Wygle Wide Web

The random-date archive wheel dropped me on Sunday, December 17, 2000, which at first looked like a blank day because I didn’t actually publish anything that Sunday. Then I looked one day forward and found twenty-year-old me still talking about the night before, and suddenly the date opened up. The post begins with a line…

The Wheel o’ Time landed on September 16, 2011, and for once it dropped me on a day I recognized immediately, or at least I recognized the name attached to it: HIVE11, the first AIGA Seattle HIVE conference, held out at Microsoft in Redmond. I remembered that it was fun. I remembered that Zug and…

Zach, I have your record. I have apparently had it for at least ten years, which means I have now owned your record longer than you ever did, although I understand that is not generally how loans work. As best as I can remember, you loaned me Pet Sounds: In the Key of Dee shortly…

A random date uncovered an abandoned Shadowrun video, a tiny L-shaped office, and the month Mitch Gitelman and Harebrained Schemes made me feel like part of the crew.

A random Thursday in March 2020 began with tampons, soccer video edits and a few strange precautions around a virus. Seven days later I was carrying my workstation home from the stadium.

The random number generator dropped me on Monday, May 11, 2009, and for once the archive immediately knew what was happening while I mostly did not. I was working for The City, the church social-networking platform that had grown out of Mars Hill Church and had only recently become its own thing. I could remember…

One random date opened into four years of Mars Hill sermons, men’s retreats, purity bureaucracy, deleted MySpace history, and a remarkably well-photographed back injury.

The rules of Random Date Archaeology are simple: pick a date somewhere inside the surviving archive, don’t reroll because it looks boring, search only deeply enough to see what survives, and then let the artifacts interrogate my memory. This time the wheel landed on Wednesday, August 15, 2018, and Gmail produced an Airbnb receipt. Seven…

The rules of Random Date Archaeology are simple: pick a date somewhere inside the surviving archive, don’t reroll because it looks boring, search only deeply enough to see what survives, and then let the artifacts interrogate my memory. This time the date dropped us onto Saturday, March 14, 2015. At first, it looked like we…

In 2021, Christianity Today released a two-and-a-half-hour episode of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill called “The Tempest.” Somewhere in the middle of it, Mike Cosper tells the story of three nerds who recovered 140 pages of Mark Driscoll’s old internet posts: Dwayne Forehand found them buried in the internet archive, Adam Wygle assembled…