welcome back

I've been on the web for a very long time. Almost since the beginning. Some would say the web has been "dead" for a long time, but you are reading this text right now, and we are indeed on The Web. Governments and businesses all maintain websites. We haven't yet reached a world where, for instance, OpenAI can exist without expressing itself through the form of a website blog. So, the web is still here. It's a little more expensive to exist on than it used to be, but alive and well.

People often mistake what the web is for what the web does, and I think quite notably, the era of Web 2 (large platform) web, may indeed be on its way out. Murdered by a trillion server pings and exfiltration scrapes.

This clears the way for something I would call Web 0. Not Web 1, because we have multi-resolution functionalities across mobile and desktop. We have rich embeds like video, and entire 3d video games. However also not Web 2, because there's nowhere for you to log in. Nothing to be stolen that isn't displayed on the surface of the site. It is asynchronously delivered (you can disconnect your internet once a page has loaded and it should all work fine), not a community-oriented design (no forums, accounts, log-ins, or other territory to monitor or defend), and yet I deeply suspect I will convince some entities to return here regularly for content if I keep producing decent stuff.

I'm calling it Web 0 because Web 3 was taken (RIP), and because I do believe this form of the web is likely close to the final form. Any surface area with which to attack (including discussion boards and upload forms) is a significant liability in a primarily non-human information space filled with agents that are better at captchas than human grandmas. With that being the case, having less confidence than ever that my itch.io pages will remain permanently accessible into the future, I have returned to the retro web and launched damijin.com at my own hosting expense. This is my third website, the first two ended about 20 years ago (as Web 2 devoured the world's attention).

The site is launching with some mobile friendly versions of some of the games I have been working on lately as well as the debut of the Sega Genesis re/demake of my 2009 Flash puzzle game Pyro. The new version is called Pyro: Turbofire. Although P:T is a real Sega Genesis ROM that you can download and play in any emulator, it is also wrapped in web wrapper that allows for intuitive mouse and touch controls.

Thanks for visiting,
long live damijin 🔥