90's Internet

I'm really amazed at how far the internet has come since I first used it. I was nine, maybe ten years old when we got our first computer, and I remember making a sandwich and eating it in the time it took to dial up to AOL. Once I figured out that there was more to this grey box than just aol, I remember fondly sits like the Hamster Dance, and Frogger. This was a golden age of pixels and bright color pallets, an era of choppy scrolling and over-decorated side bars.

We moved on to sleeker, more elegant times. Times of blogger, of facebook. A time when even sites like reddit and live journal have a faster, sleeker aesthetic.

But somehow, I don't think the kink community got the message.

Seriously, do a search, any search, for a kink-related thing. Once you get past all the porn (or filter it out), there's an incredible number of pixelated skull-and-crossbone rose-adorned headers, or bright fuscia scrolly fonts. And I know some of these sites have been up for a really long time, but... I find it hialrious that, in a community where the aesthetic is something that I usually love, their internet style is so very dated.

It's not a serious thing (although I do think it's a shame that some of these websites have such good information, and that that information might be disregarded because of the poor quality of their website). But it might behoove us to, amidst our flogging practice and discussions of protocol, to geek about something else for a while, and learn a little CSS or HTML.

Okay, out of my system. More substantive posts to come.