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How did you find niche stuff before the Internet?
Over in the topic on the perceptions of teenage boys, it was asked, “How did you find niche stuff before the internet?” I thought this was an interesting question and wanted to open it up to hear others’ memories about this.
Edit: Somewhat related, I saw this post today: The most unbelievable things about life before smartphones
Back in the 90s and early 2000s, buying cassete tapes and later CDs at concerts and music festivals was a must for fans of metal and rock music in Brazil. We copied those tapes and also recorded lots of songs from the radio. MTV Brasil, launched in 1990, was a huge source of alternative music and culture. A friend of mine still has a bunch of tapes with music videos he recorded. We had much fun with those tapes for years! He doesn't have a VCR anymore though. There were of course fanzines and alternative magazines as well. MAD Magazine had a local version with local content in addition to what came from the US.
I was part of a group of anime fans (we called ourselves "otakus"). We charged 5 Brazilian Reais for each member to enter a hot small room filled with teenagers where we watched anime. I remember I saw Ninja Scroll that way and to me it seemed like the coolest thing ever. Fansubs released VHSs which were very expensive for us to acquire and ship. Usually, only one person ordered and everyone else copied the tapes using two VCRs. Among others, I watched Vision of Escaflowne, Serial Experiments Lain, Memories, and Cowboy Bebop this way. The "rich kids" had game boys and money to buy manga, etc. I was not among those. The best way to know what anime to watch was just asking people.
We got Internet later on, but it was not what we have today and you still had to find things elsewhere. Besides, it was so slow that even navigating the web was a challenge. I remember I spent MONTHS downloading the first 3 seconds of the Smells Like Teen Spirit music video. And I showed that to people! So we basically used IRC. More often than not, people just told me stuff they thought was cool. Sometimes they lent me stuff, or allowed me to copy when feasible.
One story that I like to relate regarding discovery is how I discovered Star Trek.
At some point in 1990 when I was about 12, while my mom was getting ready to go to a store (and inevitably drag me with her), I turned on the TV to pass some boredom. Flipping around the channels, I landed right on the TOS episode "The Corbomite Maneuver". I didn't know what it was, but I was intrigued.
After we returned from shopping, I opened the TV Guide and backtracked to the channel and time slot, and learned the name of the show, the episode, and a quick description. As my eyes scanned the programming for that day, I saw something else in the 10pm slot. "Star Trek: The Next Generation". Hmm, what was this?
As I recall, my bedtime was around 9pm, but I stayed up in bed until 10pm, slipped into the living room, and as quietly as I could, I watched my first full episode. This was during TNG's third season, so the quality had gone up markedly, and 12 year old me was fucking mesmerized.
From that day on, I was a Star Trek fan. DS9 is my favorite, and my name is one of the many in the credits roll of the DS9 Documentary, but I like all of the pre-Discovery Trek to some extent. Discovery and Picard really put a dampener on my enthusiasm for modern Star Trek, but The Orville has rekindled it, and I'm anxiously looking forward to season 3, whenever they can get it out to us.
Oh man, that’s great! I have a friend who was fairly young when the original Battlestar Galactica aired. It was on too late for him to watch and his family didn’t yet have a VCR so he would put his tape recorder next to the TV and record the audio while he slept and listen to it the next day. He had to imagine what the video looked like!
Radio was a much bigger deal. I listened to soccer games on the radio and it was thrilling! Probably even more so than watching on the television.
The narrators greatly embellished the action, making it sound way cooler than the real thing.
Going to the stadium is obviously better than both. I wanna do that once covid goes away...
I'm really gonna date myself here, but the answer you're seeking for my "Dawn of the Web" generation was 'zines.
These cheap little super-DIY Xerox'ed samizdat were available in bookstores (places that existed pre-Amazon), newsstands (ditto), comics shops, subscribed via postal mail (!), given away at festivals and cons, and were practically the foam on the waves of underground culture. 'Zines were often intensely personal, barely comprehensible, the products of isolate obsession - protest, hidden history, subversive art, exotic pets, body modification, queer liberation, UFO and left/right-wing conspiracy theories, student life, O.G. hacking (anyone remember 2600?), indie music, slash-fic, esoteric religion (including the Church of the SubGenius), and kink.
