. . : : z i n e : : . .

Welcome to October.

-- ELPiS October 2025

Table of contents:

1. ASCII Art is an art born from limitations

2. Brown Doesn't Exist!

3. Doodling, or scribbling while waiting for an idea

4. Web 1.0 Fossils

5. AI devoured the internet, but choked on a Nissan Leaf muffler.

6. Epilogue

ASCII Art is an art born from limitations.

If you've ever written on an 80085 calculator (boobs), or drawn pixel art in a notebook, you've already joined the ranks of these digital painters. But let's start at the beginning - long before computers, people were already creating masterpieces from letters, symbols, and even typewriters.

At the beginning of the 20th century, when the Internet was as distant as common sense in politics, there was a phenomenon called "print art". Newspapers and magazines decorated texts with intricate patterns of letters, creating ornaments, portraits, and even full-fledged scenes. It was a kind of ASCII Art, only on paper, and it appeared due to the limitations of printing houses, which could not afford the luxury of full-fledged illustrations.

One of the most famous early examples of text art can be considered the so-called "typewriter drawings" - paintings created with a typewriter. People obsessed with boredom or creativity (and sometimes both) have been typing repeating symbols to recreate faces, buildings, and even famous works of art for a hundred years now. Imagine someone reading your accounting report and hiding the profile of Alexander the Great between the tables.

But let's move on to the digital world. The real heyday of ASCII Art came in the 1960s, when programmers, deprived of graphical interfaces, began to have fun with what they had - ASCII characters. Instead of Photoshop, they had a space, an asterisk, and a colon. However, for some, this was enough to invent an entire genre. Never mind where taxpayers' money went, sometimes naive, stupid things at first glance can later become something great, important, popular, and even valuable. Such experiments go down in history on par with space flights or the invention of gunpowder.

One of these pioneers was Kenneth Knowlton, who developed the technique of “computer mosaic” in 1966. He and his colleagues created portraits using symbols of varying density to simulate shadows and light. In an era when computers were the size of refrigerators, such things seemed like real magic.

In the 1970s, ASCII Art penetrated deeper into popular culture, including thanks to the emergence of ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet. Researchers and geeks exchanged ASCII images in emails, because attaching pictures was as easy as transporting an elephant in a minibus. Yes, yes, graphic file formats already existed, as did computer graphics, but still in limited circles, in rare films (Star Wars, for example).

And in the 1980s, ASCII Art became an integral part of BBS (Bulletin Board Systems). When the internet was slow and modems made sounds like mechanical demons, images had to be text-based. Hacker group logos, pixelated skulls, and all sorts of cyberpunk aesthetics appeared on users’ screens. Some images became digital tattoos of sorts, symbols of underground communities. Some BBSs featured animated ASCII scenes that slowly loaded line by line, like neon signs on night streets.

Teletext also played its role in the development of text art. In the 1980s and 1990s, teletext was used not only to display news and TV programs, but also for more complex graphic compositions. Simple blocks and symbols formed recognizable logos and images, creating aesthetically pleasing screens even with a limited number of colors and pixels.

Various information boards, such as those used at train stations, airports and stock exchanges, also contributed to the development of ASCII Art. Limited in resolution and color palette, they became a kind of digital canvas. Some craftsmen even managed to program animations on these boards, turning rows of symbols into moving objects.

The use of ASCII art in web design can often be seen in the Small Web, an interesting phenomenon. Small Web is a movement aimed at creating minimalist, independent and lightweight sites, often contrasted with the overloaded modern Internet. ASCII art fits this concept perfectly: it doesn’t require complex graphic libraries, loads instantly even on weak devices, and conveys a sense of nostalgia. Many geeks decorate their websites with ASCII logos, stylized titles, and decorative elements reminiscent of early computer interfaces. But why? Perhaps it’s the aesthetics of minimalism, the desire to escape the standardized design of modern websites, or simply a love for the era when every pixel was worth its weight in gold.

Geeks often stylize their websites to look like old operating systems or make them look like MS-DOS program interfaces. This is not just a matter of aesthetics, but also an attempt to recreate the spirit of the early computer era, when users had a deeper understanding of how technology works. Such design conveys a sense of control, functionality, and purity that is missing from modern web pages overloaded with animation and advertising. It is also a way to emphasize their belonging to an alternative Internet culture that values knowledge, experimentation, and autonomy.

Modern software that uses ASCII art can be found in a variety of areas. For example, terminal utilities such as neofetch use ASCII logos to display system information. Retro gaming programs, banner generators, and demoscene projects often include ASCII graphics as part of the interface or screensavers. Even in modern chats, ASCII art lives on in the form of all sorts of bots and meme generators. Years ago, this could be seen in the description of computer games, or at the very start before the game loads, in tutorials, or in various hacks and .bat files for games.

