> The Cult of Reversible Death wrote of a moonlight-appointment with God (which the devil failed to attend due to prior commitments) claiming that it was to have taken place here at Puggnac. There is no evidence to prove their claim but the local steelworks still shows the event on their coat of arms. Puggnac has superbly delicate ductwork and a hydraulics system which was designed and built in Yorkshire.
Ah yes, the Arc de Triomphe, celebrating victory in 1806, which turned to tragic defeat by 1812, and invasion by 1814, with 500k French dead, and the Russian Tsar marching into Paris - presumably inspecting the shiny new Arch of Victory LOL. The French invasion of Russia turned into the Russian (allied) invasion of France.
The aforesaid roundabout (12 avenues meeting in a neat circle, containing some vague gallic-shrug number of unmarked lanes) will always be the Place D'Etoile for me, never the Place Charles de Gaulle - but that's another long story of French arrogance and hubris. I do believe the Nazis also paraded around the French Arc de Triomphe.
You might be interested in "Crap Days Out", a book published about 1 decade ago. In it you can find out such treats as the Dinosaur Museum, which has no dinosaurs, the Pencil Museum, which boasts the world's largest pencil, and Teapot Island, home to more than 8,000 teapots. Of course Stonehenge appears in it.
This reminded me of the Hidden London tours, which allow guided access to staff-only disused and abandoned parts of the London Underground. There's a real excitement in taking a peek behind one of these dusty, abandoned-looking doors you walk past every day.
> taking a peek behind one of these dusty, abandoned-looking doors
back in middle-school in USSR exploring with friends abandoned underground fortifications one of the doors that we broke through happened to let us into an actually used military hardware storage (unfortunately not munitions nor weapons) which had its official office and gates with guards/etc. from the other side of that hill.
More intentionally though we back then several times visited using ventilation pass the large underground military fuel depot each time carrying away buckets of fuel for various fun childhood fire activities.
Interestingly the "entrances" seem to go from /page272.html to /page381.html, and then loop back.
There also appears to be some kind of autocorrecting going on in the url path, where /page1381.html will redirect to /page381.html, though some will give you multiple choices like https://www.entrances2hell.co.uk/page481.html. Seems like a strange routing system. Is this common?
The boot camp for the Norwegian Air Force used to be next to that place and had a gate there so many Norwegian air force soldiers including me guarded the gate at Hell ar some point.
That web still exists. Even though it has been eclipsed by the siloized monstrous goos, those independent, quirky, greenfield sites are still very much alive.
I love the comparison with gentrification. It’s not the same though. You can still see the old web untouched, it’s just almost impossible to find. But if you do find it, you don’t see the gentrification.
Maybe it’s more like Rome being surrounded by hundreds of miles of malls, and parking lots, and highways, and those highways (and Google Maps) only leading you to those parking lots and malls. You’d have to stumble upon a backroad that’s not on the map to find the old Rome.
Just like it was back then...
There was a very steep path for the entrance to he^W the Internet, and then it was easy to find those places. Now you can access the Internet easily but it's harder to find those places.
Part of it is, SSL certs. Google downranks, heavily, websites without SSL.
Some of these sites will never see SSL, and so they are indeed as roads not on a map.
(It isn't relevant how easy or hard ssl and obtaining certs are. The reality is, these older, static html sires sometimes don't have ssl, and will never have ssl.)
>Gentrification is a poor analogy since the web is not zero sum unlike physical space.
It looks as if it's "not zero sum" because a random user can supposedly check out anything on equal footing, whether it's Facebook.com or some guy's hobby personal website. They're both there and available.
But in reality that's never the case. A person taken at random is never equally likely to visit this or that (except in the sense: I have 50%-50% chances of winning the lottery today: I either win, or I don't). The gentrified one's would have way more exposure, be promoted as way more essential (socially, and even professionally) to be on them, they will have all the trappings of fashion, like modern design, mobile client apps, and such.
Back in 1999 that wasn't yet the case. At least nowhere near to the degree it is today.
This is reflected in viewership numbers of course, where a gentrified behemoth might get 99% of the traffic, and the rest long tail 1%, despite consisting of billion times more websites.
OK but... a personal website gets substantially less traffic than Facebook but does it get more or less traffic than the website owner's profile page on Facebook? If that person keeps a blog on the personal site and occasionally posts on FB, the website wins. If that person posts all the time on Facebook and rarely blogs, the FB profile wins.
I do have a website since last century and I stopped posting on FB since a few years ago. My website gets negligible traffic except scan bots but still more than me on FB. If people google me they might find me on FB and realize that my page is dead. If they insist they'll find my site.
Finding a path to that still-existing web is like trying to casually hike into the fairy realm or something. It's all around us and invisible, inaccessible.
90+% of people would use Google to find stuff via search, it's useful to have other means. As you can see by their results they tend to favour 'fresh' (nee recycled content) pages rather than older and original sources.
//added
which is often the case as per comments in this thread with people generally feeling the commercial web has gobbled up original and niche content. Surely it can only be that way because the gateways to the web have made it so.
