How old exactly were those bricks you were matching? I ran into a job last year where the mortar was basically lime putty and sand from the 1800s, and nothing modern would match no matter what I tried. Did you bust out any test panels before committing to a mix, or just wing it and hope for the best? Because I wasted a whole day mixing five different batches once before I got close, and even then the color was off by a shade. The old stuff just has that irregular look from hand-mixing that's almost impossible to copy with bagged mortar.

My cousin found a polka album about tractors in a Nebraska thrift store once.

You said "no loading spinners, no cookie banners" but actually those old sites had loading spinners too, just different ones. They were those animated GIFs of a little hourglass or a spinning globe that took forever to finish. And cookie banners? They didn't have them because the EU law for those didn't come until way later, not because the internet was somehow better back then. I get what you mean about speed though, those raw HTML pages were tiny compared to modern bloated sites. But let's be real, half the reason they loaded fast is because they looked like a 12 year old made them in MS Paint with 3 images total. The tradeoff between looking good and loading fast is real, but pretending old sites had no issues is just rose colored glasses.

My Brooklyn buddy learned that propane lesson too, fireball and all.

My GeoCities site had a guestbook and I think 47 people signed it over two years. That spike you got from the forum link sounds cool but honestly I never saw the point in obsessing over counters. It's just a number sitting there making you feel good or bad for no real reason. I'd rather have 10 people who actually played the game and left a comment than 500 drive-bys who clicked a link and bounced. Feels more real.