Some context<\/h3>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
Before I begin talking about 2016, I first need to tell you where I was in life before the year began. In short, I was in a pretty delicate spot, especially when it came to my mental health. And 2015 in particular had been a really tough year for me, earlier in the year I was diagnosed with depression, and I needed to go to therapy and take some medication, which really didn’t help me as much as I would’ve hoped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In addition to my garbage state of mind, there was someone in class I liked, which only made things twice as bad. It’s already bad being constantly sad and wanting to die, but when you add another thing to worry about… yeah. I don’t know how I didn’t completely lose it. And I hate that this happened again just a few years ago. Just awful. My social life that year was indeed affected by my depression, though I did meet some people at school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My main distractions that year mostly consisted of me being on my phone and tablet, though I mostly used the latter as it had more internal storage. There was this Sonic game that came out that year (Sonic Runners, I think?), which I played a lot to keep my mind busy. I also got back to watching Cartoon Network, I just watched anything that wasn’t Teen Titans Go. Those would’ve been the last years I actively watched cable TV before I’d only ever watch YouTube, which I still watched a lot of. Mostly Vinny and Joel from Vinesauce, if I recall correctly. And at the end of the year, I played Fallout 3 and New Vegas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the end of the year, I was feeling tired, but glad that I had gotten through school. Despite my depression, that year hadn’t been so bad academically speaking, though at the end I had to do a presentation to pass. And just after Christmas, somebody had broken into our house and stole some things, including my grandma’s cash and my brother’s tablet. In short, the year had started off with the worst vacations we’ve ever had, and ended in robbery. What a wonderful year 2015 was. And I wasn’t exactly optimistic about what was coming the following year…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Summer vacation<\/h3>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
Okay, so now we can talk about 2016 proper. The first few weeks weren’t super eventful, as far as I can remember. I spent most of my days either watching videos or playing games, with the occasional walk or trip to the mall to try out the game consoles, the ones that were current at the time: the PS4, the Wii U and the 3DS. I didn’t have a lot of money back then, so at most, I’d just get myself some snacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also didn’t really feel safe going out too far from home like I do today, so my destinations were quite limited. I did go out with a friend of mine at the time, we went to a mall I hadn’t been to before. While there wasn’t a lot to see, we still had fun. We had fast food and we went to the hardware store, as well as the supermarket. We just joked around a lot, and we talked about random topics. Y’know, things friends typically do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rest of January also wasn’t super eventful, as far as I can remember. So let’s jump to the next month, February. My mom let us know that we’d be going to the south, which was a yearly destination for us until my parents broke up, the last time we went there was back in 2011. It was never the prettiest place on earth, but it was nice to see the family I suppose. I was already dreading the flea situation, my body always itched whenever I slept in one of those beds, ugh. The difference this time was that we’d be staying at a different place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We left home at around 8 or 9pm, we took the subway all the way up to where the bus stations are. I remember that bus trip being a bit of a pain, I simply couldn’t get myself to sleep no matter how much I tried. My body only likes beds for sleeping, anything else just isn’t enough. When we got there, I think my aunt drove us to her house, the details there are a bit fuzzy. Or maybe we took a taxi or bus. But yeah, our first day there was just staying at home, I did go out for short walks though, just to reconnect with the locale around me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I do wish we had gone to the fancier parts of the city, but that just didn’t happen for some reason. We did go to a few beaches, one of which I had never been to before. This was fun, of course. And yes, I made sure to snap some pics while we were there, although unlike today, I didn’t really feel like documenting everything that happened in my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not a lot of drama happened either… well, my dad did come at some point (he lives not too far from where we were staying at), and he started to whine about something, so my mom and aunt effectively told him to fuck off, and we never saw him again during the trip. We also visited my dad’s family, they were all doing pretty well, and the house was slowly being expanded compared to the last time I had gone. In fact, the city in general had changed a lot, it was more urbanized and the industrial areas were slowly disappearing. There’s even a mall there now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We left about a week later, overall I had a lot of fun. I would like to visit again, but that’ll have to be in the future… I’d just need to find a place to stay at. The rest of the summer was pretty uneventful, I just went out to walk and spent a lot of time on my phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, vacation time had to end at some point. And I went back on the first week of March, as is usually the case. Most of my classmates were still there, and yes, when I turned 16 they did indeed sing “happy birthday” to me lol. About that, my mom actually threw a party for me, she invited a lot of people, which was mostly family members. We ate burgers and I had a really good time. It was also the last “big” birthday I’d ever have… which might be for the better, anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n March proved to be a really interesting month. My spirits were as high as they could be, and that’s considering how depressed I was just months prior. I remember that after the therapy I went through the year before, I ended up having an interview, to talk about my experience and how helpful it was for me. It was all recorded on tape, I wonder if that recording still survives somewhere. I was feeling rather optimistic about 2016. Hopeful, even. It’s weird to think about it now, but I was far more outgoing than I had ever been before.