Side Exhibit · Est. 1996 (in spirit)
The Meat Wide Web
A loud, under-construction shrine to the handwritten internet — and an homage to a site that deserved better.
The Meat Wide Web is the Counter's deliberately ugly side room. It renders in the voice of a GeoCities member page that never shut down: dial-up handshake, marquee, visitor counter, guestbook, blinking GIFs, Wayback Machine screenshots, and a background tile that clearly means business. None of it is reconstructed. All of it is original, written in 2026, pretending it was uploaded in 1998.
The point
The whole of this project is a letter about how the web got flattened. The homepage is a calm deli counter. The storybook is a reverent reading. The voices are a casting call. The Meat Wide Web is the other half of the argument: the early web wasn't better, exactly — much of it was terrible — but it was weird, and weird was made by people. The ugly 90s side exhibit is on purpose. Ugly, in this room, is the craft.
Bacolicio.us
There was once a free web service named Bacolicio.us. It did one thing: you pasted a URL and it returned the same page with strips of bacon draped across the text. It was built by a human, for a joke. It ran from roughly 2008 through 2010, got passed around offices, got written up, and eventually went offline — as small jokes on the free web tend to.
The "NO BACON" button in our footer, the "BACON, IF YOU INSIST" easter egg, the whole cured-meat theology of this site — it's all downstream of that joke. Bacolicio did not need to exist. That's the point. It existed because a person made it, hosted it, named it, and walked away when the hosting bill came due.
We don't have a backup of it. Neither does anyone else. That is also part of the point.
What you'll find inside
The exhibit is a fully-interactive member page inside our Slop-Free Webring. Everything renders client-side. Nothing is tracked. The guestbook writes to your own localStorage and nowhere else.
Dialing 1-800-BALONEY…
Initializing modem…
Handshake: CONNECTED @ 56k
- Dial-up handshake: the actual audio, on a skippable overlay. Headphones optional. Nostalgia mandatory.
- Marquee tag, because we promised we would not use it responsibly.
- Visitor counter, incrementing. The number is fake. The spirit is not.
- Guestbook, with seed entries from fictional 1998 visitors plus one slot for you.
- Wayback Machine screenshots of the sites the project loves — hand-curated from the Internet Archive. Look for Bacolicio in there. It earned its spot.
- Blinking, marquee-ing, tiled, table-layout page. Web Standards Project would be furious. We hope so.
It is a love letter, not a museum piece. The Slop-Free Webring hub at /ring/ is the earnest cousin; this is the ugly cousin at the same family dinner.