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Called the Wayback Machine a waste of time at a library in Cleveland, then found my cousin's GeoCities shrine to his Honda
About 8 months ago my cousin asked me to help him find an old GeoCities page he made in 1998 that was a whole shrine to his Honda Civic, complete with a spinning logo and a MIDI song that played on loop. I laughed at him and told him it was gone forever, that stuff just does not survive on the web, and he should let it go. He kept bugging me so I typed the URL into the Wayback Machine at the Cleveland library by my place, mostly to shut him up. Sure enough the thing loaded, guestbook and all, and his first entry was a message from our grandma who passed in 2004 saying she was proud of his car. I sat there in the library just staring at the screen, then spent the next 2 hours clicking through old banner ads and under construction gifs like a total weirdo. Now I'm the guy who tells everyone to go dig up their old sites, which is funny since I was so sure it was pointless. Did anyone else have a relative with one of those free Angelfire pages that is still somehow alive out there?
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derek_murray12h ago
What made you type in that URL instead of just blowing him off like you planned? I'm asking because there's a real difference between humoring someone and actually sitting down at a library computer to prove them wrong, and it sounds like something flipped in you before the page even loaded. Was it the way he kept bugging you, or did some small part of you actually hope he was right? I keep thinking about that grandma entry, because that's the part that gets me, a message from someone gone for 20 years just sitting there waiting. If you'd never typed it in, that note would still exist but nobody in your family would know it was there. So here's my real question, did you show your cousin the guestbook part first or did you make him wait while you read it yourself?
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