Somehow, the (much less impressive) Star Trek fan site I created in 2000 when I was 13 is still online.
I’ve long since lost access to it but the freeservers mob I hosted it with have somehow kept the sites from way back then all around and online still to this day. It’s a little painful and factually incorrect (I called the movie Generations a series!) but gives me a good laugh:
http://stvoyager.iwarp.com/
It appears the domain you used for your guestbook has been pass off to some sort of pharmaceutical information page in Scandinavia, I found that funny.
Excellent work, ^-KewLGuY-^. I'd say that's the most "13-year-old in the 2000s" nick ever, but that honor probably goes to xXSephiroth666Xx. Yours is up there though.
Eric S. Raymond recently posted some xeets about how retrocomputing nostalgia is due, in part, to wistfulness for the Cambrian explosion in personal computers, where every little two-bit company comes up with their own wildly different design. The design space hadn't been fully explored yet, and the future seemed pregnant with endless possibility. Then as people figured out what worked and what didn't in the computer design space, the PC sorta won, and it made much more sense to build a PC clone and take advantage of the huge PC hardware and software ecosystem. Raymond predicts that a similar coalescing on proven designs will happen with 3D printers.
Of course, ESR believes in the need for government slightly less than he believes in the need for redemption through the blood of Christ the Saviour, so he overlooks a critical forcing factor in this cycle of exploring the solution space followed by settling on proven designs: regulation. Cars were much cooler before the 1970s because the Clean Air Act was passed in the 1970s. There was an initial struggle period during which American autos shipped with anemic engines and features designed to compensate for lack of performance, until technologies like fuel injection became the norm, but again the automakers coalesced into a set of a few designs that both worked and fulfilled the obligations imposed by regulatory bodies... to the point where it's awful hard to tell a Toyota RAV-4 from a Honda CR-V just by looking.
I think the internet has gone through a similar exploratory vs. coalescing phase. Back in the 90s and 2000s, HTML and PHP let you create anything, so people created everything. And threw it up on a server, and it was wonderful. So many individual corners of the web with their authors' own perspectives. Now... well, regulation is definitely coming but in the meantime there are things with the force of regulatory bodies you have to worry about. You HAVE to do https which means you need a certificate. You HAVE to have a CDN and CloudFlare protection or else you'll be slashdot-effected or DDoS'd to oblivion. You can't even run an email server anymore without jumping through the hoops it takes to convince major providers you're not a spam farm. These are things you have to either think about yourself or pay someone to think about them for you. So the web has coalesced on a few best-practice designs and service providers. And most people just set up Wix or Shopify pages or Facebook groups anyway.
And that's why the 90s/2000s web has such nostalgic power. We could do anything from our armchairs with a bit of HTML and maybe some programming and sysadmin skills. But those days are gone. Maybe we're better off for it.
> You HAVE to do https which means you need a certificate.
This is kind of true, but, getting a cert isn't a big deal anymore. If you're not a big company, a free cert works fine.
> You HAVE to have a CDN and CloudFlare protection or else you'll be slashdot-effected or DDoS'd to oblivion.
DDoS is hard to manage, but otherwise it shouldn't be too hard to handle a /. kind of event if your page is reasonable and you make use of the abundance of modern computing... 1G cheap hosting is out there.
> You can't even run an email server anymore without jumping through the hoops it takes to convince major providers you're not a spam farm.
Yeah, this one sucks a lot. But, email is dead, so...
My job, today, is dealing with a vast influx of various types of email that all need categorising and a range of different actions. Not very dead at all from where I'm standing.
Email will never die, no matter how much most people want it to do so. The protocol is arguably the best proof of "worse is better", which is why it's held out for so long.
It's like claiming Skype is dead but my last job was at a small company with many international customers and Skype was still their daily driver for international calls.
I see the above discussion as a describing a process, very much like evolution, with web sites
bieng the species of interest, and how they are bieng shaped by, internal competition, for resouces (and prey), errr food, preditors, parisites, and environomental changes.
neat!
Depending on if you work or not, I feel there's a bigly dissonance in the perceived prevalence of email, phone calls, and other such traditional(?) channels of communique.
Most of them have clearly died in private life, but in the professional life you will be literally worthless if you aren't reachable by email, telephone, snail mail, perhaps even the fax machine.
> Yeah, this one sucks a lot. But, email is dead, so...
Really? These days, can't even login to some services (like Steam) without them sending you an email to confirm the login (some services even do this even if you already have other 2FA...)
