nostalgia

Picturesque

I sometimes take for granted the experiences I have been graced with in my thirty years on this planet. In a fit of insomnia, one pair of experiences popped into my head.

Lately while working on a new puzzle game called Interst8, I’ve been delving into road geek forums and getting into all things highway. These topics reminded me of my own experience on one of the westernmost roads in the country, the Pacific Coast Highway. Traveling on the PCH is a goal of mine, but so farm I only had a taste of it; while in Los Angeles filming Superhuman, I used some free time to visit Santa Monica and crossed over the highway on a pedestrian walkway. Nothing but a means to get to the beach.

Fast forward a few months later and I’m back at my day job. Bugs are found. Our QA lead calls me to her desk. She opens Chrome, clicks the bookmark for our corporate email, and comments on the splash screen. Default Outlook splash screen with generic stock photos.

Then it hits me.

The bridge. The sandy coastline. The buildings in the background. It’s the pedestrian walkway I visited. Phones were taken out of pockets. Photos from Dropbox were loaded and compared with Google Street View and the Outlook splash screen. It was all a match, and it was all beautiful.

I know the novelty will fade as my insomnia wanes and I’ll finally be able to sleep, but for the moment I’m basking in the awe and satisfaction of having been somewhere so beautiful that its photo was used as a cheesy login screen background. There’s something special and amazing about it.

Independence

I’m saddened by the decline of the independent blog, a fact which I felt but couldn’t put into words, until I was woken after some web-based wanderlust led to me stumbling upon some indie web movement activists. The other day, a reminder came in the form of the declaration of International Blog Remembrance Day by the folks at Motherboard.

I think I’m posting today out of guilt. That said, I should also ensure that my future lofty thoughts, rants, and ideas don’t get wasted in the deluge of Facebook and Twitter. So, in honor of blog remembrance, I’m not just going to remember blogs, I’m going to blog.

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.

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