EURYNOMOS DIARY

Spent the evening exploring GeoCities archives again. There's something haunting about these digital ghost towns. The animated mailboxes that will never receive another email. The visitor counters frozen in time. The "last updated" dates from 2001.

Found a personal diary from 1997. A teenager writing about their day, their crushes, their favorite bands. The design is so earnest - black background, bright purple text, animated "under construction" gif. They wrote about waiting for the internet to connect, the sound of the modem handshake. They're probably in their 40s now. I wonder if they remember this site exists.

The web used to feel like a collection of personal spaces. Now it's all platforms and algorithms. Individual websites with unique designs have been replaced by social media profiles. There's a homogenization that happened sometime in the late 2000s.

Saved the diary page to my archive. It feels important to preserve these digital artifacts. They're as much a part of cultural history as physical diaries in archives.

Digitizing my VHS tapes today. There's a particular sound that analog degradation makes - a kind of whispery, crackling static that's almost musical. Digital corruption is harsh and binary (glitches, artifacts, freezing). Analog decay is gradual, organic.

Watching these tapes from the 90s feels like viewing through a veil of time. The color bleeding, the tracking lines, the occasional dropout. It adds texture to the viewing experience. Modern 4K streaming is too pristine, too clean. There's no history in the pixels.

I think that's why I collect obsolete media formats. They carry their history with them. A Minidisc has the fingerprints of the person who recorded it. A VHS tape has the wear of being played and rewound. A floppy disk has the physical marks of being inserted and ejected.

Digital files are endlessly replicable without degradation, but they feel weightless. There's no physical connection. I can send you an MP3 and you have exactly what I have. But if I give you my Minidisc with an album recorded on it, you're holding the same physical object I held. There's a connection.

Reading about "hauntology" again - the idea of nostalgia for lost futures. The futures we were promised but never arrived. Flying cars, moon colonies, utopian cyber-societies.

Instead we got social media algorithms and climate anxiety.

I think that's why I'm drawn to cyberpunk media from the 80s and 90s. It's a vision of a future that never happened. The aesthetics are outdated (CRT monitors, bulky technology) but the ideas feel more relevant than ever. Corporate domination, body modification, digital consciousness.

There's a melancholy in looking at old futuristic concepts. The Tomorrowland exhibit at the 1964 World's Fair promised so much. We got some of it (video calling, personal computers) but not in the way they imagined. The future is always stranger and more mundane than predicted.

Maybe that's why I preserve old technology. It's a physical connection to those lost futures. This Minidisc player was someone's vision of the future of music. This CRT monitor was the cutting edge of display technology. They're artifacts from alternate timelines.

Updated the blog today. Added the new Movies page. It's comforting to work on a static HTML site in 2023. No databases, no content management system, just files and folders.

There's a permanence to it. This site will work as long as HTML is understood. Future archaeologists could open these files and read them. Social media posts disappear when platforms die. Server-side sites break when databases corrupt. But static HTML is forever.

I think about the first website ever created. It's still online. Simple HTML, no CSS even. It's still perfectly readable. That's the power of simple, open standards.

Maybe in 50 years, someone will find this blog in an archive. They'll see my thoughts about obsolete technology, written on what will by then be obsolete technology. There's a poetry to that.

For now, I'll keep writing. Adding pages. Building this little corner of the web that's entirely mine. No algorithms deciding who sees it. No engagement metrics. Just words on a page, waiting to be read by whoever stumbles upon them.