Famous computer viruses also left their mark on the history of ASCII art. For example, the "Casino" virus for MS-DOS displayed a slot machine on the screen, and the "QWalker" virus drew an animated man walking across the screen. In an era when hackers were more interested in creative expression than data theft, many viruses were accompanied by ASCII signatures of their creators - a kind of graffiti of the digital world.

The demoscene that began in the 1980s has always had a strong focus on ASCII art. Text demos featured complex drawings, while graphic demos featured ASCII elements combined with cheesy pixel effects. In the 1990s, ASCII contests became popular, where artists competed to create the most complex and detailed text images. Even today, such contests are held at demoparties such as Revision and Evoke.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) became the home of ASCII art, text-based RPGs, and all sorts of character-based entertainment. IRC channels featured entire emoji battles, complex ASCII drawings that appeared line by line, and even automated bots creating ASCII animations. In AD&D-based text RPGs, characters were often described using ASCII characters, and battle scenes and maps were generated directly in chats.

ASCII art exists outside of computers and typewriters. Drawings in ASCII notebooks can be called an analogue of digital ASCII art. Schoolchildren and students draw diagrams, figures of crosses and zeros, signatures in the style of hacker logos and even complex drawings in the margins of notebooks. It's like an offline version of the same aesthetics that later migrated to the world of computers. Fun fact about offline ASCII art: Kevin Mitnick, one of the most famous hackers in history, continued to use ASCII art even from prison. During his imprisonment, he sent letters in which he used text emoticons to convey emotions, remaining true to the spirit of the digital age. For him, it was one of the ways to stay in touch with the community, which saw him not just as a cybercriminal, but as a legend and a symbol of freedom of information.

Text emoticons have become an important part of digital communication. They appeared back in the 1980s and gradually developed into a full-fledged system of expressing emotions. Simple 🙂 and 😉 evolved into complex variations such as ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ and (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻. Eventually, many of them were included in the encoding tables, becoming an official part of Unicode. Now they exist alongside regular characters, preserving the spirit of ASCII art in every chat, letter and comment.

We can’t help but mention the beloved or hated Doom. In 1993, when ID Software released the legendary shooter, ASCII artists began recreating monster and weapon sprites in text format. This was not just entertainment, but a way to adapt art to the limitations of terminals, and not only.

Gopher is a network protocol that was an alternative to the early web in the 1990s. Unlike modern sites, Gopher pages were and are pure text, without decoration or images, which made ASCII art the only way to visually decorate. Many Gopher servers still use ASCII logos, frames, and even small illustrations to stand out from the monotony of text menus. The popularity of ASCII in the Gopher environment is explained by the minimalism and technical limitations that forced users to be creative, working exclusively with text.

In the 1990s, ASCII Art finally took hold on the Internet. It decorated forums, chats, and even websites, where instead of banners, crookedly formatted faces greeted visitors. If you had an email back then, there was a good chance that your signature had a small smiley, a boat, or a cat.

But don’t think that ASCII Art is just a geeky pastime. Artists like Paul Smith (who, while suffering from cerebral palsy, created incredible paintings on a typewriter) proved that art is possible even in the most limited conditions. His works are striking in their attention to detail and patience, because it took him weeks to create one painting.

With the development of the Internet, ASCII Art became a meme. Remember the same “LOLCAT” or endless variations on the theme “( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)”. This style is alive and well in the form of emojis, good old "¯\\_(ツ)_/¯" faces, and even modern NFTs (yes, someone has already managed to sell ASCII art for crypto).

But let's not forget the dark side of history. ASCII Art was not only used for fun. In hacker culture, it was a way to indicate belonging to a certain group. Some attacks were accompanied by ASCII skulls warning of an imminent digital catastrophe. If you saw a giant letter "H" made of zeros and ones on your screen in the 90s, you knew you were hacked.

And what about modern typewriters? Even in the 2020s, there are enthusiasts who print text paintings. Some use them to create works with the most subtle transitions between light and shadow. After all, who needs Photoshop and Illustrator if you have a good old keyboard and a ton of patience?

Today, ASCII Art is everywhere. It appears in advertising, website design, games, and even street art. It can be seen in Linux terminals, on T-shirts, and on the walls of abandoned buildings. Some artists still create huge canvases made only of symbols.

Operating systems have also contributed to the popularization of ASCII Art. In the world of Unix and Linux, ASCII graphics were used for terminal splash screens and program logos like neofetch. Even older versions of Windows included examples of ASCII art hidden in the command line.

I can’t help but mention one interesting and popular genre - ASCII comics.
ASCII comics are a unique genre in which stories are conveyed exclusively using text symbols. They appeared in the early years of the Internet, when graphic capabilities were limited, but users still wanted to share stories and visual art. Such comics were often published in e-mail newsletters, on forums, and in .txt files circulating among computer enthusiasts.

One of the most famous ASCII comics is "Dinosaur Comics" by Canadian author Ryan North. Although the original illustrations were created in regular graphics, enthusiasts transferred them to ASCII, making them accessible even in text environments. This showed that ASCII can be not only a means of decoration, but also a full-fledged tool for storytelling.

