Internet nostalgia

dudes, i'm playing snood right now

for my 8th algebra class ('95) i had a bearded, yet relatively young (35-ish) grateful dead fan "hippie" algebra teacher named mr. whitaker. mr. whitaker was really fond of "abtract" mathematical concepts such as fractals. he had lots of fractals posters in the classroom. one day, as a way to encourage us to fool around with The 'Net and thereby enrich the part of our brains that abstract mathematical concepts live in, mr. whitaker told us he'd kick us down us a few extra credit points if we could manage to successfully transmit to him, via the inter net, one (1) electronic mail aka E-MAIL. a few months prior, i'd convinced my dad to buy us an account with a local dial-up ISP, and i was already relatively savvy with it, so it was really no hassle at all. as it turned out, i was the only one in the class sophisticated/advantaged enough to have access to such technology at this time, and mr. whitaker was kind enough to point that out to everyone as he wrote my little extra credits down in the gradebook.

first time watching a video on the internet: some sort of 1 minute video about a space shuttle from NASA which took several hours to download and only played for a few seconds before crashing computer

oh man, that's fantastic

Another 1994 clip. Note how proud Crow is of the setup he describes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GoMoeV3Y4A

"And you think that'll make you happy, huh."

"YES."

you're a liar Z S and I don't believe you, unless 'space shuttle from NASA' is code for 'nude scene from fast times at ridgemont high'

it's the truth! bonus pr0n anecdote, though, is not knowing how to delete search history (or knowing that you could delete it, or knowing that it existed)and getting called out by dad - "...and tell me, what exactly is "hotsexvideos.com"?

"...uh, baseball cards"

^that's my totally revisionist version of what I would say, when in reality it was more like "nnnghhhh...i'm...nghgggghhhh...sorry...nnnnghhphhh"

"well you see dad, it's actually, um, 'hots ex videos' -- the guy's nickname is hots... no i have no idea how he got it -- and he posts testimonial videos from his ex-girlfriends explaining what went wrong in the relationship... so it's really an educational thing, when you think about it. it's a public service, is what it is"

ILX: the Momus years

IRC! I used to be on that shit non stop. I went and got a permanent diaup connection and everything.

my housemate Chris explaining how these two asshole lawyers posted messages advertising their firm to like, every single board on usenet

http://qodem.sourceforge.net/tradewars1.gif

//roll

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMLH_QyPTYM

bonus pr0n anecdote,

Taking about a month to amass eight floppies full of pr0n.

how long did it take you to amass eight stiffies?

I'd graduated to a 20MB hard drive by then.

early 90s: going to a library meeting about the internet -- full room, with the lecturer showing off gopher (veronica, jughead, etc) and ascii art

1996?: using netscape 1.0 with the status bar managing the files to save, which just disappear if they don't finish downloading

not actually owning a computer and having to use the public library to access Hotmail account

nb not actually nostalgic about this

Printing out a picture of Elvis Costello & The Attractions, then adding text to it with MS Word and getting the image transferred to a t-shirt. Probably 1995 or so, and I had that shirt for 10 years.

I downloaded and printed a bunch of Kinks tablatures too, enough to make a three-ring binder get pretty thick. I'm sure my dad loved getting back into his office (which doubled as the guest room) the following Monday and finding out his printer had run out of ink.

xp i did that with the picture of sly on the CD insert for the family stone's greatest hits! it was awesome! i miss that shirt...

once I met someone off the internet, and I took the train across the country to see this dude, and I spent the next hour trying to ring him from the station payphone to say I had arrived and could I get a lift, but I couldn't get through, because he was online

because, you see, in those days, online meant no phone calls
and we didn't have cellphones
uhh
yeah, never mind.

For that just out of 1998 feel try http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/

I'm pretty sure I had a geocities page with like five links or something

web rings

^^^^^^^^^

'Under Construction' GIF, sometimes animated.

"_00 hours free!!!" AOL CDs regularly appearing in mailbox

leaving the computer online overnight to download the latest game demo from HappyPuppy.com

turning off images to surf faster

hitting "stop" before clicking a link, because netscape used to crash if u tried to click away from the current page while it was still loading

people's personal "homepages"

banners, along with instructions to "contact the Webmaster" to place your banner ad in that space

― dude [yr gettin' a] (del)

Nostalgia is useless

banaka = smarterchild

I'm not sure if banaka = smarterchild.

nostalgia is the 'naive reading' of history/cultural memory, preparatory to any meaningful act of criticism

Welcome back, bernard snowy! How may I help you now?

criticism is not what is needed; what is needed is dispassionate analysis and action, action, action.

I'll have to think about that one for a while.

@_@

(o)_(o)

=||((O))_((O))||=

got mah hater-blockers on (||)_(||)

there is no hate to block, only the blinding light of truth (to use a hackneyed metaphor)

lolin at harbl

banaka how do you pronounce hackneyed, do you say 'hack en eyed' like 'hack en sack'

because I imagine that's how you say it

I'm not sure how we're defining "meme" movie, but The Blair Witch Project generated a lot of buzz because of its website (1999 headline: "'Blair Witch' Proclaimed First Internet Movie")

cf. famously unchanged (until 2021) Space Jam website

iirc The Room didn't take off until like...2011 or so. I definitely heard about it before that but it was mostly related to that mysterious billboard in LA that stayed up for nearly a decade.

Snakes on a Plane was a pretty interesting phenomenon, because it was hard to overstate how much you heard about it, not just online either. even the people who couldn't shut up about it got sick of it before the movie even came out. and the movie itself, as I recall, did not actually perform particularly well. it turns out people weren't really interested in it beyond Sam Jackson's "motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane" line. Which doesn't even make sense in the context of the movie! you could so clearly tell what was added in after the title of the movie went viral. anyway I suspect its poor performance saved us from an entire generation of idiotic meme movies. I think it's really hard to make something go 'viral' organically when you've got hundreds of people working on it.

Morbius was the best case scenario for this, imo - dogshit unsuccessful film gets ironically championed online, studio goes "o shit we gotta cash in" and rereleases it...and no one goes to see it.

yea I was genuinely proud of the internet for that one

I remember that Scott Pilgrim vs The World and Sucker Punch both seemed to have been specifically formulated to appeal to Hollywood's idea of the stereotypical internet user circa 2010/2011, breathe in - e.g. weak man-children and lolicon-obsessed paedophiles respectively. Notably the main TVTropes entry for both films are so long they're subdivided into subsections, because those two films captured the hearts of the people who wrote TVTropes back then.

But along with Kick-Ass 2 they didn't make any money, so I have the impression that Hollywood backed off internet-targeted movies for a while. And yet apparently there are no less than two Kick-Ass sequels sitting on hard drives awaiting release, so what do I know?

Scott Pilgrim a pretty straight adaptation of the comic, which in turn yes did pander a fair amount to nerd culture - the mainstreaming of which I'm sure the internet had a lot to do with, but I don't think of it as a meme film or "internet" film. At any rate you'd have a tough time suggesting that pandering to nerds hasn't worked out commercially for Hollywood.

Worth pointing out that Ain't It Cool News went online in 1996 - adding whatever flammable material there is to internet nerd rage or internet nerd love.