Check out what I just came across as I wandered through some dusty old Dropbox folders like some sort of digital autoethnographer: a silly little webpage I made (for fun) as a memento of that time we dissected frogs in Grade 11 biology class in 2003.

Folks, this website is older than some young adults I’ve volunteered or played soccer with since moving to Singapore in 2023. (!!!)

How was that 23 years ago? Everything still feels so vivid and immediate. The stench of formaldehyde permeating the science corridor, the chill of winter rushing through a crack in the window at the back of the lab; the click of trackpad buttons on the school-issued Compaq laptops.

I thought it would be fun to share my frog-dissection webpage memento here. Behold!

Content warning 🐸: Frog dissection ahead.

Now’s your chance to slam your laptop lid shut and toss your machine out the window if you don’t want to see a frog being sliced open with a scalpel by very earnest teenagers.

(scroll sideways)

(Note: I’m on a pretty barebones WordPress plan, so I couldn’t upload the html file to a file manager. Instead, I copypasted the HTML into ChatGPT and asked it to make the HTML play nice with embedding custom HTML in a WordPress page. What you see above is the result.)

Sometimes I’m surprised by how little my taste has changed over time — if you can call it taste. The look, feel, vibe, tone of this page is still up my alley today. Unpolished photos, silly captions, bright clashing colors? I still like that stuff today! Even my voice feels basically the same. Does that mean I’m still the same Justina as my teenage self? Yikes.

Anyway, here’s how I intended the page to look:

My first foray into building websites was using HTML in Notepad, making graphics in Jasc PaintShop Pro (and silly pixel animations in MS Paint). This was probably around 1999. My sister Jess wrote a really great article about our internetolescence detailing our early adventures. At some point, I figured out a faster way to get what I was looking for: build in Microsoft Word to take advantage of WYSIWYG, export the document as a webpage, then clean up the HTML in Notepad.

I suspect I made this frog-dissection memento using this method. I would have then uploaded it via WS_FTP to my little home on the internet — a directory Jess had set aside for me on our domain, balloonia.com.

At the time, I felt a little guilty, maybe even dirty, for taking shortcuts with Word’s WYSIWYG instead of aspiring to become a true HTML/CSS master. Now, I think it’s pretty rad that my younger self was just happy to experiment quickly and put things out into the world.

I think my instinct has always been to play around and publish, not to be particularly perfect at anything — trusting that somebody out there might find it fun, funny, interesting, thought-provoking, moving, useful, or stupid.

It’s all good!

The early 2000s… what a time to be a teenager putting stuff out on the internet! Maybe later I’ll post some other stuff from the archives.