I'm really sceptical of this idea that the internet was better in the good old days. For me at least, most of the change seems to have come as much from myself as from the internet. If I tried to...
I'm really sceptical of this idea that the internet was better in the good old days. For me at least, most of the change seems to have come as much from myself as from the internet. If I tried to go back to the "good old days", I'd just end up disappointed - indeed I have tried it a couple of times.
When I was a teenager, my internet hub was NationStates, which is an online political simulation game created by the author Max Barry to promote a book he'd written. The core gameplay is pretty light - you get 1-2 decisions to make each real-time day, then you choose a response and your nation has its stats updated to reflect the decision you made. But on top of that there was a lively community that built all sorts of minigames on top of that idea, mostly different forms of roleplaying, but also there was a guild mechanic that allowed "raiders" to invade other guilds and overthrow their leaders; a UN-like concept where you could write resolutions that affected everyone's nations; and an active off-topic forum.
The point is, there was a lot to do, and between the ages of about 15-20, I spent a lot of time there. Particularly when I went to University, I was involved a lot of the "defending" minigame, which involved a lot of hanging around on IRC at very specific times of the day, waiting for things to happen then pressing buttons very quickly when they did. And by hanging around on IRC, chatting with people in the off-topic forums, and occasionally, very badly, roleplaying, I had a bit of a community - people who knew my name, and whose names I knew (and still know). I really appreciated that time, and for me that was the heart of the old internet, at least as I knew it.
Then I moved on, I ended up mainly browsing Reddit, and at some point I just stopped interacting with NationStates. (I think part of that was scrambling my password at one point to prevent myself from logging on while I was revising for exams?) And moving on was sad and I miss a lot of the people there, but it was also around the right time where I was doing other things. NationStates still exists - they've just had a big event where everyone crashed the servers, so it sounds like nothing much has changed! - but I don't know that I want to go back. I don't want the community aspect that I had before, because I've got new communities, mostly offline, and I don't feel the need to rebuild that on NationStates.
Ultimately, I've moved on - not necessarily "grown out" of NationStates, but I'm just not in that exact state in my life any more. And going back would just be trying to resurrect the old feelings that I had, which seems like a futile exercise in itself.
I feel like a lot of these "new old internet" projects - Tildes included - aren't necessary rebuilding that particular period of the internet for me, they're instead starting new smaller communities. And sure, the internet used to be made of smaller communities, but I think this is a weak link to the past. In a lot of other ways - the things we talk about, the people we are, the time people are willing to spend on these sites, etc - these new sites are completely different. That's not necessarily a bad thing - there's no point debating the merits of Ron Paul 2012 over a decade after that happened! - but it also means that trying to bring back those older communities feels like a fool's errand.
Sorry, this is a bit long. I think I really just miss NationStates...
I think you're right that at least a portion of the nostalgia for the old internet is just a reflection of normal human nostalgia for the "good old days" of anything. And I feel it too, so I'm not...
I think you're right that at least a portion of the nostalgia for the old internet is just a reflection of normal human nostalgia for the "good old days" of anything. And I feel it too, so I'm not criticizing that nostalgia so much as cautioning that we need to be aware of what it is - because there's no recapturing that feeling. Objectively, were janky 90s websites with questionable functionality really better than what we have today? Was the discussion on Usenet (mostly between young, white, male, Americans) really better than the diversity of viewpoints you see on something like tildes?
No, definitely not. It was not about the sites, it was about going on an adventure in a space that was unexplored. You cannot do that anymore because you cannot unexplore something. It is the same...
Objectively, were janky 90s websites with questionable functionality really better than what we have today?
No, definitely not. It was not about the sites, it was about going on an adventure in a space that was unexplored. You cannot do that anymore because you cannot unexplore something. It is the same as a with popular tourist destinations. Once they were special, interesting and fun. Nowadays, they are not because both our frame of mind and the actual destination are changed by the influx and experience. There is no way to convert it back to that special, interesting and fun place.