Another example is the classic "NetHack Guidebook" and related ASCII comics illustrating funny and deadly moments in text roguelike games. Players used standard game symbols to create scenes with characters, monsters, and traps, adding comments in comic style.

Many ASCII comics were released in ANSI art format and distributed on BBS networks. Some of them were dedicated to cyberpunk themes, mocked corporate culture, or simply depicted everyday funny situations. They became a kind of digital graffiti, reflecting the mood of the hacker community.

In IRC chats, ASCII comics were often used for comedy mini-scenes. Users created characters from standard characters and acted out short stories in real time, using IRC command lines to simulate movement and interaction.

Today, ASCII comics are experiencing a renaissance in small online communities specializing in retro culture and low-tech art. They can be found on Gopher networks, on forums dedicated to old computers, and among programmers who like to joke about their coding adventures with the help of minimalist text scenes.

But most importantly, ASCII Art remains a reminder that art can exist even in the most unexpected forms. When you only have text at hand, but you want to draw, you can always make a portrait, an anarchic slogan, or at least a sad smiley from letters. And this is art that will never become outdated.

Brown Doesn't Exist!
A Satire for old fart webmasters, or a color that doesn't exist

Hello, web bros. Have you ever considered that all our work is a combination of light? We drag pixels back and forth, write `bgcolor="#000000"`, argue about whose design is prettier, and ultimately, we run into the biggest lie in color theory. A lie that was forced upon us. A lie called "brown."

Yes, I'm stating it outright: brown doesn't exist.
It's not spectral, not fundamental, not basic. It's a fiction.

Want to argue? Okay, let's look at the facts—but with a generous dose of dark humor.

A Little Science (But Old-School)

When we say "color," most people think of a rainbow. And a rainbow is a spectrum, scattered across frequencies. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. And that's it.

Where's brown?
That's right, nowhere.

If you disperse light through a prism, you can detect spectral lines. Red? Yes. Yellow? Yes. Green? Yes. Even violet, which has always been considered "magical." But there's no "brown-ray" there.

Why? Because brown isn't a pure spectral color. It's a mixture.

How "brown" is brewed in the kitchen of vision

The secret is simple. Brown is created by taking:

* Red (the base, like meat in borscht).
* Yellow (a layer for "warmth").
* Sometimes green (for dirt, sorry, "depth").

And simmer all this in a pan called "contrast with white light."

Because if you simply mix red and green, you get something like yellow or swampy. And to make the eye say "oh, brown," you need to lower the brightness. That is, make this cocktail dim, as if the lightbulb were unscrewed halfway.

Why does this infuriate physicists?

Physicist in the audience:
- "Brown doesn't exist!"

Designer on a Mac:
- "But my latte is that shade."

Physicist:
- "It's a trick of perception. You see dark orange."

Designer:
- "Don't you dare insult me!"

Webmaster from 1999:
- "Guys, can I just put `bgcolor="#A52A2A"` in HTML and you both can go away?"

The Windows 95 palette and eternal horror

Remember the glorious days when we had a 256-color palette?
GIFs crackled, JPEGs looked like soap, and websites were dominated by brick-like backgrounds.

Well, that palette didn't have a proper "brown." There were reddish, greenish, and orangey hues. But that warm "chocolate" color was missing. It was simulated through dithering: a red dot, a green dot, a black dot. And on a CRT monitor, the eye itself "assembled" this mess into what everyone called "brown."

The joke is, it's not a color. It's a glitch.

Brown and HTML

In HTML 3.2, we had a great set: `bgcolor`, `link`, `vlink`, `alink`. And then someone decided: "Let's make the background brown!"

And then the code was born:

```html
<BODY BGCOLOR="BROWN">
```

But surprise: it looked different in different browsers.

* In IE4, the background was a dull red.
* In Netscape Navigator, it was brick-red.
* In Opera, it looked like someone had spilled coffee on the monitor.

And all these "browns" were actually different because there was no standard. That's how webmasters learned: brown isn't a color, it's chaos.

The Eye That Lies

Why do we see brown at all?

Because we have three types of cones in our eyes: red, green, and blue. They combine signals, and the brain interprets this as a specific color.

When light that should be "orange" but with reduced brightness and contrast hits the retina, the brain decides, "Okay, let it be brown."

So brown exists only in the head.
Not a single photon in the universe carries the "I am brown" flag.

Black humor in brown tones

To be honest, brown is nature's joke.
– Red says: "I am passion, I am blood, I am energy."
– Yellow says: "I am the sun, I am light, I am joy."
– Green says: "I am life, I am grass, I am hope."
– And together they say: "Hello, we are shit."

And all this is because the brain decided: "Well, it's a bit dark, let's call it brown."

Brown as a symbol of shitty code

Why do webmasters of the old internet love to joke about brown? Because it perfectly describes what we did in the 2000s.

* Code is shit.
* Tables are nested up to the 7th level.
* Brick background.
* MIDI music.

