#017
Finding lost treasure and site remodeling
When I was young I wanted to be a pirate. There's a lot glamorizing of 18th century pirates in the media and I was in my late teens or so when the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie came out, but there was certainly a lot of mystique around them much before. The freedom to explore the open seas, have adventures, follow your own heart, live outside the system, and what not. Now I'm much older and I know better, too much pillaging, murdering and raping for my taste, I don't really want to be a pirate anymore.
Sometimes surfing the old/small web really feels like what that glamorized version of being a pirate meant to me: wandering around in search of some lost treasure the world doesn't even know exists, finding a bunch of other minor treasures and lost pieces of History along the way. Sometimes it realy does feel like you found some lost treasure you dindn't know existed, stumbling along a chain of links like exploring the open seas from island to island following vague rumors of something that nobody seems to know exactly what it is, but sounds important; or following some vague search query in a niche "old web" search engine not knowing what you are looking for.
It felt a little bit like that yesterday evening when I stumbled into Dave Van Domelen's fiction archives, Academy of Super Heroes and New Exarchs. From what I understand so far, Dave and his friends started this as a fan fiction comic book series in an email chain or usenet group in the 90's and continued pretty active until 2007 or 2009, then a few flashes of activity in the 2010's and even a couple new issues added this year it seems.
It is all raw text files, I have no idea if any of that was ever published in actual comic book form, there are ebook format files available on the site, there's even a wiki for the shared universe, many different series, and hundreds of issues.
The story itself revolves around a fictional universe where in the 1950's, alien technology was discovered on Earth, using it some scientists bred genetically modified super-humans, and then there was a whole "heroic age" in the second half of the 20th century. That's just the back-story. The story itself is set in the 2020's, after a war between the gods saw Earth cought in the middle and half of humanity, including all super humans, disappeared; and then in the 2010's a new generation of super humans started to emerge. I've only read a few so far, but I'm really impressed with the richness of this fictional universe.
How many more lost treasures are there in the old web, buried beneath layers upon layers of trash social media and corporate blog content designed and engineered to please the algorithms, waiting, hoping, to be discovered at least once more before the servers cease to run or whoever is still paying for the hosting decides it's just not worthit aymore?
In other news, I'm remodeling the site... again! This time much more thoroughly. I've decided to follow my instinct and make it more minimal, like I mentioned a couple posts ago. So if you visit the site in a few days it might look totally different than it looks today. I'll save and share a couple of screenshots of the old site before I replace it for documentation.