There's a curated selection of archival material available through RE/Search Publications.
Usenet, IRC, and mailing lists subsumed most of this energy, then it got digested into the Internet's poorly indexed corners. Now there are Dark Web fragments, and some of the cultures are re-condensing in Discord.
I missed the 'zine era, but I was exposed to it in my early internet days through those other avenues.
Places like TOTSE or Phreak.org that curated that sort of assorted apocrypha. Definitely recall 2600 with Cap'n Crunch whistles, the Church of the SubGenius, or the Hacker Manifesto. It was an interesting nexus of ideas.
It was a bit of a nostalgia trip when I heard Beto O'Rourke was a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow. I was disappointed no conspiracies about him wanting to install BO2k on the populace came out...
Oh wow! I’m surprised they had them at bookstores and newsstands. That’s very cool! I don’t think the ones I knew about ever had enough circulation to justify that. But you could add yourself to a (physical) mailing list and get them sent to you. Thanks for sharing!
I think I was as fortunate as it was possible to get in terms of opportunities before the full-fledged Internet. College town with avant-garde arts, great old-school science fiction and film societies. Detroit music scene, including the best public radio stations for indie and world music at the time. Lots of premier early adopters in late 1980's/early 1990's outlets - Borders' Books, Thomas Video, Vault of Midnight, not to mention one of the earliest BBS's anywhere. People talk about GenX slackers, but it was actually possible to pay rent, eat, and afford some of these things on minimum wage.
Random chance played a big role in my life and how I discovered things back then. There was always some new things my older brothers had found. They’d learn about a band from their friends then copy a tape or go to the record store and buy it, and I’d hear them playing it on the home stereo. Or I’d be driving around and a song I didn’t like came on the radio, so I’d just start going up and down the dial trying to find something more interesting. Radio was a lot different back then than it is now. There was a wider diversity of programming both on a single station and among stations, in a way. Instead of everything being so siloed where one station is “the hip hop station” and another is “the classic rock station,” they often had those things on the same station at different times. So just by listening to a station you’d hear promos for upcoming radio shows you might not find today because they’re all on a different channel that you don’t listen to. (Or more realistically, those things aren’t algorithmically suggested to you because they don’t match what you already listen to.) But I could hear top 40, golden oldies, heavy metal, R&B and even jazz on a single station depending on when I tuned in. If I went to other stations, I could hear reggae, gospel, new wave, new age, classical, early music (like Gregorian chants), country, and just about anything else. It was sometimes frustrating because you had to tune in at the right time to hear what you wanted. But it was interesting to explore and see what was available.
When it came to movies, it was whatever was playing at the local theater, and eventually, whatever was in stock at the video store. And I’ve ranted about how constricting broadcast TV was at the time. There were 3 networks that ran original content from ~7PM to 10PM and it was usually very bland, family-friendly almost exclusively white-written and acted junk. It was full of ads and often was a re-run of an episode you already watched. After 10PM you’d get the more adult-oriented talk shows. As a kid these were over my head.
For books, you’d go to the bookstore or library and see what was available. The stores would push the latest novels and magazines. The fun stuff you couldn’t get in bookstores. There were underground ‘zines. These were small, self-printed magazines about niche topics that people put out on their own, often including content sent in by the readers. They tended towards the young, artistic, rebellious types. They might include articles about local bands, comics about local topics, or be about specific activities like skateboarding. I usually found these at hall shows where I’d go to hear bands and drink before I was old enough to legally buy alcohol. In the 90’s there was an influx of alternative newspapers. These were actual newspapers you bought from a newspaper vending machine, and also skewed alternative and artsy, but professionally done, though on a small budget. You could look up what bands were playing in the local bars and clubs or read about small indie films playing at art house theaters.
So overall it was a bunch of different sources, all spread out, and hugely inconvenient. And if you wanted to coordinate among friends, for example to go to a movie or see a band play, you had to either call them on the (landline) phone or meet them in person to discuss it. In some ways inconvenient, but in some ways nice because you had an excuse to meet up and talk, and you had a topic to talk about.
