Everything2 is non-awful web
----------------------------

cmccabe recently asked[1] people to share their favourite
non-commercial websites offering good quality content.  Visiblink
responded[2] by talking about K. Mandla's two phlogs, which made me
smile.  I have a special place in my heart for those sites, and
they're a great answer to the question.  I *love* the idea that K.
Mandla is now, secretly, a sundog.

I kind of struggled to think of a good answer of my own.  The only
websites that I visit regularly these days, outside of webcomics and
cycling-related blogs (neither of which are very strictly
non-commercial, nor of very wide interest, although feel free to email
me if you want recommendations on either).  But here's something that
I think might fall within the scope of what cmccabe was gunning for.

Every now and then, never deliberately, I stumble into the Everything2
site[3], and usually spend some time there following random links,
much the way one does on Wikipedia, but less educationally.  I usually
enjoy myself there and even though I've never contributed to it or
become a regular visitor, I have come to think fondly of the place.

Everything2 is kind of hard to explain, especially without having
participated in it.  It's a large repository of user-submitted
writing, which is a mix of factual content, bizarre humour, short
fiction and poetry.  I usually spend time reading the non-factual
stuff.  Individual posts/articles (called "Nodes" in the community's
ontology) link to each other in a quite unusual way (I have no
understanding at all of the process by which these links are forged),
where short snippets of text in one Node are links to other nodes with
that snippet as a title (sometimes, anyway).  As random examples,
here[4] is a fun very short story entitled "Standing on a mountaintop
in northern Siberia under the rapidly descending bulk of asteroid
McAlmont, with a calculating expression and a baseball bat".  Within
that short story is the phrase "I'm no saviour. I'm just a nut with a
baseball bat", which is the title of an entirely unrelated (except by
containing a baseball bat) story by a different author[4].  The
particular phrases which are chosen as links are often really unusual
but compelling titles for Nodes.

I'm doing an awful job of explaining this, just go check it out.  It's
like a surrealistic hypertext maze, where the writing is all of *very*
good quality by the standards of the user-generated web.  There's a
strange sense of beautiful and liberating sadness or jadedness or
world-weariness that is common enough in the writing that it colours
my perception of the site.  Which, by the way, is very simply laid
out, almost entirely text, with minimal styling, no images except the
simple logo at the top and a total lack of advertising.  It wouldn't
convert to gopher very well, because it's quite strongly dependent on
in-line links, but I bet shizaru would serve it up without complaint!

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/%7ecmccabe/20-noncommercial-www.txt
[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~visiblink/phlog/20190614
[3] https://everything2.com
[4] https://everything2.com/title/Standing+on+a+mountaintop+in+northern+Siberia+under+the+rapidly+descending+bulk+of+asteroid+McAlmont%252C+with+a+calculating+expression+and+a+baseball+bat
[5] https://everything2.com/title/I%2527m+no+saviour.+I%2527m+just+a+nut+with+a+baseball+bat.

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