(Sorry, I just had to.)
Once upon a long ago — actually, it was in March 1995 — I laid the foundations for what would eventually become a massive personal website.
In its hay day, the original “Music, Madness and Mayhem” (a.k.a. http://club.innet.be/~year2846 and later http://geocities.com/emmymay) contained about 20 Gigabytes of all kinds of everything: fan pages for music artists, actresses, films and 80’s TV shows as well as stories, information about paganism and folklore, and even a personal account of living with PTSD.
For a long while, maintaining the site, though time-consuming, was a lot of fun. I heard from plenty of like-minded people, got lots of interesting feedback, both positive and otherwise. This place even won me a few prizes.
Eventually, though, I realised I’d created a monster that had grown far beyond my control.
Also, the internet was fast becoming more of a mainstream thing. For one, my favourite artists all set up their own official web pages. I couldn’t even begin to compete with those, nor did I want to.
Of course tastes change as well.
I didn’t remain a fan of some of the singers and bands I loved twenty years ago, so continuing to maintain a site dedicated to them just didn’t make sense.
Then, when a former acquaintance decided to use the mental health stuff against me and maliciously sent a bunch of people here to “go and look at the freak show”, that pretty much made up my mind for me. I didn’t need that kind of hassle in my life.
So I ‘vanished’, deleted everything, left this place in limbo for many years.
A few weeks ago, I decided to bring it back to life, not in the way it was — I can’t imagine resurrecting all the old content, most of which would be redundant by now anyway — but as a blog of sorts.
We’ll see how things go.