What Is This?

      You are looking at a "website" for a "theme camp", the way they looked at the turn of the century. You see at that time, many people and organizations had their own websites, instead of just a page on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter. Each person or organization would create a site like this in their own style, to convey their purpose, and allow visitors to interact with them.

      This particular website is for a group that started at Burning Man in 2003 (21 years ago!), and then evolved into a dynamic artistic community. The look and feel is fairly clumsy, because it was built by hobbyists instead of professionals. In fact, the Burning Man event itself was created by amateurs finding themselves, rather than by professionals seeking to market their wares. Only through gentrification has the Black Rock City we knew and loved become a playground for wealthy dilettantes, just like the Bay Area.

      One thing you may notice about this website is that certain words or phrases in the text can be clicked to go to other pages, such as this one on the French Quarter Space Program. This is a concept known as "hypertext", that was popular in the 1990s and early 2000s. This "web" of links allowing you to wander through tropics in a nonlinear fashion is how the "World Wide Web", from which "www" appears on some websites, got its name. You have probably experienced hypertext in Wikipedia, one of the few remaining places where it is still used.

      Back when the web was created, around 31 years ago, nobody imagined that the primary use would be to post images and short quips, in an effort to induce envy or outrage. At the time, it was believed that everyone would want to create their own websites, and link them together via hypertext, to facilitate unguided learning and exploration. Civilization has advanced quite a bit since then!

      And yes, all of the code that drives this site was written by hand, in a text editor.