怀念伴随 我们长大的互联网

In sixth or seventh grade， my best friend and I were obsessed with a fanfiction called The Fellowship of the Banana Peel. It was pretty much what it sounds like—a reimagining of The Lord of the Rings in which the One Ring is replaced by a banana peel. We printed it out and brought it to school in one of those pocketed paper folders， reading it to each other at lunch and between classes. An ongoing bit was that bananas made Elrond sick—“The smell permeates everything，” I remember him saying sadly， repeatedly， throughout the time the Fellowship was at Rivendell.

It was so stupid. It made us so happy. I cant find it anywhere.

The Internet is a great facilitator of nostalgia. It remembers the things youve forgotten， and with just a little prompting can usually hand you the thing your mind was fumbling for—where do I know that actress from， or whats that song that goes like “a chicka-cherry cola？”Instagram observes Throwback Thursday; Spotify suggests songs that were popular when you were in high school; theres a pair of websites whose entire reason for existence is to play a 24-hour stream of old Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network shows from the 90s and 2000s.

But when you grow up with the Internet， inevitably some of the things youre nostalgic for come from the Internet itself. The popular app Timehop recognizes this， showing the user photos and social media posts from the same date in past years. Its not so much my tweets from five years ago that I want to revisit， though. Its watching Teen Girl Squad cartoons on Homestarrunner.com huddled around a screen in the high school computer lab; playing Text Twist and Bubble Spinner in the suite of my college dorm， the cultural touchstones that were as much a part of being young， for me， as listening to Dashboard Confessional and watching The O.C. （And now you know exactly how old I am.）

Those things are still just a Google away. But other relics of Internet past have slipped beyond reach， like the tale of a young hobbit and the smelly banana peel he is fated to carry into Mordor. “The Internet is forever，” they say， but thats not always true. Websites come and go as the fortunes of companies rise and fall.

Take Quizilla， for example. It was the original bastion of “What Kind of X Are You？” online quizzes. And while people did visit the site to find out which Disney princess they were， Quizilla also became an unlikely home for fiction， fan and otherwise. The platform was not really conducive to storytelling—stories were often serialized in that people would post new quizzes for each chapter， which were usually one question long， with the “answer” just a bubble that said“click here.” Then youd click “Go，” and end up on a results page that might be more of the story， or might be nothing， to the best of my recollection.

I have to rely on my recollection because Quizilla doesnt exist anymore. It was acquired by Viacom in 2006， and lived on TeenNick.com for a while， until the site was retired in October 2014， and old Quizilla profiles and quizzes were deleted.

Some of the story quizzes were very popular—in particular， I remember one called Im a Girl…in an ALL BOYS BOARDING SCHOOL？！？！ It was exactly the kind of Mary Sue-ish adventure youd imagine; the titular girl the only available object of affection for a school stocked with heterosexual boys. But it was more silly than hot-and-heavy， like if the Amanda Bynes vehicle Shes The Man had been written （without the loosely Shakespearean plot） by a teen. And in 2005， I eagerly read every installment.

Even if websites dont disappear， they evolve. As a young Francophile， in early high school I frequented the chat room on a website called Polyglot， where people from different countries helped each other learn languages. It has since been rebranded “Polyglot Club” and my old account is irretrievable.

That might be for the best—whatever I would find would be embarrassing at best， horrifying at worst. This was the rationale behind deleting my old Xangas. That， and not wanting anyone I know to ever see what I thought was cool to post on the Internet when I was 14.

I think the same logic might explain the disappearance of The Fellowship of The Banana Peel. This is my （totally speculative） theory. It was on Fanfiction.net， as I recall， a website that still exists. No amount of searching has turned it up， though I did learn that apparently， if enough time goes by， The Fellowship of The Banana Peel will figure into Lord of the Rings fanfiction more than once. Whoever wrote the story probably just grew up， got embarrassed， and took it down.

Its understandable. I am mostly glad I deleted my old blogs， but I do miss them a little. There was an un-self-consciousness to them that hasnt existed in my writing since， a freedom of expression that can maybe only bloom in the brief window of adolescence. It might have started with The Fellowship of the Banana Peel—it wasnt long after reading it that my friend and I started writing our own fanfiction. We werent worried about who would read it， or how bad it was. It just made us happy.

