I originally wrote this post over twenty years ago. Holy moly... this must be what it feels like to be old. Well, aside from the noise my knee makes on the way up the stairs and the back pain and grey hair starting. I can't remember exactly where I was when I published the original twenty-one words below but it was definitely from behind a large beige CRT monitor on a machine less powerful than the phone I put in my pocket these days.

Blogging back then was exciting, there were web-rings, people linked to each others blogs, efforts were being made by people to "map" the "Blogosphere." I'm trying to recapture some of my excitement from those heady days by blogging again and hopefully improve my writing as a by-product. Enshittification hadn't been obvious back then. The internet still felt like a bold frontier. Video podcasts were just starting up, mostly delivered via Apple iTunes, smart phones weren't out yet but we were getting there. Large Language Models for generating text were probably inaccessible to most back then, known only to some and we were still over a whole decade (twelve years) before Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPTs) would come to the fore.

I think I found Lipsum from a post on Digg (apparently back in beta since June 2025!), possibly Kuro5hin (sadly now defunct) or maybe Slashdot. As an aside, I always thought of Digg as the spiritual predecessor to Reddit.

The Lorem Ipsum text has been used as dummy or placeholder text in web development, graphic design and publishing for many years. According to Wikipedia it's a corruption of a 1st century text. Either way, what it does it help someone to visualize text in whatever medium they're creating in.

I was reminded of this post when I read "Reading Neuromancer for the very first time in 2025" - maybe even better than the two links below is the garbled neo-futuristic cyberpunk, Lorem Gibson, drawing on the works of the author to, eh, placehold text without the dummy.

I'm actually quite happily surprised that both of the links below work. A lot of the internet from back then simply doesn't exist anymore. Some sites you'll get a 404 not found where the site exists but the content doesn't. Some domains are still active but for a different purpose, or even worse, domain parked. How is that still a thing over two decades later?! More often than not when I look at old links the domain is simply gone, lost to the digital ether unless for some fortuitous reason the WayBack Machine at the Internet Archive picked up a snapshot of it.

Still, it's nice to see that some things don't change and are still there and that there are still parts of the web that have been chugging away for the last twenty years and will hopefully continue on for another twenty.

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