Several years ago, my wife and I were looking at places to move. One house we looked at was peculiar. There were bars on the basement windows (very rare here), big bookcases along every wall of the basement, and some weird fixtures that looked like they once housed electrical equipment. We passed on the place, but I got intensely curious about the former owner and started digging.

It turns out it was the home of Fred Ennis, a journalist and former Parliament Hill Bureau Chief. He created nepean.com as, in his words, “the first Internet community newspaper, with all the news but none of the paper”. He covered local events and goings on, and worked with columnists including one Don Nox, who wrote the linked article. Don’s quote here has stuck with me for a while:

Society is a very perverse device. If you stand in front of it and call it a stupid excuse for a machine, and a designer’s bad dream, it will suck you into it’s beater and turn you into dust and moldy straw. All anyone will ever remember is that you were weird. On the other hand, if you position yourself carefully and strategically off to one side and call it these very same names, it will shower you with candy, and sometimes loose change and small denomination bills. People in this position are called eccentrics. Now you know the difference.:::

Next, the homepage for The Church of the Universe, circa 2002

Story (spoiler tag removed due to formatting weirdness, mercy suspended)

To this day, there is nothing I find more interesting from a distance than new religious movements, and the early web was lousy with pages for them.

I came across this one while looking for backissues of Cannabis Culture, a once renowned underground publication out of Vancouver, BC, lead by activist-cum-political prisoner and libertarian weirdo Marc Emery. He’s an interesting character himself, but not the focus today.

While it seems you can only get physical backissues of CC from Ebay these days, they still host articles from way back, and these two from 1994 caught my attention. Checked out the organization’s website, and oh boy - if you like web 1.0 design and content quirks, you’re in for a treat. It’s a fascinating look at a group from a time when cannabis activism was filled with freaks and weirdos (said lovingly) - kind of miss those times v. the more corporatized cannabis ‘culture’ post-legalization.

Have a few more in mind if I can dig them up, but I’m curious what people end up sharing here!

Edit: Apparently I suck at spoiler tags.