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What's one thing you HAVEN'T been able to find online, no matter how hard you tried?
It could be the final piece to your prized collection, a person you talked to before they seemingly disappeared, a story you read that has since been deleted, etc.
In my case, I really wanted to find a website called notebookinhand.com, a forum I came across while I was a teenager in the early 2010s. It was solely dedicated to people describing their hobbies, and the community seemed very nice and welcoming, and I also like how the site was designed. It looks like it's been shut down but I can't stop thinking about it!
So, tell me what's your internet "unicorn", so to speak.
There was a web-based virtual community called Cybertown. I was active on it from 1999-2002 and those were its peak years - it's entirely gone now. Think Second Life but with a functioning government, economy, virtual homes and neighborhoods, jobs (for which you are hired by a real person, and receive payment in virtual currency), and other unique attributes. I've never quite seen it replicated with modern online communities/MMOs and I'm not even sure it would work with today's internet culture.
The part that I was most fascinated with was your ability to start as a new citizen, and seek employment from someone who was hiring for a low-level job (i.e. Block Deputy, in charge of deleting homes owned by inactive users and making more space for new people to move into their block, policing homes with offensive names/content, helping their Block Leader host events for their neighbors, etc.). A "block" was a collection of homes, a "neighborhood" was a collection of blocks, and a "colony" was a collection of neighborhoods - a sample colony would have been something like "Sci-fi" colony, "Metaverse" neighborhood, and "Snow Crash" block. Citizens with an interest in the book Snow Crash would place their home there. There might be another block in the same neighborhood called Neuromancer. You could start as a Block Deputy, work your way up to Block Leader, Neighborhood Deputy, Neighborhood Leader, Colony Deputy, to Colony Leader. There were something like 6 colonies (i.e. Sci-fi Colony, Fantasy Colony, Teens Colony, etc.) and the City Council was comprised of the 6 or so Colony Leaders, along with a Mayor and Deputy Mayor. They made decisions which impacted the whole website, in coordination with the parent company/founder of the website. There were other jobs, such as Mall Chief and Mall Deputies, who were in charge of the mall; where you could upload your own 3D VRML products (i.e. a lamp or painting), and make money from the people who purchase your product to place in their virtual house. There was a Security Chief and Security Deputies who policed the website for inappropriate content and had the ability to suspend or ban users. There was an arcade, bank, flea market, theme park, employment center, a city news organization, etc. all with their own staff. I feel like I'm barely scratching the surface; it was really quite amazing for a creation of the 90s.
The primary focus of the website was simply to hang out and make friends with other users, with all of these unique features serving as a backdrop and generating bustling activity. I took on quite a few jobs while I was active in the community. One of my favorite jobs was City Photographer - I would show up to events (i.e. a party), take screenshots of the virtual world and the avatars of people who had attended, and it would be published in the Daily News along with an article written about the event. Eventually I worked my way up and became a Colony Leader and City Council Member before I left. A Colony Leader was in charge of organizing all neighborhoods and blocks under their purview along with everyone who was employed by that colony, and representing their residents on the City Council. The City Council would vote on important city-wide matters, hold public meetings, etc.
The website failed to evolve and keep up with trends, became outdated, and was sold to a company which lacked interest in keeping it going. For a while there was talk about creating a "Next Generation" version of Cybertown which would have modernized it for the early 2000s, but nothing came of that. If I had the funds and resources, I would create a modern version. It would be fun to explore which concepts worked in the 90s but wouldn't work today - i.e. the "jobs" would have to be more appealing (not just glorified moderators), and there would need to be multiple servers (cities) for scalability.
Wow, this sounds amazing! But yeah, I think you're right, I don't know if this kind of thing would be feasible in today's internet culture.
Do you have some fun personal stories you could share about having these jobs?
