Man I miss Webrings.

It really was a great thing. It happened naturally too. Started as just a site I posted my writing to, a personal site in 1997, and friends wanted to add their stuff. By 1999 it was renamed from Routhy's Den to the Den of Amateur Poetry, and then the domain was purchased and the site renamed to The Den of Amateur Writing.

I still remember the pre-PHP days. People would email their works to me and I would manually build an HTML page and update the site within 24 hours.

Yep, I fought against it for years but eventually my new user intake was lower than the rate at which the typical user would fizzle out and move on. We had users that were there for 20 years and regulars, but without fresh ideas and posts things would get stale. So I had to yield and start adhering. Around 2018-2019 things really took a dive in traffic and I could not afford ads as it was all completely out of pocket, so I started a new codebase and rewrote it over 4 years in my spare time. The site before it shut down had a top grade from all of Googles site scanners and I had thought "Perfect.. now folks will trickle in again at the right rate.". And then the delisting.

This is why I shut The Den of Amateur Writing down after 25 years of running and developing it. I had written the entire codebase for Googles SEO, rolled out the update so my users would see a bit more traffic trickle in, and then watched them delist all my URLs 3 months later when this change rolled out. I just gave up. It was taking way too much of my life fighting googles bullshit to provide a free community.

Because I dont need to pay rent for my files and I don't have to worry about AI and VCs trying invade my privacy.

Squid

Yeah, Im excited about the cards but getting a 1GB switch with a 10g uplink was expensive... 10g switches are... a lot.

I still have the Steam Link hardware console though, still rocking and letting me play my PC on the TV

I still have my original PS3. Had to replace the hardrive once.

Still have the Wii, which had a bad disk reader in the first 30 days. I had to send it to the repair shop in Toronto and they had it fixed and back to me within 48 hours for free.

My first XBox 360 lasted 2 days past it's 1 year warranty date and died. Disk drive thought everything was a DVD. MS wanted $100 for repairs plus shipping. I bought a used 360 instead for $80. That one also died 1 year later, red ring. Next one I bought a replacement, one of the lower end models. Lasted 10 days past the 1 year warranty.. Then thought everything was a DVD.... This keeps going. By the time 2016 rolled around I had gone through 10 of those pieces of shit. I finally gave up on the games I liked on that system, and I've never bought a new MS system since. I honestly wonder what their true sales were if you deduped it by removing replacements from their tally.

I have my original PS2, PS3, PS4, GameCube, SNES, Wii, Switch.

There are quality gaming consoles out there, and then there's whatever the fuck MS spews onto the market.

This. Throwing your trash on the ground because you can't find a trash can amounts to childish entitlement in my eyes.

No trash cans in the forest, is OP saying they just litter all through nature when they go camping?

Home Assistant. Offline smart home automation you can control.

Home doesn't have to be 100% dumb in 2023. But you have to do a little work for it.

Bonus: your smart home will be more capable and interconnected than any of the commercial smart home options because they are all busy trying to control the entire ecosystem and sue each other. (maybe Matter changes that but I'm not holding my breath)