Agree strongly here. I was just watching a very long history of rpgs video and it was interesting to think how going back to the old games it was always a shock of seeing something you never...
Agree strongly here. I was just watching a very long history of rpgs video and it was interesting to think how going back to the old games it was always a shock of seeing something you never thought could exist when new things came out. After a while the games were more about how they use different features together and overall production values or volume of content. It was a shock of new tech, that is long gone.
The same with the internet now. There is no reason the small web or all the things we had in the 90s couldn't exist now, and honestly are significantly easier to create now. It's just that having a web page isn't cool and novel like it was when I created my first geocities account way back when. Now that the world is online I feel like I don't have much to day or any gaps to full that others are doing a better job with. Perhaps that is defeatist but I just don't feel the same excitement level that I used to.
Another factor is that tech breakthroughs today feel over my head or are done at a scale that is untouchable for the novice. Back in the day you can learn all you need to in a short period of time output what professionals are outputting. But now the bleeding edge takes a lot of pre knowledge, money, or both.
Computers will always be magic to me but the time of it being really approachable and easy to get into are starting to be a thing of the past.
Sure there is. But there is a difference between exploring new books in the library and stumbling into a library for the very first time, slowy realising what kind of place it could be. The former...
Sure there is. But there is a difference between exploring new books in the library and stumbling into a library for the very first time, slowy realising what kind of place it could be. The former you can repeat ad infinitum, the latter you can do only once.
I’m isolating at home with Covid and booted up my ancient laptop to play Old School RuneScape — and it’s not the same, you’re right. Even if I was somehow approaching it from the same place, the...
I’m isolating at home with Covid and booted up my ancient laptop to play Old School RuneScape — and it’s not the same, you’re right. Even if I was somehow approaching it from the same place, the kinds of people playing the game today are mostly veterans who remember the good old days, and therefore also know off by heart the most efficient methods to level up the various skills. I’ll never again be the noob who thought a level-12 pure mage pvper was the epitome of cool, and I’ll never again be able to live the experience for the first time of creating a brand new character to try out being that cool mage, because I’ve lived it and done it and it can’t ever have that same sheen as it once did.
That said, I’m still having fun, because it’s still a game I enjoy regardless of how easy it is today to look up perfectly verifiable facts about the game on the wiki.
In this vein, here's a great (7+ hours for parts 1 and 2) video of Day9 playing Classic World of Warcraft for the first time in 2024. He explicitly rejects backseat gaming, does not seek out...
He explicitly rejects backseat gaming, does not seek out guides and such. Veteran players will cringe so hard at what's happening, but this is what games used to be like. There was this extended period of self-discovery and exploration that doesn't happen anymore.
In that sense, the old internet was definitely more fun. For every niceity of the modern internet, it sucks that its mostly dominated by the 10 most popular sites. And that for a lot of it, the primary use case has become shopping and paying bills. And the internet has optimized the fun out of a lot of gaming, especially multiplayer gaming.
That's something pretty recent, as I understand it, I think it's connected to the last big event they were running. I'm sure NationStates will be back. But I don't want to just go back and relive...
That's something pretty recent, as I understand it, I think it's connected to the last big event they were running. I'm sure NationStates will be back.
But I don't want to just go back and relive part of a time in my life that is over - the people there will be different, I'll be different, the things we'd do will be different. I could go back and create a new era in my life, but I don't really feel the need to do that - I've got plenty going on right now, I don't feel the need to add NationStates to that. But nostalgically, of course I want to go back, because I remember all the happy times from back then without any of the negative aspects.
While I do think we see the earlier internet with rose-tinted glasses, I think there's a lot worth remembering and carrying onward. I think there's validity to looking back at earlier internet and...
