I like to think of the deeper parts of the internet like some sort of forest. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, and when people hear that they seem to think that I lived in a modest town of 100k people.
No, I lived next to a town of 1k people, and that was half an hour away.
I lived with my family surrounded my at least 5 miles of forest on all sides, only stopped by a mountain peak or a river that cut us off from the nearby town. It was isolating, and it's surprising that I didn't grow up to be some sort of hermit nowadays.
At any given time of day, there were some parts in this vast forest that never got any light. They felt like another world, somehow detached from everything else, though clearly, since I was there, they weren't.
When I go to these neo-retro sites (neo because they're made and maintained modernly), I feel somewhat that same way. As I said earlier, this is a deeper part of the internet. I don't mean that DEEP WEB crap, I just mean places you don't accidentally stumble into; you have to intentionally look for these. That's cool to me, in the past few days ( I get in this state when my brain is allowed to run free - hooray pharmacutecal amphetemene shortage) I've seen a place made to advertise a fictional internet cafe in a fictional city, someone's NSFW drawings done in total ASCII, and about 10 different digital anarchist manifestos. These are maintained at least with some sort of care, and I find that real endearing. I know for a fact that I made this site with the intentions of almost NO ONE reading it ever, so like...I get it. I still love it.
I feel like I should admit that there were times when I was young, I would be up at 2 or 3 in the morning. Everyone in my family had already gone to sleep, but for whatever reason I would be awake. I was 7 to 10 years old, and really didn't have a reason to be up that late, but I would be. Every window in our house pointed towards the forest, but the kitchen windows would point towards the most dense entrance. For reasons I can't even explain to this day, I would stand there, in the dead of night, and just....stare out into the woods. It sounds like a creepypasta when I tell that story out loud, but I would just look out there for hours; until my dad would be up at 5am and find me, still standing there.
Web rings are still a thing, did you know that? I kind of want to apply to one. I don't know why I have the impulse to suddenly blog like this, or even own websites. A mutual on Twitter dispensed some great wisdom (Mint, look him up, more people should see his stuff) that I'll paraphrase: Everyone should have a website. I didn't make mine based on that advice, but I really think that's why I've had one this long, because I just....should. This doesn't further my job prospects, doesn't really show a deep insight to who I am, or gosh, really even further any goal I have, but it feels necessary to have.
When I got a little older, like around my teen years, I would sit out on our front porch as late as I could, once again staring into that forest. Tensions with my parents started to reach their boiling point around that time, and when they did, I'd take the truck and drive down to a deeper part of the forest entrance. We had logging roads going into it, which if you aren't familiar, are just areas of grass and dirt worn down by tires over and over and over again, making some sort of path. I'd drive on it until I couldn't see the house, which given how many trees there were, it wasn't that hard. There were many times I would find something, a neat rock formation, a deer or bird skeleton, or maybe even something left by someone else. Technically nearly 190 Acres was "our" property, but if no one can see you out there, who's to say? During hunting season if you were out and looked closely you'd see someone you didn't know sneaking around the forest. Eventually my parents just gave up trying to enforce it.
I don't really have a point here, I say that to end nearly every Twitter thread I make, but I feel like after nearly 9 years of college papers, I don't give a shit about meaningful conclusions. The old websites are cool, the fake old websites are also cool.
If I had to end with some sort of thesis, it'd be that while a lot of people compare searching the old web to archeology, I think of it like the days the wandered the forests around my house. I feel that same pull I felt, late at night, with nothing on my mind, and I continue to stare at these places until the odd hours of the morning.
And sometimes home is out of sight.