I wonder if it would be possible to filter out the noise of the “modern web” by black listing big tech the same way we block ads. Might be an interesting project.
Kagi (the search engine) has Small Web※, which (I assume) shows only results from the long tail and excludes popular sites (they use TinyGem search index for this).
If a search engine were to penalize ads, I bet a lot of those old sites would surface. The old web was an "amateur" web, people created sites to share content they were excited about, not to monetize it (or to allow a platform to monetize it). If search engines also make most of their money from advertising, they have a big conflict of interest. We need an open source search engine owned by a non-profit organization following the model of Signal.
> If a search engine were to penalize ads, I bet a lot of those old sites would surface.
Maybe using an ad blocker to build a list of "websites that serve ads" (in addition to domains those ads are served from), and using that list to filter out results from an existing search engine API (like Duck Duck Go) would get you part of the way. But you'd probably need to search really far before you start finding sites that don't serve ads.
Kagi partially does that. I lt shows how many trackers a result has on its results page and lets you boost or downgrade domains in your search results.
I would use that too, for sure! I kind of feel like experimenting with this now. I have no idea how doable it is to just "start scraping the web" though. uBlock Origin is open source, so I guess that could be used to help filter out sites that serve ads.
Wasn't there a site that showed search results but skipped the top N results, so you ended up seeing a lot more interesting smaller sites? Can't remember details and a quick search (hah) didn't find it. Pretty sure it was linked on HN a year or two ago...
I mean put adblocks into crazy mode, blacklist anything related to Google and Meta-crap by default, turn off JS and probably CSS too and you are almost there, maybe apart from blinking text and weirdly stretched bitmap backgrounds
No ad-tech, and 2002? What web were you on? 2002 had popups, pop-unders, frantically blinking banners, pages opening many other pages when you click on them, search results poisoned with transparent or small text, and barely any tech in the user's hand to fight these.
The web is, I think, friendlier now than it was in 2000-2005. And much, much more useful in general.
It's work and we need to re-establish a true net of websites, webrings and all the other forgotten stuff that was made obsolete by search engines. Here's my contribution:
I'm not sure, I think it's better to keep it private and dispense it through closed communities. These things don't work unless there is a lot of personal interest between each website creator, so just dumping them into a big list isn't great. I think the best modern approaches I've seen have forums/Discord servers organised around a topic, such as making demos or sizecoding, and then people sharing their sites and projects within those spaces.
Discord is a walled garden and is not searchable, so knowledge posted there is lost very quickly and is super hard to discover. Static HTML has its limits, but has much better longevity.
I noticed this too. Would be a safe bet it was hand crafted in notepad with no syntax highlighting.
Might just feed it to the W3C validator for kicks.
Update: The validator reported 42 errors before giving up:
Fatal Error: Cannot recover after last error. Any further errors will be ignored.
From line 56, column 1; to line 56, column 23
Verdana">↩<a href="page279.html">This w
When did we stop explicitly welcoming people to websites (literally: “welcome to my website!”) . The same era that “going on the internet” was an actual activity. I miss that. It’s like we all stopped being excited by the web.
Everyone's a "brand" these days. I get the same kind of feeling when I see a bio written in the third person but which was clearly written by the person themselves.
> Although it is an extremely exhausting process, his ability to swim through soil means that the devil will, on occasion, create temporary entrances. These will eventually be filled in by the local County Council but they can be a source of harmful mantle-gas. This example was named Oilyn by the investigating police officers after the former Prime Minister.
The flowers on the right hand side look like daisies and probably like 1-2cm across. The whole thing is probably about 20cm across. Its probably a mole-hill? It looks vaguely like it could be earth displaced from a tunneling devil if you squint a bit and go with the 2002 vibe.
So (a) it's not exactly a disused railway, because the trains of the dead used the same tracks as those of the living, which are still in use, although the dead did have their own dedicated stations and their spurs at either end, and (b) it's a shame it wasn't called the Necropolitan Line.
« I am a husband and father. The reason I was born was to become my daughter’s father. I was wise enough to notice and appreciate at the time, the slow ecstatic joy my child’s early years were giving me. So too have her later years. I will die happy. »
"The poor design is also a way of making the fictional compiler (Rae Gates) seem to be lonely, naive, obsessed, deluded and out-of-touch. I, the real compiler, am only one of these."
That's hilarious, thanks for a much needed laugh in between my job hunting. the Tories here in the UK have made such a big mess it's going to be hard to find a job with my disability.
Though these gates are not sinister enough, in my opinion, it would be a nice idea to make a game out of it with a plot around gate research. It could be fun...
Disclaimer: I am not nostalgic for the internet of the old days, especially the times when you had a few websites to access, mostly university sites, and you could memorize each and every IP address. I actually hate the fact that the major search engines (especially Bing and Google) try to deceive me with the URLs I don't need. During the times of Altavista and Yahoo, I had the regex pipeline to filter their searches; however, this tactic is now futile...
I know this location well. It leads to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_(High_Level)_ra...
which was one of the "abandoned places" I loved to explore in my youth. I always suspected there were infernal forces at play in that area.