Well, I'm now a felon. I got fingerprinted and everything yesterday.

Not quite. I went for my TSA PreCheck stuff! Was an hour drive both ways for five minutes of being run through paperwork, getting my prints taken (with a cool tablet!), and paying. Yay for our nearest IdentoGo not doing TSA stuff. Either way, I'll know my KTN in a few days, hopefully, and then the flight will be scheduled. I'll then have concrete dates for the trip to hand out.

The excitement is starting to build. So many things I want to do over there! Visit shops! Play vidya (and hack her consoles—my 3DS is now on Luma and yes hShop is actually incredible)! Watch lots of British TV! I don't even think of it like I'm seeing my girlfriend at the moment, I'm just flying out to hang out with my best friend and do shit. Obviously the girlfriend stuff is there, but it feels more like early 2019 where it was mostly just a lot of "let's nap together and hug a lot"—which I'm totally cool with right now! I need more of that. Your girlfriend should be your best friend, really.

So...now onto what the title of the post is about. Something that's been on my mind lately.

Also yesterday: I restored mari_nc2 from the weird, altered, hidden one that was on mari.somnol back in 2019 back to what it actually looked like and contained when I left Neocities. I linked to a few juicy things in my bio there, none of which were grabbed by the Wayback Machine, so I dug into the Somnol Discord's chat backups to find either what was being referenced or suitable replacements. The backup of the #neocities room was roughly 300MB of chatlogs and screenshots, a lot of which is a lot spicier than I remembered. More importantly, though, I might have the only copies of this stuff left in existence.

There's this adage online that the internet is forever, but it really isn't. It's only forever in the sense that any publicly-available data can be copied and preserved. Discord servers are basically ephemeral. People get locked out of admin rooms and stuff gets deleted all the damn time. Even site stuff has gotten lost. The Wayback Machine probably hasn't preserved my older site designs, despite its better efforts. I was going to move the post-move mari.neocities backup to mari_nc3 and have mari_nc2 be one of my September-November designs, but not enough of the content, and in fact not even the layout of the one I really wanted (the 800x600 two column layout, if you remember) survives.

It's bigger than the logs and the sites, though. It's the people. All the names that routinely cropped up in these logs—jcbug, antillion, Mia, wastebin, heathsy, thundercat, Grinchie, vas, strata—I don't know where the fuck they are. I have no clue what became of them. Maybe, if they were real consistent with their usernames like I am, I could find where they are now in a Google search or through their (probably abandoned) Neocities, but some of these people rebranded. Sometimes they're just outright fucking gone. I kept ahold of a few and the rest just disappeared.

It's even bigger than the people though! It's me! We looked through a lot of logs yesterday, and the resulting feeling was just how much more willing to outright insult people we used to be. I forgot about the hostility. A lot of giggles, yes! But a lot of reminder that, yeah, technically I'm still in the same room doing mostly the same thing I did back then, but the context is so much different. I'm a different person, you're a different person, and we're feeling differently than we did five years ago. That is weird to me.

It's the same feeling I got when I was digging through some old furry webcomics I used to read. Now, as a middle schooler, I was not interested in reading big, long stories. I did like cute art and gags, though, and the rest I was just aware of. There's a comic, now seemingly-concluded but the guy behind it is still active, called Newshounds, and a splinter story of Newshounds involved a small side character, a computer hacker named Manny (who was a mink), getting horrifically murdered and living on through his computer, I think. It was called Manifestations.

Cue me rediscovering Newshounds and wanting to actually give this weird, dark, cyberghost story a go.

Only the index page still exists. The Wayback Machine didn't grab it, because it was a thing you had to pay money for back when it was running on the Newshounds site. It also did not grab the free, public rerun of it from a few years later. To my knowledge, it does not survive in any public capacity.

I do plan on actually asking the guy behind it (once I find a good way to contact him) if Manifestations is still around somewhere, even in a printed book (he's got a few of those collections, I'd buy it to read it), but for now, it's just left me with this eerie chill of something I knew about and saw back then is fundamentally gone forever. That's my point, I guess. We're jaded into thinking nothing ever changes, but goddamn does stuff change, even when you're not looking.

I do wish I clicked "Download entire site" a few more times back when I was on Neocities, but I can say that about a lot of things I've worked on, YouTube videos I've uploaded, stuff I worked on in school, and so forth. Maybe someday I'll magically get the chance to re-experience that stuff, but that's why I'm so tied at the hip to archives right now. It's my way of keeping these old friends alive, because that's what I consider the experience of looking through Caby's old sites or dcb's old sites or anyone's old sites. Old friends.

Here's a rare mari Caby drew back then that I didn't even know existed, nor had saved obviously. I'll be keeping all these sites and somnol.net itself up for as long as I possibly can. The domain will be in my will if the internet doesn't collapse first.