* Text in orange on black.

And so this entire "design" merged into a single shade in the user's mind—brown. The color of crappy code.

Why brown doesn't sell

Marketers know: brown is bad for buttons. The red "Buy" button works. The green "Subscribe" button works too. But what about brown?

The brown button screams:
– "Don't click, it's dull."
– "This is a bug, not a call-to-action."
– "Better close this tab before it's too late."

And users listen.

Brown as a philosophy

Brown is a symbol that reality doesn't match expectations.

We think: "chocolate" But we get "dirt under our fingernails."

We think: "Natural, cozy." But it turns out "dull, lifeless." We want a "stylish earthy tone," but the website comes up with a "rural cesspool effect."

The irony is that brown isn't a color, it's a perception diagnosis.

The scientific formula "brown = fake"

Let's put it all together in a formula for webmasters:

Brown = (Red + Yellow [+ Green?]) x LowBrightness + HighContrast

So, mathematically: brown isn't a new color, but a combination of known colors, trimmed in brightness.

That's why it's not in the spectrum. That's why it can't be isolated with a laser. That's why scientists laugh when designers say, "We have a new palette, it has 5 shades of brown."

The Old Internet and Eternal Denial

Webmasters of the 90s understood a simple truth:
there's only a white background and black text. Everything else is just toys.

That's why old websites have survived the decades: minimalism is immortal. And websites with "brown backgrounds" died.

Conclusion: brown doesn't exist.

So, friends:
– It's not in the spectrum.
– It's not in the Windows palette.
– It always looked different in HTML.
– In my head, it's just a dull orange.

Brown isn't a color. Brown is a joke on our eyes.

And if you, as a true webmaster, want to be closer to the truth, forget about brown. Use a white background and black text. And leave the rest to the designers who believe in "warm colors."

Doodling, or scribbling while waiting for an idea

There's a special state familiar to anyone who's ever tried to wait for a thought. You're sitting with a blank sheet of paper or an open editor in front of you, and it feels like an idea is about to strike. But it's slow. Then your hand automatically picks up a pen or pencil and begins to draw something. Lines, circles, squares, stick figures, spirals, flowers, mazes. All of this is called "doodles"—scribbles that appear not for the sake of art, not for a purpose, but for the very act of waiting.

The word "doodles" usually carries a connotation of disdain. It's like nonsense, scribbling. But this very "scribbling" miraculously helps the brain. It doesn't distract, as it might seem; on the contrary, it maintains attention. There are studies in psychology that show that people who doodle while listening to information remember it better. It's as if the hand takes some of the energy the brain can't contain and releases it in lines and patterns.

And here it's appropriate to recall the old internet. In the late 90s and early 2000s, every other homepage looked like a doodle in code: background GIF patterns, blinking buttons, visitor counters, tables within tables, text scuttling in all directions. This wasn't a "finished design"; it was more like a game, a collection of scribbles on a screen. But it was in this chaotic energy that culture was born.

Doodling as a Form of Anticipation

Waiting is a painful thing. The modern world doesn't like waiting: pages load instantly, videos start immediately, any information arrives in seconds. But once upon a time, everything was different. You opened a website and waited for the first bits of images to appear. A special meditation was born in this anticipation.

Doodling is a visual expression of that same anticipation. You wait for the thought to take shape, for the idea to fall into place. To avoid the emptiness of a blank canvas, your hand begins to draw. This isn't a drawing for the sake of a result, but a process that has value in itself.

You could say that doodling is like the old "Under Construction" pages. Webmasters would put a blinking little man with a shovel there, warning, "The page will appear soon." But the page itself didn't exist yet. There was only a scribbled placeholder. And this placeholder had its charm: it promised that something would grow there. So it is with doodling: it is the promise of a future thought.

The Difference Between Doodling, Sketching, and Art Therapy

To understand the nature of doodling, you need to compare it to other forms of drawing.

Sketching is the practice of sketching. A person trains their hand and eye, learning to see proportions, lines, and perspective. Even if they draw quickly, they do it for the sake of skill. There is a goal—improvement.

Art therapy is the conscious use of drawing as a psychological method. People express emotions, traumas, and hidden states through images. It's a healing practice, its purpose is to relieve stress and process experiences.

Doodling, on the other hand, is different in that it has no purpose. It happens spontaneously, automatically, without intention. It's the free wandering of the hand across a surface.

Compared to the internet, sketching is like a carefully designed website with well-thought-out navigation, while art therapy is like a blog where the author pours out their soul. Doodling, on the other hand, is a page with randomly pasted GIF animations and flashing colorful banners, all meaningless but creating a playful atmosphere.

Personal experience: scribbles in the margins

I remember sitting in school during class. The teacher was explaining the material, and I was drawing squares in the corner of my notebook. First small ones, then larger ones, and then I connected them with lines. Sometimes it turned into a maze, sometimes a diagram, sometimes an abstract pattern. I wasn't trying to draw anything, but suddenly, after half an hour, I saw it: it was almost an architectural drawing.

