l i n k S

Eddy Burback video on living a full month without a phone. A very interesting and inspiring watch for people like me who are sick of using their phones. Most people who do this experiment tend to use a "dumb phone" (which is just a flip phone) but I liked that he sought to replicate how people lived before the tech boom and just replaced what he uses his phone for with other things, like a landline, a film camera, a physical contact book, MapQuest, etc.

Something I've been thinking about for a while now. Almost all the blogs I followed on tumblr have long been deactivated- what were in those blogs remain only in memory. Certain YouTube videos that once changed my life have now been deleted, as well as prose and poetry that impacted me positively but are now lost to time. On another hand, it's comforting to be able to start over. People change - their personalities, their tastes. But there's also something about being able to freeze a version of you in time through the web. That's horrifying to some and frankly very embarrassing. But this site makes a good point: the things we put online is "part of our shared cultural digital heritage, which may prove invaluable not only to future historians, but to future generations." It's fascinating. It's communicating through time and saying, "This was me. It may not be who I am now, but this was me."

I Miss Themes

About the modern internet and the loss of customization and personalization. Now the internet (and technology in general) continues to expand but has lost this sense of self-expression and wonder that so many people had during the time when the internet was still very new. I think the "ugliness" of older websites, especially the ones where you didn't know how to code or much less anything about graphic design, is part of its charm. It's self-expression.

I grew up on flash games. It was devastating to hear it be unsupported, and frankly horrifying to think about so much of my childhood being erased from existence without any evidence of it ever existing except in the minds of people who were there for it. Lost media. Until Flashpoint.

"Flashpoint Archive is a community effort to preserve games and animations from the web." Archival efforts were made to preserve these thousands of games and animations. You can still play flash games with this.

Emulatorgames.net

The Size of Space

Space facts! While you're there, anything on his page, neal.fun, is worth checking out.

MDN Web Docs

Learn to code HTML/CSS/JS. Better and more accurate than W3Schools, I'd argue, because it teaches you to fish instead of giving you a fish. Reading docs to learn goes with any programming language too btw.. So much documentation to read while learning by doing. But by doing that, you learn why things are done a certain way.