Farewell Website of the Week
A fond goodbye to a mild obsession and an insistence that the Old Web is new again
Greetings, fellow humans. I’m Caroline and I write fantasy and horror—my debut epic fantasy novel, The Obsidian Druid was released in April 2024. I also have a mild obsession with Web 1.0-era websites. This is my newsletter.
Farewell Website of the Week
I’ve been reviewing a Website of the Week ever since I started this newsletter. For a website to make it to the list, it had to fulfil two requirements: it had to be from the Web 1.0 era (roughly 1989-2005), and it had to still exist. The still-existing part was the key theme. I came of age during the ancient times of Geocities and Yahoo! and so many of the sites I remember visiting back then have since been cleansed from the internet. You can still find them on the Internet Archive (usually without images or many working links, unfortunately), but finding sites still floating about in the wild, often not having been updated for literal decades, became a small passion of mine.
These abandoned websites (not all have been abandoned by the way, some people have been hand-coding their websites since before the dot-com bubble burst and those people are awesome people) fascinate me. They offer so many questions and provide so few answers. Why do they still exist, and what happened to the people that built them? Have they completely forgotten about their Spice Girls fan page or prized collection of animated dolphin gifs? Maybe it now acts as a garish time capsule that they reacquaint themselves with once every decade—a visual reminder of who they were and where they came from. Perhaps it's simply a case of a forgotten twenty-year-old password.
I began collecting these websites like a greedy dragon collecting gold coins. Many were deemed unsuitable for 2024 and discarded (it might be fascinating to revisit the 90s through the medium of the ancient web, but instances of casual misogyny and racism can also make it deeply uncomfortable). Many more though, were delightful little nostalgia nuggets. These are the sites I shared with you. I think highlights were probably The UNOFFICIAL Rugrats Online, just for the sheer size of the place and the breadth of passion displayed, and Topher's Castle, a vast, kid-safe repository of information spanning topics as diverse as a Cereal Character Guide and Godzilla Reference Pages.
I’ve loved researching these websites and telling you about them, but just as there is always a price to pay for using magick, running multiple projects, no matter how much you enjoy doing them, always has a downside. The downside here is that sourcing a new website to review every week takes a lot of time, and time is something that I’m currently struggling to find. Something had to give, and it’s going to be Website of the Week. I’m sure I’ll soon think of something to replace it with, but in the meantime, I didn’t want to leave you high and dry—lost in a bland sea of soulless corporate websites with unnecessarily huge banners—with no comforting nostalgia nuggets to hold on to. I’m going to tell you how you can find these mysterious hidden websites for yourself.
Hidden?
Unfortunately, yes. Google search in 2024 is a pay-to-play machine that often hides personal static websites beneath pages of Pinterest search results and ad-riddled, AI-written blog posts. If you want to start your own Web 1.0 adventure, you’ll have to step off the map and explore elsewhere.
When I begin an old-web treasure hunt, this is my starting place. Wiby is a search engine that lists “simple in design” websites, where “simple HTML, non-commerical sites are preferred”. This means that not all the sites you’ll find here are from the Web 1.0 era, but many are. When I’m low on inspiration, the “surprise me…” link on the front page rarely fails to deliver. (I just clicked it and was presented with a spoof Britney Spears fan page from 2002. Beautiful.)
This is an Altavista-style search engine that scrapes pages from the Internet Archive, which means the sites you’ll find have probably been deleted, but it’s still a fun visit. Altavista was one of the web’s early search engines, and it’s been recreated here in all its 1999 glory (it even has a working guestbook).
OoCities is an ongoing project to catalogue old Geocities sites. Again, these sites no longer exist outside of their archived form, but you can find interesting stuff just by clicking around (that’s how I found this random review of Ringo Starr’s 1998 concert in St. Petersburg—”The beginning of the concert was cool: Ringo's group began to play "It don't come easy". Ringo wasn't on stage, but when it was time to sing, he ran on the stage and everybody began to applaud.”)
There are many other retro internet services but listing them all would make this newsletter novel-length. If your craving for old-web nostalgia nuggets still hasn’t been satisfied, perhaps you’d like to study an entirely different kind of map…
The Old Web is New Again
I’m not alone in my dissatisfaction with the web circa 2024. Far from it. Entire communities of people are creating new, simply coded websites that are as far from a bland corporate website or hellish social media timesink as it’s possible to get.