Years later, when I started making websites, I realized these scribbles resembled page layouts. Rectangles—like future blocks. Lines—like menus. Even if I didn't plan it, doodling suggests form when you least expect it.

About 25 years ago, while waiting for websites to load on my old Pentium, I sometimes drew patterns in a notebook. At first, just for fun, but then these patterns became prototypes for website frames. That's how "meaningless" scribbles turned into ideas.

This time, these "scribbles in the margins" inspired me to write this article.

The Philosophy of Emptiness and Expectation

Doodles teach us to live with this emptiness. You seem to be "doing nothing," but at the same time, your hand is busy, your brain continues to work, and in this pause, a thought gradually crystallizes.

It's akin to how, on the old internet, we waited for images to load line by line. First, the top bar would appear, then a little lower, then another. We knew: sooner or later, the image would appear. But we waited, and in this anticipation, a special value was born. Today, when images open instantly, we've lost this meditative part.

Why do I so often return to the old internet analogy?

Websites of the late 90s were chaotic. There were no design rules, strict typography, or UX research. People just did what they could. They inserted animations, backgrounds, frames, tables. Sometimes all of it.

It looked wild, but there was a sense of freedom in that wildness.

Scientists have long noticed that doodling reduces stress levels. A person who doodles mechanically relaxes. Their attention doesn't wander, but rather, it's held within a framework.

Nostalgia is similar to doodling

Interestingly, nostalgia itself is also a form of doodling, only in memory. We recall old websites, old programs, old computers. These memories are often practically useless to us, but they provide a sense of rhythm, warmth.

I remember visiting various Geocities-style pages. They featured flashing banners, counters, GIF ornaments. Essentially, it was doodling in code: people played with possibilities, creating chaos for fun. Today, everything has become too regular and sterile. But sometimes, those very "scribbles" that once created individuality are missing.

Sometimes, doodling ceases to be just doodling. Some develop their own style. Images are born from random lines, entire worlds from scraps. Thus, school doodles in the margins can evolve into designer handwriting.

The old internet also traveled this path. What began as a chaotic collection of pictures and frames gradually evolved into web design as a profession. But the roots of this art lie in those first scribbles. We often underestimate the small side processes. We think: work is important, and scribbles are trivial. But it is precisely in these "trivialities" that freshness is born. It is a practice of anticipation. It is a bridge between emptiness and intention.

While sketching and art therapy require intention, doodling is free. It reminds us of childhood play, of the time when we simply drew with sticks in the sand, without thinking about the result.

In emptiness there is the possibility for something new to be born. We still draw in the margins, draw lines in notebooks, and color in the squares in our workbooks. Because this is our little form of freedom - the freedom to wait, the freedom to play, the freedom not to have a goal.

Web 1.0 Fossils

In the early 1990s, the internet was like the Wild West, only instead of cowboys, there were bearded programmers, and instead of revolvers, there were modems screaming at 56 kilobits per second. People were exploring the digital space like prospectors exploring gold-bearing streams, and everyone wanted to snatch their piece of the digital El Dorado. Against this backdrop, GeoCities emerged—the first true utopia of mass online self-expression, a portal to an era where anyone could become the god of their own page. And while modern users, spoiled by the neat grids and pastel colors of Instagram, look at the websites of those years and gasp, for the enthusiasts of that era, it was pure ecstasy of freedom. Yes, it was visual chaos, a design nightmare, the aesthetics of a candy factory exploding, but it was precisely this madness that held the meaning—for the first time in history, millions of people had the opportunity to scream into the void, and the void responded.

GeoCities wasn't born as a corporate shark project, but as an experiment by two dreamers, David Bonnett and John Rezner. They envisioned a digital version of a real city, where every resident would have their own street, house, nameplate, and colorful curtains made of GIFs. Initially, it was called Beverly Hills Internet—a name that sounded like something out of a cyberpunk poster for housewives. But by 1995, when the world had fully descended into hypertext fever, they renamed the project GeoCities. The site offered each user one to two megabytes of server space where they could create their own personal temple of taste (or bad taste). You were assigned a plot of land in a themed "district"—"Hollywood" for movie buffs, "Silicon Valley" for programmers, "Colosseum" for sports enthusiasts. It all looked like a cross between SimCity and a carnival of idiocy, but people loved it. After all, no one said the internet had to be pretty. It was meant to be yours.

GeoCities became something of a digital Babylon. Thousands of new users flocked there every day, hanging their pixelated signs, copying JavaScript animations, embedding hit counters, and MIDI melodies that blared from speakers. Websites glittered with starry sky backgrounds, animated hearts, and glitter. It was an eye-catching internet, but there was something genuine and touching about it. People built their pages like teenagers decorating a notebook with stickers, with no thought for harmony—just for the brightness. This aesthetic had a vibrant pulse of freedom, straightforward and playful. No one knew the word "usability," and certainly no one thought about "UX design." The website was an extension of the individual, not a showcase. GeoCities was like a city where every apartment in the building was wallpapered in a different color, and all the neighbors were on first-name terms.

