Olden Times

by Jon Sullivan - 2020-02-06 - Stories

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I was playing the old DOS version of the game Master of Orion last night, and thinking of how it used to be the main reason people came to this site.

By the late 90s the game was nearly impossible to find. And since it had come out before the Internet was really a thing there were no handy online strategy guides or walkthroughs like you have now. Worse, the game had a theft security feature where you had to look up something in the paper guide that came with the game. Without it the game wasn't playable, and most people didn't have it. So I just blatantly broke the law and posted everything here. It made the site pretty popular.

These days you can just buy it on Steam, which is how I play it now. They have everything I used to, as well as a great forum for discussing the game. So I see no reason to bring back that page. But it does bring to mind some of the other pages I had that brought in massive traffic.

The Diet Coke page was huge. As a long time fan of that delicious beverage, I tried to have links to every resource I could find. Articles, images, products, collectibles, etc. But pretty quickly I got dragged into the world of the crazy bastards who would later become anti-vax lunatics. Back then their theory was that Big Chemical had conspired with every hospital, lab, and regulatory agency to hide the "fact" that Diet Coke caused brain cancer.

While taunting such morons was fun for a while, they eventually wear you down with relentless and bottomless stupid. So I won't be bringing that page back.

My Ireland vacation page brought in lots of traffic. I suspect mainly due to my site being the only place online that mentioned some of the small towns and archaeological sites. Remember this was before Google. So even if there was a web page, search engines were really bad. They would come for the Diet Coke virtual rumble, and stay for the cool Ireland trip.

I still need to finish my posts on the 2018 Ireland trip. I'll likely make a page for that when I'm done.

Recipes were popular. Since I predated food blogs. But these days the food blogs are way better than anything I'll be doing. So I'm not too motivated to make that a thing here again.

So quiet here now, compared to the 100k+ views a day past. I'm cool with that.

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