MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)

comfy

published: 3-29-2018

It’s a word I already knew, a word I already knew the definition to. But thanks to the most cancerous imageboard on the internet, it’s taken up a whole new meaning.

Comfy.

I can’t exactly put my finger on what “comfy” is- it’s easier to define what “comfy” isn’t.

Stock Android phones running the default Google themes aren’t comfy, devoid of all emotion or personality, just one more product straight off the conveyor belt.

Chromebooks aren’t comfy in the slightest, being as the most “customization” one can do on them is move the dock position and change the background.

Windoze Winblows the bane of my existence Windows 10 isn’t comfy at all. I mean, using Linux can get hectic at times, but at least it doesn’t puke ADVERTISEMENTS all over the system!

But the default Windows XP that I grew up with, that ran on the weird old desktop that ended up meeting its demise in the back of the office before it got gutted and turned into a bedroom for one of my siblings, was comfy.

Antergos with six different windows open at the same time while working on my homepage is pretty comfy, I’ll admit. Especially with a solarized GNOME that I don’t have to spend forever digging through menus just to pull up one program- Windows key, a short search, enter, and I’m on my way without so much as even looking at the touchpad.

Old screenshots of crowded dashboards for what I assume is WOW look comfy, if not a little stressful imagining the hectic gameplay that must have been going on at that fossilized moment in time.

But I wouldn’t know, because I’ve never played WOW.

Maybe “comfy” is just a misplaced sense of nostalgia. Windows XP was pretty cool to ten-year-old me, even if I never got the password-protected folders working. And I used to have a working copy of Game Maker Tycoon I got from a school book order, where I’d take the premade maps and just romp around in them instead of actually getting anything done.

And then the license verification servers stopped working, so I can’t reinstall it for the time being.

But I still miss Web 1.0 a lot, even though I was born in the tail end of it just in time for monumentally bad ideas like MySpace to start popping up and for Usenet to start winding down, even though both still exist today. There’s something unrefined and yet romantic in a static page without any sort of JavaScript making bloated widgets or walls keeping out people who aren’t paying subscribers or logged into Facebook or Google or whatever privacy-raping service is all the rage these days.