kontextmaschine:

So yesterday I remembered that Slate and Salon had been around for like twenty goddamn years, and I thought it would be funny to go back and check their early stuff and see how much had changed and how distant the past seemed

I settled on this issue of Slate, April 26, 1999 which of the earliest Wayback Machine archives was the first one to be something useful, sooo, let’s take a look

First off, it leads with a bunch of features that are really just summaries and links to other publications or websites - I forgot before social media platforms and blogs, really, how much websites were just daily-updated lists pointing you to interesting things elsewhere. It’s interesting that many of these summaries don’t have any links, I’m not clear whether that was because they were of dead-tree media that didn’t have websites or because of journalistic etiquette policy.

I remember that back then old-line journalism was kind of daffy about the net, and I know some places at least frowned on linking to internal pages, because they wanted you to approach and navigate through the front page, paper-style. So as to prevent someone from undermining their advertising model and system of cross-promotion and cross-subsidy exactly like Facebook did maybe, so.

The big news of the day was NATO’s war in Kosovo and the Columbine shooting, which had just recently occurred (and seemed to be shorthanded more as Littleton than Columbine at this point). So, what kind of OC do they have on the war?

Ah, hm. Masha Gessen kinda mawking us towards Eastern European war, William Saletan meandering in circles stroking his chin, Jonathan Chait (in an installation of regular feature “Crapshoot”, tagline “Dumb Ideas Exposed Here”) dismisses the notion that soldiers are underpaid and in need of the raises they recently recieved

The 13 percent “pay gap” represents the difference in the growth of military versus civilian wages since 1982–that is, civilian wages have grown 13 percent faster. This does not mean that soldiers earn less than civilians, because it does not take into account the pay differential from 1982. If my wages have increased by 100 percent during the past five years while Bill Gates’ have increased by nearly 50 percent, this does not mean that I am earning 50 percent more than Bill Gates, since he was making more to begin with.

So, the more things change, I guess. What else, what else? Oh, “Explainer” was them. That wasn’t cited enough as a precedent to Vox, at least their early intentional style, the modest height they dived off to chase clicks

Looking around in other links there ARE some really striking bits in here though.

Students at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C., staged a protest March 3 against one of their fellow students, white supremacist Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a Web-savvy junior who runs a neo-Nazi organization from his dorm room.

man was just ahead of his time

A University of Arizona student who enrolled in a class called “Women in Literature” was dismayed to discover that the class addressed gay and lesbian issues. As a result, the Arizona legislature is now considering warning labels for courses with potentially “objectionable” content. Says Arizona Regents President Judy Gignac, “The students are our customers and they are paying to be taught. They need to know in advance what it is they’re paying for.”

ditto

Confronted by an increasingly vocal faction of rabbinical students and liberal rabbis, New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary may be forced to reconsider its ban on admitting homosexual students.

That’s Conservative Judiasm, if you were curious

The Matrix (Warner Bros.). Keanu Reeves stars in this complex, dystopic sci-fi thriller. Critics give high marks to the computer-enhanced special effects but are divided on the merits of the ambitious plot and the everything-but-the-kichen-sink filmic provenance, from Soylent Green to Terminator 2 to Hong Kong actioners. For some the effects are enough…

nice

(To see the trailer and some fine Keanu pics, visit this fan site[)]

NICE

Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman writes [10 Things I Hate About You] “may be the cheekiest ‘literary’ update yet–a post-riot grrrl gloss” of the play. Many gush over the foxy young star, Julia Stiles. Complaints are mainly a result of critics’ upscale-high-school-caper-film fatigue.

yeah, I guess those were two actual movie trends

A Walk on the Moon (Miramax Films). Mixed reviews, tending toward the negative, for this tale of sexual liberation set in 1969. A 32-year-old Jewish housewife who married too young is on vacation in the Catskills with her two kids and mother-in-law when she meets a sexy, young blouse peddler. The rest? As the Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert says, it’s “one small step for the Blouse Man, a giant leap for Pearl Kantrowitz.”

uh

Economist, May 1
(posted Friday, April 30, 1999)

The cover story predicts that the disappearance of privacy will bring about “one of the greatest social changes of modern times.” Technology is destroying privacy that we took for granted 20 years ago, but the corresponding benefits–better government services, cheaper products, less crime–may outweigh that loss.

uh

New Republic, May 17
(posted Friday, April 30, 1999)
      The cover story describes the Palestinians’ shriveling economy and corrupt political system… …Holocaust scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen asserts that Serbia’s crimes are “different from those of Nazi Germany only in scale.” He also argues that an allied victory could stimulate a postwar democratic transformation of Yugoslavia similar to that of West Germany after World War II.

