the internet used to be cool and weird and radical and unique and personal. you'd find some crazed out website like freemasonrywatch.org (which I spend hours and hours on) and then you would just keep clicking all the random links until you were down some rabbit hole you had no idea how to get back out from. i would go from reading about how washington dc was arranged like a giant pentagram to some guide on how to communicate with dolphins all just from randomly clicking links. i remember erowid and at some point i had a wallpaper of a "white widow" strain massive bud that my mom got mad about. my aim screen name was gaypriest4u2nv which my mom also got upset about btw. but yeah the early internet was like this vast zone of pages that weren't there to sell you anything or do anything really besides to educate you about some obscure stuff or just as a personal homage to the fact that they were capable of making a website.

i only stole one thing in my entire life and it was max payne the game. i wedged it out of the box at best buy and managed to get just the cd to fall out the bottom and i put it in my pocket and left. i felt bad. i never stole again. then i got home and tried to install it and realized the license key was on the jewel case (which i didn't have cause i stole it). luckily i was a purveyor of the darker corners of piracy on the early net and i went to warez.com and searched and searched and finally found the license key for it and was able to get it working. that game was so sick. the moral of my story isn't to steal things (well after going to the movie theater and being charged $100+ for four people to see a movie with drinks and popcorn i think i became a little radicalized to steal from corporations now so yeah maybe steal more stuff) but that there was a weird little freaky dark corner of the net you could find almost anything. the warez sites were so edgy and going there felt like you were some clandestine agent. keygens had cool music. people put genuine thought and love on every little thing they did. we dont need to do that anymore because the corporations do it for us.

the internet was fun and adventurous and titillating and you just you'd never know what kinda stuff you would find or stumble upon. and that brings me perfectly into also why I made this little project.

i was in college when it came out - stumble upon - the little browser extension that you would just click and click and it brought you to all kinds of freaked out and cool website. i had sooo many bookmarks from it (that i wish i could get back). but the sad reality is that t h a t internet is straight up GONE. you try to go to half or more of those website and they are just gone. there is no back up there is no trace. maybe internet archive has some of them but most of it is just evaporated into thin air.

it makes me sick to think about all the human creative effort that went into these genuinely expressive sites just for them to vanish. but i guess this is kinda how we are too, all unique and beautiful and one of a kind and then we die.

then later on and you know the story because you probably lived it too but social media took over and we all just started browsing the same 5 sites and that's it. we put all our content on there all curated nicely. we molded and bent our voices to trends and virality and all of that. but that's also the way it goes. i think something like hundreds of languages are forgotten every year when the last person that know how to speak them dies and never taught anyone (or probably no one wanted to learn).

technology vs the individual

its in the bible right? mark of the beast, tower of babel, the beast system...

its just going to get worse too - unless there is an apocalypse.

so i made this little homage to that era and also to stumble upon and i tried to scrape as many sick ass cool websites as i could. it's not perfect and i will keep making it better. if you have recommendations please submit them below so i can add them in. we should really all try to bring the unique personalized taste of the internet back. neocities helps a lot. i tried to make my fashion company vapor95 a unique oasis of radical fashion in a cesspool of monotony.

im rambling... have fun surfing.

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> love, river // a vapor95 art project