I mentioned back on day four that I had an idea for an in-universe Pennyverse Geocities homage people could visit called Meowcities. To elaborate a bit (you might know what Geocities is and you're very smart, but most people in real life don't), Geocities was a web host in the 90s bought by Yahoo! where people could make their own basic HTML websites about whatever they saw fit, exactly as they saw fit. If you're wondering what people made sites about, it's your usual—Catholicism, Cajun cooking, Pokémon, rennaissance fairs, phone booths out in the Mojave desert.
I would've gone.
Meowcities is meant to be an in-Pennyverse clone of that that a bunch of our characters use for their own websites—Ryan having his photos up there, or Madeleine and her sketches/Colton shrine, or Rory with a little site of family recipes—just a neat way to round out their characters and tell stories with them through web design and defictionalization.
Anyway, that hadn't left my head three days later, so I started dipping into Restorativland for inspiration. Restorativland is an effort at a maintained archive of historical web content and subcultures, started in part by my old archnemesis Kyle Drake. They started by patching the Geocities crawl, and now they have a player for old MySpace MP3s as well, with plans to move into Geocities Japan, FortuneCity, and AOL Hometown as well.
As for why I'm talking about it in this trip diary? Well, for a few days in the middle of the trip, throughout the day and also to lull myself to sleep (Caby and I learned pretty quickly we just smush each other if we try to cuddle in our sleep—we'll figure that one out sometime), I'd gather up what I considered to be good reference material for the feel of Meowcities sites. I figure, with some examples of my own and a ton of reference material, we'd be able to create sort of a vast Geocities-like landscape of random sites about absolutely everything for the character sites to blend nicely into.
Plus, I mean, looking at old web sites is fun. After gathering up twenty or so different sites, I started a thread in the server for them, and folks were having a ball looking through them just as much as I was.
Some of it also just plain got us wistful, like we were looking at versions of ourselves from another time, and our eventual future, perhaps.
I created this website in the late 1990s to serve as an outpost of sorts for my friends and me. Originally it was a collection of images of various anime characters, but later it evolved into a repository of our creative works.
Nobody visits this website anymore, but I can't bring myself to take it down. It is a reminder of the heyday of our group of friends -- a formative time which we reminisce about and sometimes miss. It was a time when our efforts went into planning the next night of junk food and video games, when the world was small but growing, and when trivialities seemed paramount. It was a time before drivers licenses and girlfriends and salaries -- a time before the joys and sorrows of adulthood. It was a time of freedom from responsibility but bondage to our own lack of mobility and social ambition.
This website is a slice of our history, but not a cross-section. I encourage you to take a look around and take none of it seriously.
-Ted Londner, 2009
As for Caby and I, while we were still taking it easy after all the previous day's walking, we did get drinks at Lidl (a chocolate-and-coconut drink and a Starbucks-brand caramel macchiato chilled coffee, if you're curious) and sit in the park at sunset, discussing more Gamedachi stuff and giggling as dcb mixed up pickles and green peppers in the chat. Listen, I can't judge, I didn't know frogs could swim once upon a time, because everything I know about frogs comes from Frogger. We all have our moments.