There are a number of things that make me sad about those old Alewife Bayou entries. The biggest recurring one is that we don't really have the same channels we used to.

Those pages didn't have a lot of readers but they did have a steady core, and since the world was small back then, the steady core seemed pretty significant. I mean, fifty people or so was a pretty big deal back when the web was tiny. And it was tiny. You could make the round of the twenty or so webjournals and other sites you read, check a couple of news sites, and that was the size of the web. There was not a lot more than that. Or at least that's how it felt.

And sometimes, when you read something on someone else's site and you wanted to say something about it, or tell them you liked it, you'd just do that. You might send them an email. Because, see, email wasn't dead yet. Email hadn't been so ruined by spam, nor become so ubiquitous as a work tool, that people just stopped using it because they'd rather not do the work to filter out the spam (or didn't know how), or because they associated it with work and thus didn't want to use it for fun things. (This latter part is why my mother does not use email for personal correspondence, never has, never will. To her, email will always be something associated with having to file grueling financial reports every week by deadline, and even though she's been retired for a while now, the stigma is still there.)

And of course we all had the reading comprehension and the long attention spans to read a few hundred words at a time of email, let alone compose it. Now, some days, I feel like I'm the last person left who isn't daunted by pages of communication.

(And nowadays, time and attention has gotten so short that my co-workers all basically won't use email unless forced. They'd rather send a message in Teams or Slack, which is faster, but unfortunately, not all vital communications can be reduced to short sentences, y'know? And the decreasing ability to read for context and/or parse entire paragraphs drives me to despair and even occasionally causes me to lose my temper: I told you that, fucker, you just didn't read it.)

Anyway, the point is, those interactions in those Alewife Bayou entries? Where I say something and then report on a response I got to it that same day, or not long after, from someone who read it and comprehended it and bothered to say something about it? Those days are gone. They won't be coming back.

Now the web has almost been destroyed under the weight of various perverse incentives, which is to say money. Money -- or the endless quest for it -- has killed the web. Money is why your search engine doesn't search worth a damn, and why people now write their web pages for SEO instead of usefulness, or even clarity. Money is why all content on the web has been hacked into short, blunt, still-bleeding segments of raw meat, and why usually even then you get two or three chunks in before hitting a barrier. "Subscribe to see the full video!" Subscribe to my foot, fucker.

I mentioned yesterday that my world had gotten very small, and a lot of that is because of this stupidification of everything, because of the destruction of what once promised to be the greatest information and entertainment resource we'd ever invented. Every day I look at DeviantArt and maybe chat with Iain there a bit. I check my email. If I have time -- while I'm out at lunch, twice a week, and need something to read, or maybe while the render machine is doing renders -- I catch up on Bluesky. And that is the entirety of my web universe now.

And you may say, well, that's your own damned fault, isn't it? But where would I go? News sites are paywalled to hell and gone, and anyway I read a physical newspaper every morning and usually these days it's just "yeah, I heard about that on Bluesky yesterday." The magazine, and even the web equivalent of the magazine, are dead. And none of my friends writes about what they're doing or thinking or feeling anymore.

I miss webjournals. I miss when there were only fifty people and they all kept webjournals. I think maybe that's one of the reasons I've dusted off these pages. A small act of defiance. Even if no one sees it but me.

I know you're all out there. I do still get brief glimpses of your lives, when you can spare the time and the energy. I'd like to have more. I look at this archive of people who have disappeared from my life and the lyrics to "Whatever Happened To You" play in my head.

That song plays in my head a lot these days, actually.