Internet nostalgia

you clearly cannot jam with the console cowboys in cyberspace

that clip came to my attention years ago when it was highlighted in an early Xkcd.

it's good

Anybody want to play some Legend of the Red Dragon or Tradewars?

My band back then had a Geocities page. Will be interesting to see if it pops up.

WestHollywood was *super* important to me back in the mid-90s, because it was when I first came out to my wife as gender-curious, and was one of the first places I could connect easily with other people in my situation.

good account of what Internet use was like right before Berners-Lee and why the web initially seemed to be more of an incremental change than a transformation

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-gatekeepers-fortresses

The official Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich website is looking a bit internet nostalgia:

http://www.dddbmt.com

Came across this site when doing some important Beatles research:

https://sentstarr.tripod.com/beatgirls/first.html

Love it.

Somehow never knew about Rory Storm's macabre fate. Amongst the pleasant reminiscences of Liverpool Art College and the Cavern,

While Rory was at Stormsville comforting his mother Vi, he overdosed on a mixture of sleeping pills and alcohol. he died on 28th September 1972, and his mother committed suicide upon finding him.

Never seen Rory Storm before. Somehow I expected him to look more like Mal Evans that this, rather startling figure who looks like he's stepped out of the Blitz club in 1980. Photo by Astrid Kirchherr, which helps, I guess.

https://i.imgur.com/JgCa8qW.jpeg

you know what I miss, those little custom link buttons that everyone made. used to be people would connect via forums and they'd exchange buttons and put 'em on the "links" section of their webpage. they were all so ugly but I miss 'em

i stumbled on something that still had its "web ring" materials in place recently, it was like opening up a buried ruin and breathing air trapped centuries ago.

I miss (permanently) under construction pages with the little digging stick figure. Maybe 24 years later he’s still digging.

Wiby - Search Engine for the Classic Web

The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.

Oh, how lovely. Except the phallic lighthouse, maybe.

hypnospace outlaw is a great little detective game rooted in that 'webring' era of internet- pretty clever conceit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb4Jul496QE

it's also really *funny*. recommended

http://www.cwgsy.net/community/tosy/images/rabbit2.gif

well damn

Here is a collection of more than 700 88x31 web buttons from the 1990's and 2000's

(Just randomly found this when clicking "surprise me" at the Wiby site linked above.)

https://anlucas.neocities.org/petrape.gif

Wiby and button page are both great finds!

Yeah that "surprise me" button is endlessly entertaining.

https://i.imgur.com/LkM5Fu6.jpeg

Love to see an internet nostalgia site that’s still being regularly updated, complete with guest book and all.

All you Beatles and solo Beatles needs:

https://jpgr.co.uk/beatroot.html

Great find, reminds me of SugarMegs: http://sugarmegs.org

Rediscovering the Small Web

logging on to the nbc supernet pic.twitter.com/Vl3HNYzOz8

— no (@n0wak) April 8, 2022

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/09/way-back-in-1989-usa-today-launched-an-online-sports-service-i-found-it-at-goodwill/

Wow

Had some new thoughts...

https://www.patreon.com/posts/look-back-part-1-111028261

love it, Ned.
Discovering the internet is intertwined with Suede online chats for me. My first email addresses were puns on Suede and Modern Life Is Rubbish tracks. Hardly anyone was online, especially not other British people...

Discovering the internet is intertwined with Suede online chats

I fell for an Australian girl who had an email address before anyone else I knew.. she also had Suede CD's on her floor
Like 1994-95

Early discussion on whether to get the internet:

My mum - Do you know if it's even worth it? Are there enough interesting sites?

Me - Mum there are millions of sites, everything has a site *picks up magazine and turns to ad page* like see here, 7up has a site!

Mum - Well but why would you want to visit the 7up website?

mum otm

when my dad asked me what was on the internet in the mid-90s, the only thing i could think of was "....uh, like photos of airplanes and stuff!"

I remember when every shrub, hedge and creek in the nation were littered with AOL startup discs

it was an absolute environmental holocaust

yeah between that, OJ Simpson, and Monica Lewinsky, you were pretty set as a stand up comic in those days

Rather than zodiac signs, I like to picture people's personality and fates tied to media releases, so if you were born in 1997, you were born in the Year of Titanic, but if you were born in 1996, you were born in the Year of Mr T Ate My Balls

when my dad asked me what was on the internet in the mid-90s, the only thing i could think of was "....uh, like photos of airplanes and stuff!"

There's a 'red eye' joke in this but needs some work

Eight million jokes in this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z7kVH9xePM

aww, that was cute. my old Internet friends!

Red Letter Media recently pointed out that there have been some good, original films this year, but no-one went to see them*, and in the process they mentioned that Minecraft was the first "meme" movie. The comments corrected them by pointing out that Snakes on a Plane also attracted an internet buzz back in... whenever it came out. 2006. Albeit that I don't remember anybody back in 2006 throwing snakes at Samuel Jackson. Or disrupting screenings by releasing snakes into the theatre. Or deliberately hijacking airliners and crashing them into a snake farm.

* e.g. Companion, which is a riff on Ex Machina that grossed around $30m.

Which got me to thinkin' if there were any earlier internet meme movies, but I can't come up with anything. I remember that Swordfish attracted a bit of press (beyond Halle Berry's chest) because the villainous plot was to steal stock options, or something like that - it was written during the height of the dot.com boom - but that wasn't really an internet meme thing. Ditto the likes of Hackers and Virtuosity etc, neither of which seemed to have been written by people who actually used the internet for anything beyond email. Ally McBeal had the dancing baby and that was millions of years ago. Murphy Brown had references to Dan Quayle from the Civilization games, but he was an actual person.

Still, I find it heartening that NASA's Apollo Lunar Surface Journal is still online in more or less the same form it was in the mid-1990s:
https://www.nasa.gov/history/alsj/index.html

It uses the plainest of plain HTML. It predated frames. It predated CSS. It did not sanction that buffoonery. Along with the slightly newer Apollo Flight Journal it's a rare example of an ancient website that's still readable and actually useful.

Emoji Movie?

Emoji Movie released well after Snakes On A Plane - I think there's quite a few you could cite in between 2006 and now, but can't think of much pre '06, think maybe internet culture hadn't become sufficiently hegemonic yet?

The Room was 2003 but I think the internet meme status came later?

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.