My Geocities page crashed the browser at the worst time

I was showing off my rad Space Jam fan site to a girl at the public library in 1997. It had blinking text, a midi file, and a visitor counter that took forever to load. The whole thing froze on the animated GIF of a dancing baby and we just sat there in silence for 10 seconds. Anyone else have a page that backfired like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

eric_carr24d ago

10 seconds of silence with a girl is rough but looking back it's hardly a disaster. The baby dancing GIF was probably the bigger sin anyway. You survived and she probably forgot about it by the next day.

paul33015d ago

Saved myself once by just leaning into the awkwardness. I told the girl straight up that my page was so cutting edge it needed a moment to load all that sweet multimedia, and pretended it was part of the experience. She actually laughed and we ended up messing around with the Dancing Baby GIF until the browser finally gave up again. The trick is to own the crash instead of sitting there praying the screen will fix itself. Pull a joke out of it or start talking about something else like the song playing on the library speakers. Ten seconds feels like an hour when you're quiet, but it's nothing if you keep moving. Those old pages were a gamble every time you hit refresh, especially on a shared public computer. We all had a version of this story, just some of us were unlucky enough to have an audience.