2006jul28. [Cardhouse] Hello. Hello there. Got something “special” for Friday Freeday. I have “put up” the Cardhouse archives, it is Part II of my three-part plan to divest myself of little trinket-like writerly things for the larger, more complex writerly things that God surely put me on this planet to execute, complete, and appear on morning TV talk shows to promote because I am also handsome and this is good for marketing. [pets own head gently] This brain-stabbing nonsense goes back to 1995 (along with scattered whatevers going back to 1987). That is a lot of jibber-jabbering. If you have been reading for awhile in the past, I think if you go back and re-read some of it you will find that it’s not as good as you remember it to be, which is like a lot of things. We’ve changed. We’ve all changed. We grow, and we exponentially accelerate to the best versions of each of ourselves which necessitates leaving jokey little websites like this in the rear-view mirror, with sort of a half-wistful smile that’s near cracking. If you are relatively new to this stuntspacular website experience, then you can now waste your time actually experiencing what weblogs were like back when there were no weblogs. Man, didn’t know how good I had it back then. I miss nutter mail, the mail that made you go “Yeah. I’d hang with that email person.” Now our brains have been pureed into a million little bits and there’s only so much we can portion out. Is this any way to live? Ask yourself this question.
Here’s a sampling of the “non-worst” entries that I ran into. There are others that are probably even non-worster, perhaps. Knock yourself out, piggies.
Nigerian scam letter from 1995 | Stairway of the Edmund Fitzgerald | The Message of Friendship | TV Reporter engulfed | A song about prions | Dynamic cat names | Non-dynamic CueCat wrangling | Wisdom | Sushi racing | Sharing Wisdom w/Others | Rocket-based kitchen appliances | Lyrics to Goldfinger | Planning the dinosaur | Fuggin’ Squirrels | The End of Everything | How To Be Funny and Thus Have Sex | The 97%-Not-Helping Toothpick Letters | Martin v. The Donut Ro-bots | Bugs: A Love Story | Hershey’s Countersinks | Excerpts from Inflight Magazine | Baby Boomers Want Trinkets | Advertisers + joking UPS drivers | Japanese ideograms | Cleaver Wielded in Bangkok Airport | Border crossing | Bugs: A Food Story
And of course, the start of The Geese Saga. Poor geese.
Okay, that’s enough already. Observations after looking at ten or so years of archives:
- About 70% of the links
are dead. Too much reliance on news feeds in the early days. It has taken
me awhile to learn that “news” is just a distraction, even if it’s quick
little bits that take two seconds to read. Or rather I
used to know this but forgot somewhere along the way.
- For some reason I got a lot of weirdo news articles from Fox, of all places. Those links are all dead. News sources tend to die, except for the NYT or Washington Post, maybe [FX: Nandotimes-branded tumbleweed rolls by]. A lot of other sources have changed their URLs, and I’ll just leave those for someone else to dig up if it’s that important to read what my snotty reply was to whatever horrific/stupid topic it was that I was foaming off about.
- Other random websites have also died, changed URLs, etc. Sometimes I tracked down the new URL, sometimes I did not. Sometimes I killed a dead URL, sometimes I did not. I have no desire to keep up with this, in the future there will be a little piece of software that does this for me. It will come in the form of a daily pill that costs $27, and Medicare doesn’t cover it. One website I tried to recover all links for was Word.com, which some of you may remember was the best website in the entire world. Some stuff wasn’t properly archived, mostly the image-based sections. Here’s one article from their “Work” section. Perhaps one day I will go on a big Wordhunt and corral everything together. Perhaps someone already has. Another: Flight Attendant.
- Once you start eyeballing the entries to fix ‘em up, it’s like a whirlpool sucking you in. In general I just made little text filters to fix punctuation, ellipses trouble, my semi-flirtation with UK-style punctuation etc. I found my earlier “link the entire paragraph” style annoying enough that I tried to pare down the more egregious samples.
- At some point in the past I switched from a static home page to a typical weblog format, back when there were about twenty weblogs and we all met each month at Buck’s to set the future course of weblog development and eat overpriced pancakes while looking at SNOW (Shit Nailed On Walls). I’m not really sure how far the weblog goes back. 1997. Earlier? Don’t know. If there’s anything left of the archive before then, it’s on Mac Zip disks. I don’t have a Mac at my disposal, though I do still have a Zip drive. I’ve been intending to remove everything from the Zip disks and trash the whole lot for years now. I did finally replace the Fry’s $0-with-rebate PC speakers fished out of a dumpster, though. So there’s that.
- Yes. The feed is coming. Much sooner than later now. Unless I chuck everything – though there’s not much of anything to chuck – and go on walkabout.
- Eventually Cardhouse will also have tags and stuff like this will be rolled into the main archive. Someday.
- This archive represents a significant educational resource for individuals and institutions interested in the dawning of the global weblog phenomenon and [starts choking on own tongue] woulGAAKKKK I GLARRH--
In summation: big ... fat ... fuck. Wagons ho.