I spent three hours last Tuesday trying to get a <table> to center inside another <table> using only a 478-page HTML 3.2 reference book printed in 1996. The margins were full of handwritten notes from the previous owner — a college student named Mark who underlined the <BLINK> tag three times and wrote "COOL!!!" in ballpoint pen. Somewhere between the third nested <font> tag and the discovery that NebulaView Ultra 3.0 renders tables differently than PageView 4, I realized something: this was the most fun I had had on a computer in years.
EVERYONE HAD A NEIGHBORHOOD
StarCity gave thirty-eight million people a plot of digital land organized into themed neighborhoods — CosmosQuarter for sci-fi obsessives, CodeBase for tech enthusiasts, StageLight for entertainment fans, and FableWood for kids' pages. Your address wasn't a handle appended to someone else's domain; it was a numbered lot in a city you helped populate, one badly-animated GIF at a time. When you visited a neighbor's page, you saw their MIDI choices, their carefully curated "Cool Links" list, and whatever they felt like saying to the entire world at 2 AM. Go make your weird little corner of the internet. Put a visitor counter on it and set it to 000001. Link to your friends. Break the layout in NebulaView Ultra 4. I dare you.