Exemplary
While I do think we see the earlier internet with rose-tinted glasses, I think there's a lot worth remembering and carrying onward. I think there's validity to looking back at earlier internet and seeing parts of it that we're nostalgic for and also technical parts of it that some of us want to see carried forward. I did thoroughly enjoy it when small communities, blog/personal sites, etc were more prevalent and there's thankfully a resurgence of that (and I'm trying to contribute also)
The biggest thing for me is somewhat aesthetic, somewhat functionality- I'll take a janky 90s HTML site with under construction gifs, a tiled background, and mostly text, almost any day over the javascript bombs we call websites today- especially for things like forums, news, aggregators, blogs, personal sites, wiki sites (see fandom for a glaring example of how shitty these can be). Sure, it depends on the purpose of the site (shopping carts/sites feel better these days IMO) but in many cases I definitely prefer the smaller, more text-focused web not the absolute piles of garbage we experience now. That said, it's not always true. I have no real nostalgia for Java (not Javascript, just Java), Silverlight, or Flash for web content. Some people made neat things but I'm glad they're mostly gone.
Modern web bloat and complexity is one of a plethora of reasons I got out of web design / web dev pursuits. I escaped before all the web-app / SPAs / react-style stuff became a thing and it was moving so fast at the time that I quickly got left behind skill-wise so I gave it up entirely, not liking the direction things went. These days if I build anything, it is extremely lightweight and doesn't use any of that- and that's why right now I've decided to only do web stuff for myself- I used to do it at a hobbyist level for a couple of local businesses and even that I got sick of.
I hope to see the small, personal, information-dense web carry forward forever where a bunch of people have their own sites and get together in webrings, forums, and what not. It is, without exception, my absolute favorite part of the internet and I hope we never lose it.
Addendum: Also- thanks OP for posting this site. It's a prime example of why I love the small web- I am keeping that site open and slowly going through each of these linked articles talking about...
Addendum:
Also- thanks OP for posting this site. It's a prime example of why I love the small web- I am keeping that site open and slowly going through each of these linked articles talking about the small web- and then clicking around and learning about the people behind these articles- and these bloggers also have links to blogrolls and other sites they enjoy.
What always happens is something like this starts this hours-long jump down the rabbit hole of personal internet content and I thoroughly enjoy my time spent there. It inspires me to be more creative myself and it connects me to new people whose work I may want to follow. Artists, devs, musicians, writers, and more. I end up finding small teams making neat, lightweight web projects, cool new ways of re-imagining things on the web. It gives me things to sit and think on in how I can proceed with the next era of my own work life, and so on.
It's just an experience of gem after gem and it has this hard-to-articulate personality and value that I absolutely cherish. A thousand minutes spent on social media can't match the feeling I get from sixty minutes exploring the personal web.
I think this is proof that something like this still exists, should exist, and is something we can explore and maintain in a modern form that echoes the old sites (and IMHO, still allows us to have that joy of exploration- there's still a fun, interesting, and special side to the web, and it's more diverse than ever )
I still read webcomics before anything else in my RSS feed. But it's the same ones I read 5-10 years ago: Girl Genius, Questionable Content, El Goonish Shive, Bad Machinery. There were others I...
I still read webcomics before anything else in my RSS feed. But it's the same ones I read 5-10 years ago: Girl Genius, Questionable Content, El Goonish Shive, Bad Machinery. There were others I used to read, but they ended.
I assume there are more out there. What am I missing?
Hopefully not derailing here, but what is everyone using for RSS reading these days? I sort of stopped using RSS regularly after the loss of Google reader and now I'm thinking I might want to give...
Hopefully not derailing here, but what is everyone using for RSS reading these days? I sort of stopped using RSS regularly after the loss of Google reader and now I'm thinking I might want to give it another try.
I've had a Newsblur subscription for many years. It works as a desktop web app, and also has Android and iOS clients. It does what I need and there are lots of features I don't use.
I've had a Newsblur subscription for many years. It works as a desktop web app, and also has Android and iOS clients. It does what I need and there are lots of features I don't use.
