Water is Back

2:32 AM

The utility of something does not determine its value, otherwise water would be worth nearly infinity. Water has more utility than nearly anything else, we literally need it to survive, as does every other living creature on this planet that we know about. The ability to summon water in your home at any time you wish, that is an insane ability, and one we take for granted.

I was awake when the water came back on. I had a couple of my faucets left all the way open while there was no water coming out, so I would know right away when they came back on. The other times I've done this, I was asleep when they came back on. I think it was on Saturday night / Sunday morning. It was a few hours after I wrote my entry of not having any water, literally just a few hours later.

The water started with a trickle, and what was interesting, was that soap water was coming through. I thought I was hallucinating or something, but no, it was soap water that was coming through. The sinks where I had left the faucets on were filling up with bubbles and foam. That was interesting. There were people on the beginning where this water was feeding through who were pumping soap through the whole pipe system. I turned off my sinks shortly after finding out they were soap water. I couldn't do much with that, except I did flush the toilet a couple of times with this kind of water.

Even though I had water, I still couldn't wash the dishes, couldn't do laundry, couldn't take a shower, I couldn't even wash my hands, because it was all soap water. You have to rinse with clean water after doing any of this, or else you just leave a soap residue that dries up, and that' wouldn't be nice. It took another 6 or more hours before I could open up the faucet without any soap coming out. After that, I was able to enjoy water again. I washed all my dishes, did the laundry, and was able to brush my teeth and floss so much more comfortably.

My water bill is always the same every month. It doesn't matter if I use it or not, it's the same amount every month, even when I'm not in Puerto Rico for a few months. It's been the same price for years, literally the same exact dollar amount, it's like a subscription to water basically. I think it's because they don't have a good way to track how much water every resident in my neighborhood uses, that's my theory at least, so they just charge everyone here the same. Actually, I'm not sure if everyone here pays the same water price or not, since I don't know how much anyone else pays for water. I don't even know how much my parents pay for water and they are people I can easily get that info from.

But yeah, water is really nice to have. My life felt more at ease as soon as the water came back. I also refilled all of my empty gallon containers of water that I used up, and I counted how much I have. It's just 22 gallons of reserve water that I have. I thought I had 30-40 gallons of water saved up, but I had only 22 gallons all along.

It's weird how a gallon of water is only around $1. It has more use than a backpack for example, but a backpack nowadays is like $40 on average, the cheap ones are like $30 now. When I was in high school, the most luxurious and expensive backpacks were $100. I remember because I would do online shopping during freshman year of high school. I don't really know where I got the money from though, maybe my parents were the ones who would buy it? Anyway, I'd put some dream backpacks I wanted into a wishlist, and the most expensive ones were $100, like the Oakley backpacks. Searching now, there are actually a lot less than $100, but also some that are $150 now, those weren't around in 2009.

Since those backpacks were actually too expensive for me, what I did was make my own backpack designs. I don't know anyone else in school that did this, but I bought this custom printing parchment, where you could print a design on a special fabric paper using an inkjet printer, and then you could iron it into anything. So I ironed and stitched this design that said JustMegawatt on my backpack with a custom logo, and just like that I had my own "custom" backpack. I had a couple of these, and I would also put the logo on the sides and the pockets to make it look cooler. Ironing it wasn't enough, it had to be stitched as it would fall off if it wasn't.

My calculator was also customized. It also had "JustMegawatt" on it. Actually, there was this one time special service by this random sticker company, a special event for Casio calculators. They also offered this service for free, I don't know why or how. But they had this entirely, very user-friendly creator where you could design your own look for your calculator, it was like one of those shirt editing programs where you can design a custom shirt and place any design anywhere and resize it and add text, but for a calculator for some reason. What's insane is the design went in between all of the keys too, so literally it was this fully decked out and special editor, and the final result was exactly as the editor showed. I had the coolest looking calculator.

It's interesting that you can find the most random and specialized and useful of services, that no one else knows about or uses. It's really random for there to be a sticker company that makes custom print designs for calculators. It was for the Casio Prizm, let me see if I can find anything on it now, if that service is still around. Nope, no longer around.

I was able to find that you can now program python into these Casio Prizm calculators. That would have been the coolest thing back in the day. I used Casio Basic, I think that's what the language was called, to make games and apps on that calculator back then. I don't know why I was so obsessed with calculators back in the day. This was before the "decent" smartphone era, back then all smartphones sucked, the best one was the iPhone 4 and that was amazing for its time, but it was still slow, had low storage, and wasn't super functional.