Great experiences. Nowadays it's kinda hard for something to surprise us. I remember going to see Matrix just because people were talking about, and oh boy, I didn't expect that! A friend of mine watched Blair Witch thinking it was an actual documentary. What experience he must have had! And what about catching random movies on TV late at night? I watched Rocky Horror Picture Show that way and it was glorious. That's the perfect movie to watch with zero context.
I have been trying to control myself and watching stuff without looking them up, but it's hard, it's so tempting...
I rarely watch trailers nowadays, though. They make so many and reveal way too much, you end up so hyped that it makes for a worse experience. Sometimes there so much media and news cycles surrounding a movie that when I finally see it I'm kinda tired already.
I’m the same way with trailers. They give away too much. I know a guy who’s an editor here in Hollywood who sometimes does trailers. He’s older than me (and I’m ancient), and he complains about how trailers today miss the point. You’re supposed to give a taste of what the movie’s about, not give away the whole thing. You want to draw viewers in and get them intrigued enough to want to see it.
The trailer for Psycho is the perfect example of that.
pre-95 it was all zines, BBSs, and talking to people. Around 95 pretty much everybody had moved over to usenet and IRC and the main BBSs I liked slowed down a lot.
It’s funny because I didn’t get onto a BBS until I had (dial-up) internet in 1994. My internet provider at the time also ran a BBS that you connected to over the internet, and which oddly enough, had access to USENET. Anyway, I used the BBS for about 2 years then moved to another city and never used one again. Kind of weird how that worked out. But that was definitely the time when stuff started moving online.
ha. that's hilarious. There are still a lot of BBSs around via ssh and some via telnet. Its a fun little rabbit hole to go down.
I miss those days. Everything seemed so simple and pure... even though it wasn't.
What people do on BBSs nowadays?
some have games, chat, etc, others are nearly identical to Tildes. Typically they're smaller communities where everybody has known each other for a long time -- at least in my experience.
So mostly it's exactly the same as today, although many of those things have (partially or fully) moved online.
My definition of niche might not be narrow enough, but I used to find interesting, out of left field topics by wandering through the non-fiction stacks at local libraries.
That definitely counts! I had a friend who used to do that. I remember one time he checked out some Scientology literature and thought it was hilarious. It was far less well-known at the time.
I was born in 90, so maybe I'm too young to claim a purely internet-free experience, but I've only been online consistently since 2005, when we got our first DSL connection. Before that, it was dial-up with an interruptor and a busy phone number, so I wasn't exactly able to be online for a long stretch. Even at that, most of my internet time was spent playing Runescape, flash games, or doing research for school work. I couldn't find new stuff online because I simply wasn't.
I think I can summarize my experience best with video games: I got games from people I knew, or else had to take a huge chance as a relatively poor kid. My mom bought us all GameBoys, and a few games as she could, and a neighbor gave us a pile of games, some of which are still my favorites (Kirby's Dreamland, Link's Awakening, for example), but I would've never found these games another way. Industry media (Game Informer, EGM, and Nintendo Power) also showed me new things.
I knew people who had other games, like SimCity or Super Smash Brothers: Melee, which I would argue were formative moments, a teacher who let us play copies of Quake II, III, Wolfenstein 3D and StarCraft, which introduced me to games I would come to love later, but would've ignored with no previous experience.
As far as taking chances, my older brother (by a year) happened to be into fantasy stuff, and was shopping around for various games that caught his attention. He bought "Black and White," "Myst," and this particularly weird one called "Morrowind" in the early 00s.
I feel like that generally sums my experiences in general: You either don't know, it gets given to you, you catch a whiff of something and chase it, or you just stumble into something great. It happens much faster with the Internet, of course.
EDIT: I'm not referring to niche stuff, exactly, but for where/when I was doing this stuff I mentioned it didn't really have much traction in the circles I was in, or eventually became stuff that everybody seemed to have experience with, but didn't talk about until we were all older.
Those are definitely tried and true methods!