Remembering all the sites like “ff7base” or “ffiix-planet.net” that would pop up as like fanmade teasers for the English releases of 90s Square JRPGs, and maybe 3 or 4 would emerge sustaining and they’d get occasional drips of “exclusive” screens and stuff
Still thinking about the internet in relation to legacy culture systems
Like I liked the 2000s, when it was possible to combine being on the internet with being about in the world, it just meant putting your laptop in a specific stylish bag and going to 1 of maybe 4 coffeshops in range that basically used cheap urban rent for places for people without 9 to 5s to be on the internet all day
And Gawker was like a specifically Manhattan publishing industry blog because like with Slashdot and tech that’s who could keep going back to the same page at work to check for updates
At this point I think you’re just objectively wrong if you think marvel movies being shat out at a sickening pace is good because what in gods name is this. who the fuck are these c list characters. when will you people stop going to watch generically attractive people stand in front of a green screen
Really is getting through to me how culture engines like “Make Movies With Pretty People” are still going after the internet shattered the media system that integrated that with the rest of life.
Like, it used to be The Teens were into Beverly Hills 90210, or Melrose Place, or Dawson’s Creek, or The OC, and other mass media like E! and supermarket tabloids and late night TV would pick up and repeat out like “oh, these are the few people that are important now” even if you weren’t in their specific target demo
And the cutting edge was maybe talking on the internet but that would mean likely over 1-to-1 IMs or melee “chat rooms” but even if there were specific scenes for it it was general-knowledge stuff, like the real nerds might be on alt.tv.x-files but even people with no internet were aware of The X-Files, and read about it probably mostly in TV Guide
The “Zendaya is Meechee” song really captures the difference now because I still have no idea what that movie was or who Zendaya is. I hear she came from the DisneyLodeon Celebrity-generating neo-studio systems, those were already going in the ‘90s but when Lindsay Lohan was declared a Thing I, with no Disney Channel, could still say “oh, the girl from The Parent Trap, which I saw commercials of on TV, which are things I still see and a place I still see them!”
Hilary Duff I couldn’t pick out of a lineup but it got through to me that there was a person in that life role with that name, I guess that’s about the level Zendaya’s made it for me
Oh, at first I thought this was some sort of “biting the soap” (crossing “biting the pillow” and “dropping the soap”?) joke about prison rape
Thinking about how the whole Project Bluelight/RaveSafe on-site pill testing stuff of the 90s, like MyRedBook and the escort review system of the 2000s, was really a SF Bay project by reflexive Internet types
The fact that in the later 90s antiwar.org and Justin Raimondo were ultimately a paleocon entryist op to the “let’s listen to RATM and make paiper-mache protest floats” scene is retrospectively elegiac but hilarious
i think one of the scariest things about being online in the early 00s was how prolific shockwave/flash was. when you load up creepypasta or whatever on youtube it has a seek bar and a duration and a comment section and shit but bro if you opened up a flash file? fucking forget it dude everything’s on the table. and then there would be those fucking archaic-ass escape room games or shit like ouverture facile where it’s just the stark barren realm of flash and zero other interface. i STILL get nightmares about “THE_FINAL.swf” which i cannot seem to find uploaded anywhere about escaping from a bedroom and having only 3 pills to take to abate anxiety, switching between night and day, and the puzzle was essentially on an ‘insanity time limit’; the longer you went without your scant 3 doses or solving the puzzle, the more the room became disjointed and disturbing, graphics becoming corrupted and flashing. like there might be darkweb nowadays but sometimes stumbling across individual websites hosted off of freeware domains like geocities or angelfire was like paddling into deep ocean and finding some kind of fucked up uncharted island. then youd run into shit like THE_FINAL or diningroom.swf/The House and be like ‘welp! that was a fun internet voyage for today. who the FUCK would make this’
EDIT: NOT TO MENTION THAT FLASH FILES COULD GIVE YOU ACTUAL MALWARE. so there was THAT fun caveat too of like…the closest a digital file could be to being legitimately cursed/haunted was that it could actually fuck up your computer for real while fucking up your psyche
yo what was that tastemaking 2000s hipster music site that was a successor to Rolling Stone/Spin except they did vicious low-grades sometime like a zine?
They were important circa like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But I keep thinking at them and getting Flavorpill, which was like the mid-2000s (“Sparks era”) web take on the events page
That closed down bcuz it was VC I guess and people eventually realized it was mimicking alt-weeklies where it had been a legitimating wrapper on the profit center of hooker ads
So I remember once telling (to Freddie de Boer, re: a fight with Sady Doyle in like 2008, cause I’m some kinda Zelig/Forrest Gump of The Discourse) about how Salon had started putting its woman-themed articles under the heading “Life” – which is a classic newspaper women’s section title, I think the Philly Inquirer used it growing up - even though the still-kinda-static early-CMS HTML publishing system kept putting them in the /mwt/ directory after the original branding, “Mothers Who Think”
Bc in the late 90s-mid 00s, furries were universally hated and repelled, which was kind of a self-reinforcing thing bc if you ran a forum that didn’t assertively ban furries it would get around and they’d flock and before long whatever you were doing was fucked, haha you’re running a furry board now
(and this is when furries were still otherkin “I’m RILLY a wolf, stop fursecuting us!!” in a way that got adapted from ‘90s Wiccan “Burning Times” and later got diverted to trans shit)
So Something Awful (which pioneered forum culture, and then monetized its excesses by charging you to register an account and being gratuitously banhappy so you’d lose it every so often) was like “okay, we’ll finally have a forum for furry shit”
And after a while if you’d posted in the furry board you’d get forum flair attached to your posts, like a yellow star haha Holocaust jokes
And then after more time if you had you’d only be allowed to post in the furry board
Then all the tainted accounts were deleted at once
Ha!
(part of the joke is they did the same thing again later as “April Furs’ Day” and people still fell for it)