The first website I ever built, where I learned HTML, was a Goldeneye 007 N64 fan site. I had all the cheats, all the walkthroughs, all the funny jokes and animated gifs. I misspelled "license to kill" in the url I created at angelfire.
Angelfire has a lot of sites from back then (~1999?), but not mine.
The site wasn't even that bad by modern standards. Had a frames layout, vertical frame on the left for the nav. I didn't know about server side includes yet.
Nice! If you remember the full URL, it's very possible it's on archive.org. My first couple websites are on there, fortunately (or unfortunately, considering how dorky they are hahah)
I've looked extensively, I don't think it exists. I can't remember exactly how I misspelled it, though, so there's this little glimmer of hope in my mind still.
Mine was a Linkin Park fan website, also hosted on Angelfire from around then. IIRC frames were the subject of a holy war at the time. I thought they were magical and had the same frames layout as you, but read a lot of stuff about how they were awful design so I created both frames and noframes pages (the latter having the nav bar across the top).
It was a lot of fun. When I discovered JS I started playing around with alerts, which surely would have driven my visitors mad if I had any.
Resources like the Simpsons Archive aka SNPP, the episode capsules particularly, which are just a collection of lengthy text files written decades ago but filled with treasure trove of insights and searchable references/quotes, are one of the rare simple gems of the Internet that I hope last forever.
This touches me so deeply... I had a similar experience in the sense that I too created a fansite for something I really enjoyed back then (first with Frontpage, then iframes, then PHP), and now that evolved a lot and I kind of become an expert on that (and a business on itself, I am generous!)
But while I was doing that, being a 10 years old, my best friend had his own Simpson fansite, so this triggered a lot of nostalgia. I when I visited yoru website and I saw the Buttons sections, oh my god. I wanted to cry. Thank you so much, I don't know how to thank you. I'm in love with the fansites from 2000-2005, and this was a trip.
Tangential but timely: I haven't watched the Simpsons regularly in about 20 years. However, my internal clock still sounds an alarm every Sunday night about 15 mins before showtime.
You've reminded me of how intensely frustrating it was to be a fan of a TV show pre-WWW and pre-streaming, when networks would shuffle shows between different days and times, trying to find the perfect lineup (or trying to accelerate the demise of an underperforming series).
In Toronto, we had a slight advantage where the TV channel that played most of the Fox content (Global TV on NTSC channel 6) bled into the tunable FM range so you could at least listen to it on your car radio (or any FM radio for that matter).
I also remember hearing neighbors' phone calls and baby monitors on the first cordless phone my family had.
In addition to the privacy issue, I think we've collectively forgotten just how bad those first few generations of cordless phones were. There was limited range (how about those telescoping antennas?), the sound quality was terrible, the batteries didn't last more than 30-60 mins, etc. In my experience, they weren't worth the trouble or cost until around 1998.
Random "early web Simpsons memory": in 1995 when I was taking a course to learn HTML, I had a great time browsing the web with "super-fast" ISDN (this was amazing at the time), and downloaded the Itchy & Scratchy song, in .au format. The filename was itchscra.au -- pretty sure I remember this because I spent so long trying to embed the audio into my web page and make it automatically play, which I don't think I ever got working haha
My first website was a baseball fan site in the late 90s. I discovered Google that way, because I had somehow reached the #1 result for "perfect game baseball" and got a lot of traffic thanks to David Wells (or Cone, can't remember which).
The web was so amateur back then, that I even got an email from a sports journalist asking if I accepted submissions from freelancers.
Every time I am presented with something like that that reminisce me of the 90's web, its innocence, and the unlimited potential it presented, I am brought back to Jaron's Lenier book, "You are not a gadget" and this often-cited quote out of it:
"If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless"
> I vaguely knew C++ to be the more powerful language but regardless of that, it seemed cursed because it was more steps away than PHP from building things that I could put on the internet.
>I had more fun being creative online when the stakes were so low that it seemed that just by playing I had already won something.
I’ve been thinking about this on and off a lot these past years.
I think part of it is that when your time has no value, nothing you choose to do is a waste.
That’s not to suggest your time needs to be worth nothing. But that you stop perceiving your time as having intrinsic value. My kids succeed where I fail all the time. They’ll spend hours on projects that have been done far better by other people already. But they just don’t think about those facts. They’re not relevant. Their time is not being valued in anything other than the feeling of “I want to do this thing.”
I built it and it’s pretty bad. Even with the power of the Wordpress template I managed to make a bad website.
