internet nostalgia
an ode to grey backgrounds and shooting stars
ads were scarce, nerdy anti-capitalist hobbyists abounded, and we knew the stench of trolls on usenet and irc.
bots were things that helped keep our irc channels fun, helped limit trout slaps, and autobanned anyone who might dare post “asl”. we knew our online friends only by their usernames alone.
our websites boasted blue eff banners, for the organization whose uncomfortable and inconvenient warnings have proven valid so many years later.
finding the right geocities neighborhood was as fun as creating your website itself, as was poking around your block to find the sites that were your virtual neighbors.
game companies interacted in our plain text usenet spaces, and got to know their users, sometimes even hiring them.
a slow loading site wasn’t so bad, we could be entertained by the shooting stars of netscape, or spinning globes of internet explorer and ncsa mosaic. but it was slow because of your 28.8kbps modem, or someone’s ill-considered overusage of the lake java applets, not because of endless layers of overused javascript frameworks and 50 third parties collecting data. we strived for optimization, and scorned those who used an uncompressed jpg.
that’s enough for now.