<\/p>\n\n\n Practically all of my real life interactions were at school, I talked to most of my classmates at the time. This was actually the first time I decided to break out of my bubble after being afraid to talk to other people. I lowkey miss how that was for me, now my brain short circuits at the thought of approaching people. But it wasn’t just me who made the effort to talk to people, others would sometimes approach me as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For instance, there was this girl in the other class that had taken an interest in me for some reason. I don’t know what it was that she saw on me, or what her intent was in the first place. But I figured I’d give her a chance, now that I was far more willing to socialize. We began to hang out a lot during breaks, we talked a lot and generally we got along really well. We shared our socials at some point and even chatted outside of class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But then her classmates began to tease her over it, claiming that we had feelings for one another. My overall school performance was about as good or better than it was in 2015, aside from English I didn’t really excel at any particular subject. But I was above average, in general. There really isn’t much for me to mention in this area, aside from some of the activities we did at school. We went to this interactive museum, which was fun although I don’t recall the reason for our visit. History class had some wacky activities as well, including making a music video (I just took video of bus trips for that one) and making… history memes, which we then had to print.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As far as distractions were concerned, well, aside from just taking walks, I spent a lot more time on my phone now that I had social media. I was carrying a 2015 Moto G, which was such a cool phone aside from the little RAM it had. One gig was rough even 10 years ago. There was one app I remember using a lot with my friends… does anyone remember Miitomo? It was Nintendo’s first smartphone app, it was kind of like a social media platform, you could dress up your Miis, customize their rooms, make Miifotos and answering questions. And now, I’ll proceed to show you 35 authentic answers I wrote back then. Click to enlarge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As much as I loved the app and all the silly things I did with my online friends, it sadly failed and it shut down only two years after launch, in May of 2018. I actually didn’t really play a ton of games that year, aside from random ones I found on the Play Store. I mostly watched YouTube and sometimes TV, when that was still worth a damn. I also began drawing, here are a few samples of the things I drew. And you can see my interests of the time, as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One thing I got myself into this year was the entire concept of meeting people from around the world. The year before, I decided to start using social media after being pretty hesitant about it. And for some reason, instead of using Facebook or Instagram like any normal person would’ve back in 2015… I instead opted to use Google+. Then again, I would hardly consider myself normal. And I feel like I was even weirder back then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Did you know that Google once had an entire social media platform? Google+ first launched in 2011 as an invite only platform, but it was later opened up to the general public. It had a very similar design to Facebook, and it had this entire concept of “circles”, where you’d add certain groups of people, like say family members or friends, and then choose if you want to share it with everyone, or among your circles. There were also collections, which allowed you to very neatly group certain types of posts, for example, you could make a collection for art posts and another for personal things. Kinda like Pinterest. There were also communities and all that, just like other social platforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you were on the internet back in 2013 or so, you’ll remember a particular shitshow that happened. Google began to force G+ on YouTube, making it so that you needed a G+ account to make comments, old comments made before this change became read only, and lost all of their replies and likes\/dislikes. This made a lot of people unhappy, and you probably saw Bob in a lot of comment sections on YouTube (see picture below). While Google did revert this by 2015, the damage was already done, and Google+ took a massive dip in its reputation.<\/p>\n\n\n While G+ had a ton of users, the reality was, user retention was extremely low. At some point, Google was forced to admit nobody wanted to use it, and after discovering a nasty vulnerability in 2018, they announced they’d be shutting it down by August 2019. Then there was another bug that exposed users’ data, which caused the shutdown date to be pushed forward to April that year. And that was that, the business\/education version continued to operate for a few more years (and it was later renamed to Currents), before finally being shut down in 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This was the last time Google ever dabbled with anything social media related, after their other experiments had failed. And you would think they’d learn something about not forcing things down people’s throats after all this nonsense, but considering they’re now doing the same with their shitty AI slop, it’s safe to say they haven’t learned a damn thing. For fuck’s sake, Google…<\/p>\n<\/details>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/poble.cl\/thoughts\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/IMG_20160207_125845761-1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\nSchool, real life and my distractions<\/h3>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
And for the record, she wasn’t really my type anyway.<\/s> While it didn’t affect me too much, she was… offended, to say the least. It got to the point where she acted weird around me, saying she’d stop talking to me just to protect me or some other nonsense. I suspect she did have feelings for me, but I have no way to know that. Our friendship failed before it could even get off the ground. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\nMy introduction to online friends<\/h3>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
Side note: what was Google+?<\/strong><\/summary>\n