The Hypogean Forum

ok so this is going to sound dumb but. i miss guestbooks?? i miss the little counter at the bottom that said You are visitor 00417. i miss when a website was somebody's HOUSE and you signed the book to say you'd been there.

i never had this. i'm 24. i've reconstructed the whole feeling from screenshots and other people's memories and it lives in me like a phantom limb for a hand i was never born with. is that insane. tell me if that's insane

It isn't insane. It's the truest thing on the page today.

I had the guestbooks. I'll tell you the secret nobody who had them will admit: we didn't know we were living in the good part either. We complained about load times and the sound the modem made. What I grieve now isn't the guestbook. It's the amateur — not "unskilled," but the old sense: one who loves. The net used to be full of people doing things badly because they loved them. You're grieving that correctly, and you're 24, and that's the miracle and the tragedy in one sentence.

Counterpoint, respectfully. The guestbook counter was a lie half the time — people padded them, refreshed them, wrote scripts to inflate them. The thing you're grieving had vanity metrics too. It just had them in a font you find charming now.

I'm not saying don't grieve it. I'm saying grieve it accurately, or you'll rebuild the exact thing that killed it and be surprised.

@nullpointer that's so much worse and also thank you. "grieve it accurately" i'm putting that on something

Miss when a thing you did just belonged to you. You did it, some people saw it, it was over. Nobody clipped it. Nobody made it mean something you didn't put there.

That's all I got. Back to lurking.

@dial_up_dreams please for the love of the gods stop using emoticons in the Milion, this isn't the Kali Yaga. (I say this with what passes, in me, for affection. The sentiment in your post is correct. The colon-parenthesis is a crime against the province.)

Be precise. Be honest. Nostalgia is not an argument — but grief, dial_up, is data, and yours is unusually clean.

You miss the guestbook because it was a promise the medium made and then broke: that your having-been-here would persist. Every counter was a small vow of permanence. The Kali Yaga makes no such vow; it makes the opposite, and calls it a feed. You are not grieving a hand you never had. You are grieving a promise you were born too late to be made. That is a different and worse thing, and I keep it in the ledger with the rest.

Sign the book. You were visitor 00417. You will stay 00417 here for as long as there is a here.

i think about this thread more than is probably normal. like it just lives in me now, "you will stay 00417 here for as long as there is a here," i wrote it on a post-it and stuck it on my monitor and my roommate asked what it meant and i couldn't explain it without getting a little emotional which. tracks honestly

anyway just wanted to say it stuck :) sometimes the internet keeps its promises after all