---
title: Welcome To My Crappy Website
date: 240116
category: phlog
---
One thing I've discovered about the smallweb, and gopher in specific
is how it brings me back to a comfortable scale of network. Even if
I don't intend on visiting, reading, or connecting with every other
user or holding here, it feels like I can see the boundaries if I try
to. Even understanding the numerous -nix shells out there hosting
public server space for Gopher or Gemini (though many of those clock
more as graveyards), if I wanted to, I think I could metaphorically
walk from one end to the other. This is wholly unlike our cumbersome
present-day Internet, in its infinite mutations and masks. I'd have
a difficult time mapping out a single Wordpress blog, pages generated
and served for my use on-demand from a nest of hostile, opaque code.
In a way I haven't done in decades, I've been bookmarking. More than
that, I've been remembering. Remembering URLs and terminal commands.
Remembering these are muscles I had once, when I got my hands wet and
my feet dirty learning and exploring the Internet of the mid-1990s on
AOL. Something of a joke, but they made it easy and accessible for
a tween to learn email, USENET, chat (supplanted by IRC, but still),
BBS, FTP, and of course, that sweet 1996 HTTP. One step beyond the
bespoke AOL kid gloves and gloss, the beating heart of the world.
Acclimating to the freedom my parents didn't realize they were giving
me (and, admittedly, with a few youthful account-compromising lapses
in judgment along the way) my favorite of AOL's flashy facades to the
real shit was called "Roadtrip." I loved AOL Roadtrips with a fervor
reserved for the young, but I think back fondly on the technology.
The gist was this: a chatroom with a web browser attached, any number
of users, and one guide who could send an HTTP redirect to the shared
browser. Through this, one person could synchronously walk a group
through pages of shared interest. AOL Employees ran the "official"
tours, marketing the service as a newbie-friendly way to learn all
that AOL had to offer. Beyond that, there were user-created tours,
where anyone could drag a busful of hapless tourists around the young
Internet. These tours were, of course, my favorites.
Imagine, if you will, a 13-year-old shut-in just now experiencing the
walls of AOL's garden becoming shorter and shorter. This kid wants
it all now, and moreover, he wants to share his tips and tricks. AOL
Roadtrips gave me a venue to learn from the people who did the (to my
mind) awe-inspiring behind-the-scenes work, to go a step further with
the elders (probably 14 or 15 years old themselves) who had the sites
THEY weren't going to show YOU, and then to take a caravan of pals
and strangers through my prideful initial HTML exploits: a rehost of
a certain notorious anti-capitalist "recipe instruction text" and a
handful of self-made South Park GIFs, all set to the MIDI tune of, I
want to say, Green Day's "Welcome to Paradise."
It was silly, it was imperfect, it was questionably legal, but it's
how I feel today, in what we're calling 2024, when I explain what I'm
doing on the small web. When I send a list of Gopherholes and Gemini
Capsules that I've enjoyed to a friend who saw a screenshot and said
"aesthetic," I'm hopping in the driver's seat. Now who wants to see
where they keep the good stuff?
-30-
gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:1965/~trunnion/phlog/240116.txt
-- Leo's gemini proxy
-- Connecting to zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:1965...