Nikolai Gogol's Big Adventure

12/03/2025

This is really dumb, but here goes.

A Gogol:

A goggled Gogol:

A goggled Gogol, glugging grog:

A googol goggled Gogols, glugging grog:

At Google:

Clearly, I missed my calling in graphic design and/or writing online comics!

P.S.

  1. The Wikipedia page for googol says, “Not to be confused with Google or Nikolai Gogol.”

  2. When someone asks you a question they could easily search for on Google, it used to be popular (if a little mean) to reply with a link to Let Me Google That For You. We could build a “Let Me Gogol That For You,” where your search query is turned into an absurd Russian short story.

  1. There is a European dessert called a kogel mogel, kind of like a warm egg nog. Sometimes spelled gogol mogol! Can you imagine a googol goggled Gogols glugging gogol mogols at Google? Now we have the makings of a children’s book. But it would need a Choking Hazard warning for parents trying to read it aloud.

First Post

11/26/2025

In 1994, a college student named Justin Hall set up a website called Justin’s Links and began posting about his life, making his website (links.net! Still online!) the first of humanity’s many blogs.1

What did Justin write about back in ’94? Since he’s kept the original site online, I was able to find out. It includes:

  • Some details of his computer setup (“a Hypertext server using MacHTTP v1.2.3 running on a Powerbook 180 w/ 8 RAM and a 120 HD”). That’s 8 megabytes of RAM and a 120 megabyte hard drive, I hasten to point out.
  • Lots of stuff about HTML. The word “HyperText” appears 8 times.
  • A picture of himself next to Oliver North. All photos on this page are less than 2 inches wide on my screen, but they were probably pretty big at 1994-era resolutions!
  • A link to the Barney Blaster screensaver, in which Barney the dinosaur repeatedly appears and then dies horribly (shot, blown up, set on fire). I remember having this on my computer! Why did we hate Barney so much? He only wanted to bring us love…
  • A picture of Cary Grant taking a hit of acid. (I thought this was a joke, but apparently Grant was an “enthusiastic supporter” of LSD and took it 100 times).

What will my blog be about? Pretty much the same, I hope. Probably less LSD. The 1990s internet was a special place, hopeful and weird. It’s a world I’d love to visit again!

P.S.

A few other things that came up as I was writing this:

Here’s what the Powerbook 180 looked like:

Also in 1994, Justin registered the domain bud.com. That is a pretty amazing domain name! In the late 90s, Anheuser-Busch offered him $50,000 for it, but he turned them down. Then, in 2018, he used that domain to start a business selling marijuana online, because of course he did.

In 2015, Justin made a 40 minute documentary called Overshare: The Links.net Story, which I look forward to watching.

Notes

1

Whether Justin’s Links is really the very first blog is debatable. Wikipedia says Tim Berners-Lee’s 1992 website about updates to web standards was the first blog. But in my opinion, 1) TB-L already (rightly) gets credit for inventing plenty of things, including HTML, HTTP, and URLs; and 2) that blog sounds boring.