Filter the entire Sarcastic MySpace catalog by era, format, or feeling. From glitter GIFs to Google Reader obituaries — every artifact catalogued with affection and side-eye.
In 2005, getting bumped from a friend's Top 8 was a small, public heartbreak. We trace the unwritten etiquette, the strategic reordering, and the time Tom himself made the list. Featuring interviews with 37 people who still remember exactly where they ranked.
Read the full essaySix new entries from the desk — a mix of deep dives, oral histories, and one piece that is mostly just screenshots.
Twelve personal websites, two Flash splash gates, and one extremely polite server error. We saved them all in 2008. Pull up a chair.
Before curated grids, we expressed ourselves in 12-pixel Arial. A defense of the deeply unhinged personal homepage.
Fourteen people who wrote their away messages like short fiction recall their most-used rotations, including the eternally iconic "brb snogging."
Twelve artists, three Brazilian servers, and one Lithuanian domain registry. How a single 8kb animation ended up on 40 million pages.
We pulled five years of Comscore data and the results are surprisingly, painfully symmetrical. A look at the platform's arc — and ours.
Why every personal homepage in 2003 read like a zine — and what zine culture taught us about building web things that matter.
Each era has its own flavor of unhinged. We sorted the archive so you can find your exact flavor of nostalgia without scrolling through 900 entries.
Discord servers, group chats, the death of the public post, and the strange rebirth of the personal website. Includes our coverage of the post-Twitter diaspora and the rise of the curated private feed.
The flattening of the feed, the rise of the aesthetic, the long slow goodbye to Tumblr, and our complicated relationship with the algorithm. Plus: extensive coverage of the rise and fall of Vine.
The catalog's heart. Top 8 drama, glitter GIFs, custom CSS, Xanga confessions, Friendster ghost towns, and the moment we all realized we were being archived. Over 380 entries and counting.
The amateur hour. Animated GIFs as performance art, guestbooks as community, and the wild optimism of a million under-construction pages. Includes our rescued Wayback Machine deep dives.
Usenet, BBS culture, early zine networks, and the proto-internet that came before. The weird, generous, slow roots of everything we're cataloguing.
Sometimes you want nostalgia, sometimes you want a polemic. Pick your poison.
The warm, hazy stuff. Bring tissues.
Sharp takes. Mostly affectionate.
People who were there, talking.
Numbers, charts, recovered files.
Layouts, GIFs, fonts, the works.
Profiles of the people behind the pixels.
Got a screenshot, a URL, a forum thread, or a memory that deserves cataloguing? Send it our way — we read every submission and we've already added 23 reader-suggested entries this year.
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