A few years ago, on a cold winter day in Grand Rapids, Michigan, my coworkers introduced me to pho. Pho is a Vietnamese noodle soup that I’m fairly certain can cure any cold or sinus situation when you’re sick. Even if you’re not sick, it’s a filling, tasty, and usually massive bowl of soup perfect for fighting back against chilly weather or massive hunger.
Category: food
Nostalgia
Tim Carmody recently asked Kottke.org readers to give him their takes on the best of the web, and then curated the responses in something that feels like a cross between those awkward Top 5 list YouTube channels and a flip through my pocket notebooks from the best years of my life. My puzzle blog, The Griddle, and my response about Ed Pegg’s MathPuzzle made the cut, as well as some of my responses that echoed general public consensus. (RIP Geocities. Thanks, Wayback Machine. Etc.)
Aside from wanting to gush about how much I love the online puzzle community, I think this survey and article series spoke to me because I kind of haphazardly grew up on the Internet. Between lunch hunched over the desk in the newspaper classroom in middle school, frequent trips to the public library’s computer lab, and eventually getting a hand-me-down IBM box and firing up AOL, I constantly dug for content and people that spoke to me. Back then, finding content was more of a scavenger hunt than it is now. Searching and curated lists were the name of the game; today there’s a lot of subscribing and refreshing feeds hoping for a morsel of awesome between ads and whining.
So, at the risk of being pretentious or jumping on a bandwagon, I wanted to put together a list of some sites that have that vintage web feel and formed a vital part of my growing up on the web.