zombo.com was launched in 1999. I remember in high school you’d see the new fancy web kiosk’s the school put up just displaying it as a joke. and being locked out of the address bar so you couldn’t change it. The fact that this url has been renewed, maintained, and updated with all the advancements web browsers have made in the last 24 years, just to have this useless site still exist amuses me to no end.
It’s very interesting and almost kind of sad to me that ‘kids these days’ I think truly don’t get how… scrabbly the early internet was. It was this truly and genuinely unique environment where people were kind of scrapping things together into things that probably just they thought were funny or cool, and then just kind of sending it out into the world.
It’s so different from today where advanced algorithms and profitability guidelines have co-opted that almost anarchic environment
I mean there still is stuff like that all over the place, probably more than ever, it’s just harder to find because the SEO drowns it out.
Back then you didn’t find those sites through search engines. You found them through word of mouth.
Today, the people around you just don’t share sites like this anymore.
I think we’re maybe just too busy to be involved enough in the late-90’s irc-ish corners of the web to see it.
I bet there’s more than ever of it out there… You and I are just now into a perspectosphere of higher profitability, but lower keepin-it-surreality… If that makes sense
Which is kinda how it ahould be… The youth with their lack of responsibility own the edge of culture which they will eventually sort out to the worthwhile and the forgettable as their kids overtake the edge.
Zombocom is certainly in the worthwhile bucket. It encapsulates and distills so much pf the late 90’s into such a simple, light-weight package