There were two recurring themes some editor at Salon – around say ‘96 when it and Slate kind of were for-internet print media – was fixated on.

One was a child-liberationist one, like “parents can have people abduct their 'problem children’ to offshore reform camps like Tranquility Bay, and also often backwater areas of various states use 'Person In Need of Supervision’ structures to apply the state to control teens on parents’ behalf AND THAT’S FUCKED UP”

The other was “oh yeah remember how there was once a rich subculture of female Star Trek fans writing 'slash’ fanfiction?”

And it was honestly surprising to me it was the second one the culture ended up picking up as a major subplot.

Kind of a shame no one tried to revive the RealPlayer brand for streaming.

official-kircheis:

vriskakinnieaynrand:

allah the internet you gave mankind so we could trick each other into clicking beheading videos and goatse has resumes on it

Nubiles really one of the internet porn brands that’s held up over the years.

I wonder what CD Girls is up to now.

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

The only reason I haven’t put together a “favourite pre-2000 Internet meme” poll to complement all those “favourite 2000s Internet meme” ones is that nobody actually remembers when the 1990s ended and I know for a fact that the notes would just be a solid wall of people going “dude, you forgot X” and me replying “bro, X is from 2005”.

@mashmaiden replied:

If you DO eventually do one, the dancing baby better be on there! That’s the first big internet “thing” I remember as a middle schooler back in the day. I remember having it on my computer and hearing about it on the news, and then it was on ally mcbeal. first “meme” I knew of in my internet life

An incomplete list of Internet memes that are actually from the 1990s:

• All Your Base*
• Colin Mochrie
• Dancing Baby
• Evil Bert
• Hampster Dance
• Mr. T Ate My Balls
• Stick Death

* the phrase itself, but not the the viral text-to-speech video; the latter first appeared in June of 2000

An incomplete list of Internet memes which are popularly cited as 1990s memes which actually debuted in 2000 or later:

• Annoying Thing/Crazy Frog (the sound clip of a guy making motor noises with his mouth is borrowed from an earlier meme, but the creature itself was created in 2003)
  
• Chuck Norris Facts (popularised in 2005)
  
• Hatten är din (the song is from 1981; the Swedish flash video that made it a meme is from 2000)
  
• Homestar Runner (though the eponymous character existed as early as 1996, the webtoon series that spawned the associated memes just barely misses the cut, debuting in January of 2000)
  
• O RLY? (though it’s uncertain precisely when the originating image macro was created, the owl photo it’s based on is not known to have been present online before 2001)
  
• Real Ultimate Power (the website went live in 2002)
  
• Tunak Tunak Tun (the song was published in 1998, but it didn’t achieve viral meme status until 2006)
  
• YTMND (Finding Forrester did not exist in the 1990s)

vriskakinnieaynrand:

man, i’m worried about the kids these days. i think they aren’t being raised with the proper values. i think they aren’t being acculturated right. they’re being denied their heritage. their cultural inheritance. like do they even know what goatse is

youzicha:

centrally-unplanned:

centrally-unplanned:

The internet is amazing for sociological research in that it is the ultimate double-edged sword. All self-writings are performative to some degree, in fact things like historical ‘journals’ were often literary fads or writing projects that would envision public release. But still, in comparison the internet is an absolute explosion of written, documented text (& images and film!) about what people care about, spend their time on, etc, but all of it has been ruthlessly pruned by optimization metrics to be content to be consumed by others. Its all half real, half brand.

I will often, to study how people view a media property, watch all the different youtube videos or read the reddit posts on it, but (particularly with the youtube) you can’t actually take naively that the opinion being stated is the creator’s opinion; instead its the narrative they would be interesting to make as a video. They probably believe that narrative after making the video, that work changes you, but that chronology matters, and you can only view that process from the edges of those polished works.

So someone linked an upload of some really early anime websites that got loaded on CDs… from a magazine? That would include as a bonus to subscribers?? Archived versions of fansites on the CDs??? Which is just, amazing on so many levels, but is a real bonus for us. One of the linked early fan sites is Fredart.com, Megatokyo author Fred Gallagher’s pre-webcomic site on anime news and his personal art. (Really having a lot of Megatokyo Baader-Meinhoff these days)

First off it’s adorable, the art in particular is great and it has all of these details on like forum website drama at the time, precious info. Check it out if you want.

What draws my eye most is something it shares with its contemporary peers, the utter *lack* of optimization its text has gone through to engage its audience. Everything is just filled with asides, personal details, life stories; now you know this fan-art outfit was inspired by shopping with Fred’s then-girlfriend Sarah at the mall, on Saturday, at Hudsons!

Or how Sarah’s Origami page tells us she picked it up as a seduction technique to get into weeb-master Fred’s good graces on its literal intro, which is the cutest and she should be immensely proud of this even 24 years later, I hope she is:

No one (on average ofc ofc exceptions exist) does this posting fan art these days, you add like a quippy one-liner or a tag & title, because people want the art, you have optimized the content for that. Its not like Fred & others weren’t trying to make their website entertaining, though; they just didn’t get feedback on how, there were no engagements and very few metrics. “Talking normal about themselves” was as good a way as any. So you get very high levels of just authentic, actual real-life information. I know more about Fred in 1998, how he actually lived, from this website than I do from 99% of the people I follow on Tumblr (or worse, Twitter).

