(I work at the MIA now, long after the creation of the above page. I found it on a fileserver in a directory along the lines of "old sites". Very ~)

# So tilde.club…

  Kind of fun, right? It's been a while since I've sat down to write
  something on my website, and now I'm in a caché insider's club of
  tongue-in-cheek retro web folks. I guess a good place to start would be
  thinking back on the web that's been mine over the years.

  I pestered my parents to get dial-up. I was probably in 6th grade when we
  did. Mom made me take a class at the library first, so I went there a few
  times, browsed around, asked the teacher when I had a question.

  The next thing I remember is getting way into a MUD. I ended up joining a 'clan' or
  two, chatting to people, spending $20 on a 'magic pocket', having a crush on
  someone who was probably a young female(?). The only
  trace I could find.

  I don't remember the name of the MUD client I used. It started with R. The
  first guess was 'Rasputin', but that's wrong. It ran on Mac OS
  9? Anyway, you could write perl scripts and bind them to keys. It saved some
  of the trudgery of pressing `n, n, w, e, s…` to move around all the time. I
  wrote a minimmaly successful regex loop that tried to keep me on the road
  while 'running trade routes' with a wagon through the ASCII forest. This
  passed about 8th grade.

  [Editor's note: Rapscallion]

  Next I fell to blogging and the early web. I tried out MT. Didn't like it. I did like Textpattern. I wrote my posts in
  Textile. Wordpress came along, it sucked. I took a beginning web class as a
  freshman. We learned some html, some javascript, some tables and framesets.
  We would have learned ASP, but the teacher couldn't keep his IIS server
  running. Mostly we played Pinball on the windows machines. I sat next to a
  sophmore who told me about Blackstar.

  By now I used bloglines (later google reader, now stringer) to read varying
  amounts of RSS. I kept up to date with god knows who and what. Through here I
  remember The Morning News. Through that, 'Gary Benchley: Rock Star'.

  I wanted to learn to program, but didn't like php. I downloaded and printed
  out a 'learn C in the time it takes to clip your fingernails' and kept it in
  a cheap green folder. I still haven't learned C. I went with Ruby.

  Somewhere textpattern turned into textdrive. I spent $200 of my small savings
  for 'lifetime' web hosting. I ran Instiki, through CGI, and wrote my school
  papers. I logged in from the school library to print them out. Instiki used
  textile too.

  I bought a domain. Instiki put me front and center when the same guy made
  Rails. The summer after high school I started working for a small web
  design firm who'd also just jumped rails bandwagon. (From ASP).

  So that's that. I let my first domain lapse,
  which I'm on the fence about. I'm glad my uninformed rambling is gone. Though
  it's
  not gone very far. ('Station 11' was helfway up the lift at the ski
  mountain where we visited my grandparents each winter.) My claim to internet
  fame is an absolute badass listed me in
  the sidebar of his blog. His arctic
  exploring partner commented on a post I made recommending a book. (The
  Metaphysical Club). He said if I ever wanted to go to the arctic, get in
  touch…

  Can that happen on the web today? 5 tilde club members got drinks last night
  . On the way out the door, ~kronick, moving to Oakland, joked he should on
  ~club if anyone had a place to rent. I hope he finds one.

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# Minnesota ~s met each other today
  I wanted to make the photos into ASCII art. It didn't work.

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# I made an atom feed of tilde club user's .plan files:
  tilde.club/~kjell/tildes/plans.atom
  check out ~kjell/public_html/tildes/Makefile # task plans.atom