Sometimes I wake up and want to time-travel — not to fix history, not to warn anyone about the future, but just to log onto the internet when it still made fun noises. You know the ones. The slow static roar of a modem connecting to something bigger than you. The little thrill when the home page loaded — half text, half chaos — and you realized you’d entered a world someone hand-built. Before websites were corporations with chatbots, they were bedrooms with curtains of code.
We didn’t call it a feed then. We called it a site — because it had sight, and personality, and the unspoken promise that if you clicked too far, you might end up somewhere you weren’t supposed to be. Now everything is smooth and frictionless, like the world’s most efficient waiting room. Back then, it was messy and magical and slow, and I miss that.
So I’m bringing it back. Not ironically. Not because I think nostalgia is noble. Just because I want to have a good day, and the early web was good at giving me those.
When Bookmarks Were a Love Language
I want to be bookmarked. Not followed. Not tracked. Bookmarked — saved intentionally, by someone who liked what they saw enough to remember where they found it. There was intimacy in that. You had to care to come back.
Today we outsource memory to algorithms. They bring us things we already forgot we wanted, and we call that convenience. I miss when discovery required wandering — when you didn’t know what you’d find because the search bar didn’t know you yet.
So if you like this page, don’t subscribe. Bookmark it. Pretend your browser is a little scrapbook. Pretend that your curiosity is worth organizing by hand.
(But also, totally subscribe — you’ll get rad posts like this delivered right to your inbox, a little reminder of what you meant to revisit if your bookmarks look as clusterfucked as mine.)
The Joy of Digital Imperfection
The modern internet is obsessed with polish — streamlined typography, perfect contrast ratios, no more “under construction” gifs. But the old web was under construction. Always. That was the charm of it. The chaos was honest. Every bad layout was proof of a person learning in public.
I think that’s what we’ve lost — the permission to be visibly figuring things out. Now we’re expected to show up finished: branded, optimized, professional. No one wants to see the code anymore, just the conversion rate. But I miss the times when HTML felt like a love letter and the guestbook was a social network. Maybe I don’t want frictionless. Maybe I want visible fingerprints.
Retro as Resistance
Choosing retro isn’t regression. It’s rebellion. It’s saying: I could have made this slicker, but I didn’t want to. It’s remembering that art doesn’t need analytics and a blog doesn’t need SEO to matter. It just needs a person behind it who gives a damn.
Retro-vibes on purpose are an act of sincerity — a refusal to let joy be optimized out of existence. You don’t build a shrine to the old web because you miss the past. You build it because you miss meaning.
1999 Wasn’t Heaven — It Just Felt Human
Let’s be real: the 1990s weren’t perfect. Half the internet was a conspiracy in Comic Sans, and half the other half was a bad fan page for something nobody remembers. But there was heart in it — unfiltered, awkward, sincere heart. That’s the feeling I’m after: the thrill of building something small that still matters. Something alive enough to change without warning.
So yes, make like it’s 1999. Bookmark this page. Don’t expect an email newsletter or an algorithmic reminder. Just come back when you feel like wandering again. You might find something new here. You might not. Either way, you’ll have remembered that the web — like art, like people — used to feel handmade.
And maybe, for a day, that’ll be enough to make the future a little less sterile.
If you’d like to be a financial backer of someone building a little slice of nostalgia one stubborn line of code at a time: You can support me through the Mutual Aid Fund or by exploring the Shop: Made by Me | Oddities & Convenience. Also: Bookmark this page and subscribe to the Newsletter 🙂 The “All Posts” option will give you daily updates, the Quarterly Newsletter is… well. Quarterly.