But I spent too much time thriving for perfection. And this one sort of works which is better than a non existent site that might work better.
This is the latest iteration after multiple Django based rewrites. Last night I was looking into just running a wiki but that would require more time, which I don’t want to spend. More important things to do like finding speakers for the group events.
> My kids succeed where I fail all the time. They’ll spend hours on projects that have been done far better by other people already. But they just don’t think about those facts. They’re not relevant. Their time is not being valued in anything other than the feeling of “I want to do this thing.”
Watching my boys grab some paper and a marker and sweat quietly over a desk for 30 minutes only to walk over and hand me some crude drawing of "a little buddy I can put on my desk" always has me rethinking my station in life. Maybe I shouldn't be so tough on them.....
I think the problem is the pressure to "monetize" projects that today's internet puts on everything: either monetize the attention (ads) or by generating expertise (the "personal brand"). Back then it was just for fun, so it looked and felt more human and less corporative. We need to make the web human again, specially now with generative AI.
My dad has saved snippets from the newspaper that he read over the years. One of those snippets he gave to me is stuck to my refrigerator.
>What I strive for and to a degree achieve as a craftsman wood turner has its roots in the idea expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson: The reward of a thing well done is to have done it." This feeling cannot be abandoned. (Richard H. Montague, Groton, Vt.)
I don't know what paper or magazine this came from, probably Fine Woodworking, probably 1980s. It has the same spirit many of us are talking about. The joy in doing something is doing it, not making money on it or being the best at it. In the Internet era, if you only take joy from being the best at a hobby or task online, you will never be happy.
Nice nostalgia piece overall, but I especially enjoyed this line:
"The distinction between noise and signal becomes decreasingly apparent the further one gets from their source."
Very succinct and insightful. I will use that in the future.
There were a few Flash tidbits buried as downloads I took down, but the main content should all display, as it's just PHP rolling out HTML aside from the rollover up top that uses JS.
Somehow, the (much less impressive) Star Trek fan site I created in 2000 when I was 13 is still online.
I’ve long since lost access to it but the freeservers mob I hosted it with have somehow kept the sites from way back then all around and online still to this day. It’s a little painful and factually incorrect (I called the movie Generations a series!) but gives me a good laugh: http://stvoyager.iwarp.com/
It's kinda funny how your site has outlasted most of the sites on the Links page :)
I‘m so happy the Lurker‘s Guide (http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/) is also still online.
I was there, when it was still in creation.
jms is such a treasure. Listening to his autobiography, narrated by Peter Jurasik, is wholeheartedly recommended.
This rocks, love finding stuff like this.
It appears the domain you used for your guestbook has been pass off to some sort of pharmaceutical information page in Scandinavia, I found that funny.
Excellent work, ^-KewLGuY-^. I'd say that's the most "13-year-old in the 2000s" nick ever, but that honor probably goes to xXSephiroth666Xx. Yours is up there though.
Eric S. Raymond recently posted some xeets about how retrocomputing nostalgia is due, in part, to wistfulness for the Cambrian explosion in personal computers, where every little two-bit company comes up with their own wildly different design. The design space hadn't been fully explored yet, and the future seemed pregnant with endless possibility. Then as people figured out what worked and what didn't in the computer design space, the PC sorta won, and it made much more sense to build a PC clone and take advantage of the huge PC hardware and software ecosystem. Raymond predicts that a similar coalescing on proven designs will happen with 3D printers.
Of course, ESR believes in the need for government slightly less than he believes in the need for redemption through the blood of Christ the Saviour, so he overlooks a critical forcing factor in this cycle of exploring the solution space followed by settling on proven designs: regulation. Cars were much cooler before the 1970s because the Clean Air Act was passed in the 1970s. There was an initial struggle period during which American autos shipped with anemic engines and features designed to compensate for lack of performance, until technologies like fuel injection became the norm, but again the automakers coalesced into a set of a few designs that both worked and fulfilled the obligations imposed by regulatory bodies... to the point where it's awful hard to tell a Toyota RAV-4 from a Honda CR-V just by looking.
