cabescion.com and That Weird Ache for the Internet That Used to Be

Published: May 29, 2025

So, I was up way too late (again), half doomscrolling, half chasing nostalgia, and ended up on the
Wayback Machine version of cabescion.com from 2006.
I can’t tell you why I was even looking it up. I don’t really know what I expected to find. Maybe something. Maybe nothing. But what I did find… kinda hit me harder than I thought it would.

The page was… honestly, sort of a mess. Like, boxy layout, Times New Roman everywhere, broken image icons. No animation, no popups, no cookies yelling at you to accept them. It looked like a time capsule from when people made websites the way you’d make a scrapbook — not for clicks, not for money. Just because they could.

There’s a part of me that misses that. And not in the “everything was better back then” kind of way (it wasn’t, a lot of it sucked), but in a real, personal kind of way. The internet used to feel small. Intimate, even. Like a weird little town full of strange shops and homemade signs, and cabescion.com was one of them. It didn’t try to sell me anything. It just… existed.

Now it’s all SEO, engagement funnels, conversion rates. Ugh. Everything is “content” now. Even this post probably counts. But cabescion.com? Nah. That was just a corner of the web where someone put their stuff — maybe about cars? Or maybe it changed over time, I’m honestly not sure. There’s barely anything left, and that’s kind of the point.

There’s something heartbreaking about seeing a site like that frozen in time. Like stumbling across an abandoned GeoCities neighborhood.
You don’t know the people behind it, but you feel this weird… loss? As if the internet forgot someone who used to matter. And that sucks.

If you’re reading this, maybe you remember a site like that too. One that didn’t care about virality or “scale.” A blog you used to check every week. A silly Flash game you played on dial-up. A forum where you made friends that felt realer than people you saw every day. Those places mattered. They still do, even if they’re gone.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, cabescion.com reminded me of a web that felt less like a marketplace and more like a living room. It reminded me that it’s okay to make something weird and small and imperfect and real. Not everything needs to be polished and monetized. Some things can just exist.

If you’re thinking of starting something online — a site, a blog, a whatever — just go for it. Don’t wait till it’s “perfect.” Make your weird corner of the internet. There’s beauty in that.
Who knows, maybe in 20 years someone will stumble across it on the Wayback Machine and feel the same ache I felt.

And if you happen to know what cabescion.com actually was… let me know. I’d love to hear the story.

— just a random person on the internet, feeling a little too much about a site that doesn’t exist anymore.