THE NIN HOTLINE

In mid-April, I got a notification that I had a new email in my NIN Hotline email address, and when I saw the sender, it made me feel really happy. The name Keith Duemling should ring a bell if you've ever done a deep dive in the NIN Hotline article archives, or if you're old like me and used to go to SmashedUpSanity.com. I often collaborated online with Keith in my late teens and early 20s, including the launch of NothingRadio.net, a streaming station that only played music from Nothing Records - which showed up in print in both Spin magazine and Shift magazine, and which got me a three-way phone call with NIN's publicist and Ross Rosen, NIN's lawyer. (Totally silly, but it worked out in the end). I even got to hang out with him in Cleveland at the first show of the Fragility Tour.

A quarter century ago.

It's hard to describe the breadth of what Keith put into motion at SUS. A huge archive of NIN related articles, still hosted here today. An online zine, with multiple contributors submitting poetry, prose, and editorial articles. Newsletters, reviews, lyrics, art, fonts, wallpapers, discographies, chat, and more - it was a powerhouse of a fan site up through the early 00s, but the site slowly faded away, as more important things commanded time once spent on a seemingly never-ending hobby.

I'm so delighted that what Keith sent along was a new site, but full of decades of memories. And All That Could Have Been is an experience out of time. When you click or tap through, you enter a gallery of thousands of visual memories, each pausing for a few seconds before you're pulled into some other point in the timeline, at another dimension of the experience. In a century defined by moving fast and breaking things, it's a slow, thoughtful place. And if you've been online since the turn of the century, you might even find a callback to the randomgrid - familiar, but different.

I'm so glad to see Keith building again. He makes it look simple, but I also find it reflective and thoughtful. AndAllThatCouldHaveBeen.com