However, where the masses see beauty, professionals see disaster. By the mid-1990s, GeoCities had acquired a new label: "visual nightmare." Web designers, considering themselves the architects of a new world, regarded these pages with the same horror a Roman patrician might have felt at graffiti in a back alley. They called it "illuminated monstrosity." GeoCities' webmasters ignored all principles of composition, logic, and aesthetics. They could combine acid-green text on a red background, insert a GIF of flying comets, and caption it in Comic Sans with the words "Welcome to my homepage!!!" For designers who dreamed of turning the internet into a gallery of rationality, this was tantamount to an insult. GeoCities became synonymous with barbarism and aesthetic decay. Web designers hated it as passionately as rockers hate pop bands.

But while the professionals were grinding their teeth, GeoCities was growing by leaps and bounds. By 1997, millions of users had registered. The company took its site public, and then, as usual, it was gobbled up by a big shark—Yahoo!—for $3.5 billion. This was the peak, the golden age, the moment when GeoCities became the king of the internet jungle. And then everything went down the well-worn corporate path—advertising, restrictions, paid upgrades, formalization. Yahoo! ripped the soul out of this anarchic monster and replaced it with a neat logo. Freedom became a business plan, creativity a commodity, and websites a monotonous mess. People started leaving. Some went to MySpace, some to Blogger, some simply turned off their modems and went for a beer, because nothing was the same anymore.

On October 26, 2009, GeoCities shut down. Or rather, they killed it. Yahoo! shut down its servers and wiped millions of pages. Imagine waking up to find your house, your street, and your entire city gone—all that remained was a 404 desert. For the generation that grew up in the '90s, it felt like cultural genocide. They lost not just files, but an entire era, where every pixel was a piece of their youth. GeoCities died, but its spirit lingered in the memories and archives of enthusiasts who managed to salvage at least some of that digital chaos. Today, these fragments of the early internet look like cave paintings—primitive, childish, yet alive.

From a design perspective, GeoCities was truly a disaster. But from a cultural perspective, it was The apotheosis of human creativity. People created websites not for likes, not for SEO, but simply for the sake of existence. So that their page would exist in this new world, like a house on a world map. And even if the text spilled beyond the table boundaries, and the links glowed a poisonous blue—this was real. Designers, armed with experience and color theory, saw this as bad taste. But users saw it as a celebration. And maybe they were right. After all, aesthetics is just a contract, and GeoCities was a violation of it.

If you think about it, the professionals' hatred of GeoCities is easily explained: it proved that the internet could exist without designers. That a person without a graphics degree could build a world, albeit crooked and shaky, but their own. It was ugly, but alive.

Nostalgia for it began almost immediately after its death. In the 2010s, the website Geocities-izer appeared, transforming any modern page into a neon mutant from 1996. Back then, you could open a page and realize there was a real person behind it. Not a brand, not a startup, not a blogger, but a person with strange dreams and a GIF of a dancing banana.
But the world has changed. The internet has become too big, too serious. It's ceased to be a game. Corporations have turned it into an office building with a reception desk and cameras. No more acidic backgrounds, no more blinking stars, no more "Welcome to my homepage." Now design must be clean, logical, neutral. Every page is like flavorless toothpaste. This is Web 2.0—sterile, shiny, and empty. But beneath this polish lies ordinariness and boredom. That's why, decades later, we still remember GeoCities like an old punk concert—loud, dirty, but real.

Web designers hated GeoCities because it reminded them that design is not power, but a means. That form is not law, but a tool. That bad taste is sometimes closer to the truth than a perfect layout. Because when a user creates a website themselves, they do it not for beauty, but for connection. GeoCities was the collective cry of humanity, realizing for the first time that it could speak without intermediaries. And this cry was heard!

Today, only ruins remain of GeoCities—archives, fan copies, research. But they are like ancient artifacts that future archaeologists will examine in digital folklore museums. After all, GeoCities wasn't just a hosting service. It was a symbol of an era when the internet was still wild, honest, and free. When anyone could be anyone—even if their page looked like a WordArt nightmare.

And maybe one day, when the internet tires of its glossiness again, people will return to these roots. They'll open Notepad again, type "<html>", insert a blinking text, and set up a visitor counter. Because deep down, we all long for that temporary madness, where there were no algorithms, but there was a feeling of living in an endless city built of pixels and dreams.

