Have you ever been trawling the internet all night when you come across a patch of "old internet"? You know, the site that hasn't been moded in 9 years and has all the broken links (or URL script that ISN'T a link!) that take you to those weird site limbos after a page dies and becomes a bizarre search engine zombie? Don't you feel like you have kind of unearthed a fossil and that you figuratively have to sweep away cobwebs since the page must not have been touched in so long. It's a fragile, delicate feeling of awe at that ancient technology before you realize how frustrating the next half hour of forced content scraping will be to get the information you require. Your eyes grow stiff and your brain eventually refuses to communicate in anything farther than a guttural utterance at various stimuli poking you in the face.
Taking your first blink in twenty minutes of a staring contest with your monitor (which you may have won at this point) results in a sensation of running water moving through your head, floating your brain and making even the dull humming of a dusk-choked fan sound like a lullaby. The next moment you look out the window and see the sun beckoning with gray light in the sky, a warning akin to that feeling you get when you pass a police car and get the distinct impression they are going to pull you over, regardless of what you are actually doing. You decide to rest for a while before the birds get too loud, and so click the bookmark button and close the screen. You convince yourself of the novelty of the experience; discovering this new ancient treasure you have unearthed from 1998.
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