I enjoyed being a City Guide. I would hang out in public places and be a friendly face for new users. New users could also choose to summon a City Guide who would appear before them and introduce them to the city. I had fun taking users through the city, showing them what fun was to be had (i.e. take them to the arcade to play games, casino to gamble, theme park to ride rides, stadium to toss a ball around with other users, art gallery to see art hung on the wall, Sunset Beach to see our most beautiful/artistic VRML world, employment center to get a job, mall to buy items, help them set up their house and decorate it, etc.) and explain the history behind the places we visited (like Flyby Park which was named after our Mayor who passed away in real life). If you did a good job as a City Guide, you might form friendships and continue to see these people hang around and gain standing in the community.
Hosting events was also a big part of the culture - like trivia nights. Here's a website someone made which describes their life in Cybertown, including events they attended. Events were a part of many people's job duties because it helped generate social activity.
I was young (I ran the Teens colony) and picked up a lot of real-world skills by participating in Cybertown at that age. Many jobs benefited from learning HTML and honing leadership abilities. At one point I wrote for the Daily News, and the Chief Editor was an extremely knowledgeable man who I presume was about in his 50s and edited each article with the same care and attention to detail you'd expect from a professional journalist, therefore my writing skills improved. I can't say enough good things about it, and my experience leads me to the firm belief that there is a lot of untapped potential for modern games to be designed with similarly advanced social systems. I later spent many years being a guild leader in MMORPGs creating fun social structures within the context of the games we played.
There's something so beautiful about communities of passionate people dedicating a part of their real lives to build things like this. Following rules and playing your role seems to have been abandoned these days, with people favouring greefing/trolling for laughs instead of conforming and belonging to a certain community.
That all sounds wonderful, which makes me even more sad that the site couldn't continue. But at least you were able to learn some pretty valuable and marketable skills!
Have you stayed in touch with any of the users you knew or befriended?
I did keep in touch with one until about 2010. We joined a Star Wars Galaxies guild which kept us in touch after Cybertown, and then we started a multi-gaming guild together in 2005. That guild is still going strong today, but eventually we both lost our passion for gaming and fell out of touch.
It's really not that simelar, but you have reminded me of this online thing that I think was called the Backbone Zone. If I can remember correctly, it was an educational site where you could play games that would teach you about money. What made it unique was that it was also a social network that allowed you to contact others and make friends through the platform. Of course, being made for children, it also had parental controls.
It disappeared ages ago; I don't remember if it even went past the 90s.
Do you know what happened to it?
Not a clue. I can't even say that I got the name right, it has been so long since I have seen it. Heck, I think I was in and out of it before Google was publicly available. Like most of the pre-google web, I would imagine that it's lost to the sands of time.
Thanks for the walk down memory lane. Over the last few years I’ve looked back to Cybertown with fond memories, and always wondered why nothing of sorts existed in modern times. I felt like Cybertown had struck perfect balance between the two extremes of a simple chat room and something as daunting as Second Life.
Times change, people change, but the nostalgia for the late-90s and early 2000s internet remains.
Whoa, I remember that! I was super interested in VRML, and enjoyed looking at what they'd done with it. It was really cool to poke around and see how it was done. I don't think I ever did any of the community stuff, but it was definitely fun looking at the tech.
this might interest you
https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-gamemode-17263545
Would you consider paying a private investigator to help your search?
I definitely would! Hi haven't a clue where to start but I suppose there are websites I could read up on, I entertained the idea before.
Oh gosh, I'm so sorry, that sounds like an awful time.
I hope writing it all down has helped you, at least somewhat.
It did help, thanks :)
This is not at all what I expected in this thread, I hope one day you will be able to find her. Thank you for writing about this.
Henry Rollins' and RuPaul's cover of Funkytown. Henry spoke about recording it, but the CD was never cleared and, therefore, never released. He said there's probably a recording of the song floating somewhere online. He has a copy of the CD and plays it in small venues sometimes – which is why there's an in medias res video of the man seemingly DJ'ing over the track.
Soulseek has nothing. YouTube has nothing. The Pirate Bay has nothing. Social networks have nothing.
I hope you find it one day, that sounds an awesome team-up!
That is amazing. Henry Rollins' career is fascinating to me! He's done so much stuff!
I thought he was a rock musician, has he done other stuff?
To add to @rmgr's answer: Henry...
There's probably more, but I'm either not remembering or not knowing about it at the moment. He's a prolific creator and entrepreneur.
