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<h1>Zompist.com is 30 years old!</h1>
How did that happen?
<p>I don’t have much to say except, thank you for visiting, please explore the firehose of content, and take care of yourself in these depressing times.
<p>I did redo the main page. I moved the mouseover area to be more visible and redid the quick links. Plus, there’s a bunch of new material!
<p>If you’re viewing it on a phone... that must be uncomfortable. <a href="mobile.html">Here’s a simpler view of the front page.</a>
<h2>...And at 20</h2>
I've been doing this since 1996, when some of you were probably toddlers. I actually forgot about this, but alert reader Raphael reminded me. So I decided to celebrate by doing a redesign of the front page. I attempted to reduce the scrolling by using dynamic content; hopefully it will work on everyone's browsers. And I wrote this page.
<p>And I created an <b>explosion of content</b>!
<ul>
<li><a href="libmoral.html">The morality of <b>liberalism</b></a> (promised 4 years ago, finally done)
<li><a href="Le-spirituality.html"><b>Beic religion</b></a>
<li><a href="maraille.html"><b>Maraille</b>: a D&D idea stack</a>
<li>Bob reviews <a href="bob60.html"><b>Nimona</b> and <b>Bandette</b></a>
</ul>
If you haven't been by in months, these pages are pretty new:
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<li><a href="comicswomen.html"><b>Women in Comics</b></a> - Over 300 names! Give me more!
<li><a href="piketty.html"><b>Piketty</b> in the 21st Century</a>
<li><a href="bob59.html">Bob reviews the <b>Batman</b> Golden Age Omnibus</a>
<li><a href="dialect.html"><b>Mangling Foreign Dialects</b>: a manual from 70 years ago</a>
<li><a href="china.html">The <b>China Construction Kit</b> is here!</a>
</ul>
Going forward, the <b>Recent</b> tab (under “Read all the things”) will have the last year or so of new pages.
<p>To make room I've also removed some very old pages. I doubt you were reading them, but you can always ask to get them back.
<p><b>What's next?</b> Twenty more years, I hope. After that comes the Singularity, and our new computational overlords will probably not care about comics and puny human languages.
<h2>How to be on the web that long</h2>
Bitten by a radioactive web page, I was compelled to make a page of my own in about March 1996.
<p>I called it <i>Metaverse</i>, after the term from <a href="snow.html"><i>Snow Crash</i></a>— the actual zompist.com domain came a few years later. (I guess I've been phasing out the old name ever since. Slowly.)
<img src="rkulchah.gif" align="right" title="That's pretty good pixel graphics, isn't it? It came from a SimCity mod I worked on.">
<p>The earliest version the <b>Wayback Machine</b> has stored is from <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970801125218/http://www.tezcat.com/~markrose/">June 1997</a>. There was already a fair amount of content!
<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19990428062450/http://www.zompist.com/">Here is the earliest capture of zompist.com</a>, and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20060107014059/http://www.zompist.com/">here's one from 10 years ago</a>.
<p>Web designers will note that I pretty much haven't learned anything since. I <i>have</i> been slowly adding Unicode support and CSS.
<p>I also still have the '90s idea that a person should, well, <i>have their own interesting website.</i> For day to day editorializing, book reviews, and general great thoughts, I've <a href="http://zompist.wordpress.com/">moved to Wordpress</a>. It's tedious to do all the updating and linking for just a few paragraphs. But when I have a lot to write and it seems of permanent interest, I still put it up on the mothership.
<h2>Fame</h2>
Back in the '90s, I used to look for links to my pages. Mostly this would be the name of the page and a link… this is what most people's web pages looked like in the '90s, a long list of unannotated links. But sometimes they'd say something about me. Googling “zompist” today is a little tedious… I'll mostly find references I've already seen, then the same things copied on a bunch of sites, then some outright plagiarism. So that's depressing. Googling my name, I learn that there's another Mark Rosenfelder in Texas. Man, <i>he</i> must hate googling his name.
<p>(If you google “Rosenfelder” you find mostly me. But my brother Terry is on page 2; <a href="http://www.rosenfelderart.com">go look at his paintings here</a>.)
<p>Bored reporters have sometimes run across one of my pages, so my site has been mentioned in <i>Le Monde</i>, 21 fév. 1998— that would be in France— and in <i>Il Corriere della Sera</i>, 8 Marzo 1998. Both articles focused on my grammar of Syldavian, but <i><a href="lemonde.html">Le Monde</a></i> also admired Virtual Verduria, whose <i>futilité absolue</i> it found not without charm. The <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2004-05-23/features/0405230529_1_linguistics-mark-twain-comic-strip"><i>Chicago Tribune</i> found me</a> in 2004. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zompist.com">Wikipedia</a> found a few more.
<h2>My strange niche</h2>
<img src="yonagu-lck-cover.jpg" align="left" width="77" height="120"> If you're still reading, you may wondering about me. Tall and devilishly handsome, I spent about thirty years in programming. Here and there on the site you can find references to the projects I was working on. All this time I've lived in Oak Park, Illinois, except for three years when I lived in Quincy, Massachusetts.
<p>I lost my last programming job at an unfortunate time— at the height of the recession, with unemployment rising to 9.6% and middle-aged programmers in low demand. So what the heck, I figured I should take the opportunity to write a book-length <i>Language Construction Kit</i>.
<p>It took a few more books, but now I can say that I'm not “a hobbyist” but rather “self-employed”. Just barely, maybe, but I can be frugal. At this point I've sold more than 18,000 books, which is not bad for a writer. About 8,000 are copies of the LCK.
<p>The nicest thing is that in quite a few places now, my books have been used in linguistics or conlanging classes. I don't always hear about this, but sometimes the professor contacts me, and three times I've gone to visit classes. This professorial thing, I can see the appeal. Talking about languages all day is a lot of fun, when people are interested.
<p>As I've mentioned, I've <a href="https://zompist.wordpress.com/2012/11/02/conlanger-for-hire/">created conlangs for several clients</a>… I've lost track, at least 8 people. (If you are a possible client, <a href="contact.html">see my contact page</a>.)
<h3>Edit, summer 2024</h3>
Did I say 18,000 sales? It’s now over 50,000.
<h2>Old anniversary info</h2>
I used to keep track of search strings people used to find my pages, because they were kind of amusing. Sadly, my ISP doesn't provide this anymore.
<p><a href="bday.html">Here's the older version of this page</a>, which contains those search strings, traffic figures from 1999, the time I got published in <i>The Journal of Irreproducible Results</i>, and more.
<p><i>—M.R., April 2016</i>
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