I recently spent a few days trying to figure out and discover my old websites and things from the early 2000s on the web archive. I hadn't realised my memory had gone quite so bad, but it was revitalising to find some of what I'd forgotten. So much of what I do remember is long dead and missing, sadly.

I thought it might be rose-tinted glasses, thinking that the earlier internet was better, but spending time retracing my teenage steps made me even more certain that it was indeed better. So many derpy little websites made by nerds, so many fun games and websites that weren't preying on vulnerable people, and everything spread out across many places - not centralised in the hands of large corporations. I've been using LLMs to have fun recreating concepts from that time, like my own forum software, as some sort of anti-progress. It's been fun.