A love letter to a simpler time

Dear readers,

It’s been a while. I don’t know how many of you are still out there but, from the occasional email in my inbox, I know it’s not zero.

For the small handful of you who still come back from time to time, I fixed the blog and redid the design. Actually, not only did I redo the design, I made it possible for you to experience every single blog post rendered the way you might have remembered it first, cringe included.

All you have to do is to tap (or hover over) the little button at the bottom right on every page and you have a time machine at your disposal that lets you take that page through time. You can even experience alternate reality versions that never existed before.

My readers and I belong to a generation that grew up with the Internet, and the Internet grew with us. We were using Hotmail before Gmail. We blogged inane details of our lives in the absence of social media. We loved flip phones. World of Warcraft shaped our lives. We hoped naively and passionately for the end of history. Occasionally, we saw the cracks that would later become fissures.

So for all my fellow millennials struggling to make sense of what the world has become, I hope you find something here that reminds you of a simpler time. A time of digital chaos that felt exhilarating and not existential. This is a love letter to you.

And for newcomers, welcome to a weird and forgotten corner (黒歴史) of the Internet. Check out the featured or archives to see what you missed (or rightfully avoided).

How it happened

For the past few years, the site looked like this:

After years of neglect, my custom theme in WordPress had gradually grown increasingly encumbered with abandoned plugins and old PHP. In 2021, things came to a head when it stopped working completely and I had to switch to a generic WordPress theme. Under the dark cloud of Covid-19, the last surviving part of my adolescence that brought me here was slipping away.

A few days ago, thanks to Claude Opus 5.5, the site was brought back to life with a complete redesign. Then I decided to go a step further and not just fix the site as is, but to fix every single past incarnation of the site. We went back in time and rebuilt every era from scratch, revived dead image links and even imported posts from a pre-WordPress blog hosted on the same domain.

The source code and crazy shenanigans are available GPLv2 on GitHub: https://github.com/darkmirage/darkmirage.com

None of this would be possible (or sane) without AI, and yet this nostalgia for the past is also driven by a growing dread of what AI is about to unleash upon the world. I am not sure what teenage me, idealistic as he was, would say about today. But I think now is the time to shine a light on him.

Dramatically yours,
DM

P.S. The new blog mascot is Kiro (as in 蜃気楼) and he’s inspired by my IRL Shiba-inu, Kabocha.