Web Sites I Wish Still Existed

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt is "web sites I wish still existed." 

The web sites that I wish still existed are the ones that disappeared because bloggers died. 

Sometimes blogs are kept online as memorials. I like this; at least readers don't lose the whole archive when the blog stops being written.

Sometimes web sites just disappear. You click on a link to a web site you used to frequent and see a message that the site name is available for rent, if you want to set up a site with the same name.

Either way, the living web site is gone when its primary author is. Group blogs like Making Light, and like what this web site originally intended to be, do outlast one primary author as long as other bloggers survive. Too often the whole group are the same age, so the others don't outlive the primary blogger by very long. This web site did start out with the perspectives of two different generations; by now of course it represents only one.

I miss the living, growing Ozarque blog.

I miss Scott Adams' Dilbert Blog.

I miss Vivian Zems' Smell the Coffee Blog.

I miss Barbara Ehrenreich.

I miss Linda Lee Lyberg. 

I don't want to rush back to the "bright side"--facts first, feelings follow--but I will point out that, oddly enough, although I miss the blogs I followed twenty years ago, I still seem to find more worth reading online than I have time to read.

For one thing a lot of people who never used to blog are now blogging on Substack. Gene Weingarten, Dave Barry, Roy Blount, Garrison Keillor--many baby boomers' favorite comedians now have blogs. Poets like Rajani Radhakrishnan, literary novelists like Margaret Atwood, have blogs. These writers are not young. No worries--lots of younger writers are on Substack too. All I can say is, if you open a Substack account (even if you don't publish a'zine there), you'll be astonished at the number of people who you never thought would have blogs, who now have them, on Substack.

I don't look forward to having to starve the monster by pulling out of the Internet...but if that's what it takes to stop the plans for "data centers" to turn our Promised Land, North America, into the sort of toxic waste dump that is now known as Industrialized China, I''ll do it. And so will you. We'll just have to print our Substack'zines on paper and send them out by real mail.