[Backup on the Internet Archive]

Okay, so when I started hacking on this webpage jam, I sort of made up the rule in my head that I wasn't going to write appreciations of my close ctrl-c.club friend's pages. Somehow, it felt too easy, too pat. In real life it would be weird to gush over your chum's jeans, wouldn't it?

Well, I just checked ~gome's page about the Jam and realized that it ends in four hours! And then, in a flash, I suddenly realized that I had to say something about their page. The urgency of the jam ending made it all seem so much more important. You know, just like when you're getting up from the table at a cafe with a friend, and you're both about to leave, and you suddenly realize that you need to say something about your friend's watch because you're not going to see them for a while, and you've been admiring the watch this whole time, and ... You gotta say something now. It's like that. And so, without futher ado, here half a dozen things that I love about ~gome' gomepage!

First, that's a great name. Homepage / Gomepage. It cracks me up every time.

Second, the pure visual delight of those backgrounds on the landing page. They have a definite vibe; it's deeply welcoming, cozy, and nature-y. I am sure that Christopher Alexander, of A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building fame, could pin-point exactly what is going on here.

• The hut of the wine keeper
• A hike in the Pays-Bas
• Algonquin: I've hiked in Algonquin. It really looks like this.
• A moon gate in the Netherlands

Third, this whole thing is made by hand. The post "How I update my site" goes in to all the details. It is nice to read some "organic, cage-free, free-range HTML" in this age of huge CMSs and static site generators.

Fourth, the Topical Index is a neat idea and much more intuitive than reading through a list of ALL THE THINGS or navigating by tags. I love books with an annotaed table of contents and that love transfers over to websites. If you're looking for a place to start reading ~gome's writing, start here.

Fifth, the conent. It's so good. There are whole areas (e.g. music) that I'm going to not even mention. Here are the posts that I think about often, like once month or more. These are the posts that I remember off the top of my head.

• Hobby spin up period
• Basic health stack
• I want to see inside other people's homes
• I want to be a budding naturalist
• I have had singing -- Oops, I mentioned music.

Six, the jam. I think that the Web Page Jam is a great tradition because builds it local community. I'm going to participate in it as often as I can. Writing these appreciations has been really cool and got me deeper in to ctrl-c.club than I've been in a long time. It is nice to have a reason to deeply engage with the server. Thanks for running the jam, ~gome.

Seven, the little invitations at the end of every page. I love this was of soliciting feedback and starting a conversation. I can tell that every one is hand crafted for the page where it lives, and that's delightful. Everytime I've followed up on these invitations and reached out to ~gome, I've had a great conversation by e-mail.

[Backup on the Internet Archive]

And now, on to, ~balglaas. This is a very minimalist and mathematical page. The first thing that struck me was the lovely font. It is looks like the whole page rattled out of an dot-matrix printer. Also, look at the way that it totally degrades under image compression. So crunch. Much glitch! I love it! This is the sort of design touch that makes the smolweb weird and wonderful. Also, the favico.png is a little pixel art Bob Dobbs.

This page is heavy on mathematics. As a professional mathematician, it always delights me to see people play with this sort of stuff. And there is just so much to discover. For example, checking out ~balglaas's page introduced me to this weird 6174 fixed-point.

• Here is their app: 6174 for the Kaprekar fixed point.
• You can play with iterated function system fractals here: IFS Fractals.
• Or explore the Collatz conjecture here: Collatz here.

I love this sort of stuff. It's amazing how computers open up a whole world of mathematical exploration. These mathematical hacks must have been fun to put together.

It looks like ~balglaas has more content at their SDF site. If you're interested in mathematics (or clocks!) then check it out.

[Backup on the Internet Archive]

~greymtr's landing page is some peak web minimalism. It feels so "late night hacker"-ish. The author of the page is named Gauthum, from Bangalore, but goes by greymtr online. I think that's a super-slick handle. All the pages have this sweet mandala. It looks really good on a black background and apparently it also looks good on a white background too!

Looking back at the updated.html, it looks like the last time ~greymtr was active was in 2021. They have a blog that runs 2018-08-01 to 2019-08-24. Lots of raw internet blogging here. Very honest and open. There is some reflection on dwm, teaching a class on gimp, and installing Arch.

There is also a very moving post on not being able to fit in. I can remember feeling like that in highschool and undergraduate, and it still gets me from time to time. There is something about being a geek on the internet that makes the real world feel very isolating. It is helpful to know that there are other people out there who feel the same way. If you read this, ~greymtr, please know that you'll eventually fit in somewhere and feel good. Eventually, you become who you are, find your people, and live a happy life. I think my views on fitting in are best summarized by this great quote.

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

On the topic of literature, look at this solid book store haul!

• The Wastelands [ The Dark Tower III ] by Stephen King
• On The Road by Jack Kerouac
• Psychedelics by Aldous Huxley
• Stranger in A Strange Land by Robert A Heinlein
• The Colour Of Magic by Terry Pratchet
• The Aleph and other stories by Jorge Luis Borges
• Discource on Methods and The Meditation by Rene Descartes
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
• The Day of the Triffids by John Whyndham
• Illusions by Richard Bach
• The Salmon Of Doubt by Douglas Adams

I would love to meet anyone who picked out these books.

Thanks for writing, ~greymtr.