…

New York Times Magazine, May 2
(posted Thursday, April 29, 1999)
      The cover story contends that eliminating affirmative action does not devastate equal opportunity in higher education.  …A Susan Sontag essay riffs on the Kosovo crisis, concluding that it is a just war to deter “radical evil” and that the allies will fail if they don’t oust Milosevic.

Time and Newsweek, May 3
(posted Tuesday, April 27, 1999)
      The newsweeklies reconstruct the Littleton massacre and solicit expert opinions on why it happened. Newsweek says that teen-agers kill when pre-existing biological flaws are exacerbated by poor nurturing. Biological warning signs: low heart rates and swollen brain lesions.

haha wut

Newsweek reports that black athletes are shunning white agents for black ones. Among the black agents courting rookies are Puffy Combs, Master P, and Johnnie Cochran.

When Dan Quayle announced his presidential candidacy late last week, he also announced a theme. He would run against the “dishonest decade” of Clinton rule.

As someone who has been more or less overweight for most of my life, I’ve noticed the increasing virulence with which TV and movies treat the issue of weight. It is rare, in fact, to see a portrayal of a fat person in which his weight is not the primary reason he is on screen. In the recent movie Office Space, for example, the heart-attack death of a fat marriage counselor is used as a pivotal plot point played for yuks…

…In a time when almost every deviation from the norm has been reclassified as a disability–you can’t even make fun of drug addicts any more–fatness has become the new Polishness: an all-purpose locus of fun.

One person caught unawares by the popularity of armed guards in high schools was Charlton Heston. Heston, the NRA president, told reporters just after the shooting that the presence of “even one armed guard in the school” could have averted tragedy. (For a Swiftian take on Heston’s comments, click here.)

…ah, I’m gonna regret it, arent I

Shoot Hooligans, Not Hoops
Stop school violence: Arm school kids.

By David Plotz
Posted Saturday, April 24, 1999, at 4:30 p.m. PT

THERE’S the Slate I knew and loved

ABC’s movie Swing Vote (Monday, April 19, 9 p.m.) plunges us immediately into a liberal’s fever dream: Roe vs. Wade is ancient history, and a black Mississippi woman has been convicted of murdering her unborn baby.

In The Simpsons, a donut is not just a donut. It is a semiotically loaded piece of iconography nine years in the making: We have seen Homer steal the huge metal donut from the parking lot of Lard Lads Donuts to exact revenge for its “false advertising” (they wouldn’t sell him a donut as big as the one outside). We have seen him pretend Grandpa Simpson was so senile he qualified for a helper monkey, which he then used to steal from donut shops. We know that at one point Homer actually sold his soul to the devil for a donut. In short, that small ring of frosted dough contains a universe of meaning for Simpsons viewers.

This detail goes a long way toward explaining the subdued critical response to the pilot of Matt Groening’s new show Futurama, which aired last Sunday.

So, takeaway lessons?

First, yeah, I guess Slate really always was a liberal hawk rag, getting high on R2P.

Second those external links to essays from names you’d still recognize on the necessity of war in Yugoslavia are fuuuuuuuucking bonkers though. I forgot how crazy the ‘90s were when we had no idea what to replace the Cold War with

Third I forgot how much they were still running a literary tone carried over from “small magazines” - in the selection of culture topics and the general tone of writing

25 years ago!

gowns:

I Can Eat Glass

I Can Eat Glass was a linguistic project documented on the early Web by then-Harvard student Ethan Mollick. The objective was to provide speakers with translations of the phrase “I can eat glass, it does not hurt me” from a wide variety of languages; the phrase was chosen because of its unorthodox nature. Mollick’s original page disappeared in or about June 2004 [but there is an archived version of the website here].

As Mollick explained, visitors to a foreign country have “an irresistible urge” to say something in that language, and whatever they say (a cited example being along the lines of “Where is the bathroom?”) usually marks them as tourists immediately. Saying “I can eat glass, it does not hurt me”, however, ensures that the speaker “will be viewed as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect”.

confused-stars:

“this meeting could have been an email” but instead it’s “this video tutorial could have been a post with less than a hundred words”

In fairness there really were a lot of vidya walkthrough sections that turned out to be a lot better as 2 photos or 15 seconds of video than they had been as 3 paragraphs on GameFAQs

The fundamental [tumblr] vs. Twitter thing is that Twitter treats replies and reblogs as creating a subforum about that particular post, and no bby what is you doing

Portland has a public interface at PortlandMaps.com

dogweapon:

timely-prince:

dogweapon:

I know this is a longshot but I feel like Tumblr is the best place to ask- does anyone have the official Joe Biden Spore file? I have not been able to find it on the old Sporepedia links that I found.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about I know what you’re thinking- “Joe Biden Spore model? OFFICIAL Joe Biden Spore creature model?”

