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| thl_history [2025/12/15 12:55] – created thehomeland | thl_history [2025/12/30 03:26] (current) – thehomeland |
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| Back when THL originally had been offered webspace with his first non-AOL internet access in the mid 1990s, in his teenage wonder of what could be crafted, he wanted to make a list of everything scifi: every book, every movie, every story in every scifi magazine, etc, and it would be called 'the homeworld' and he set to work on it. | The username "thehomeland" is based on the concept of having too big of a project to feasibly complete, and having to scale back to a more achievable goal, and possibly not even finishing that. I am thehomeland. |
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| It soon became apparent that such a task was too big of an idea, so he scaled back to a more reasonable collection: inspirational email forwards that were popular at the time. In order to pay homage to his original concept, he renamed the little web space plot 'the homeland' in April 1997, and that name stuck, representing loads and loads of other ideas he would later dream about as his new life's work and then have to scale back again or set aside as it was more complex than feasible. In May 2000, he registered thehomeland.org, and signed on with a then- South African web host called Hostyard which offered hosting for $20/yr, no frills. | Back when I first had access to webspace to do with as I please, in the early days of dialup internet companies, where you could actually have a small local internet provider instead of a giant megacorp, my parents allowed me to subscribe to one such local dialup internet provider called Cyberstation. I had occasion to go up to their business a few times to pay a late bill in person, and it was essentially a function-over-form, hacked-together mess of wires and blinking lights and dust, out of an old strip mall suite. It had very little of the modern day aesthetic cord management systems in place, and was a literal tangle of black wires and modems screwed onto the drywall, with one nerd manning an extremely messy desk. |
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| The site has undergone easily a dozen reboots with new directions to take, realized it wasn't feasible to maintain, rebooted, forgot about it, rebooted, had a good run of content but suddenly forgotten, rebooted, short burst of content but forgotten, etc. This wiki version may very well be another such short-lived reboot. | With this web space, which I think may have been 10mb, I was allowed to ftp my text files in *.htm extension, for the world to see. I had a hit counter, and got very few hits. The earliest version of my homepage was the classic 90s-er internet page with a very busy blackground image tiled, and a column of centered links. After getting basically no hits but my own, I realized I needed a gimmick. |
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| One of the longest successful runs was in the form of [[The Dead Sea Blogs]] which I will try to restore the prior versions. It was mostly a slice-of-life online journal before sites like xanga and livejournal crowded it out, with various links to neat web places to visit. | After thinking on it a bit (but not hard enough) I settled on making it a list of science fiction everything. Every TV show, every book, every film, every anything science fiction, would be found on this list, and I would call this list: the homeworld. |
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| This wiki is called **Main Page**, a reference to the [[BBS]] community he was part of before the commercial internet really took off. THL used to design main menus for the local //boards// in ANSI graphics, using MS-DOS art GUI called [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw|TheDRAW]], so perhaps this can be a main menu for a figurative BBS, autobiographically about THL himself. | As I began making the list, I soon realized how dreadfully difficult it would be to actually even approach completion of the task, and how difficult it would be to maintain completion, as it would necessarily include foreign science fictions of all those categories, sci-fi magazine individual issues, and would need to classify what science fiction would be restricted to, and the homeworld collapsed. |
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| | Popular at the time, were email forwards. In a similar way that you might share a Tiktok with a friend over a messenger app nowadays, there would be email forwards, which were several paragraphs of text shared countlessly from one email reader to the next. Text was easy to compress and made for dialup-friendly content you could share to a relative for a pick-me-up. I decided my new collection would be essentially email forwards that hit my inbox, that I felt were worth sharing. This drastically scaled down collection's goal would, at least, reference the old project in spirit, as the homeland. |
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| | In April 1997, the homeland was born, and in 2000 I registered thehomeland.org as a more expansive way to share it instead of the rinky-dink domain.ext/~user dialup ISP webspace I had before. My original web host was Hostyard out of South Africa, for $20/yr, no frills. Some while later, (date to be added once known) I registered an original Xbox console username 'thehomeland' pre-Xbox Live, and have kept it ever since. |
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| | thehomeland.org has undergone easily a dozen reboots with new directions to take, new web 1.0 re-releases (pridefully and truthfully claiming and holding out as a notepad-only HTML site), mostly involving realizing additional collections added on weren't feasible to maintain again, rebooted with a new design, forgot about it, rebooted, had a good run of content but suddenly forgotten, rebooted, short burst of content but forgotten, etc. This wiki version, itself, is a reboot from a previous Mediawiki installation, and so far has had decent staying-power. |
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| | One of the longest successful runs was in the form of [[|The Dead Sea Blogs]] which I will try to restore the prior versions. It was mostly a slice-of-life online journal before sites like xanga and livejournal crowded it out, with various links to neat web places to visit. |
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| | This wiki is called **Main Menu**, a reference to the [[|BBS]] community I was part of before the commercial internet really took off. I used to design main menus for the local //boards// in ANSI graphics, using MS-DOS art GUI called [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw|TheDRAW]], so perhaps this can be a main menu for a figurative BBS, autobiographically. |
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