I think the internet has gone through a similar exploratory vs. coalescing phase. Back in the 90s and 2000s, HTML and PHP let you create anything, so people created everything. And threw it up on a server, and it was wonderful. So many individual corners of the web with their authors' own perspectives. Now... well, regulation is definitely coming but in the meantime there are things with the force of regulatory bodies you have to worry about. You HAVE to do https which means you need a certificate. You HAVE to have a CDN and CloudFlare protection or else you'll be slashdot-effected or DDoS'd to oblivion. You can't even run an email server anymore without jumping through the hoops it takes to convince major providers you're not a spam farm. These are things you have to either think about yourself or pay someone to think about them for you. So the web has coalesced on a few best-practice designs and service providers. And most people just set up Wix or Shopify pages or Facebook groups anyway.
And that's why the 90s/2000s web has such nostalgic power. We could do anything from our armchairs with a bit of HTML and maybe some programming and sysadmin skills. But those days are gone. Maybe we're better off for it.
> You HAVE to do https which means you need a certificate.
This is kind of true, but, getting a cert isn't a big deal anymore. If you're not a big company, a free cert works fine.
> You HAVE to have a CDN and CloudFlare protection or else you'll be slashdot-effected or DDoS'd to oblivion.
DDoS is hard to manage, but otherwise it shouldn't be too hard to handle a /. kind of event if your page is reasonable and you make use of the abundance of modern computing... 1G cheap hosting is out there.
> You can't even run an email server anymore without jumping through the hoops it takes to convince major providers you're not a spam farm.
Yeah, this one sucks a lot. But, email is dead, so...
> But, email is dead, so...
What an extraordinary claim!
My job, today, is dealing with a vast influx of various types of email that all need categorising and a range of different actions. Not very dead at all from where I'm standing.
Email will never die, no matter how much most people want it to do so. The protocol is arguably the best proof of "worse is better", which is why it's held out for so long.
Unless there’s something important, I check my email about once a week these days. Otherwise it’s just for authentication.
Work vs leisure.
I rarely send emails for leisure, but I send and receive dozens a day for work, both internal and external.
It's like claiming Skype is dead but my last job was at a small company with many international customers and Skype was still their daily driver for international calls.
I see the above discussion as a describing a process, very much like evolution, with web sites bieng the species of interest, and how they are bieng shaped by, internal competition, for resouces (and prey), errr food, preditors, parisites, and environomental changes. neat!
Depending on if you work or not, I feel there's a bigly dissonance in the perceived prevalence of email, phone calls, and other such traditional(?) channels of communique.
Most of them have clearly died in private life, but in the professional life you will be literally worthless if you aren't reachable by email, telephone, snail mail, perhaps even the fax machine.
> Yeah, this one sucks a lot. But, email is dead, so...
Really? These days, can't even login to some services (like Steam) without them sending you an email to confirm the login (some services even do this even if you already have other 2FA...)
These are the best. Thank you. anyone have any xfiles sites?
Smoking man theories were the best!
I'm looking for a character shrine for Akane from Ranma 1/2 myself.
https://wiby.me/?q=Akane+Ranma came up with https://geocities.restorativland.org/Tokyo/Pagoda/3879/, does that count?
That's perfect!
The DS9 theme MP3 is still functional!
I tried to sign the guestbook but could not. Didn’t expect it to work but would have been nice.
Wish guestbooks were still a thing. Visiting my site to find a new message was always a treat.
Ha ha thanks :) yeah the guest book was an external service. Along with the image based hit counter :)
I wish this was still what the internet was and not a bunch of walled garden xitter links I’ll never ever read.
I love your website. You’ve inspired my to put my blog back online in 2025 and document some of the things I plan to build.
> I wish this was still what the internet was
Here you go: https://wiby.me.
I've got the "surprise me" link bookmarked for a random distraction, it's great!
Incredibly cool, thanks
The good internet is alive! You just can’t find it is all (google).
My old website had a bunch of random stuff about DBZ. I still can’t figure out how to find my old geocities site.
If you remember the neighborhood(?) https://geocities.restorativland.org/ may help, since you can browse through screenshots+titles by neighborhood.
But I remember my exact address, and it's not there. Archive.org has it, but you'll need your exact address.
Ah, I remember that colour scheme. I used similar in my goth phase, when I had a geocities page.
Our rival high school’s debate/drama team made a website c. 1999, and by some miracle, Tripod keeps it up:
https://mcneilforensics.tripod.com
OMG thats cringe
The first website I ever built, where I learned HTML, was a Goldeneye 007 N64 fan site. I had all the cheats, all the walkthroughs, all the funny jokes and animated gifs. I misspelled "license to kill" in the url I created at angelfire.
Angelfire has a lot of sites from back then (~1999?), but not mine.
The site wasn't even that bad by modern standards. Had a frames layout, vertical frame on the left for the nav. I didn't know about server side includes yet.