It's going to really depend on one's sense of humor, but I really enjoy Poorly Drawn Lines, Extra Fabulous Comics, Safely Endangered, and Mr. Lovenstein.
It's going to really depend on one's sense of humor, but I really enjoy Poorly Drawn Lines, Extra Fabulous Comics, Safely Endangered, and Mr. Lovenstein.
Recently, I started reading these: 1/0 (Tailsteak, https://www.undefined.net/1/0/; the first 200 strips or so are the best) Absurd Notions (Kevin Pease, http://www.absurdnotions.org/page1.html)...
Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures, or DMFA, is one I'm still following. Don't worry about the name, it's safe for work, and while the premise has drifted it was originally about Furcadia and the...
Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures, or DMFA, is one I'm still following. Don't worry about the name, it's safe for work, and while the premise has drifted it was originally about Furcadia and the author's friends. The early stuff is really amateurish in quality, but at some point it undergoes a dramatic evolution.
There's also Goblins, if you can tolerate that one's shortcomings.
If you haven't read them yet, I can also recommend 8 But Theater, as well as Bob and George, the two comics that started the sprite comic trend of the 2000's. They've both ended, but they're hilarious, and I'd even say worth a reread if it's been a long time since someone last read them.
I have been wanting to respond to this post for a minute, but haven't both been in front of my computer and remembered to at the same time :-/ I'm old. I've been on networks since...
Exemplary
I have been wanting to respond to this post for a minute, but haven't both been in front of my computer and remembered to at the same time :-/
I'm old. I've been on networks since arpa/fido/gopher/bbs days. I wasn't super informed in those days, so I couldn't tell you which network I was using (bbs were obviously over the phone), but I was on some kind of network that linked universities, govt, some businesses (including old services like compuserve and The Source, which would become AOL, and also probably The Well), and some really weird cats. I can tell you that was fun, a lot of fun. But when the web hit in the early 90s, it was a new game. It was a way new kind of fun. I was on some kind of WYSE terminal connected to I don't know what at the backend learning everything I could about HTML (using lynx as a browser), and then there was NCSA Mosaic and the next decade were a blur of drugs, cyberpunk, being way overpaid for tickling a few network tricks, rock and roll, women, The Grateful Dead, and The Matrix.
Part of the fun was my age, carefree salad days spent excessively and recklessly. But there was something really cool in the air, the web was something truly new and different. TV was the same probably in the early 60's (Arthur C. Clarke), VCRs/PCs in the 80s (Dick), Radio in the 10s (Lovecraft), but we had Gibson at we were fixing to really leave the planet by going inside. Websites were not just informational, they were art. People pushed the limits. My favorite example was a site called superpants.
Like @ewintr pointed out above, experience a library for the first time is not repeatable, until you find a museum, a chemistry lab, a computer lab (ahem). The internet has matured, and sadly, become infected with capitalisms worst traits. But some of its early charms persist, Tildes is a good as any bbs forum, better than a lot of newsgroups. It's not all nostalgia, though, those early times were filled with exuberance and hope, that somehow this new medium and sets of tools could really advance the needle on civilization. And it has, and does. Wikipedia has proven exceptionally useful in the dissemination of information that entrenched players would love to keep quiet. When decoupled from corporate controlled backbones, the nature of the internet allows for very robust networked communications. It's not as glamorous now, though, maybe kindofa shame, but also not nearly as elite, (or l33t), which is good progress. Regular folks can now benefit. My conceit has been that once empowered, regular folks would suddenly become elevated and effete and pursue with us the highest ideals of aesthetics and goodwill. Instead, they just want to get through the day, be reasonably well fed, and feel like their kids are safe. And good on them, the more I emulate that lifestyle, the more at peace I am. A few, however, mostly in places far worse than I have ever even visited (and I've been to East St. Louis), have taken these mundane applications and put them in the service of real change for better, the nobility of which is practically a fairy tale to me.
