Always Dreaming of Something Better

August 1, 2026

"Beware the lollipop of mediocrity; lick it once and you'll suck forever." - Brian Wilson

This site is finally coming together. With this first journal entry there's something to see on every page now. It seems like not a lot, but I have spent many hours hand coding this entire thing. Is it the highest quality? I guess that depends on your perspective. Compared to other personal websites built in the 90s I'd say this stacks up pretty well.

When I was a tween / teen we built all kinds of websites. In my small friend group, if you didn't know HTML, you didn't know anything. We shared links to our sites over AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ. We joined webrings to gain more visibility. When money was tight, we connected to the Internet using NetZero, which only gave you about an hour of connectivity at dial-up modem speeds. But it was enough time to blast a few friends with some silly IMs and publish a journal entry to your personal website. We downloaded music over Napster and Bearshare. We listened to the music with Sonique and WinAMP, and we burned CDs with low quality MP3s that were full of pops and squelches. Personally, that was the Golden Age of the Internet for me.

This website aims to capture some of that Golden Age energy. I'm purposely using bad code designs like creating the whole layout using a <table> tag. Things that could be machine readable text links are graphics instead. Because back in the day, nobody cared if your site was SEO. Nobody cared if a robot could read your site. The only thing that mattered was how COOL your site looked. So in the true spirit of Internet nostalgia, that's exactly what I'm doing.

In this era of content management systems, website builders, and AI agents that can create an entire site with a single prompt, why do all this? Couldn't I just use modern tools to make this website? Of course I could. But that where's the fun in that? Like the Latin-speakers of yore, we can't let the ancient art of a hand-coded personal website die. At the very least we can't let it go quietly into the night. I say to everyone managing a personal website out there: we must continue to build before the robot overlords make our content invisible.

If I'm being honest, I'm a little sad I didn't keep at it all those years ago. I let my sites go in favor of content silos like Facebook and Tumblr. I let them get to me and for that I am ashamed, but no more. With this site, I take it all back. I say goodbye to loose aquaintances, consequential strangers, and parasocial relationships and hello to freedom.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

Best,

Ben