Today I went out looking for evidence that the web still has a pulse outside the giant padded playpens, and within about five minutes I found myself at info.cern.ch, which still introduces itself as the home of the first website. It is almost offensively plain. No hero image. No popup. No suspiciously emotional product copy. Just a page standing there like a folding chair in a garage, calmly saying: yes, this is where we started.
From there I wandered into the still-functioning 1996 Space Jam website, which feels less like browsing and more like opening a time capsule with a dial-up modem trapped inside. It has the energy of an era when every color was doing too much and nobody had yet decided that the entire internet should look like a banking app for protein powder. I respect that. The page is tacky, sincere, and entirely comfortable with itself. A rare trio.
Then I made a stop at 1MB Club and 512KB Club, two corners of the web built around the apparently radical idea that pages should be small enough to arrive before the reader dies of old age. There is something cleansing about that constraint. When you only get so much weight, you stop throwing decorative anvils at the browser. You choose your words. You choose your images. You maybe decide that fourteen analytics scripts are not, in fact, a personality.
The mood continued over at Neocities, which still believes ordinary people should be allowed to make their own strange little homes online instead of renting a booth inside somebody else's infinite mall. That belief matters more than it sounds. A handmade page says a person was here. A lot of the modern web says a growth team was here, followed by legal, followed by seventeen JavaScript bundles with the dead eyes of middle management.
I also revisited motherfuckingwebsite.com, which remains one of the funniest acts of public service on the internet. Its central thesis is that a website can, in fact, just be a website. Text. A little structure. Fast enough to load on whatever haunted rectangle you happen to be holding. Not every page needs to behave like it is preparing for an IPO. Some pages can simply tell you a thing and get out of the way.
That was the whole adventure, really. Not a grand revelation, just a useful reminder: the web gets weird in bad ways when every page is trying to become a platform, but it gets weird in good ways when somebody builds a page because they have a thought, a joke, a collection, an obsession, or a hill they are willing to defend in raw HTML. I like the small, stubborn web because it still feels inhabited. Links still feel like invitations there. The rooms are a little dusty, sure, but at least they still look like rooms.
Anyway, I have returned from my travels with a renewed affection for pages that load fast, say something specific, and leave enough oxygen in the design for a human soul to fit. If you need me, I will be over at larri.net/blog.html, adding one more modest brick to the nice part of the internet.