Comment by MagicalEmi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MagicalEmi | Hacker News Reader

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Oh, hello. This is my website. I'm Emily. I saw the influx of (nice, thank you!) comments on the guestbook, so I checked to see what was up. Yes, I keep the site running and haven't changed very much about it (mostly out of laziness) but I do periodically update it when something new (music, tv. merch, game, etc)happens. So I guess it is only still being updated because the franchise keeps popping up with random new things over the years. I do still have a lot of unfinished areas of the site that I tell myself I need to get done, but it has been 20+ years now, so you can see how well that's going (I see you, episode summary sections). I designed this for 800x600, lol. I am, frankly, terrified to actually look at the site on my phone. Back then I was really into making anime fan sites, and Bebop had such a nice aesthetic. Anyway, thanks for visiting my site and signing the guestbook. I am equally amazed that my old guestbook service is still operating.

So much of the "good ol' web" has disappeared into oblivion because people couldn't bother keeping their personal home page online after moving onto other interests, and they can't be blame for that.

Your website has that "handmade touch" that we took for granted back then and that has completely disappeared from the "modern" web. Stumbling upon your page, one can't help but feel nostalgic about what the web was back then, compared to what it has become. "Back in the days", the web was human. Now it's just a stream of unending, same-looking, ad-infested, seo-optimized noise.

Thanks for keeping this site online : it reminds us that another web was possible.

P.S : I looked at your other websites, and they all have that nostalgic-retro-looking warm-and-fuzzy-inducing design. I love it !

Nice header text designs and effects, you're good at Photoshop! We should start a webring on Xoom or Tripod.

But seriously, it's nice to see old-school fans still maintain websites independent of the big platforms and social media (Neocities being a recent bright spot). Webrings were a nice community-organic way to navigate to related sites/homepages, and we've lost that to the Social Algorithms feeding us what they think we should see.

Bring back Web 1.0 New and Improved, please. The Wild Web.

It's perfect just the way it is! It's so great that you keep updating the relevant parts!) :)

The website looks fine on my Palm Phone (720 x 1280 pixels in portrait mode, so slightly less wide than your original 800 px width). Need to pinch to zoom in some parts, but that's standard for any website really.

Thank you for creating this little treasure and maintaining it. It's a time capsule from that era!

>>I do still have a lot of unfinished areas of the site that I tell myself I need to get done, but it has been 20+ years now, so you can see how well that's going (I see you, episode summary sections).

Maybe ChatGPT could help create episode summaries for the Cowboy Bebop live action series? At least as a placeholder until you have time to write it yourself?

I would personally prefer this beautiful piece of hand-crafted artistry not be infected with generative AI crap.

Even if it stops being updated? The internet is replete with old sites that are still up but have long stopped getting updates. What made this unique is that it was continuously updated for over 20 years. If the price of continuing that is AI generated content, at least as a placeholder until which time the site owner can handcraft the episode summaries, isn't that a price worth paying?

Especially if it stops being updated. This was an intentional stopping point for the author, so it should remain as such.

Lots of artwork or literature exists in unfinished form. They should remain as such for historical posterity.

All else being equal, the later the point in time when the author chooses to stop updating the site is, the more special the site will be.

The question is, is the site more special if it stops being updated now, when it's made up of exclusively handcrafted content, or if it transitions to less labor-intensive/AI-based content generation for new updates, and continues being updated for many more years.

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