Gosh, the time flies. Being a time traveller of sorts, I can tell.

 Here goes my (short) story.

 I was born in the early 90s, and had an unremarkable childhood. 
 In addition to my dolls, I enjoyed playing video games and tinkering
 with qBasic on a family computer. School was boring, but the better
 my grades were, the more time I was allowed to spend using the PC.

 One of my first teenage summers, thanks to my engineer mum, I got 
 a part-time job helping out in a computer shop. With savings from
 the job I got myself a decent laptop, and I could afford some
 dial-up time and new Gameboy games. Soon I learned about Linux
 and coding. The life was good.

 Truth to be told, I can't remember that much. My memory must be 
 hazy because of the time leap. But I remember that on one autumn
 night of 2005 I fell asleep while playing More Friends of Mineral
 Town.

 I woke up on the morning of January 27th, 2023. The world around me
 has changed dramatically.

 You know... I don't want to think about these events too much.

 Long story short, I contacted my good friend A. She says I can live
 at her place for now.

 To think about it, she still looks like she's 17! Incredible. 

 Also, my friend was kind enough to not ask too many questions. Instead,
 she helped me out to get up to speed with the events of the world
 and the advances of the technology.

 To do my research, I wanted to connect to the Internet ASAP. I was 
 about to plug a cable from laptop's modem to the phone socket when 
 A told me she has a FIBER-OPTIC INTERNET at home. Wicked. Just wicked.

 She also has a Wi-Fi router at home, which is very convenient for me, as
 I bought a 3com Wi-Fi PCMCIA card not that long ago. But before I could
 figure out how to reconfigure my friend's router to work with my Wi-Fi
 card ("legacy" mode, what a joke), she told me it would be unwise to
 use Windows 98 or Debian Sarge for browsing the Web.

 Huh.

 To my dissatisfaction, I couldn't boot a Debian LTS (it's 10 now?!).
 The kernel itself seemed to be working, but libata doesn't support my
 IDE controller. I tried a few other distributions, but most of them
 required either 10 times more RAM than I have to just launch the 
 installer, or a 64-bit CPU. It turns out, most computers in 2023
 are at least THAT powerful.

 I borrowed A's computer for a few days to set up my own laptop properly.
 Building a custom kernel helped a bit, but startx on Debian took
 forever, so I decided to build an LFS-like distro for my own use.
 It took a full week to finally get a comfortable and sleek desktop
 working.

 A few notes:
  * No Firefox. Too slow. Sad. Links is the way to go.
  * No ICQ. Everyone uses browser applets for chat. What?
  * Almost every applet asks for a cell phone number now. Yuck.
  * Guess what? E-mail also requires a web browser now.
  * And a cell phone number, too. 
  * FreeShell still works. Yay!
  * To make friends I decided to get an account in Mastodon.
  * Mastodon clients gave me a lot of headache. I'm on tut now.
  * It's February of 2023. The heck.
  * I have a cell phone, very cheap "feature phone".
  * It has ten times more RAM than my laptop. 
  * It still cannot run Mastodon well. Ha-ha.