I'd love to read this guy's autobiography!
Get in the Van is one about his time in Black Flag, the punk band. It's the one he won Grammy for. Might well in a store near you.
Thanks, I'm gonna put that on my reading list :)
He's sort of one these D list celebrities who'll do anything. He's done a bunch of movies of varying qualities, he does stand up/spoken word shows, he's collaborated with William Shatner on music. I just think he's a really interesting dude!
In addition to all of the above, he did voice work on the Avatar Spinoff as an evil Anarchist who can control the wind.
I have a vague memory of this, was it that bald character who freed some of the other antagonists?
Yep, same guy.
When I was a kid, around the age of 6 or 7, my mom gave me a VHS tape of a documentary she recorded. It was about telescopes - the one in Hawaii, aswell as the Hubble space telescope - and it ran on one of our public TV channels. I must have watched it at least a dozen times. It really put the awe of space in me. I've been scrambling to find that VHS for years, I've searched our apartments in the two countries I've grown up in to no avail. I'm still searching for any scrap of information in the national TV archives through the internet, or just on YouTube.
I search each year for an hour or two and then give up.
This kinda stuff is important. I hope you find it soon enough.
What sort of information do you have on it? Names, dates, locations?..
I think I know the general theme, the name of the channel, the name of the journalist, and roughly the years it could have aired. As you can guess, that's not much to input into search engines, but hey, better than nothing.
I really hope you find it, it seems like it's important to you!
This? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340569/?ref_=ttpl_pl_tt
Unfortunately no, but thanks for having looked :)
There are a lot of flash games that I consider gone. One of my favorites was a game called Spewer, where you played a little slime creature that propelled itself by vomiting. There was a limited amount of spew you could store and more could be collected from the environment, including the stuff you already got rid of. It was an extremely fun platformer, even if the premise was a bit gross.
You should definitely consider checking out a program called BlueMaxima's Flashpoint, it's an archive for all the browser based games and animations, and lets you easily play them without needing to have the old versions of Firefox or what have you. I checked and Spewer's in there!
Spewer was made by Edmund McMillen (Super Meat Boy, Binding of Isaac)! It's available as part of The Basement Collection.
Speaking of flash games, I remember playing a game where you controlled signals and had to get trains through a bunch of switches and intersections and ensure none of them ran into each other. I went looking for it several years ago, and never found it on the website I originally played it on.
It's not that flash game, but check out Train Valley. It sounds similar to what you are talking about.
Well for a college paper, I was trying to find all releases of the CIA World Factbook. I wanted to get economic information on Middle Eastern countries since the 60s, and the factbook was the only possible aource I could find. But the main CIA archive only goes back to 2000. The internet archive had the 90s and 80s, but just a few in the 70s. At this point I was curious, so I tried to find physical copies. I looked through Ebay, rare book stores and a few other auction sites, but I could never find all of them. I believe it was 1968, 1971 and 1979 that I never found, but it was a while ago. So if anyone here knows where a copy of these books are, I would love to know.
The game Mission to Planet 429. I played it when I was ~8 and I loved it. I've never been able to find a copy of it online, unfortunately.
I'm assuming it was for a physical console? And not an online game?
Browser game, according to the Google, used to run at PBS Kids...
https://th.ru.st/mission-to-planet-429
It reminds me of the old Cartoon Network website's games, I used to play them all the time as a kid (since I didn't have my own money and had to have my parents buy me games).
Foreign music tends to be very hard to find, and when you can find it it tends to be either expensive imported media or poorly-transcoded mp3s. If it's niche or independant, you are likely to not find them at all.
Right now I'm looking for an album called Yorlga II, but I can't find even a used copy for anything under $30. I'm hoping that it'll get less expensive over time, but I have no idea how many potential sales it may have, so they may just get more expensive as time goes on.
I use a private torrent tracker for music, and that album is on it as a FLAC rip.
I could invite you to the site (if you know how to use torrents and will maintain a good ratio), or upload the album to a site like mediafire.
