LAN feelings
Nostalgia hits hard as I reminisce about the chaotic joy of 2000s LAN parties.
The room smells like microwaved hotdogs and sweat. Six computer tower units wobble precariously on someone’s mum’s dinner table, fans blasting hot air into the already-thick atmosphere. Cans of knockoff Red Bull litter the table and someone is crouched on their knees trying to find the other end of a patch cable. Welcome to a computer game meetup in the early 2000s.
Kids of today missed out on so many formative experiences from that era. Some they were lucky to dodge: dial-up internet, memes about President Bush, MiniDisc players and the music of Limp Bizkit. But in other areas, I pity the children of Gen Z, because they never got to experience things like CDRW mixtapes, the early internet before its enshittification, attending school before everyone had phones and cameras, and, of course, LAN parties.
For the uninitiated (or youthful): a LAN party was one of the only feasible ways to play PC games with friends before online multiplayer for games consoles was as ubiquitous as it is today. You’d bring your computer (and enormous CRT monitor, and keyboard, and mouse) to someone’s house—probably a friends’s parents’, given this was a mostly-adolescent pursuit—and play games together.
This is an idealised description, of course. The reality was often: someone would forget to bring some critical piece of equipment, resulting in pleading phonecalls to parents to deliver a missing network switch or CDR with the pirated copy of Windows everyone needed. And no LAN party would be complete without spending at least the first hour trying to get the network set up properly so everyone was on the same “workgroup”, whatever that was. Once everyone’s computers could “see” each other, then you’d discover that someone’s copy of CounterStrike was using the wrong patch version, and another hour would be spent trying to download a 200mb zip file on creaking home broadband while everyone else played without you. I could go on.
Technical troubleshooting aside, though, these times were some of the happiest of my late-teen life. Despite the smells and dedicated nerdery, these were social occasions for the type of teenage boys (and it really was just boys, as far as my experience went) who didn’t want to play football or sneak into pubs. The whole point of all this over-engineered technofiddling was to spend time together, and this is where I think today’s youth are missing out.
I occasionally get to see the younger members of my extended family play games these days and to my elder-millennial eyes, it looks like a horrifying hellscape of the worst aspects of the internet: anonymity + audience turns a normal person into, well, a “total fuckwad” (though this theory was coined in 2004, at the same time we were piling into Tony’s mum’s front room to play Half-Life).
The advantage of our LAN parties back then was, well, privacy: we were in someone’s family home, which immediately adds a certain background aura of respectfulness and civility, and we didn’t need to perform or act-up for internet strangers. I fear today’s kids feel a constant pressure to always be producing “content” for a perceived (real or imaginary) audience, and act accordingly. The closest we ever got to this was trying to impress someone’s older sister, who would sensibly run a mile as soon as the living room door opened and a cloud of B.O, energy drinks and congealing beige food smells leaked out.
Our parents must have thought what cute little nerds we were, dropping us off with our carloads of bulky equipment and ringbinders of CD-ROMs. But in retrospect I still defend the social, intimate and character-building interactions that these things were for me and my friends. When I hear a teenage cousin screaming borderline-abuse into a headset microphone on his XBox to a distant child somewhere in rural Idaho, I wonder if we missed a trick by improving our technology to the degree that a LAN party became a relic of the past. Maybe all we really needed were laptops.
Mini-feels this week
A quiet barber and a crispy head
I went for a haircut yesterday at 2pm, chosen deliberately because I thought the barber’s would be quiet. It was indeed: the shop was empty and the sole hairdresser was sagging in a chair, almost asleep as he clutched his phone.
I quickly discovered that arriving at this particular time was actually a huge error: when there’s a big queue of overly-hairy blokes lining the walls of the barber shop, the guy cutting your hair is going to get the job done in ten minutes or less, with minimal conversation and few flourishes of the scissors. When you turn up and there’s nobody else in sight? You’re getting the works.
Photo by Hai Phung on Unsplash
As the cut eventually dragged on and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, the barber stepped back for a second to fetch my least-favourite implement: the can of hairspray. I watched in the mirror as my freshly-trimmed hair quickly went from looking stylish and clean to a crispy, over-amplified pop star sheen. But he wasn’t done: he pulled an unusual-looking comb from a pocket and began to delicately tease and twist seemingly every strand of hair on my head individually, applying more hairspray and adjusting each aspect of my coiffure until he was satisfied.
He grabbed the mirror to show me the back of my head and I almost recoiled in shock: I thought I saw a bald patch. But I’d been fooled by the sheer volume of hairspray applied: the hair on the back of my head had been formed into crisp canyons of spray starch, parting like the red sea to reveal my pale scalp below.
I swallowed the grimace, tipped him a fiver, and stepped outside the shop. As soon as I was the round the corner I furiously dusted the back of my head with my hands until all the spray was removed, examining my fringe with my phone’s front camera and panicking that I looked like a ne'er-do-well.
Next time, I’m going at rush hour.