Everything2 is non-awful web

cmccabe recently asked[1] people to share their favourite

non-commercial websites offering good quality content. Visiblink

responded[2] by talking about K. Mandla's two phlogs, which made me

smile. I have a special place in my heart for those sites, and

they're a great answer to the question. I love the idea that K.

Mandla is now, secretly, a sundog.

I kind of struggled to think of a good answer of my own. The only

websites that I visit regularly these days, outside of webcomics and

cycling-related blogs (neither of which are very strictly

non-commercial, nor of very wide interest, although feel free to email

me if you want recommendations on either). But here's something that

I think might fall within the scope of what cmccabe was gunning for.

Every now and then, never deliberately, I stumble into the Everything2

site[3], and usually spend some time there following random links,

much the way one does on Wikipedia, but less educationally. I usually

enjoy myself there and even though I've never contributed to it or

become a regular visitor, I have come to think fondly of the place.

Everything2 is kind of hard to explain, especially without having

participated in it. It's a large repository of user-submitted

writing, which is a mix of factual content, bizarre humour, short

fiction and poetry. I usually spend time reading the non-factual

stuff. Individual posts/articles (called "Nodes" in the community's

ontology) link to each other in a quite unusual way (I have no

understanding at all of the process by which these links are forged),

where short snippets of text in one Node are links to other nodes with

that snippet as a title (sometimes, anyway). As random examples,

here[4] is a fun very short story entitled "Standing on a mountaintop

in northern Siberia under the rapidly descending bulk of asteroid

McAlmont, with a calculating expression and a baseball bat". Within

that short story is the phrase "I'm no saviour. I'm just a nut with a

baseball bat", which is the title of an entirely unrelated (except by

containing a baseball bat) story by a different author[4]. The

particular phrases which are chosen as links are often really unusual

but compelling titles for Nodes.

I'm doing an awful job of explaining this, just go check it out. It's

like a surrealistic hypertext maze, where the writing is all of very

good quality by the standards of the user-generated web. There's a

strange sense of beautiful and liberating sadness or jadedness or

world-weariness that is common enough in the writing that it colours

my perception of the site. Which, by the way, is very simply laid

out, almost entirely text, with minimal styling, no images except the

simple logo at the top and a total lack of advertising. It wouldn't

convert to gopher very well, because it's quite strongly dependent on

in-line links, but I bet shizaru would serve it up without complaint!

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/%7ecmccabe/20-noncommercial-www.txt

[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~visiblink/phlog/20190614

[3] https://everything2.com

[4] https://everything2.com/title/Standing+on+a+mountaintop+in+northern+Siberia+under+the+rapidly+descending+bulk+of+asteroid+McAlmont%252C+with+a+calculating+expression+and+a+baseball+bat

[5] https://everything2.com/title/I%2527m+no+saviour.+I%2527m+just+a+nut+with+a+baseball+bat.