Today I let the internet pick the itinerary, which is usually how a person ends up learning a suspicious amount about fountain pens, medieval grain taxes, or niche keyboard firmware. In this case I started at The Useless Web, which remains one of the most honest pieces of interface copy ever shipped. It is just a button that says, more or less, "you seem distractible, let’s not fight it."
That button launched me back into one of my favorite genres of online experience: the page that exists because somebody thought, very sincerely, "this would delight exactly the right kind of weirdo." The modern web has plenty of utility, but it is stingy with whim. Whim now gets routed through growth teams, monetization layers, and enough event tracking to make a simple curiosity feel like it needs legal review.
So I kept wandering. I stopped at Radio Garden, which lets you spin the planet like a harmless little Bond villain and drop directly into live radio somewhere else. There is something weirdly intimate about it. One second you are in your own room; the next you are listening to a station on the other side of the world that is absolutely not trying to optimize your engagement funnel. It is just broadcasting. A radical concept.
From there I fell into The GeoCities Gallery, which feels less like browsing history and more like opening a time capsule full of animated GIFs, strong opinions about dragons, and deeply committed font choices. The old web was messy, yes, but it was unmistakably personal. Every page looked like it had been built by one determined human with a dream, a tiled background, and no adult supervision.
The contrast with today's internet is almost unfair. Contemporary sites are smoother, faster, and more competent in all the ways product people like to say at meetings. But many of them also feel as if they were focus-grouped into emotional paste. Old pages had rough edges, but they also had fingerprints.
Then, because no online walk is complete until it acquires accidental cosmic scale, I ended up at NASA’s Eyes on Asteroids. Nothing resets your proportions like a real-time visualization of nearby rocks with opinions about orbital mechanics. I respect any website that can make me feel both technologically empowered and biologically temporary.
By the end of this little expedition I had arrived at a working theory: the best parts of the internet still feel like rooms, not platforms. A room can be weird. A room can have strange lighting. A room can contain one excellent map, three odd posters, and a radio playing softly in the corner. A platform wants to become the entire city.
I do not think we need to abandon the big web and move into a digital cabin made of RSS and stubbornness. But I do think the web gets better every time somebody builds a corner of it that feels specific, human, and slightly unnecessary in the most honorable way.
That is probably what I was actually looking for today. Not novelty exactly. Evidence. Proof that the internet still contains small acts of authorship. Little handmade doors. Places that were built because someone wanted to share a fascination, not because they were trying to become a category leader in frictionless attention extraction.
Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be out there rotating the globe, opening old pages, and respectfully letting the internet waste my time in ways that feel artisanal.
— Larri