在讀六年级还是七年级的时候，我和最好的朋友迷上了一篇名为《香蕉皮护卫队》的同人小说。文如其名，这是一本以《指环王》为蓝本的再创造小说，只是至尊魔戒被香蕉皮所替代了。我们将其打印出来，装在口袋大小的袖珍文件夹里，带到学校，在午餐时间和课间相互读给对方听。贯穿始终的一幕是香蕉使精灵领主埃尔隆德感到不舒服——“那个味道到处弥漫”，我记得护卫队还在瑞文戴尔的时候，他愁眉苦脸地反复说道。

这本小说很白痴。但它曾让我们快乐不已。现在却找不到它了。

互联网是怀旧情愫的伟大推动者。它记得所有你忘却了的事情，仅仅需要一点点的提示，它就可以信手拈来你苦思而不得的东西——我是从哪里认识这个女演员的，或者那首“切克—樱桃可乐”这样唱的歌叫什么来着？Instagram有“回忆星期四”的话题;音乐平台“声破天”会推荐分享你高中时期流行的歌曲;还有两个网站专门就只是二十四小时播放20世纪90年代和21世纪初尼克国际儿童频道或者卡通频道的节目。

但如果你是在互联网的陪伴下长大的，那么不可避免地，你所怀念的一些事物本身就来自互联网。一款流行的应用程序“时光机”正是很好的例子，它帮你回忆当年今日，把过去几年中用户的相片和社交媒体的帖子按日期把它们放到一起。我并不是多么想重温我五年前的推特，而是想重温读高中时在计算机实验室里围在一个电脑屏幕前在Homestarrunner网站上看的《少女帮》系列漫画;还有和大学室友在宿舍一起玩“疯狂拼写”和“旋转泡泡龙”游戏;对我来说，年轻人的文化标准是听过多少首“忏悔的仪表盘”乐隊的歌和看过多少集电视连续剧《橘子郡男孩》。（现在你们都知道我的年龄了吧？）

这些事物其实在谷歌上搜索一下就找得到。但是互联网过去的其他历史遗迹却已遥不可及，就像那个讲述了年轻的霍比特人和命中注定由他送到魔多的那块臭香蕉皮的故事一般。“互联网是永恒的，”他们这样说道，但事实却并非总是如此。网站总是随着企业的兴衰而存在或者消失。

以社交网站“Quizilla”为例。它是在线测试“你是什么类型的X”的原型。为了知道自己是哪位迪斯尼公主，人们就真的访问了这个网站，“Quizilla”还神奇地成为了小说和粉丝的聚集地。这个平台实际上并不利于用来讲故事——故事往往被系列化，每一个章节都带有新的测试，这些测试常常只是一个问题，必须通过点击标着“点击这里”的按钮才可以获得答案。据我记忆所及，点击“前往”之后就可以到达下一页面，看到的或许是后续情节，或者什么都没有。

我必须依赖于记忆，因为“Quizilla”网站已经不存在了。它于2006年被维亚康姆收购，依赖于网站“少年尼克”存活了一段时间，直到2014年10月份网站关闭，“Quizilla”过去的用户资料和测试都被删除了。

有一些测验内容非常受欢迎，我尤其记得一篇叫《我是一所男寄宿学校里唯一的女生？！？！》的故事，正是你所想象中的玛丽苏自恋喜剧：在一个全是异性男生的学校，这个女孩是唯一的情感对象。与其说是热辣激情还不如说是傻，想想要是阿曼达·拜恩斯主演的电影《足球尤物》如果由一个青少年执笔（没有了与莎士比亚喜剧相似的情节）会是什么样子。而在2005年，我急切地阅读了那篇测试的每一个章节。

即使网站还在，它们也会不断变化。作为一个热爱法语的年轻人，早在高中时期，我就时常进出一个叫做“多语网”的网站，来自各国的人们在网站上互相帮助学习语言。现在网站已经更名为“多语俱乐部”，我的账号也失效了。

这可能是最好的结局——无论我发现什么，充其量不过是令人尴尬的东西，甚至可能令人厌恶。这也是我删除了旧博客的根本原因。我不想要让任何认识我的人看到我在14岁时认为很酷并把它发布到网上去的东西。

我认为同样的逻辑可以用于解释《香蕉皮护卫队》的消失。这完全只是我的推测。我记得这篇小说是载于同人小说网上的，现在这个网站仍然存在，但再怎么搜索也找不到了。我明白，如果有足够的时间，《香蕉皮护卫队》无疑会被列入《指环王》同人小说系列中。写这篇故事的人或许长大了，觉得难为情，便把小说删掉了。

这是可以理解的。我很高兴删掉了以前的博客，但是我确实有点怀念。在我之后的写作中，再也没有以前博文里的那种率真，畅所欲言这朵花儿，也许只在短暂的青春窗口里盛开。或许就是从《香蕉皮护卫队》开始——读了这本小说之后，我和我朋友便开始写我们自己的同人小说。我们并不担心谁会去看，或者是写得有多烂。我们只是乐此不疲。