You never forget your first.
There are so many specialty sites these days that it can be hard to remember when the web felt like a vast desert with a few choice oases of content. I was reminded of one of my first online “homes,” the recapping site Television Without Pity, when I sat down to write about TV for io9. Teenage me, who once ordered a TWoP “Spare the Snark, Spoil the Networks” t-shirt, would have completely flipped out at the idea that I’d get to recap one day.
Television Without Pity — once called Mighty Big TV — was known for detailed, multi-page, often hilarious recaps of popular media, and for their equally snarky forums. They were responsible for making recaps of established phenomenon, but after acquisition by Bravo/NBC Universal and the departure of the site’s co-founders, TWoP became less of a must-read mecca. It shut down in 2014, with the content available via archive. My t-shirt of their mascot Tubeelzebub documents a lost moment in web-time and is hopefully in a box at my mother’s house.
What was your first “home” on the Internet? Is the site still in existence, and if it is, do you stop by to visit these days?