Though I think there is an added factor to this one - in 1998 on the internet you would expect people to care about this more. The reason fan artist #8367 phrases every non-art tweet as a joke or politics rant is because they know you won’t care otherwise, you have ten thousand fan artists to choose from so you gotta make it interesting (note, if you are thinking of counterexamples: are they hot?). You only matter for your content; existing is useless. But on the early internet, running a website? You were important *by default*. You got points just for showing up. Numbers were low, content was sparse, finding peers was take-what-you-can get. As such, you did care about the person, inherently, as they were there, and that makes them worth caring about. Its like default celebrity status. Visiting these websites - personally made by small groups - was like a digital housecall. People very quickly became no-qualifiers-needed-friends in that environment.

Now that you pick and choose from a list of hundreds of thousands, we have all been trained to look for different things. Which means we write different things to match. How we communicate has been transformed by our digital architecture (Other factors at play of course, generational conditioning, social media site design, etc; one at a time…)

Oh and here is Ruri in a Summer Dress, in case you were curious; the jacket is great, love the curved hem and the piping.

Huh, that really is very different from the modern web. My first impression was “teenager” (when we also tend to experiment with different forms of social presentation and see what works), but Gallagher was 30 when he wrote it.

olderthannetfic:

–

wwwtxt:

I just want to let you know that reading posts here and sending info back and forth with people is an important part of my day. ↯94MAY

Shame about Slate, but of the big two daily online magazines from the 90s, it def. beat Salon by the 2000s

argumate:

shortly after the introduction of the World Wide Web some clever people said hey, what if instead of lots of different web sites there was just one site, a “portal” if you will, that contained all the news and information and entertainment you might want? and we told those people to fuck off and die because their idea sucked shit, so they went away and added comments and rebranded it as “social media” and we couldn’t get enough of it.

Remembering the mid-90s when the killer app for online was like… chat rooms! Which were like IRC channels full of total strangers

fantasyanime:

Maintaining an RPG & Anime fan site for 23 years

Opened in 1998, I’ve been working on FantasyAnime.com for the past 23 years! Uuf, it doesn’t feel that long. I’ve had people message me saying, “Wow, you’re still online! I used to go to your site when I was in middle school.” - and then my hair instantly turns grey 👴

In this article, I’m going to talk about my experience maintaining a fan site for such a long time. I’m also going to reminisce about the early days of the Internet.

Keep reading

bogleech:

I think it’s really funny….that I’ve seen younger internet people say this freaks them out……….and that they just see it from “old people” on the internet……but when I was a teenager online…….we thought a bunch of ellipses…….were the way to recreate natural-looking speech through text……I don’t know why that is……..but we thought it was what looked friendly and casual…….like we thought there had to be punctuation to break up the flow of our text…………….but any other kind of sentence punctuation was too abrupt and therefore read as hostile………..It’s just an interesting little quirk of internet language evolving that I still think about a lot……….

memecucker:

I’ve only ever seen scattered isolated episodes of Buffy and Angel but reading about Buffyverse and the discourses around it made me realize that the past 20 years of media analysis have simply been footnotes to late 90s/wary 00s Buffy fandom message boards

Xena too

newyorksjojos:

From bi.org in 1997, its first year, when it was at bisexual.org and called “Bisexual Options”

I’m so old I remember when the .jpg/.gif distinction was about modem-era filesize, color palettes, and suitability for clean computer-generated vs. busy natural images, not motion

tototavros:

audreycious:

voxette-vk:

squareallworthy:

shieldfoss:

sophia-epistemia:

cipheramnesia:

solitarelee:

cipheramnesia:

solitarelee:

cipheramnesia:

runcibility:

the–amala–network:

endreal:

Say how old you are on the internet without saying how old you are

Here’s mine:

gpoy

napster

WWIV

log off, I need to make a phone call

See this, this is how I know we’re age-compatible 

Not the age in my bio?

What if I’ve been secretly dyslexic this whole time and never realized it said you were in your FOURS? It could be code for number of stages the polycule has spread. I can’t take that risk. I must find the truth through dial-up. 

That explains why it took so long.

Internet Relay Chat

webring

Atari 2600

You’ve got mail

I hear there’s rumors on the, uh, internets, that we’re going to have a draft.

Google+

anime shrine

kontextmaschine:

through the years realized that through whatever blind groping the ‘90s-ass “edgelords” were desperately trying to save us from this, through proper gatekeeping and filtering

and at first I’d thought it was gratuitous and supported it being relaxed, maybe not shaming everyone who publicly mourned a suicide, mea culpa, mea culpa, I have debts to pay

>@siliquasquama​ said: wait, what are we being saved from? The public mourning of the suicides of famous people?

exactly

>@tsukutsukuboshi said: seconding the question of what’s been so bad about the public reaction

>@russian-hackers-official said: yea what’s so bad about that

That was how we kept the internet culture from growing mawkish and cry-bullyish: basically, if you were so weak as to get weepy over corpsemeat you got cancelled, the shame would follow you forever and you’d never be allowed to forget it.

Like, you know how from now unto eternity, whenever Tim Buckley gets mentioned someone’s gonna heap shit on him for getting melodramatic and heavy about a character having a miscarriage? That but real. At the time I thought it was too much but ::gestures around::

One of the critical moments I remember most was when Gawker was young, still focused on Manhattan celebrity gossip and young-people-in-publishing industry news, and to comment on it you had to pass an “audition” and if your comments fell below par you’d be ceremoniously removed in Friday “Commenter Execution” posts

And there was some post about a toddler falling out of a high-rise Manhattan apartment window and dying, and some commenter referenced the classic Anal Cunt song “Your Kid Committed Suicide Because You Suck” (about Eric Clapton’s kid, who died the same way, inspiring “Tears in Heaven”) and some scold huffed that he should show some restraint because A Child Has Died, and then that scold was not featured in that week’s Commenter Executions and I was like “hmm, this is an ill omen”, and it was