I know this is completely off topic for the main thread but I've always wondered about private trackers sites. I've got solid internet and keep good ratios on stuff but it seemed hard to get a foothold in the community. Any advice on getting into the private sites?
This is a good guide.
redacted.ch, a music tracker, has an IRC interview process.
Once you become a "power user" on one private tracker, by reaching upload requirements and maintaining a good ratio for a certain amount of time, you gain access to that tracker's invite forum, where you can request access to almost any other private tracker.
I got into private torrents when I got invited to What.CD by someone on 4chan's /mu/ board over a decade ago.
Thanks for the guide. That's quite the amount of time to be on them.
Interesting, I thought it'd be easier nowadays since we have youtube and social media.
the death of what.cd is a huge loss for mankind.
There was this youtube video that was an amateur 3D animation of Calvin and Hobbes where they broke Dad's binoculars or something. The voice acting was suuuper funny. Seems like it got deleted. Not very important or anything but just a weird thing I remember that's gone now. This was about 10 years ago when I used to watch it I think.
How was the animation? I assume if you came across it now, it might look dated.
Okay, I'll admit I should've done that from the start, but in my defense I had thought the admins/owners of the forum had decided to shut it down completely, since it's happened to other sites that I've known. Thanks though!
A cheesy and very over-the-top soundtrack l once heard in a CNC Generals: Zero Hour modpack called Axis of the Matrix. Cheesy stuff, a bit overpowered(l was like 13 when l played that, don't judge me lol).
Anyway, it had this orchestral song with blaring horns and decently fast rhythm and l just can't seem to find it anywhere. l'll see if l can record a bit of what l remember, since that's all l have.
Nothing in particular, but I guess that universal sense of self, passion and contentment I had/never had, but can't remember not having so I remember myself having it. Also all the places I have been, people I became, Reddit history since I nuked my account, all that is either mothballed or paved over by digital gentrification. When you grow up as on the internet, you can't really ever go back home.
I really like the last line of your paragraph; pretty much explains most of my memories of spending time online.
My old forum signature images. I used to be active on a few forums and had some userbar-style images in my signature on one of them. The forum I was most active on has some archives on Wayback machine, but Wayback isn't very good about following forum links, and the only pages archived with posts by me were too new (so they only had my "retired from the forum, message me on skype" signature).
On one forum I used to frequent had an archive of my user profile...and it was even more cringeworthy than I remembered. It was hilarious to stumble upon.
Was anyone else ever involved with the CPPS (Club Penguin Private Server) community, specifically the Rile5 forums or ClubPenguinV?
Edit: also, some old MLP fanfictions. I remember finding some really weird ones back in 2012 or 2013, haven't been able to find them since (and I know they were on FIMFiction).
Would you consider yourself a brony?
Yes. I started watching the show back in 2012.
I saw the first 2 episodes of the first season, but it's just not for me. Has the show ended yet? I know there was a my little pony movie within the last year or so.
Season 9 is over (as of October 12), and with it, the current generation of the show. G5 is coming next year.
There's a PC game I played when I was 9-12 or so (not totally sure) that I have not been able to find. To be honest, I'm not sure to what extent the game is remembered or imagined, since those years for me were close to 30 years ago (1991-1994-ish).
The game was a side-scrolling adventure game like Faxanadu or Kid Icarus and it had both swordplay and elemental-based (I think) magic spells. The setting was the world of Ancient Greece and the color palette was a bit brighter than that of Kid Icarus. This is pretty much all I remember about the game. As you can imagine, it's been hard to find. I've spent hours here and there over the years looking through archives of PC games from that era to no avail. In that search I found another that I enjoyed as a kid, Thexder 2, so at least the search wasn't in vain. I've been meaning to make a post to /r/tipofmyjoystick (or whatever it's called) searching for it but haven't gotten around to it.
I'm not sure I'll ever find it because, like I said, I'm not sure if I even remember it or imagine it. But whichever one of those is in my head, the game seemed fun and imaginative, like a creepier, more magical version of Zelda.
Was it The Battle of Olympus? It was a NES game, but it sounds exactly like what you were describing to me, so maybe you played it through an emulator or something?
