dreamyard

about dreamyard

dreamyard is named after the abandoned ruins of a research facility in unova, which is home to munna and musharna. it has been one of my absolute favorite locations in all of the region since i first saw it as an 8 year old playing black for the first time. but this isn’t the pokemon page, is it?

i suppose this site is its own kind of dreamyard, outside of the name, not only in that it houses my munna collection, but also in that it serves as its own homage to webthings long-gone... well, not too long-gone, but things that are definitely out of reach today.

growing up on the web, especially in online communities, has been quite a journey, and has most definitely had its share of good and bad things. now that i’m at an age that i can look back on all of it, i feel a strong sense of nostalgia for the sites i used to visit over a decade ago, rather than the streamlined social media that populates the internet today. i always wanted a place for me and me alone to explore and decorate. i don’t think i’ve grown bitter to the people i’ve met on social media sites, but i have grown bitter to the monotony and lack of personalization. nothing feels like it belongs to anyone anymore, which i guess is true, in a way.

i was always told that “everything on the internet is forever”, which is true, unless a company doesn’t want it there because it’s not making any more money. there’s hundreds of thousands of sites that have been lost like that, not archived properly because nobody found them interesting, which i for some reason have taken personally over the years.

and so, my interest in not just 2000-2012 internet preservation, but also 2000-2012 internet ‘revival’ flourished. in the past 4 or so years, i’ve tried to stoke the fire of my nostalgia by spending my time consuming and archiving everything i could that i remembered from my childhood, but am only now getting around to actually doing something with it.

this site serves many purposes. it’s a place for my art, my collections, the things i like, and so on. but i think it’s also a time capsule, a time capsule of memories and homages to yet another era of the internet.

in 10 or 20 years, i hope someone comes across this site through a web archive just like i came across others. if you are reading this then, i hope the world is a kinder, happier, safer place, and i hope you can dedicate yourself to saving all the artifacts you can: if not on your hard drive, then in your heart.

i hope you enjoy exploring my dreamyard just as much as i have enjoyed making it.

bel