Oh yeah, I also owned a Blackberry Pearl, and a Palm Pre. The Palm Pre card system would be copied into iPhones and Androids later, they had it figured out before anyone. The Palm Pre, to close apps, you would swipe them up and away, and they displayed a list of all the apps like cards, this is what all phones use nowadays, but back then only Palm Pre did it. It's weird because the Pre was so obscure, but there were still lots of custom software and themes for it, you could even jailbreak it I think, and load up even more custom themes and programs. Who the heck were the people making these themes and programs for it back then?

My Palm Pre was decked out, I had this cool and random purple theme, that made all the icons and wallpaper look like this weird purple psychedelic trip. Who the heck made that theme? And there were hundreds of themes.

In the early 2000s, there were all these random anime gifs of amazing quality. All you had to do was copy and paste this HTML code, and you could have these gifs into your Neopets page or MySpace. Who the heck made them? And where are they now? They are no longer around now. I don't see anymore animated gifs of anime characters anywhere, I haven't seen them in over a decade. But it always made me wonder, who the heck was making these things? You literally cannot find these chibi gifs annywhere anymore, I am trying to search for them now, to no results. Actually, nice! I was actually able to find some! They aren't as amazing and super quality as I remembered.

There were also fan sites. I remember AAML or Ash and Misty's Love pages were popular back in the day. In Pokemon Tower, oh wow, I can't believe Pokemon Tower isn't around anymore. Insane. I'm reading some Reddit post about people reminiscing on it, so interesting. It's very much like that for some websites I have made too, that only I know about. I'm not naming them, but if I search for them on reddit, let's see... Fuck yeah. I'm so proud. The comments I got on my past websites, amazing. Yeah, I've had some very popular websites back in the day, sometimes more than a million visitors in a month on some (I think this only happened a handful of times though, it wasn't like this every month), and it's interesting people's opinions on them. They say it will have a special place in their heart, and that it must've taken a lot of effort to make such a site. That's cool as fuck. Thank you for the compliments.

I actually have received some random emails and such to a lot of my websites. It's actually also interesting that these people will say a website of mine "will have a special place in their hearts" and some even say, after visiting it on an archive site, that it brings back memories and nostalgia for them. These comments are live and online right now, they might disappear if the user who posted them on Reddit gets banned though. Comments like that are so priceless. It's so cool and random. I did not expect to impact anyone with any of my websites.

Oh yeah, there was this one creepypasta I rewrote / improved upon and posted on one of my websites that became extremely popular, and they made a movie from it. My website used to be the prime destination for this creepypasta, so this one page would literally have like 200k views per month or something, just this one page. They never contacted me about the movie or anything, but it's so cool and random that they make this movie from a story you sort of wrote. It's been so long so I don't know how much influence I had on the story, but I know I made improvements upon it, even though the original story wasn't mine, it's by some anonymous as well. Yeah, this one I can give the name of, the "Midnight Man Game", is the creepypasta, and they made a movie from it.

Oh wow, if I search for that, they have rewritten my entire creepypasta. I don't recognize it being this long. Other people's versions are much longer, so they probably don't have my original version saved up. What I missed out on here, is the backlinks, because I took my own page and website down for no reason, 'cause I'm an idiot. Anyway, I probably had millions of backlinks to this one page. Backlinks is how Google and other search engines used to rank your page. The more backlinks it had, the more it got bumped up. Mine was the original, the first on the entire Internet to post this story, my version was the only one live for years, and everyone linked to it. Yeah, if I regret anything, it's missing out on the backlinks. They are so priceless. I'm a dumb moron.

This was in high school by the way. I had these websites with millions of views and backlinks back as a high school student. In college as well. It was after I got my first job that I abandoned these websites. I just let them rot and disappear, and vanish from the Internet. I don't know if I regret that.

Anyway, on Pokemon Tower, I still cannot believe that website is down. It's been down since 2012 apparently, but my most recent memory of it is that it still worked. Like my most recent memory of the Pokemon Tower, is that it was still working, and that I was visiting it and was shocked to find that my stuff was still on there. I was on there as a 3rd grader, and my username was G4Fan. It's this fanfiction website by the way, specifically for Pokemon. People uploaded random fanfiction stories they wrote. My stories were all dumb and they sucked, the writing was terrible too, but it was just interesting.

But yeah, time moves on. It tick tocks. Is the Internet better now? Or is there more junk online than ever?