Internet nostalgia

I had a diaryland. Before Myspace/LJ/Pitas. Remember that community fondly

pitas and diaryland launched very close to one another. by the same guy!

winner if he made ANY money from that, hope so

*wonder

he didn’t and the kickstarter to relaunch pitas just failed. he’s doing other stuff though.

he was also one of my favorite comedic writers on the old school internet

the other day for some reason i really wanted to see nice images of all the toys and vehicles from the mid-1980s care bear line (the small action figure size). did some googling for a few minutes, confident i would quickly find some collector nut's exhaustive resource dedicated to these toys, the different years of the line, how there's a rare version of this one guy with blue hair by mistake, maybe scans of toys r us newspaper circulars..... nothing! or rather, such pages are obviously out there, but unfindable: page after page of search results is e-shopping, mostly for present-day care bear items. it is so, so much harder these days to find sites that are not in some way selling you something, or robotically generated clones of sites trying to sell you something.

otfm

and, (somewhat related I think), so many image searches lead to just a bunch of Pinterest pages! where, for some reason, it seems difficult to navigate to the image source or even save/share the image

yeah that's a huge problem ime

Like these guys, or the stuffed versions?

https://i.imgur.com/C8N68iD.jpg

those guys!

Looked up 80s care bear plush and got a bunch of hard plastic. Go figure.

80s care bear -ebay -etsy -store -shop -pinterest -vintage

still no closer to the imagined repository. the other problem is countless quick words-for-dollars clickbait articles for websites that need content in order for people to share it on facebook. 14 things only 80s kids remember. 20 things you might be an 80s kid if you remember. 10 toys you had to have in 1985. 5 best toys of the 80s. 11 awesomely cutetastic toys of the 80s. 7 80s shows we loved as kids in the 80s, and the toys we loved that went with them.. products of the 80s flashcards | Quizlet. 9 times the care bears cared about something.

this stuff is like the kudzu of the web. it's filled in every available space and the main things you want to accomplish on the internet are becoming impossible.

at least there's a flickr group photo pool, thank god: https://www.flickr.com/groups/gluecksbaerchis/pool/

site:geocities.com 80s care bear
or tripod or angelfire or aol

brb making a poll of the songs posted here:
http://thetotsbox.tripod.com/id78.html

ok, here's the best I could come up with:

https://web.archive.org/web/20021030001249/http://carebears.scritch.com:80/merch/pvc/pvc.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20011105073854/http://www.oz.net:80/~carebear/Pvcs.html

fwiw I searched for site:angelfire.com "care bears" "collection" and came up with this link page, which I ran through the wayback machine (circa 2002) so that I could access a bunch of defunct fansites at once

it's frustrating that you can't access a dead site unless you happen to remember the url or stumble upon a link to it somewhere. the beta version of the wayback machine had a basic keyword search, but it's closed now, and that feature hasn't yet been integrated into the main version.

sometimes you can sidestep all that pinterest/ebay/buzzfeed dreck by limiting your search to a particular date range, say 1995 to 2010. the downside is that if you get even a little bit crafty with your searches these days, google hits you with a "we've detected some unusual traffic..." citation and makes you identify street signs or storefronts for 5 minutes. it's like someone out there doesn't want us to know the raw, unfiltered truth (about '80s Care Bear action figures) 🤔

http://www.wishbear.net/2011/05/poseables.html

^this seems to be the best resource currently on the net. it has better photos but not as many variants as the links in my last post

damn, unreg, nice work. you made my quest your own, thank you!

np! I feel strangely invested in a topic I didn't particularly give a shit about an hour ago :)

one final link w/ additional Care Bear trainspotting:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010620142532/http://www.oz.net:80/~carebear/poseable.html

(do people like this even exist on the internet in 2018?)

god, that's great. the old internet was wonderful.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010609215115im_/http://www.oz.net:80/~carebear/Copyrightpic.JPG

I often find myself adding "reddit" to my google searches (esp when looking for technical info) since it's become the easiest way of filtering the countless irrelevant SEO'd infomercial sites, usually there's some Reddit thread with the info I need

Unreg otm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1550622.stm

The comments on this are brilliant

Take pictures of friendly dogs I see when I walk around.
John, US

With the addition of Sharp's miniature Color Mobile Printer, you can run off copies on the move, too.

feel like this technology should've caught on

Kinda surreal to note that was posted a week after 9/11, just in terms of the unstated 'well let's keep going' vibe.