Looks interesting. I'm surprised how similar it looks to Zelda 2: it's so similar in the moveset and world design it seems like stealing. Of course, that doesn't bother me, as I loved Zelda 2. I'll have to try it out.
Sadly, it doesn't look familiar to me. I remember the character being smaller (maybe 2/3s the size of the character in this game?) and I'm pretty sure I was able to use the four buttons on my PC gamepad. I think this is something that stood out to me: I felt so powerful having a few different powers at my fingertips. Thanks for the suggestion, anyway!
Visually, that reminds me of Zelda 2 meets Faria. I like it.
I have spent a couple years kind of casually learning brazilian portuguese, and I have spent the last bazillion years listening to the harry potter audiobooks in english about once a year. I'd REALLY like to listen to them in portuguese.
I know they exist because I've seen pictures of the cd boxes, and I have found a few listings for libraries around brazil that have a CD copy in their library! But the internet has utterly failed me on this one!
I am legitimately surprised you can't find them. I would've thought a popular series like Harry Potter would be in every language imaginable.
Me too! I give it the ol college try every few months because it feels like it will pop up somewhere! I think a big part of the problem is that it's actually pretty hard to search the parts of the internet that are in a language you're not fluent in!
The names of all the people I used to chat with via the chatroom SailorMoonPics. It was a chatroom within the chat application FrenchKiss, owned and hosted by GlobeTalkers. We were a collection of kids/teenagers, and I'm sure some adults (maybe more than I realized) that all enjoyed anime. Lots of anime-esque combat and roleplaying. I had made quite a few friends from there, but the names I remember are either non-existent now adays online (CrimsonSpaz/CrimsonDiablos) or were super generic (Bitcherz). Other names, I can't even remember because they were anime related to anime that I wasn't familiar with.
Though unlikely, if someone sees this and says "Hey I was on that chat", I went by either Sparks or PrinceMist.
When I was in second or third grade (around 1999), I found a book on computers in my elementary school's library. The book immediately inspired me to get into programming. This youtube video made me think about it again semi-recently. I've looked for it since, but I've had no luck.
I remember the book having
The text description explained that the numbers on the left were step numbers, and "INPUT" made the computer prompt for a value from the user which was then stored in a named slot.
I remember being instantly enthralled when I saw this code. It felt like I had been reading all about wizards, and then finally I was shown an actual spell, and it turned out to be perfectly comprehensible to me. It would be a while before I actually had a BASIC interpreter to try the program out in, but just seeing an example of a program was enough to captivate me into writing my own silly simple programs in my notebook just to prove to myself that it was within my reach.
I'm pretty sure the title had the word "Computers" in the same font as the "Computer Stupidities" title - a very classic computer-y font, like MICR. I remember it being large (tall and wide but not too many pages) with a hard red or partly red cover. Based on the cover, I thought Computers (1972) by Melvin Berger (image from http://tedfelix.com/books/) might be it, but it definitely wasn't. I actually bought that book to check it, and the content was 200% not it.
The book I remember had a lot of colorful illustrations and diagrams and wasn't too shy on text or detail. The illustration in the "Computers in the Home" page of "The Usborne Book of the Future" (image from this article) has an extremely familiar style. That specific illustration wasn't something from the book, but I remember the book having some pages of that style with lots of technology present, and a text box to the side explaining each bit of technology in the image. (I think I remember one fanciful 70s-futuristic illustration having a small dalek-like robot as a minor detail, and a text description saying something about the future possibility of robot companions for entertainment or as pets.) The book may have been an Usborne book, but I haven't been able to figure out which one.
I found The Usborne Young Scientist: Computers (1992) which from the preview has a few familiar details. The cover looks like it might be a related book or a different edition. I think I remember the back cover having a similar "Titles in this series" note.
