nostalgia

ahhh, the internet. it has, unforunately, (d)evolved so far from what i first knew it as back in the mid/late 90s that it's borderline unrecognizable. what once felt like a winding path leading to people's unique homes has become a soul-less six-lane interstate riddled with speed cameras and billboards, where every exit brings you to the same shopping plaza that consists of the same 20 chain stores all vying for your hard-earned (and less and less powerful) dollar. i highly recommend reading Enshittification by Cory Doctrow for more on this lovely subject.

first off, wiby.org, specifically the "surprise me.." link, is a fantastic place to be thrown back in time to a simpler age of the internet. below are a few of my favorites.

• the dead malls archive - this one should hit you right in the feels on a few different levels. a bygone archive of a bygone era.
• neocities.org - a clone of the now-defunct geocities, keeps the legacy of personal web sites alive and kicking. geocities was once one of the major hubs of the internet and *the* place in the mid 90s to early 00s to make your own personal website with zero knowledge of html.
• the GUI gallery - true to its name, the GUI gallery (i'm pretty sure they want you to pronounce it "the gooey gallery") an overview of the GUIs for most major OS releases in the past ~35 years.
• dragon court revived - a painstaking recreation of an original java game from the late 90s/early 00s. dragon court is a point-and-click adventure RPG with limited player to player interaction. a great way to kill a few minutes every day when your quests refresh!
• slashdot - still one of my go-tos for tech related news, although more and more political bs has slipped in in the past few years.
• mit's internet statistics - this page holds a fascinating look into how big the internet was at inception. i think i first "went online" around mid 1995, when there was a whopping 23,500 web pages. awww.
• this personal website - someone named alison lucas put a lot of time and effort into her place on the web. it's just so.. unique. so personal. it embodies a time and a place - not physical, but a virtual space. created by someone for the sake of creating. for the sake of sharing with the world with no expectations of anything in return. in today's times when everything online is monetization and "content", alison's site is a breath of fresh air.