Hope Dies Last But Should It? On Wishful Thinking, Hanging on by a Thread and the Peace of Acceptance
There is this interesting digital library I learned about not too long ago called the Wayback Machine, which, among other things, archives what is happening on the internet by taking occasional screenshots on any random day that take you, well, way back to what a given website or blog looked and functioned like from 1996 to the present day. Yes, including the long-dormant blogs and bloggers I’ve been occasionally wondering about since 2003. Once you enter the URL in the search bar, the links still work and the adorably primitive early animations are still there, frozen in time, just as they looked back in the day.
As someone who was part of that first wave online with our scrappy little AOL dial-up, our Power Macintosh 7500 computer and microwave-sized monitor, going back and touching down on some of the early blogs and message boards has been warmly nostalgic, though the gossip, dramatics and flame-wars between bloggers and commenters that I was glued to at the time should have been foreboding for what was to come with social media if I’d been paying closer attention. That said, it’s been kind of fun in my off hours to travel back in time and see who was warring with whom on the vegan message boards in 1998, to look at the natural parenting blogs prescribing nettle tea…