There even is a tiny mirror next to the lens to help you frame self-portraits.

I was wondering what steampunk was going to look like in 2096.

I would like to use it when I am very angry, like when I have taken a day off work and a tradesman does not appear.

this guy for presidetn

I would use the camera phone to take pictures of my best friend, my dog Benson.

eerie

is it real?

Feels about right, I had gone to Japan about 6mo prior to this and was amazed by phone culture which was using handsets looking like this, and certainly taking photos to use as wallpaper, while people at home were using Nokia 3390s and the 3330 was the brand new 'break your contract if you must have the latest' model on the market and texting each other ringtones.

Having said that

The next logical step, but I think the quality is too inferior to be of much practical use. If someone is going to do it, then at least they could do it properly with a 4 megapixel zoom camera, 1Gb RAM, Global Positioning and fast data transfer via infra-red or wireless or cable to computer/ftp/e-mail account, video transmission to TV preview, and in addition to being a phone, PDA, web browser, internet radio and mp3 player/recorder. We will soon end up with lots of obsolete also-rans when one holy grail of a device will eventually be able to do it all. On the other hand, if it gives people a lot of fun and they can afford it, then each to their own.
Andy Haveland-Robinson, Hungary

feels fake, but possibly isn't as internet radio (which was a pretty niche thing but did exist to a reasonable degree) might just about be a touchpoint for someone commenting on a BBC tech story.

It’s definitely real ha ha

I guess it just doesn't feel that long ago to me that I was reading this stuff, plus I'm used to looking at old BBC pages.

Now where's my RealAudio button?

It's good context to realise why the iPod launch (a month after this) was greeted with a chunk of derision among the nerderati — their heads were already thinking about wireless devices with lotsa GBs hence OG iPod got greeted with "no wireless, less space than a nomad, lame".

iirc that was the official comment of vaunted internet tastemaker... slashdot

oh man, i rolled with a yard-sale nomad from like 2008 to 2010, it was janky and obsolete in so many ways but that capacity was so so fabulous. having built a serious mp3 collection by that point, i saw no viable alternatives.

it also cost a dollar, plus time finding god-bless-em freeware that would let my computer talk to the damned thing

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/index.htm

good website

Promising:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/n7jzgm/the-geocities-archive-is-bringing-the-early-internet-to-life

Christ, my band's website might rebound

sweet link (the geocities gallery), thanks

restore Kill From The Heart from nyu.edu and we're talking

My geocities is up there! Unfortunately its final iteration is just a note that it has moved, but still...

The last iteration of my geocities site

hah, I can't remember my URL but scrolling through a section I thought it might (or might not) have been in and then giving up halfway down I suddenly saw my ex's page sitting there

(there is no content, it just says he has a new page somewhere else, with just enough personal information that I am not pasting it here, no sir)

(I am fairly sure Camaraderie at Arms Length is not my ex)

the first section I dipped into was fairly plain stock backgrounds and I felt not much nostalgia, but then I clicked into one of the SunsetStrip subcategories and there were band photos and hand-pixelled logos and moody black backgrounds and people trying to be cryptic and arty and yes, yes, this is my internet, take me back

I will download all your .mod files, guitar tabs and Doom WADs

(thanks, Alba!)

Great find, will eagerly look for my old X-Files fan site that I drew on paper first. Check out http://theoldnet.com/ as well -- it's a front for the Wayback Machine that even simulates browsing in an old version of Netscape.