JAN 11

2024

Thursday: successfully picked up Newbold Cafe for lunch and submitted a refund request for the payment submitted while they were closed. After lunch, I picked up groceries, and this week, I'm switching back to chicken sandwiches for my workday lunches from the peanut butter and honey I'd been eating: we've got an excess of mayonaise to get through, and I'm a little fed up with how many times i've dripped honey on my pants in the last week. My usual streamer on Thursday nights wasn't available, but I split my time between FFXIV playthroughs and people talking about the new Hearthstone mini-set. I did not get myself to work on my project today.

2023

Wednesday: got a haircut and a sandwich before dropping off the old fluorescent light bulbs at Lowe's. Couldn't find a new filter fountain watering dish for John at Target; I'll have to go to an actual pet store, most likely. At Acme, the usual entrance was closed off and people had to enter from the west side of the building. After picking up my supplies for the week, we went to the gym for a bit, but Julie had evening plans, so she left after half an hour. I spent my time on the Precor machine reading blogs linked from my main page and thinking about game design, specifically about the "climb" command in interactive fiction. The other thing I thought about was this blog entry I was about to write concerning my old websites. I started writing this update after getting home and finishing my salad for dinner.

Internet Memories: the Page of Purposelessness
Some background: From the age of 9 to the age of 14, I spent a week each summer studying German at "Foreign Language Camp" on the campus of Kansas Wesleyan University. These would have been the years 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, and 1996. In one of the later years, our activity schedule included a couple of hours in their computer lab, where we were supposed to use something called Netscape Navigator to search for pages written in German. I didn't understand the significance or appeal of this World Wide Web yet, but that was my first exposure to it.

A year or two later, my parents subscribed to a local internet service provider. (Feist, later supplanted or purchased by cox Communications, assuming I didn't forget about one or more middle steps.) Aside from corporate offerings like Nintendo's Camp Hyrule and WotC's web promotions like "Oasis: A Braided Novel", my favorite sites were personal pages on GeoCities. Web rings, fan shrines, "virtual towns", the edgy proto-humorist forerunners of sites like Something Awful or Old Man Murray, goth-adjacent personal mythologizing: I wanted to make my mark among them. I wanted to intrigue and fascinate in the manner that so many others had intrigued and fascinated me, but I couldn't admit this goal to myself. As such, once I bought an html manual from a book fair and taught myself markup, I made a web page of my own, and I called it "The Page of Purposelessness," or "PoP" for short.

Earlier in life, I would have been ashamed to link it, but I've stopped blaming the Jason of yesteryear for his errors. That guy was just doing the best he could, and if I find a lot of his choices disappointing and cringeworthy, well: that's life. A great example of this was his choice of username: "ander387", as preserved in the web address of the most memorable iteration of the PoP. (My middle name is Alexander, and it would be a couple more years before I encountered the nickname "Xander" for the first time. The number 387 was an oblique reference to my first crush.) Another example is the use of a regrettable color scheme that tries to unite my three favorite colors—green, blue, and red—which is a practice I still haven't shaken, I'm afraid.

While the earliest versions of the Page of Purposelessness now exist only on a disconnected hard drive in a box somewhere in my apartment, Archive.org does at least have a record of it existing at the Athens/Oracle/5390 address. That page makes reference to a virtual landscape, but neither entrance works. We may be fortunate in this regard, as the map was not well constructed. The landscape did have landmarks, and navigation was consistent; it's not like it was a maze. It was just monotonous. Fortunately, I had anticipated this possibility, so each of these one hundred pages contained an embedded, auto-playing MIDI file taken from the soundtracks of Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII. One hundred tracks for one hundred rooms. Marvelous.

After getting my own site set up, I worked with some friends to create "The Dumping Ground" on GeoCities. If the unctuous name doesn't give it away, the idea was that we were a bunch of stressed and moody teenagers, and sometimes we'd need to vent in a manner too unseemly for our "main" webpages. We could gossip and tease and grouse and flirt and annoy one another in a dedicated space. In retrospect, this seems like a catastrophically bad idea, though the semi-public nature of the site meant people still didn't post their deepest secrets. I can imagine that, upon reading this, you're asking yourself: "Is Jason trying to claim that he and his friends invented vagueposting??" Well: that is for the historians to determine. However, I feel confident they will agree that we developed the technique independently, even if examples should be found that predate our own.

(While The Dumping Ground is still around on Archive.org if you know where to look, this is the one I don't feel comfortable linking to directly, both because of its collaborative nature, and due to those cringeworthy decisions I referred to earlier.)

In 2001, my friends at the University of Kansas decided to set up a new web domain, and Ryan had to teach me FTP so that I could move the Page to its new home: icbw.screamingspheres.com. I replaced the old GeoCities version of the page with farewell placeholders and tried to create a version of the Page that would be less trouble to update. Unfortunately, that FTP process was too much for me to handle, so I'd turn to third-party blogging software. I'd make it more and more blog-like until finally just moving to a LiveJournal account from 2003 onward, though my last real update there was from 2010. My need for a website had become subsumed by web forums and Twitter and Facebook̵well, until now. I'm glad to be back.