You visit your parent's house and find your white Xbox 360 in your childhood bedroom. The tri-coloured composite cables are still stuffed behind the nightstand where you left them, tangled the way you left them, and when you plug them in you hear the ambient glow of the logo as the system boots up — that specific fan pitch, that particular frequency of electronic patience. You're presented with a vibrant, extinct design language and a friends list full of gamertags that haven't booted up their own console in hundreds of weeks. You hover the cursor over a name and the tooltip reads: Last Online: 640 Weeks Ago. Twelve years and you hadn't thought of him in eleven. You read an article in a physical, ink-printed newspaper in 2012 discussing how Microsoft is announcing the shutdown of MSN Messenger next year. You hurry home and try to remember the password to the Hotmail account you had in middle school. You look through a plastic binder full of polynomials and chemistry-balancing…
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