I just noticed that there's a borrow/download button on that archive.org page, so I'm doing that now. From the contents, I definitely think the book I remember was a different edition of this book, or the books were somehow related. Many of the pages in this book talk about the same subjects that I remember, but do it in a different way with different illustrations and examples. This book has a nearly identical span of subject matter, which can't be coincidence. There's even a classic BASIC program, but it's a weirdly complicated program snippet instead that's hard to follow. The short description of the BASIC language next to it seems very familiar though. There's no meaty CPU diagram, but instead a photo of a CPU with some labels draped over it in a way that's not very clear. No half-adders in sight! Some of the illustrations are in a very distinct cartoony style that I don't remember at all, and there are pages that are 100% unfamiliar to me like the page about a choose-your-own-adventure-game. I see The Usborne Young Scientist: Computers (1992) was based on an older 1981 Usborne book, but that book looks very similar to the 1992 book and not any closer to the book I'm thinking of.
Maybe the book I'm looking for was an even older possibly-Usborne book, and these two Usborne books were inspired by it or were future editions that attempted to make it more kid-friendly by replacing the diagrams with cartoony illustrations and dropping the half-adder circuit entirely. Or maybe the opposite: the book I'm looking for could have been based on one of these Usborne books and re-worked for a slightly older audience.
An archive of Selected Shorts, specifically from when Isaiah Sheffer hosted back in the day.
A lot of people listened to it/it is a pretty big podcast, and he had such a soothing voice, but they didn’t keep an archive and don’t own the rights(?) to the previous episodes, so they aren’t available anywhere, at least not legally.
It still goes on today, but I miss his voice and there were some really good stories that I can’t recall the names of read years ago.
Were these original stories he wrote?
When the first use of the word "thread" as applied to discussion threads was.
I assume it was applied to email threads first.
I imagine it'd be somewhere around the late 90s, right?
As a middle school student, so circa 2010, following random Youtube recommendations led me to a video about the lost city of Atlantis, Lemuria, and how the human race was started by hybridization of 'Israelites' and 'Egyptians', Lemurians and Atlantians. One really bizarre aspect was its narration seemingly done by Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation.
I don't care about finding it in terms of viewing the content as important, but it was such a bizarre thing that I sent it to a close friend the following day, and haven't been able to confirm its existence since. It feels like a fever dream, except that the close friend also remembers it.
Would that be the conspiracy channel Spirit Science? It is hilariously bad
I think it is, thanks!
There was an online game called Territories3069 that I played back in the early 2000s. I'd love to find a place that hosts that game and play again. I'm sure it wouldn't be as fantastic as I remember it to be.
There was a flash animation that was a mix of poorly drawn super heroes/anime with the book Dom Casmurro. I remember that some character yelled "Capituuuuuuuu" and used some super power in the style of Dragonball.
This is the only thing i remember. Me and a friend watched that all the time when we were kids.
It is harder because it was a thing only here in Brazil. It's gone forever.
Replacement tilt window latches for my 1991 original build windows.
The specific measurements are ever so close to many similar parts. But not all of the measurements exist in a single replacement.
Wasn't planning on buying new windows for another couple years. Everything else, including the argon filling, is good.
An audiobook of John White's series set in Ansalon (the sword bearer, the tower of geborah, etc). I heard on it tape as a kid, and I look for an audiobook of it about once a year. I've confirmed with the local library, that the tapes still exist - alas I haven't been able to locate a tape recorder nearby either.
A track off the compilation album Kilamadgargoyle from the early '80s called Funky Winston's Exploding Trousers by the band Funky Winston and his Individually Wrapped Fruit Pies. I saw it on a list of bad band names from about 2005 and I just had to hear it. Nothing on the guy who allegedly wrote it's website, nothing on Youtube, no indication the original cassette even exists anymore outside a few attics in southern England. I was, however, able to find another track from the same album. It's called I Hate the Entire Population of the World (Except Cromer) The guy who uploaded this song never uploaded the rest of them. I also have a track listing, but nothing there either. However, there are auto-generated topic channels for several of the bands listed, but they all have no content.
Funky Winston's Exploding Legs.
Couldn't find a recording of it, but I found the website of the cassette's producer, https://www.davidviner.com. He was a member of the "first punk band in Norwich", apparently, and he maintains a tribute website for that too.
the cassette's page
some music downloads (though nothing exploding)
I suppose you could try to contact the guy and see where that leads.
Good luck.