Eternal September or the September that never ended is Usenet slang for a period beginning around 1993 when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users. The flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms. AOL followed with their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users. Hence, from the early Usenet point of view, the influx of new users in September 1993 never ended.
Yeah I meant it not as bragging but as acknowledgement of the reality that for many of us it is so far into the only internet we’ve ever known that as a cultural touchstone it’s lost on us, even those of us in the fediverse/linux sphere.
Young or old, in our society age isn’t an achievement or something one should brag about. But it’s important to keep in mind the wide array of ages present here. Some here lament the death of forum culture, others caught the tail end of it, and still others will need the explanation of why it’s worth missing (and yeah I’m not that young, but I know professionals who are)
The eternal September is to some of us full adults, people complaining about our parents being on the internet for as long as we’ve been alive, which is actually something we can agree to complain about, but people that age are also here
And also it feels like while there’s just the one eternal September there’s also several. I’ve been part of some and I’ve been frustrated with others, and for some I showed up in December and didn’t realize what I’d missed
Having lived through it, it really does feel weird though. I (mostly) missed the gasoline crisis (I was a child). It’s hard to imagine gas pumps all over the US being out of gasoline, and mile long lines waiting for a tanker to show up so you could get gas. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine staple rationing (butter, sugar) during wartime in modern US. I certainly didn’t live through it - having the TP aisle empty during covid doesn’t quite match that. And the actual (1930s) depression. I suspect those folks would consider the crashes of 87 99 01 08 and 20 minor annoyances - a bad Tuesday - compared to what they lived through.
Think of this, though - you have Covid. Okay we have Covid. That’s a world-wide event with life-changing implications for so many. And, we can hope, we don’t get another pandemic event of that magnitude in our lifetimes. And a decade or two from now you can lord it over some kid who was born in the last 3 years and just “doesn’t understand” that “closing school for three days because the flu is so bad” is not a pandemic, and that they just don’t understand what a game changer Covid was. ;-)
One trick is to tell them stories that don’t go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they call Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. “Give me five bees for a quarter,” you’d say. Now where were we? Oh yeah! The important thing was, that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.