Digging Up the Distant Internet-Past

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Like you do, I was digging around the WayBackMachine, trying desperately to recall the names of my old Geocities pages … much to no avail. But, there is one page I know the name of, that is at least partially archived, and I visit it every once in a while. I’m not sure I’ll share it’s name because I made it when I was like 15 or so, and it’s really anime-waifu, 2001 embarrassing. But, the sad part is, while the website was somehow archived, it wasn’t fully crawled … except for a few things.

Most of the pages on this old site that I made in high school show nothing but blank white. But! I was … able to dig up the CSS font styling? I don’t think I even made that. But the place was hosted on this service called Homestead. I think, at the time, it was some Geocities alternative. And then I found a pictures archive, from the website, and found this:

Of all of the things the WayBackMachine could’ve dug up … it somehow managed to save the avatar photo I was using on my little website, and on Animeboards.com.

Amazing.

Oh, and I was also able to access this:

Which must have been what I was using on the site’s sidebar. It’s not really anything all that special, but I can at least be like, “Hey, I wrote the filename of this image and edited it in 2001, and in some miniscule way, that’s like reaching out and glimpsing past-me.”

Could I do anything with this, now? Probably.

There we go, that’s marginally better. And I can tell by looking at it that I was using some kind of ancient photo editing software to manipulate it, and color out whatever was around her. I must have spent a while erasing that background. But, now, I can resurrect a piece of that old-internet work that I did, and add it to my modern website.

I may not be able to travel back to 2001 and stop myself from being so cringe at times, or give myself the chance to play The Sims when it was brand new again, or go on AOL Instant Messenger and talk to my two internet girlfriends one more time.

But, at least I got this?

No, but it is really a shame that crawlers didn’t do a better job of preserving much less, lesser known sites. So much of my past, that exists that long ago are more like spots of cloudy memory at this point. I remember the house, I remember my computer, I remember the AOL dings. I remember the addiction to the forums, the hiding my screen in software dev class while I played DOOM.

Anyway, thanks for coming along for this kind of disappointing ride back to 2001.