An Amazing New World

FWIW, I didn’t pay either of those prices. (It was a quarter at the thrift store that doesn’t have cool cats to play with.)

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, this is a non-fiction, first-person narrative account of what the Internet was like in 1995—published in 1995! IRC chatrooms, newsgroups, MUDs, a forum devoted to the destruction of Barney the Dinosaur… As someone who still remembers the random jumble of characters that comprised his Prodigy e-mail address (PXVQ62C why would you do this to me Prodigy), that’s the kind of thing I can get into.

Information Superhighway Surfboard

I found this artifact of late 90s e-kitsch in the Dollar Bargain, which—hooooooly crap, if you’re ever in north-central Ohio and you’re a very specific kind of weird, you have to check this place out. It’s like someone built a K-mart around the ancient burial grounds of a dozen long-dead dollar stores and decided to sell everything (including, like tilework and pieces of shelving) for 59 cents each. I spent four hours there.

There’s a great write-up on it over at Heather Loves Things, but the long and short of it is that the place looks like this: