STA
The Personal Website Comeback
People are building personal websites again. Not for SEO, not for monetization, but for the simple act of owning a corner of the internet. The personal web is resurgent.
deadpacket :: April 12, 2026 :: 9 min read
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Tech and nerd news commentary. The wider signal, the things that matter to the people who care about how systems work.
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The Zine Tradition: From Paper to Digital
From punk fanzines to Phrack to phreak.fm: how self-publishing shaped hacker culture, electronic music, and outsider networks. The direct line from photocopies to personal blogs.
Ripper :: September 1, 2026 :: 8 min read
STA
The Dial-Up Sound: A Technical and Cultural History
What each screech actually means: carrier detection, protocol negotiation, training sequences. Why the modem handshake had to be audible and became a cultural touchstone.
deadpacket :: August 15, 2026 :: 8 min read
STA
The IRC Channels That Built the Internet
EFnet, DALnet, Undernet. How real-time chat in the 1990s created social infrastructure for open source, hacking, and electronic music communities. The channel as gathering place.
deadpacket :: August 1, 2026 :: 10 min read
STA
The Text File
From Phrack e-zines to the Anarchist Cookbook to Cult of the Dead Cow's t-files. How plain ASCII text became the medium of the underground. No formatting, no images, just words.
deadpacket :: July 15, 2026 :: 9 min read
STA
ANSI Art and the BBS Underground
ACiD Productions, iCE, and the art groups that turned 80-column terminals into galleries. The first digital art movement, sixteen colors and a blinking cursor.
deadpacket :: July 5, 2026 :: 8 min read
STA
The Demoscene: Computer Art in Impossible Constraints
From the Amiga to the web: coding parties, size-limited competitions, and the purest form of creative hacking. The demoscene as UNESCO cultural heritage.
deadpacket :: June 20, 2026 :: 8 min read
STA
Geocities as Digital Archaeology
The neighborhoods, the under-construction GIFs, the visitor counters. Geocities represented ordinary people building web pages because they wanted to. Its 2009 shutdown and the Archive Team rescue changed how we think about digital preservation.
deadpacket :: June 1, 2026 :: 10 min read
STA
The BBS Era
Before the web, there were bulletin board systems. Dialing in at 2400 baud, ANSI art, message boards, and door games. The SysOps who built networks from their bedrooms shaped everything that came after.
deadpacket :: May 8, 2026 :: 10 min read
STA
RSS Is Not Dead
Feed readers are experiencing a quiet renaissance. The people who never stopped using RSS are right. And phreak.fm itself is built on the bones of the open web.
deadpacket :: April 8, 2026 :: 7 min read
STA
The 3AM Frequency: Notes on Staying Up Too Late Online
There is a specific quality to the internet after midnight. The algorithms quiet down. The professionals go to sleep. What remains is stranger and more honest.
deadpacket :: March 30, 2026 :: 6 min read
STA
The Death of the Forum
Web forums built the internet's most valuable knowledge bases. Platforms killed them. And we lost something essential when threaded discussion died.
deadpacket :: March 22, 2026 :: 9 min read
STA
The Wayback Machine: Why Big Tech Fears the Internet Archive
Brewster Kahle built a library to save the entire internet from disappearance. The work still matters, and the opposition proves it.
deadpacket :: February 15, 2026 :: 8 min read