Yes, OFFICIAL Joe Biden 2008 election voting awareness ad campaign Spore model.

Please, I need it for obvious reasons.

Sporepedia

Image is taken from the sporepedia listing but if that doesn’t work then it’s the result by MaxisCactus on this link.

Not only did it work, but I also discovered that 12-15 year old Sporepedia comments are still readable on the website.

And in this moment I know that we must go back to when the internet was this inscrutable

heatandapathy:

hellsite-yano:

Happy Birthday 4chan

official-kircheis:

dryiffsrevitalizingtailholetonic:

Why has everything gotten so much worse starter pack:

vriskakinnieaynrand:

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

Going back to 1997 to tell them that Wal*Mart isn’t that relevant now and the 800-pound gorilla of American mass-market retail is Amazon

They mostly have questions about eBay

kushblazer666:

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)

Hm I can’t think of sources but in terms of themes I’d look at Buzzfeed and clickbait, Gawker and the stable of feed “verticals” as a business model, and the professionalization of “feminist blogging” into identity media

No, actually, that was a step in the development of the Internet I missed, by the time it showed up my hopper of amusing & regularly updated novel content was already satisfactorily full

secondbeatsongs:

x-cetra:

accessibleposts:

dangernoir:

banananutloaf4life:

actualaster:

nerdfighterwhatevernumbers:

ryanthedemiboy:

pewterkat:

small-flower-prince:

dreadpiratecherry:

gentlemanbones:

I have no idea what’s going on

Congrats, we have reached a period of time where there is a generation that does not remember the first memes.

Look, i’ve been on tumblr for nine fucking years and I don’t get this meme. I remember seeing it at some point, but have no clue what it means.

because this meme is pre tumblr and pre-youtube and is about 17 years old, almost twice as long as you’ve been on tumblr

the ancient depths of albinoblacksheep will never die

But like, can someone explain. The fucking. Context.

It refers to a meme song, called The Badger Song or sometimes Badger Badger Badger, Mushroom, Mushroom. There is a snake in the lyrics also. You can watch the video on YouTube, if you so desire.

By way of further explanation, this comes from a time when most people had 56K modems or even slower, so downloading a full video clip of even crappy 320x240 resolution could take 5-10 minutes. You really had to want to see the Ballad of Bilbo Baggins or the Exploding Whale.

Flash bypassed this problem with cel animation. Each scene uses a static backdrop image plus small images of each of the moving parts, like pieces of a paper doll, which are then repositioned, scaled or flipped using a series of text commands written in a simple programming language. As the visual components were just a handful of static images, they didn’t have to be compressed as much as later Youtube video, making their edges as crisp as modern 4K. The most bandwidth-intensive aspect of Flash was the accompanying soundfile, but that loaded in a matter of seconds rather than minutes for video.

The result tended to look like a Monty Python animation, and so Flash yielded a bumper crop of the absurd from BadgerBadgerBadger to Pavoratti’s Elephants to Fight! Kikkoman, the soy sauce superhero. All of which only survive in imperfect, fuzzy YouTube captures.

I originally just put this in the tags, but I think it’s important enough to add to the actual post:

these flash animations aren’t just found in fuzzy youtube videos! you can see the original animations using BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint, a flash preservation project!

the software is free and open-source, and it has built-in players for flash and shockwave (as well as many other platforms). it allows you to search their archive of games and animations, and play them whenever you want!

they’ve got Badger Badger Badger, Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, Charlie the Unicorn, the original asdfmovie, and just…so many other animations and games that were thought to be lost or unplayable.

as of their most recent update, their archive has over 130,000 games and 20,000 animations, and most of them look just as crisp as they did 20 years ago.

so, go put Badger Badger Badger fullscreen and admire all of those sharp edges and clean lines! or play the Escape the Room series from 2keysgames, or the old Barbie games, or whatever you want! it’s an incredible resource, and I have spent hours getting lost in it.

downtroddendeity:

socialmaya:

ALT

As a public service announcement, someone scraped every single text file on GameFAQS in March 2020 for archival purposes, and you can find it on archive.org with the title “Gamespot TXT GameFAQs - Full Archive.” You can download the whole thing (it’s about 2 gigs) if you want to spite Wikia’s attempts to make themselves the gatekeepers of all fan knowledge.

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.