Nice! If you remember the full URL, it's very possible it's on archive.org. My first couple websites are on there, fortunately (or unfortunately, considering how dorky they are hahah)
I've looked extensively, I don't think it exists. I can't remember exactly how I misspelled it, though, so there's this little glimmer of hope in my mind still.
ahh dang! maybe you've got the URL in an old email somewhere? only thing I could think of... fingers crossed for you!
Mine was a Linkin Park fan website, also hosted on Angelfire from around then. IIRC frames were the subject of a holy war at the time. I thought they were magical and had the same frames layout as you, but read a lot of stuff about how they were awful design so I created both frames and noframes pages (the latter having the nav bar across the top).
It was a lot of fun. When I discovered JS I started playing around with alerts, which surely would have driven my visitors mad if I had any.
I definitely drove my visitors mad with my DBZ website. When I started making my Linkin Park website, I made the layout in photoshop
Flaming text was all the rage then. I had a page about how to do that on my E/N website. In paint shop pro
I rehosted my Tolkien fanpage from 1999 or so: https://tolkien.stavros.io
I also have my personal website from back then somewhere.
This is the most responsive website I've visited in a long while.
Well, it is the finest artisanal HTML the 90s had to offer.
Resources like the Simpsons Archive aka SNPP, the episode capsules particularly, which are just a collection of lengthy text files written decades ago but filled with treasure trove of insights and searchable references/quotes, are one of the rare simple gems of the Internet that I hope last forever.
I hope so too! Jouni is still active and recruiting maintainers here: https://simpsonsarchive.com/about.html
I hadn’t realised this had resurfaced after snpp.com went down! Pleased to see I’m still listed as a contributor to the computer list - https://www.simpsonsarchive.com/guides/computers.file.html
This touches me so deeply... I had a similar experience in the sense that I too created a fansite for something I really enjoyed back then (first with Frontpage, then iframes, then PHP), and now that evolved a lot and I kind of become an expert on that (and a business on itself, I am generous!)
But while I was doing that, being a 10 years old, my best friend had his own Simpson fansite, so this triggered a lot of nostalgia. I when I visited yoru website and I saw the Buttons sections, oh my god. I wanted to cry. Thank you so much, I don't know how to thank you. I'm in love with the fansites from 2000-2005, and this was a trip.
You are very welcome! It makes me so happy to hear that I could add a little to your day. Frontpage was my first IDE as well!
Tangential but timely: I haven't watched the Simpsons regularly in about 20 years. However, my internal clock still sounds an alarm every Sunday night about 15 mins before showtime.
You've reminded me of how intensely frustrating it was to be a fan of a TV show pre-WWW and pre-streaming, when networks would shuffle shows between different days and times, trying to find the perfect lineup (or trying to accelerate the demise of an underperforming series).
In Toronto, we had a slight advantage where the TV channel that played most of the Fox content (Global TV on NTSC channel 6) bled into the tunable FM range so you could at least listen to it on your car radio (or any FM radio for that matter).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/87.7_FM
That is so cool. I'd not heard of this "phenomenon" before.
I ran into this a couple of different ways growing up.
As with Toronto, on some FM radios I could catch a local Indianapolis TV station. Don’t remember which station off-hand.
More concerning, on my boombox, I discovered that could pick up some local cordless phone calls in my neighborhood.
I also remember hearing neighbors' phone calls and baby monitors on the first cordless phone my family had.
In addition to the privacy issue, I think we've collectively forgotten just how bad those first few generations of cordless phones were. There was limited range (how about those telescoping antennas?), the sound quality was terrible, the batteries didn't last more than 30-60 mins, etc. In my experience, they weren't worth the trouble or cost until around 1998.
When I created the website for the Ultimate Simpsons Doom II mod, I published it at tripod.com. It's still there 22 years later https://waltersgameboy.tripod.com/simpdoom/
I miss the old Internet.
Random "early web Simpsons memory": in 1995 when I was taking a course to learn HTML, I had a great time browsing the web with "super-fast" ISDN (this was amazing at the time), and downloaded the Itchy & Scratchy song, in .au format. The filename was itchscra.au -- pretty sure I remember this because I spent so long trying to embed the audio into my web page and make it automatically play, which I don't think I ever got working haha
My first website was a baseball fan site in the late 90s. I discovered Google that way, because I had somehow reached the #1 result for "perfect game baseball" and got a lot of traffic thanks to David Wells (or Cone, can't remember which).