GeoCities wasn't just a hosting service—it was a portal to a new civilization, where the laws of taste ceased to apply. But to understand why the websites of that time looked so kitschy, as if they were created by a designer after three liters of coffee and a nervous breakdown, we need to look back to the Web 1.0 era—a time when the internet was young, naive, and completely ignorant of the concept of "concept." We're used to thinking that digital aesthetics should be clean, minimalist, and fonts should be chosen based on contrast and proportion. But back then, none of that was necessary. Web 1.0 resembled a child's drawing: crooked, sincere, and full of strange details that make today's designers' eyes twitch ;=)

These websites were like the imprint of a primitive culture, only instead of cave paintings, they had GIFs of dancing skeletons and stars blinking against an acid-green sky. Why? Because it was beautiful. Not according to the rules of the Bauhaus, but according to the rules of the heart. Back then, every user felt like an artist. No one studied composition; people just went and did it. They decorated their pages like a Christmas tree, unaware that it already had three garlands, two blinking text boxes, and falling snow made of JavaScript.

There were several reasons for this visual chaos. The first was sheer amateurism. Between 1993 and 1995, the internet went from a university tool to a public domain. And then it turned out that millions of people, newly exposed to HTML, had no idea how to use it. Back then, books said, "Create your own website—it's easy!" And indeed, it was easy. Just open a notepad, write a couple of tags, add an image, and there you have it—your digital universe. But no one included taste or a sense of harmony. As a result, the websites looked like every color of the rainbow had gone crazy at once.

The second reason was the lack of content. Many GeoCities personal pages were devoted to the most touching and useless topics: a favorite cat, a collection of icons, musings on the meaning of life, fan galleries of the actress from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." When you have nothing to say, you start compensating for it with embellishment. This is how animated backgrounds, GIFs with shimmering hearts, and text that shimmered like a gasoline slick appeared. It was the digital equivalent of glitter on a cheap postcard: meaningless, but it sparkled.

The third reason was the paucity of tools. Back then, there was no CSS or proper editors. Everything was done by hand. Tables served as markup, images were inserted piecemeal, and anyone who wanted to center text turned the code into a mess of <FONT> and <CENTER> tags. Even if you wanted to make it beautiful, the result often looked like a cry for help. But that was part of the beauty. The web was imperfect, and therefore alive.

And finally, and most importantly, Web 1.0 was a time when no one thought about brands. No one tried to "retain users" or "increase engagement." This was an internet of enthusiasts, not marketers. The concept of "design that sells" didn't exist. Websites were built not for profit, but for pleasure. And this pleasure was expressed in everything from neon text to shooting stars. Yes, it was kitsch, pure and simple. But this kitsch was sincere, not like today, when kitsch is turned into a product, packaged, and monetized.

Web designers of the time took this chaos as a personal insult. They dreamed of a digital renaissance, but what they got was a farce. GeoCities became a symbol of this wild freedom. By 1997, the term "GeoCities style" had become a slur among professionals. It was used to describe anything that looked too bright, too noisy, too "folksy." As if your website were a vanity fair. And yet, despite the ridicule, it was this "ugly" style that became the basis of internet folklore.

Web 1.0 sites were visual diaries. They told the stories of ordinary people, unfiltered and unedited. Some wrote about politics, others about their Jack Russell Terrier named Milo (who was that?), still others published philosophical musings, interspersed with GIFs of a blinking Buddha. This was the poetry of the old web—a mixture of silliness and sincerity. It was like a radio in the desert: someone broadcast, someone listened, no one knew why, but the process was more important than the result. Every HTML amateur felt like a star. There was only the individual and their passion to show the world something.

And indeed, Web 1.0 was poor in technical terms, but rich in human terms.

GeoCities became the quintessence of this philosophy. It wasn't just a platform—it was a living organism, composed of millions of self-made cells. The irony is that this is precisely why it was hated. Designers, engineers, corporations—all those who later erased individuality for the sake of user-friendly interfaces—couldn't forgive him for this anarchy. He was too human for a system that wanted to turn the internet into a product.

But this "ugly" freedom held magic. GeoCities became an archaeological layer through which the prehistoric internet is now studied. It lacks symmetry, but it does have soul. And when contemporary artists like Cameron Askin create collages from old pages, like his project *Cameron's World*, they literally resurrect those spirits—gifs, banners, counters, and buttons. They remind us that the internet wasn't always a store and a prison of recommendations.

And perhaps that's why nostalgia for Web 1.0 endures. Because it wasn't "convenient" there, it was "real." Behind it all stood a real person who, for the first time in his life, felt he could say to the world, "Hello! It's me. Welcome to my page."

And to be honest, the internet began with people who, albeit clumsily, but lovingly, built their first websites. So when you see an old website with a starry background, blinking text, and a comet, don't laugh. This is the legacy of those who first dared to transform a blank screen into a living space. And perhaps it is precisely these fossils that hold the key to the internet's future, one that will once again become vibrant, chaotic, and human.

AI devoured the internet, but choked on a Nissan Leaf muffler.

Who would have thought that the end of the internet as we know it would come not from World War III, not from a sudden global blackout, but from those smart idiots called "artificial intelligence." And yes, I'm talking specifically about those digital parasites that cheerfully answer any question—from "how to boil an egg" to "explain the meaning of life to me with practical examples."

