Erg.
Okay, I feel as if there needs to be some sort of discourse on the state of Das Bistro, even if it does veer into the realm of poopy oversubjective stuff.
Das Bistro was started in I think 1996 or 1997, updated very infrequently, and then crushed to oblivion when the company hosting it fired one of the site's founders, thereby eliminating our free webspace. The site stayed on their servers for a couple of years before they finally wised up and nuked it. So it goes.
For me it was a way of learning and practicing HTML. For Erik, the other main figure, I think it was something for him to do while taking whiny tech support calls. The division of labour was like this: I wrote the pretty words, Erik made the pretty pictures, corrected my sloppy code, and was a good sport about holding my hand through this whole website thing. There was also another contributor, Charlock Swezey, but he took his ball and played elsewhere after a few months.
As Mr. Phillips said once, "Das Bistro was very '96 web." It was a collection of rants and toys, including Erik's ever-popular "Where's Buddha" and my never-popular Conspiracy Kitchen. We had quasi-high ambitions for it, none of which ever came to fruition: a chat lounge (a big deal in a time when the electronic community was just emerging out of BBS's), a haiku guestbook (we were trying to write something that could count syllables, but eventually chickened out and started editing the entries ourselves when the need arose), and witty, insightful discourses on the nature of humanity that would elevate it to the infamy of suck.com (which I'm not sure even existed at the time, but I really wanted some level of infamy that didn't involve sheep).
Das Bistro primarily lives on as a mailing list, DasBanter (administered by Sam), which keeps with the spirit of the site it's based on in the regard that it has no purpose whatsoever. Interested parties should investigate the following address to find out more:
http://www.dasbistro.com/mailman/listinfo/dasbanter
Also, the official Das Bistro IRC channel is:
#dasbistro (duh.) on us.slashnet.org