I host my author website on Neocities, which calls itself “a social network of 806,700 web sites that are bringing back the lost individual creativity of the web”. It’s hard to describe how much I love this place, but apparently I’m a writer so I will try. I found Neocities during the plague year, at a perfect point in time when I was not only feeling nostalgic but was also bored as hell. I truly believed that websites like the ones you’ll find here didn’t exist anymore (because Google hides them!), and when I stumbled through Neocitie’s brightly coloured, animated gif-loving, blinkie graffitied doors, I’d never been so happy to be proven wrong. There are personal pages pulsing with sparkly rainbows, vaporwave-inspired cybercafes, and arts communities celebrating “the digital lives that all netizins share”.
The creativity on show is boundless, and there’s barely any barrier to entry. Web hosting and a Neocities url is free, and if you’ve never written any HTML or CSS code before, it’s not as scary as it seems. I had a basic knowledge going in thanks to a youth misspent on Geocities and Angelfire (I still have a basic knowledge, I’m not fooling anyone), but if you want to learn, this Absolute Beginner's Guide is an excellent starting point.
Micro-SPFNO - Week Three
Shining a light on some excellent indie fantasy novels that weren’t chosen to compete in the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off by reviewing their first chapters.
The Guild Master's Daughter by Geneva Price
The Guild Master's Daughter is a historical fantasy. Historical fantasy is another genre that I haven’t spent much time with, but if the first chapter of this book is anything to go by, I might have to rethink my reading habits. Here’s the blurb:
Faith has the power to turn imagination into reality. The Guild Master has the power to stop her.
In 1816 New York City, there is no place for women in the world of art, especially not for Faith, the gifted step-daughter of a renowned artist. Her step-father expects young women to be dutiful, reserved, and respectable, traits utterly incompatible with Faith's innate nature and the attention her extraordinary talent would attract. Faith masks her feelings, holds her tongue, and hides her drawings.
But when her step-father draws an apple that Faith can pick up off the page and hold in her hand, she can no longer deny her calling. The mystical Ink he uses to bring the imaginary to life offers freedom and power she can never have on this side of reality. It may not get her out of an arranged marriage, but it might keep her from suffocating in it.
Denied access to the Ink by the Guild that guards it and the Guild Master, her own step-father, Faith finds a way to train in secret. As she learns to manipulate the imaginary world where fantasy and fear are equally real, she discovers that even her reality is not what it seems. As the lines between real and imagined blur, Faith's quest for self-agency may cost her everything she holds dear in both worlds.
The Guild Master's Daughter is the award-winning story of one young woman's journey to create her own destiny through courage, self-discovery, and the extraordinary power of belief. Lose yourself in her world of artistry and magic, where dreams take form, art becomes life, and the imagination knows no limits.
The novel begins on a ship bound for New York. Our young heroine, Faith, is travelling with her domineering stepfather and her mother, who seems to be suffering from acute seasickness and melancholy (although she rouses to ask for wine, which endeared her to me immediately).
The first thing I was struck by was how smoothly the writing flowed. You feel as though you are in capable hands during these first glimpses into Faith’s world, and some truly beautiful images are painted. This was my favourite: “The sun was now a golden puddle beneath an explosion of carmine, vermillion, and magenta. A seagull flew past, its silhouette consumed by the bright center of the sinking sun before reemerging as a dark chevron on a flaming sky.”
I also enjoyed the sense of realism. No punches are pulled when describing the stench below deck, drawing a clear division between the "noxious miasma" of the common space, and the staterooms, which are "tolerable". Faith's positive attitude despite the obvious suffocation of her upbringing makes you root for her from the get-go. She loves the sailors' stories of adventure and mystery even though she is afraid of the sea, and I get the feeling that when Faith finally finds the strength to stand up to her stepfather, it’s going to be a satisfying payoff.
The Guild Master's Daughter is available in paperback, hardback, and ebook.
Midnight Metropolis is a sci-fi/fantasy novel about daemons, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and the neon megacity sprawled on the blackened backside of a sunless planet revolving around a colossal, sentient head. New chapters are posted every Tuesday and you can read all available chapters for free.
That’s it for now.
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