It's Happening!It's Happening!

Steve and Candace met MANY years ago, at the decline of dial-up internet, but still, just before the very first iPhone was ever invented. This is how it happened about 20 years ago… They met through what at the time was known as a “Message Forum” and this website wasn’t quite a chat room, but it was more akin to what Reddit nowadays resembles, but the forum was dedicated to Helio mobile devices. Helio said “Don't Call Us a Phone Company; Don't Call it a Phone.” We’re just gonna say “phone” anyway, and sure, it they had their unique phones that were SO uniquely different from any other phones of their time! The only other options at the time were Nokia bricks or Razor flip phones, so what Helio fans decided to do, was to make a website dedicated to the unique features and limited apps of the Kickflip, Hero, and Ocean. So get this okay, back then, every other phone was limited to having the game Snake available, sending and receiving simple text messages, and of course making phone calls… But, just by having a Helio phone, this was the ONLY way to get MySpace at the palm of your hand! This was a BIG WEBSITE with many customizations, but, just by being a member of Helio, you could get EIGHT people (not just Four) onto your featured Top Friends list of your MySpace profile page!!! People on the message forum would have discussions about their favorite features of the Helio phones, how they could download “apps” to browse the web or get new games to maximize their enjoyment of their Helio! On one fateful day, Steve, who was just some kid who wanted to animate a very specific image, made a post asking, “Can anybody animate my profile picture for me?” The picture was a pixelated simple bee inside of a jar that he just threw together, and as fate would have it, there just so happened to be a young art student name Candace (not Candance) who was up to the task… She told him, “I can do it!” She worked within the constraints of her art software, pushed buttons and clicked stuff on her computer… and then… THE BEE IN THE JAR WAS BUZZING AROUND IN THE TINY ANIMATED GIF!!! (It’s pronounced gif, not gif) The image looped just like Steve had envisioned, Candace had just brought his pixelated idea to digital life, the bee flew into the jar, circled around inside and made little angry buzzing animations, knowing that it had been captured. Steve was extremely grateful, immediately befriended Candace, and he even added her as one of his top eight MySpace friends, she would go onto reciprocate the sentiment! (Maybe, idk, seems like something they would do.) As their friendship blossomed, They discovered that they had many things in common and… Well, eventually, they lost touch with one another… They faded from each other’s lives and memories, Helio became a defunct phone company, MySpace faded out of popularity and Facebook took its place. But then, at just the right time, just as both Candace and Steve were logging back onto MySpace to download their cringey MySpace pictures to port over onto their Facebook profiles, they just so happened to reconnect with one another! They chatted like if they hadn’t skipped a beat, they rekindled their friendship which eventually turned into a long distance relationship and, well the story was supposed to be about how they met… because of that pixelated bee in a jar that Candace so graciously gifted to Steve. 🐝🫙