💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2022 › 202206 › 20220622-simpler-times.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:50:29. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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I've spent a lot of yesterday and today looking back to the past. Yesterday I took a drive around town, the first time I'd left the house since testing positive for COVID, and I spent the majority of the time driving past my friends' old houses and places where I used to spend time with them. Today I engaged in a different form of retrospection by digitizing a stack of old VHS cassettes.
One of those tapes contained a commercial for America Online dating from late 1995. The advertisement boasts such selling points as e-mail, a point-and-click interface, "over one hundred" digital magazines, and a Web browser. Seeing such a time capsule of a commercial was rather fun.
The Internet was not nearly as heavily populated or restricted as it is today, nor was it as filled with bots, spam, tracking, and harmful content of one kind or another. I lived in a very small farming town in those days, and the tight-knit, trusting culture of that town was similar to culture of the early Internet.
Gemini is still a very small place, and it hasn't yet attracted those who want to hurt others or try to exploit them for money. It reminds me of the world I grew up in. Maybe that's why I like it so much.
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[Last updated: 2022-06-18]