💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › phlog › everything2-is-non-awful-web.… captured on 2020-10-31 at 02:14:29.
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Everything2 is non-awful web ---------------------------- cmccabe recently asked[1] people to share their favourite non-commercial websites offering good quality content. Visiblink responded[2] by talking about K. Mandla's two phlogs, which made me smile. I have a special place in my heart for those sites, and they're a great answer to the question. I *love* the idea that K. Mandla is now, secretly, a sundog. I kind of struggled to think of a good answer of my own. The only websites that I visit regularly these days, outside of webcomics and cycling-related blogs (neither of which are very strictly non-commercial, nor of very wide interest, although feel free to email me if you want recommendations on either). But here's something that I think might fall within the scope of what cmccabe was gunning for. Every now and then, never deliberately, I stumble into the Everything2 site[3], and usually spend some time there following random links, much the way one does on Wikipedia, but less educationally. I usually enjoy myself there and even though I've never contributed to it or become a regular visitor, I have come to think fondly of the place. Everything2 is kind of hard to explain, especially without having participated in it. It's a large repository of user-submitted writing, which is a mix of factual content, bizarre humour, short fiction and poetry. I usually spend time reading the non-factual stuff. Individual posts/articles (called "Nodes" in the community's ontology) link to each other in a quite unusual way (I have no understanding at all of the process by which these links are forged), where short snippets of text in one Node are links to other nodes with that snippet as a title (sometimes, anyway). As random examples, here[4] is a fun very short story entitled "Standing on a mountaintop in northern Siberia under the rapidly descending bulk of asteroid McAlmont, with a calculating expression and a baseball bat". Within that short story is the phrase "I'm no saviour. I'm just a nut with a baseball bat", which is the title of an entirely unrelated (except by containing a baseball bat) story by a different author[4]. The particular phrases which are chosen as links are often really unusual but compelling titles for Nodes. I'm doing an awful job of explaining this, just go check it out. It's like a surrealistic hypertext maze, where the writing is all of *very* good quality by the standards of the user-generated web. There's a strange sense of beautiful and liberating sadness or jadedness or world-weariness that is common enough in the writing that it colours my perception of the site. Which, by the way, is very simply laid out, almost entirely text, with minimal styling, no images except the simple logo at the top and a total lack of advertising. It wouldn't convert to gopher very well, because it's quite strongly dependent on in-line links, but I bet shizaru would serve it up without complaint! [1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/%7ecmccabe/20-noncommercial-www.txt [2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~visiblink/phlog/20190614 [3] https://everything2.com [4] https://everything2.com/title/Standing+on+a+mountaintop+in+northern+Siberia+under+the+rapidly+descending+bulk+of+asteroid+McAlmont%252C+with+a+calculating+expression+and+a+baseball+bat [5] https://everything2.com/title/I%2527m+no+saviour.+I%2527m+just+a+nut+with+a+baseball+bat.