Cringeworthy for the Sake of Posterity

Thanks to Archive.org, I found an old Tripod version of this website that looks a little like this:

It is embarrassing to see the pretension of the 21-year old version of myself (look at the nom de plume!!!!!), how I was trying to cultivate my own identity and just how derivative and poorly executed it was. 15 years later, it’s nice to see my execution skills are still lacking. No, I’m not going to bother linking to that archived site. It’s embarrassing enough that I have imported the blog posts over here. You know, for the sake of posterity. Or hilarity.

The scary thing is reading back on these posts, I remember exactly what was going on with me at the time. I remember what I was into, what I was exploring, what I was feeling. So while the outside person might read these and just think they’re bad and nothing more, I read them and am transported to being 21 in Santa Barbara again.

One thing I am curious about is seeing older versions of websites I made. I think the first ones I made date back to February 1998. So that’s two years of pretentious bullshit that have disappeared. And I’m supposing they were especially pretentious since I was still going through by goth phase at that point. Hell, the first internet nickname I made came from a Bauhaus song: “Who Killed Mr. Moonlight.”