[Backup on the Internet Archive]

Let's check out ~captain! This is a nice small page focussed on retro tech. It is amazing that people are breathing life in to old PDAs. I can remember being a kid and thinking that Palm Pilots were the coolest gadget. There was a store down the street that sold them (along with ThinkPads), and I can remember endlessly oggling them. It must have annoyed the shop owners. And yet, no one foresaw the rise of smartphones and ubiquitous computing. I couldn't even fathom the idea of my current phone when I was a kid.

Here are the posts that spoke most to me:

• Self-hosting a household wiki: The post describes setting up a Bookshelf wiki for shared information in the home. This is a great idea. Working on my website requires a bunch of Linux-fu that it would be unreasonable to unload on anyone else. I think that a nice simple wiki personal would be a great asset. My various attempts to get "shared documents" going with my partner have failed, but I'm attracted to a shiny wiki.
• Scripts to automate my day: This is some next level automation. I love it. Lots of it has to do with making external things (weather, food, daycare) more accesible from the computer. I'm not a proficient enough hacker to pull this off, but I admire it.
• I shot the moon: Some lovely astrophotography. Make me want to bust out the telescope which is gathering dust in my closet.

One feature that I really like about this page is the clear RSS link at the bottom. I love RSS and I'm glad to see someone using it on their ctrl-c.club page.

Thanks for writing ~captain.

Random aside: Oooh! I just learned how to use the Internet Archive's screenshot feature. It looks much nicer than the ones that I've been shooting by hand.

[Backup on the Internet Archive]

Let's check out ~FikaMedHasse! This is another lovely corner of ctrl-c.club. Visually, I love all the rounded corners on the boxes. There is a blog and a journal (more of a micro-blog). On my self-hosted Hugo-based site, I've always struggled with the way that the list views such as /notes/ look. It's not visually clear where one post ends and another begins, or even that one should click through. Let's check out ~FikaMedHasse's approach of making these clickable rounded corner boxes. Each post in the blog looks like a big clickable button!

Here are some blog posts that I appreciated for their honesty:

• Religion: thoughts on switching for atheism to "who knows" ideology
• Life Update: switching gears from summer work to school, thinking about the future, and an appreciation of their place in the world

It turns out that ~FikaMedHasse switched over to The Dark Side Gemini.

I've moved to gemini, this is now unmaintained and shall remain here as a relic of my kinda cringe past might continue here as well soon if i have the energy to write a program that syncs gemini to html files

The capsule is quite a bit more compact than the webpage. Some ASCII art, a brief introduction, a little bit of now-page like content, and then a list of wants. There is a wonderful "I Want To" list. These are some great wants! The ones that speak to me are:

• mananage my own time
• lay down and rest underneath a linden tree beside a small river
• read in a big armchair beneath a warm blanket with a cup of hot tea while the rain pours down
• go roadbiking in the countryside
• go somewhere i've never been
• go camping in summer
• reconnect with old friends
• write something interesting
• stargaze without light pollution

 # I want to
 mananage my own time 
 read a good fantasy book 
 lay down and rest underneath a linden tree beside a small river
 see my family more often 
 have an actual choice
 travel the world 
 study chemistry
 read in a big armchair beneath a warm blanket with a cup of hot tea while the rain pours down
 outside
 study cybersecurity
 see my friends more often
 discover new music 
 listen to more shoegaze
 sleep more 
 get up when I want, not when I have to 
 go roadbiking in the countryside 
 go somewhere i've never been 
 go camping in summer 
 reconnect with old friends 
 write something interesting
 get a job
 be economically independent
 listen to bird noises
 hug someone
 make information free and accessible 
 change something 
 be less vauge in what I want 
 make a cool open-source program
 stargaze without light pollution 
 do more hobby chemistry
 care less about what I think 
 lower my fucking expectations
 plant a tree 

[Backup on the Internet Archive]

Let's start off with a random page. I looked at the member list and found ~zote. They have a blog with entries ranging from from 2021-07-27 to 2023-11-10. All the posts are chill and stream of conciousness. Very raw internet writing. Three entries that stood out to me:

• listening to music: a nice little reminder about electro swing (a wonderful genre).
• retro systems and the fun to be had: discovering iris, bbj, and old-school bbs.
• adventuring around the internet: the slow shift from gaming to linux.

The posts always end with enigmatic precepts. They seem unrelated to the post content, and I don't know if they're quoted from somewhere else. Anyway, this one (quoted in "adventuring") really spoke to me. I don't think that I make enough space in my life for rest.

Precept Three: ‘Always Be Rested’.
Fighting and adventuring take their toll on your body. When you rest, your body strengthens and repairs itself. The longer you rest, the stronger you become.

Also, I like the Gemini-like link styling. It gives the page a very strong smol web vibe. Interestingly, gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~zote/ has rather different content.

Thanks for writing ~zote.

This week, I will look at other user's ctrl-c.club pages, and write little appreciations. So much of our time online is spent consuming media, but we don't often write about we like the stuff that we consume. And most web authors' lives are quite quiet, you never really hear what people like about your work. So, I want to build a bit of community and write about what makes me smile on other people's pages.

• What was interesting?
• Why did I like it?
• What do I want to imitate?

This page is my contribution to ~gome's Webpage Jam 2024.