And of course, the actual comment is deleted.
 
I don't really know where to take my investigation from here. I've truly exhausted my abilities. I imagine "39" "Shane Nolan" "Ireland" is working in the upper echelons of Dublin's booming media industry. Or maybe he opted for a quaint life in a sleepy Irish town that aspirational cottage-core girls only fantasize about. I love the idea of this 20 something year old Irish dude with an affinity for American mid-aughts television and decides what he's going to do is share his love with the world.  

"39" "Shane Nolan" "Ireland." The only person in the world who loves Ugly Betty as much as I do.

mrtvoreo: a shy update 

 

I approach you, dear readers, with my head down and my bushy little tail between my timid little-r legs. 

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It's been months since my last update, but I relinquish - in typical Hajin fashion - any blame. It's not like I didn't want to. It was moreso a lack of new content. 

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I mean all this paranoia surrounding surveillance and internet cookie crumbs, yet I still can't manage to find someone based on their name, age, and nationality? Sure, Russian bots can wring precious data from boomers with impenetrable minion memes and personality quizzes thereby tapping into deep-seated xenophobic fears and swinging the Presidential election, but God forbid I try to pay my dues in this sick sad world. 

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And here lies the great paradox of the internet. Despite its promise of everything always and that looming threat of "it's there forever," the digital space, like everything else, has been pervaded by and thus driven by core capitalist god-terms (growth, money, progress, cha-ching!) that destroy and pillage once-flourishing cyber-empires. 

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Sites like Yahoo Answers have since gone defunct since I began my journey just a few months ago. God knows how many have diminished since 2011.  ​

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The internet may seem like an archive, a benign sage and scribe perseverant, but that was internet 1.0, baby! Pre-C.A, 1990-whenever. Things are different now. 

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That fun site where you theoretically share fun pictures of your life? Yeah, its accelerating fashion cycles and making kids depressed. Nobody cares about your vacation to Cabo, dummy! That's not what the sites about anymore. Features like the NEW algorithm and shopping tab made it clear: commerce over catalog, bitch! 

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It's the snake that bites its own tail, the hydra that re-emerges baring little resemblance to its original self, a third symbolic mythological animal.... this is the internet now.

Give me your memes, your content, and by god, give me more.

All this to say... I think this is goodbye.

MrTvOreo, Shane Nolan, my personal hero.  

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Unbeknownst to you, we were connected by some servers and our shared love for Ugly Betty. Our friendship blossomed thanks, in part, to the same mechanism that killed it. 

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mrtvoreo: case closed?

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12.29.2021

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One of my least favorite crime procedural tropes goes a little something like this:

Detective A: guess we’ll never find the criminal! Let’s just give up the case

Detective B: seems like we have to. Anyways, [insert irrelevant anecdote or a straight-up non-sequitur]

Detective A: wait repeat that again!

Detective B: [repeats anecdote or straight-up non-sequitur that ends up being tangentially relevant to the case and leads to the final clue]

Do you know what I mean? Like, as if real-life mysteries could ever be solved because of some bullshit happenstance.

Except when they are. And it happens quite a lot. Distant relative's 23-and-me results or distinctive handwriting and what not.

In fact, it happened to me.

That’s right, my fellow TV’s, Oreos, and Mr’s, I have finally solved the mystery of “Shane Nolan-39- Ireland”’s identity. Loyal followers of the story may remember I found Shane’s alternative channels, “IrishCarlowLad” and “MrTvOreo2” via the Wayback Machine a few months ago. Unfortunately, both channels were deleted and unarchived and so my unenterprising ass left it at that. Unenterprising as I may be, I also have an extremely poor memory so I tried searching for MrTvOreo’s identity using the same 3 mechanisms (Google, Wayback Machine, and a combination of the two) and running into the same wall, error404: “channel ‘IrishCarlowLad’ not found.”

Albert Einstein or some other person who notoriously gets quotes misattributed to them once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well whoever said that was insanely wrong! Youtube’s error message would have typically signaled the end of my investigation, this time, however, I stared at the proverbial error message with a new-found curiosity: “what exactly is Carlow?” Curiosity may have killed Schrodinger’s cat but curiosity resurrected mine.

Okay, I’m going to stop turning platitudes on its head with corny zingers.

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I took to Google and I find that Carlow is a city in Ireland. Then the next logical search query followed: “Shane Nolan,” “39,” “Carlow.” I hit enter.

The first page is unpromising, there’s obituaries and deactivated Twitter accounts - the typical stuff. I wonder if I should even bother with the second page of Google, a meme in and of itself akin to the deepest and darkest recesses of the ocean; it’s mysterious, it’s uninviting; it’s that thing under the iceberg, the Roseart version of whatever you’re actually looking for.

Despite my reservations, I proceed.

2nd page, let’s go.

A blog post at the top of the page immediately catches my eye: “Shane Nolan - Contact Me.” My heat skips a beat and I click. I’m led to an embedded contact form accompanied by extensive instructions should one want to schedule a meeting with the site's owner. I scroll further down and see he’s linked a Youtube channel. I click and - hmm, what's the more sophisticated way to say "shook." In any case, I'm fucking shook.

Though his Youtube channel contains no videos, playlists, or description, he’s left one bread crumb for ol haj to savor: an oreo cheesecake profile picture. No, not just any oreo cheesecake - the oreo cheesecake. The one that once littered his channel’s background and decorated my childhood memories, infinite iterations of oreo cheesecakes that promised to go on and on- until it didn’t.

Now, it reappeared into my life, imbibed with a familiarity and warmth I had since forgotten, like that first hug from you mom after summer camp. I’d been thinking about this moment for almost a year and now here it was, served on a silver platter. I was just a few clicks away from finally getting to meet the man behind the oreo. And yet.

And yet.

It’s been over a week since I’ve made my discovery and I have yet to make contact. Here is a man who innocently uploaded some random TV shows in 2009 and over a decade later, he gets an email from a complete stranger who found his identity through their little amateur investigation. I recounted this story to my friends to see what they thought I should do. Some friends found the story endearing and encouraged me send him an email; others were creeped out I had gone such lengths to find Shane and was certain he would feel the same. I’m going to at least give Shane the holidays to himself and come 2022, I’m sending an email, god damn it!

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