The web was so amateur back then, that I even got an email from a sports journalist asking if I accepted submissions from freelancers.
Every time I am presented with something like that that reminisce me of the 90's web, its innocence, and the unlimited potential it presented, I am brought back to Jaron's Lenier book, "You are not a gadget" and this often-cited quote out of it:
"If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless"
Was there a time or place in where money flowed to musicians, journalists, and artists instead of their managers?
Sadly my first major site (with a four-letter dot-com and everything) went down before internet archive got to it.
The first, and indeed only, site I did for cash, dating back to early 1997, was still hosted by claranet until 2009 - well after the shop had bust
Love the “Match-Ups” page:
https://gardnermcintyre.com/simpsonszip/view.php?page=matchu...
Thank you! I remember having a great time putting that one together!
> I vaguely knew C++ to be the more powerful language but regardless of that, it seemed cursed because it was more steps away than PHP from building things that I could put on the internet.
Still true!
>I had more fun being creative online when the stakes were so low that it seemed that just by playing I had already won something.
I’ve been thinking about this on and off a lot these past years.
I think part of it is that when your time has no value, nothing you choose to do is a waste.
That’s not to suggest your time needs to be worth nothing. But that you stop perceiving your time as having intrinsic value. My kids succeed where I fail all the time. They’ll spend hours on projects that have been done far better by other people already. But they just don’t think about those facts. They’re not relevant. Their time is not being valued in anything other than the feeling of “I want to do this thing.”
Have you seen the Python Atlanta website ? https://pyatl.dev
I built it and it’s pretty bad. Even with the power of the Wordpress template I managed to make a bad website. But I spent too much time thriving for perfection. And this one sort of works which is better than a non existent site that might work better.
Perfect is the enemy of done.
Exactly.
Now I’ve seen it. And I’ve seen it because it exists. If you didn’t make it and never finished it, I wouldn’t have seen it.
This is the latest iteration after multiple Django based rewrites. Last night I was looking into just running a wiki but that would require more time, which I don’t want to spend. More important things to do like finding speakers for the group events.
> My kids succeed where I fail all the time. They’ll spend hours on projects that have been done far better by other people already. But they just don’t think about those facts. They’re not relevant. Their time is not being valued in anything other than the feeling of “I want to do this thing.”
Watching my boys grab some paper and a marker and sweat quietly over a desk for 30 minutes only to walk over and hand me some crude drawing of "a little buddy I can put on my desk" always has me rethinking my station in life. Maybe I shouldn't be so tough on them.....
I think the problem is the pressure to "monetize" projects that today's internet puts on everything: either monetize the attention (ads) or by generating expertise (the "personal brand"). Back then it was just for fun, so it looked and felt more human and less corporative. We need to make the web human again, specially now with generative AI.
We see opportunity cost as such a danger, and you're right, it probably holds us back from enjoying life quite a lot.
My dad has saved snippets from the newspaper that he read over the years. One of those snippets he gave to me is stuck to my refrigerator.
>What I strive for and to a degree achieve as a craftsman wood turner has its roots in the idea expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson: The reward of a thing well done is to have done it." This feeling cannot be abandoned. (Richard H. Montague, Groton, Vt.)
I don't know what paper or magazine this came from, probably Fine Woodworking, probably 1980s. It has the same spirit many of us are talking about. The joy in doing something is doing it, not making money on it or being the best at it. In the Internet era, if you only take joy from being the best at a hobby or task online, you will never be happy.
I love it! I will take a closer look at some stage.
I have a full set of the Burger King promo figures still in the plastic which I just recently pulled out of storage box to show my young son.
Thanks to oocities.org the ska-punk band I was in at school still has it's glorious table based design https://www.oocities.org/peat_bog_man/
Tables were big for web design back then but tbh a lot of modern CSS frameworks remind me a lot of that old school table design.
Huge shout-out to your dad for being a stay-at-home dad in the 00s!
He was definitely ahead of his time then, and even more so in the 90s!
So this is the homegrown Simpsons stuff people are talking about
Nice nostalgia piece overall, but I especially enjoyed this line: "The distinction between noise and signal becomes decreasingly apparent the further one gets from their source."
Very succinct and insightful. I will use that in the future.
Thank you for your kind words!
Main content of each page not loading for me - maybe it's Flash?
There were a few Flash tidbits buried as downloads I took down, but the main content should all display, as it's just PHP rolling out HTML aside from the rollover up top that uses JS.