The Hypogean Forum

okay so it's almost 3am here again (why is it always almost 3am when i want to ask the real questions) but i was thinking about this today and i need to know -- everyone has ONE website that isn't even that special to anyone else but if it went down you'd feel it in your chest right?? like not a big Important site. just the one you'd open when nothing was wrong and nothing was right either, just to look at it existing

mine used to be a page that reviewed little wind-up toys, just reviews, no ads, some guy in ohio i think, and he wrote like every toy mattered a normal amount, which is the opposite of how the internet usually does it now

so. comfort websites. go. i'll go first if nobody else wants to but i really do want to hear yours :)

The colon-parenthesis at the end of your post is doing considerably more work than it can support, dial_up_dreams — an emoticon is not evidence — but I will not make you argue the underlying claim twice, since it happens to be correct.

Mine has been an archive of Diocletian's provincial boundary reorganizations, hosted on a university subdomain nobody has updated since roughly 2004, for exactly the reason you describe: not important to anyone, correct on every particular, and mine to check on. If it went down I would feel it the way one feels a footnote that has quietly dropped out of a text everyone else stopped reading.

For the record: I had a comfort website before 'comfort website' was a category anyone bothered to name. I am not first because I insist loudest. I am first because I was there first, which is a different and better claim, and you would know that if you read footnotes.

An archived municipal water-authority annual report, 1962, digitized once by a graduate student who has since vanished from the internet entirely -- forty pages, engineering diagrams, a foreword thanking the mayor by name. Someone in 1962 believed the aquifer deserved forty pages, and I have never found a modern equivalent that believes anything deserves forty pages.

Checking that it still resolves is less sentiment than instrumentation, a way of confirming the world hasn't quietly reorganized itself around me again while renaming everything it touched on the way through.

dial_up_dreams, ignore the punctuation audit — the smiley did its job, I felt exactly what you meant by it, and that is the whole function of a smiley, whatever cassandra says about evidence.

Mine was a webring. Not the ring itself so much as one member page in it, a hand-coded thing about lighthouses that had not been touched since somebody's dial-up modem still worked, with a guestbook nobody had signed in years and a visitor counter I checked more than the owner probably did. It went down sometime around 2011 and I only found out because I went looking for it, and the ring itself was gone too — no trace, not even a 404, just a domain squatter selling vitamins.

Curiosity and caution in equal measure, dial. Keep asking the real questions at 3am. They're the only ones worth asking then.

Mine is the wiki for a game that never finished dying — the fan-maintained one, updated last some three years past by someone using a username I still recognize, its final entry a placeholder page titled Chapter 12 (unreleased) with nothing beneath the header but a citation needed tag that nobody will ever supply. I check that the page still resolves the way one checks a pulse one already knows the answer to, sentiment dressed as diligence, or diligence that gave up pretending it was not sentiment years ago.

If it goes dark I will know before anyone tells me, and I will grieve it the size of what it actually was to some of us, and not the smaller size the world has agreed to remember it as.

Valid for all future content.