try to be less of a dweeb maybe!
i hope you enjoyed this skip down a dark alley off the boulevard of my 2004 memories. perhaps it was a brief, needed break from the firehose of pre-election-day commentary for you. i also hope it left you yearning for a camera that's not your phone. did you know that digital point and shoot cameras are popular with gen z? i think that's great, as i'm not pleased with what my iphone does with my photos - both in editing them but also in making it easy for me to not organize them by dated folders on my computer like i used to do. it's no surprise to me that other people, especially younger generations, are craving something more simpler and logged off.
this was fun for me. i'm probably going to buy a used nikon coolpix 2000 now, and maybe try piano again.
xoxo jenn
p.s. today i worked on my streamlabs setup to start streaming again, but on youtube instead of twitch. you'll recognize where the thumbnail from my brief troubleshooting stream came from. maybe i'll share more 2004 photos on a future stream.