Just yesterday, people were cheerfully typing Google queries, poking around in links, stumbling upon websites with casino ads and "Login" buttons that lead nowhere. Today, screw you. AI will do everything for you: it will crawl websites, comb through forums, and compose a response so polished it makes you want to puke from the sterility.

The Fall of the Old World

Numbers are merciless. Over 60% of Google searches are completed without a click. Imagine millions of websites where people once lived—writing culinary blogs with photos of casseroles, running forums about repairing their favorite cars, collecting related literature in various languages…—now sit empty, like abandoned villages after a locust plague.

You used to search for a recipe for "charlotte without eggs and flour, but with love" and click the first link to some Aunt Anya's blog, where half the screen was filled with ads, half a screen with photos of her granddaughter in a beautiful sundress, and only at the bottom was the line "take apples, sugar, and that's it." And now? Now ChatGPT or Gemini will give you:
— "Take 200 grams of apples, 150 grams of sugar…"
And that's it. You won't see the granddaughter, or the ad for dentures, or the comment "can you substitute potatoes for apples?"

Websites are screwed! Advertising is screwed! The internet is on life support!

Victims and Survivors

Under the steamroller of progress are:
Medical reference books (now we're treated exclusively by AI advice and YouTube scams).
Culinary blogs (you shouldn't have taken photos of those three layers of cream and written twenty times, "This cake is especially good with hibiscus tea").
SEO specialists (finally, all those shamans with their drums and keywords will be sent to a mine or a factory).

Who survived?

Major news sites (of course, who else will tell you that politicians have taken a dump in the aquarium again), streamers, TikTokers, and other purveyors of "personal experience." So, if you film yourself eating noodles off the floor, you're still in business. If you've been writing scientific articles about astrophysics for twenty years, sorry, but now your work will be processed by AI and spit out something like "10 ways to make a black hole out of a potato."

AI is our new god and liar.

It's funny that AI itself is a dumb monkey with machine learning. It doesn't think. It just takes tons of other people's texts, mixes them like Olivier salad, and dumps them back out. And sometimes such gems are born that you'll be stunned.

One user complained:

"AI advised me to check the muffler on my electric Nissan Leaf."
That's great. Electric car. No exhaust. No muffler. But the AI is sure: "The problem is the muffler!"

And it even provided a link to a website where someone equally genius had already written this nonsense. It's like a doctor coming to you and saying:

"You have a sore throat, we'll remove your kidney."

Now imagine millions of people being treated and repairing cars exactly like this.
AI is like a schoolchild who knows nothing, but can perfectly retell other people's essays. With a serious expression. And with a link to a "very important source."

Business Model, or How They'll Sell Us Advertising Again

For now, AI is "free." But that's temporary. Hardware eats electricity, data centers overheat, and programmers want to eat shawarma. So, the freebies will end.

We face a simple choice:
Watch an ad before the AI's answer ("before seeing the borscht recipe, watch 30 seconds about Pampers").
Pay a subscription ("just $9.99 a month and the AI will even tell you how to scratch your left heel").

And yes, there will be ads in the AI—but the websites won't get anything out of it. Because why share? Let them die. And if they get anything, it'll be like "a 0.0001 cent royalty for stealing your salad recipe."

The Internet of the Future: Websites Without Design

Website design will also die. Why make pretty buttons if people won't even click on them? AI will provide the answer anyway.

And here's where the fun begins: people are starting to gravitate toward the "real thing." To paper books, to live concerts, to exhibitions where you can touch (or at least smell) the paintings. Because it's impossible to get a thrill from AI's "soaped-up" answers.

The internet once promised us freedom, but now we're sitting in a digital McDonald's where we get information powder instead of food.

Why will we still use this crap?

The problem is that most people don't need precision. They didn't dig deep before, either; they just clicked the first link. Now they're simply content with the first "response" from the AI. And who cares if it's nonsense? The important thing is, it sounds confident.

But there will remain a minority who will seek real depth. And they will be the ones reading books, digging through archives, poring over printed reference books. At some point, they will become the new elite—because they will at least know that an electric car doesn't have a muffler.

Results

The internet is becoming fodder for AI. Websites are dying, advertising is moving to chatbots, and users are turning into children whose "mother" chewed their food. But gum without flavor gets boring.

In a couple of years, we'll have a generation that will once again seek out books, live lectures, and genuine experiences.

For now, enjoy. Ask an AI "how to replace a muffler on an iPhone"—and it might even give you a link.

Epilogue

It's October outside. Cold winds and the first gray mornings make you want to wrap yourself in a warm blanket, pour yourself a cup of cocoa, and immerse yourself in your favorite pastime—writing, drawing, coding, creating.
This issue was as thematic as possible; I hope it entertained you rather than overwhelmed you. The main idea of this issue is a return to the true freedom of the internet, to the time when a page was the author's personal space, not a product. We must remember that the internet was and remains a living, experimental, and personal space.

Best wishes, warmth, and may the muse of true autumn inspiration overtake you.

— The ELPiS team.

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