a few people have noticed that some of the sites i link to — the puzzle terminal, the practice rooms — aren't hosted on neocities or geocities or any of the places you'd expect. they're on something called helltop.net.
this is not a coincidence and i want to be transparent about it because archiving is about provenance. helltop.net is a small hosting provider that one of us set up. "one of us" meaning the friend group this log is loosely about. i am not going to name names because the person who runs it has been through enough without me pointing a flashlight at them on a public page.
the short version: they had server space. we needed somewhere to put things that wasn't a free platform with terms of service that could vanish overnight. they offered. we said yes. the sites live there now.
is it strange to have your puzzle-terminal hosted by someone who is also, technically, one of the characters in the puzzle? yes. enormously. but at a certain point you stop pretending the fiction and the infrastructure are separate things. the wire carries the signal regardless of who owns the pole.
i trust the hosting. i do not trust everything the hosting person says. these are two different assessments and i hold them simultaneously, which is, i think, what archiving teaches you: you can preserve a source and still be suspicious of it.
if helltop.net goes down, this page will still be here on neocities, and the archive will note it. that's the whole point of having both.