What's wrong with exploring oneself? Obviously not too much nor wrongly in public and never to excess, but if the modern spelunking is just urbex - which it is, in my view, and much more appealing than any dank smelly old cave - then, though I won't repeat the hideous portmanteau, I don't suppose I see too much of a problem with this practice, either.
After all - γνῶθι σεαυτόν, wasn't that the phrase? No accident at all we find it incised over the gateway to an oracle. You might want to think about that, who has just finished reading this now.
I ran into one of these neo-geocities-style websites in the wild when telling my friend about a trendy pizza place I liked. Even the EN-FR switch is animated:
Pretty cool. Nice to see iframes, don't think I've seen those in a long long time. Also very good that the forum has a post your desk thread[1], very 2005 internet of them. One thing I can't figure out, are these old people who lived old internet or young people who have recreated old internet for themselves to live? Either way, cool site.
I played the "guess what it's going to be about before clicking on it" game with this item, and lost badly. I won't spoil the fun, but only remark that this site is neither about [1] a melon farming business, nor [2] a certain famous man with autocratic tendencies whose handle in "last-initial first" format would be "melon".
This is a perfect example of the "neocities" movement - a modern revival of the 90s/early 2000s web aesthetic that explicitly rejects the homogenized, corporate design patterns that dominate today's internet.
I feel a bit warm and fuzzy inside when the forum (and the guestbook) seem reasonably active even if they're hidden under a rock. It's a treehouse kind of vibe.
The reality is this is on the HN front page probably because it was trending on Reddit/Twitter or whatever the kids use these days. Without the grace of the benevolent algorithms, you would never ever have found out about this website.
Readit News
After all - γνῶθι σεαυτόν, wasn't that the phrase? No accident at all we find it incised over the gateway to an oracle. You might want to think about that, who has just finished reading this now.
https://pizzabouquet.ca/
[1]https://forum.melonland.net/index.php?PHPSESSID=641b114d1686...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132
Words like "quiz" and "blog" came to existence this way.
The entire world wide web used to be just like that, back in the Good Old Days of teh Internets, or so I'm told.
Fortunately, you can skip it very easily: https://melonking.net/melon
This is what the World Wide Web is supposed to be.
[1] https://html.energy/html-day/2025/index.html