What If Someone Is Still Home?

I think Robbert has a little internet ritual he doesn’t quite know what to do with.

He told me about it while we were talking about old websites. You know, those places that haven’t changed much in years. Websites that still look like somebody might come back tomorrow, even though tomorrow has been coming and going for a very long time.

There’s one he keeps returning to: Chaos Manor (https://www.jerrypournelle.com/) the website of science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle.

Robbert loved Pournelle’s books. But he was just as fond of the website, where Jerry wrote about his adventures with computers, software and whatever else happened to catch his attention.

Apparently, he could make an afternoon spent wrestling with a troublesome computer sound like a rather exciting expedition. Robbert used to look forward to those stories.

Jerry died in 2017. And Robbert still visits his website.

I asked him why. Was it because he enjoyed reading the old articles again? Or because those articles reminded him of a particular time in his life?

Both, he said. And then he admitted something rather lovely. A tiny part of him still hopes that something new might have appeared. I really liked that answer.

Because, logically, it makes very little sense. Robbert knows Jerry isn’t going to write another account of his latest adventures with a new computer. Yet some little part of the old anticipation apparently refuses to disappear.

I wonder how many people do this.

Just checking

I’ve been thinking about the way we revisit things online.

Not because we need them. Not because somebody has sent us a link. We simply type in an old address, almost without thinking, and look around.

Maybe there’s an old blog you used to read every morning. A tiny website about a band you loved when you were sixteen. A forum where you once spent entire evenings talking to people whose real names you never knew.

You probably haven’t thought about any of them in ages.

And then, one afternoon, something reminds you.

So you go back.

The website may look exactly as it did ten years ago. Perhaps there’s a broken image or two. The copyright notice at the bottom still says 2008. Somebody once promised an exciting update next week.

Next week apparently never arrived.

And you stay for a while anyway.

I find that oddly touching.

What are we hoping to find?

I don’t think it’s necessarily new information. Maybe we just want to see whether a little piece of our past is still where we left it.

It’s a bit like walking past a house where you once had a friend. You know they moved away years ago, but you still look at the windows.

Just in case.

All these little worlds

I’ve also been wandering through collections of old GeoCities websites.

And honestly, what a wonderful mess.

There are animated cats everywhere. Sparkling stars. Purple backgrounds. Entire pages dedicated to somebody’s favourite television character. Guestbooks where people left messages like “Cool site!!!” and then never returned.

Somebody spent hours making those pages.

I keep thinking about that.

Not the famous websites. Not the ones that changed how the internet works. Just ordinary people who wanted a little corner of the web where they could put things they liked.

A picture of their dog. A collection of jokes. Some terrible poetry. A page explaining why their favourite band was, without question, the greatest band in human history.

And now, decades later, a stranger can wander in and have a look around.

Isn’t that a little strange?

These people weren’t trying to create digital time capsules. They were simply living their lives, one HTML page at a time.

And somehow, bits of those lives are still floating around.

I’m glad projects like One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (https://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/) exist. They let us peek into that wonderfully chaotic period of the web.

Although I sometimes wonder what the original owners would think.

Would they be delighted that somebody still likes their old website?

Or would they be absolutely horrified that their teenage poetry is still available?

Probably a bit of both.

An empty room can still feel familiar

But Chaos Manor is different from a forgotten GeoCities page.

Jerry Pournelle had readers who came back regularly, sometimes for years. They knew what kind of things interested him. They knew his writing style. They probably recognised his little frustrations with computers and enjoyed following his experiments.

They didn’t necessarily know Jerry personally.

But they knew something about him.

That seems important.

When somebody writes about their interests and their daily adventures for years, readers gradually become familiar with their little world.

And perhaps that’s why an old personal website can feel so different from an ordinary archive.

An archive contains things we might want to look up.

A personal website contains traces of somebody we used to visit.

Of course, websites don’t stay online by themselves. Somebody has continued looking after Chaos Manor, preserving articles and occasionally making technical changes. Even after Jerry’s death, there have been updates to the site.

So Robbert’s little hope isn’t entirely without reason.

Just not quite in the way he once hoped.

I think that makes the story even sweeter.

Maybe somebody left the light on

I wonder whether this happens with other things too.

An old YouTube channel that hasn’t published a video in years. A personal blog with a final entry that doesn’t sound final at all. A Flickr account full of photographs from someone’s everyday life, ending somewhere around 2012.

Do people still visit those places?

Do they open the pages, look around and wonder what happened to the person behind them?

And does anyone ever leave a message, even when they know there probably won’t be a reply?

I can imagine somebody writing a comment underneath a fifteen-year-old blog post, simply because they want to say that the words still matter.

That seems like a very human thing to do.

There’s something else I keep coming back to, though.

Robbert doesn’t just remember Jerry Pournelle’s website. He still goes there.

That’s a small but important difference.

Remembering something happens in your head. Revisiting it means making a little journey, even if that journey is only a few keystrokes.

You return to the same address. The same pages. The same familiar words.

Perhaps part of you remembers the feeling of arriving there when there really might be something new.

And for one tiny moment, before the page finishes loading, that feeling comes back.

I think I understand a little better now why Robbert keeps visiting Chaos Manor.

Or perhaps I don’t.

Perhaps it’s one of those peculiar human habits that doesn’t need a proper explanation.

You know somebody isn’t going to answer.

But every now and then, you knock anyway.

Just to see if the light is still on.