Do you know what I mean when I say “old-school internet forums”? I’m not talking about, like, 8chan. If your forum has been linked to even one mass shooting, it is not the kind of forum I’m talking about. I’m also not talking about subreddits, though Reddit appropriated and modernized the same basic structure, and I’m not talking about Discords, though Discord appropriated and modernized the same basic approach to community. I’m talking about a message board with its own unique domain name and a specific topical focus. Maybe that domain name is peppermintchat.org. Maybe that topical focus is peppermints. Peppermint Chat will have been founded by a single peppermint enthusiast, possibly called Stuart, in about 1998. It will have undergone precisely one redesign in the intervening 26 years, probably around 2007.

The users of peppermintchat.org will be the biggest group of hardcore freaks you can possibly imagine. They will be passionate. They will be scholarly. They will be deeply opinionated and wildly adventurous. And they will be each of these things exclusively about peppermints—nothing else. Their lives will revolve around the peppermint. (And also possibly their grandchildren, at least one of whom is named Peppermint.) They will use language like, “When I began my peppermint journey.” They will import rare and exotic peppermint cultivars from China. They will have contacts inside Brach’s and report breathlessly on minor tweaks to the candy cane formula ahead of what they call “the high season.” They will say things like, “I’ve probably spent upwards of $70,000 chasing that red-and-white-striped dragon.” Will their site load on mobile? It will not.

Within the larger body of Peppermint Chatters, there will be a smaller subset of elite posters, micro-celebrities of the peppermint kingdom. Their personalities, proclivities, states of residence, and even real names will be known to all who frequent the site. They will sometimes meet up in real life for peppermint-related activities, and in the world of the forum, these meetings will have the gravity and significance of the Yalta Conference. MintMan1 flew to Belarus to see PepperMinsk! The forum will be divided into many subforums, with the biggest fish spending most of their time in General Peppermint Talk and the most deranged individuals in human history congregating in Off-Topic Musings. Many threads, of course, will devolve into arguments, for such is human nature. Depending on how strictly the forum is moderated, these arguments will either end peacefully, with a broad acknowledgement that no type of peppermint is better than any other, because we are all on different peppermint journeys, which is why it’s so wonderful to have variety in the world; or they will end violently, with seven pages of posts in which Peppermint Chatters accuse one another of not “understanding basic logic.”

My childhood was spent on forums like this. I’m now itching to find myself a new one.

The programming language is called "cursed". It's cursed in its lexical structure, it's cursed in how it was built, it's cursed that this is possible, it's cursed in how cheap this was, and it's cursed through how many times I've sworn at Claude.

Absolutely dying at this.

Someone took the retro Weather Channel interface and turned it into a functioning website. Absolutely brilliant.

I suspect Netscape used 88x31 "sample" sized buttons to promote their "Now" rewards program and browser. But then they released "official" 88x32 buttons to registered rewards program participants. It would be a quick and easy way to verify if your site was using an "authorized" image.

But if all you wanted was a "Now" button or if you wanted to modify or remix it, well you'd just grab the unofficial 88x31 "sample" size buttons off the Netscape site and riff. And riff people did. I also suspect this usage guideline "No Alteration Allowed - The Netscape Now button must not be altered in ANY way. Do not shrink it; take it apart; change its proportions, color, or font; or otherwise alter it from the Netscape-supplied version." did little to discourage people and probably outright encouraged them just for spite - y'know because the Internet. By the end of the decade and well into the 2000's everyone used 88x31 buttons - from software giants like Microsoft, advertisers, media outlets, technology sites, to Geocities homesteaders - everybody.

This origin story (theory?) for the 88x31 button is wild.

I've been going through the hard drive which contains all my documents since... well, basically the beginning of my computing life, and I recently came across a bunch of old 88x31s that I used for various websites of mine.

Here they are for your amusement:

I don't care what you say: that "Tim's World" one still rules.

A virtual museum of video game levels. I spent a few minutes reliving the good ol’ GTA San Andreas days, as well as perused the Mario Kart 8 levels, and this is extremely impressive and fun.

(Thanks for the tip, Matt!)

Listen.

This blog doesn’t always have to share deep, thoughtful posts.

Sometimes, it pays to take a minute¹ and appreciate that we live on the timeline where this moment was captured, uploaded to the internet, and then viewed 54,000,000 times. Humanity isn’t always bleak.

Also, I wish more people were this honest about what they were delivering. Because this video is 100% what you see on the tin.

Two years ago, Twitch streamer albrot discovered a bug in the code for crossing rivers. One of the options is to "wait to see if conditions improve"; waiting a day will consume food but not recalculate any health conditions, granting your party immortality.

From this conceit the Oregon Trail Time Machine was born; a multiday livestream of the game as the party waits for conditions to improve at the final Snake River crossing until the year 10000, to see if the withered travellers can make it to the ruins of ancient Oregon. The first attempt ended in tragedy; no matter what albrot tried, the party would succumb to disease and die almost immediately.

Filed under “reasons I love the Internet.”

I will insist on using this for my CAPTCHA purposes from here on out.

Fun exploration of why <font color=“chucknorris”> gets converted into <font color=“#c00000”>.

Apparently timbornholdt gets converted into #0b00d0, a lovely shade of blue.

Matt Might wrote some shell scripts back in 2010 to identify and correct a few bad writing habits.

Simon Willison took these scripts and used Claude to build a tool that does the same, but within a web browser.

I could see taking this concept and baking it into my publish system for this blog. I am very interested in becoming a stronger writer, and having something like my own Rubocop would be annoyingly useful.