The early internet is gone, and so are my 20s (which I extended well into my 30s). I have realized my many limitations, and the extent which I was living in a fantasy life. There is no blame, much like Mr. Robot, my rich dissociative denial and imagination kept me alive through horrible circumstances. But when the circumstance abated, I did not release the defense mechanisms, and here we are. But in my 20s, and during the internet's early days, I could more easily ignore my limitations and focus on the fanstastical places I was going to go.
I still have utopian leanings, however. The technology is there to alleviate so much suffering, we just have to find some way to create a collective will. The old ways, unions and 20s progressivism, will not work today. There are too many disparities, too much focus on individualism. Some of that may need to be rolled back, but the variegations will persist and deserve celebration and inclusion. Democracy will not work, and manufactured persuasion (aka Public Relations, Marketing, and Advertising) cannot unite enough of us on enough stuff. No, there must be a new, simultaneous, spontaneous, and widespread recognition of commonalities, trust through desperation or exhaustion or surrender, release of the fear of insecurity, humility and cooperation. The ideal truism from the old days is still useful, repeat it wherever you can: from each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need.
I did not mean exactly to turn this into a mildly revolutionary manifesto, except maybe I did. This kind of random, unifying, perhaps too glittering meandering is exactly the kind of spirit that seemed to flow over the deep in the first seven days of the World Wide Web. Maybe there's nothing wrong with naivety, excitement, and nerdery, and that absence is what's most missing from those days to this.
Unions are exactly the sort of thing that can help with many of the problems you've identified here! Communities that fight for each other and against Capital are the first step toward any sort of...
Unions are exactly the sort of thing that can help with many of the problems you've identified here! Communities that fight for each other and against Capital are the first step toward any sort of meaningful change in the US.
I always tell my interns that if they really want to get hired somewhere, start a blog. Write about your personal projects. It may seem like ancient internet, but it works in a way new internet...
I always tell my interns that if they really want to get hired somewhere, start a blog. Write about your personal projects. It may seem like ancient internet, but it works in a way new internet doesn't.
Having a social media presence is fine, and having a github is even good if you're wanting to get into a field that uses that, but as someone who hires nothing is a surer way to the top of a stack of similar applications than a blog. It shows your work and personality in a way that no other format (save for maybe a long-format YouTube channel) does.
What sorts of things interest this person? How do they approach problems? How do they communicate? What's their personality like? If there's a link to a blog on the resume, I have pretty good answers to all of these questions before even starting the interview.
The trouble with the resume is they're practically meaningless: You can get someone who can barely create anything listing 100 different skills that they saw in a book one time and have used for all of 30 seconds, and they're up against others who list only a tiny handful of skills that they're insanely competent in, and whose pride won't allow them to list things they see as merely intermediate skills. The education and experience sections can somewhat legitimize those, but I've seen plenty of people with long lists of impressive-sounding titles who can't actually do what their title says.
A blog skips right past all of that and proves it, and does so with an air of legitimacy and depth that social media is just lacking in most cases.
I really miss the days of reading webcomics and Project Wonderful advertisements leading me to new webcomics and adding all these webcomings to my RSS Reader extension that was integrated into my...
I really miss the days of reading webcomics and Project Wonderful advertisements leading me to new webcomics and adding all these webcomings to my RSS Reader extension that was integrated into my Firefox sidebar.
I still vaguely remember a couple that had continuous plots that I never found out what happened, and I'm vaguely dissatisfied by this, even though I don't remember what was happening at the time that I stopped reading them...
Wall of text for those who haven't heard this story, because it's almost mindblowing for me. It's like watching indirect everyday reports of somebody's mental health in real time. The original...
Wall of text for those who haven't heard this story, because it's almost mindblowing for me. It's like watching indirect everyday reports of somebody's mental health in real time.
The original Sinfest used to be basically a playful, lighthearted webcomic that often made fun of relationships, sex and various religions in a relatively non-aggressive way.
Then something happened and the author suddenly became a stereotypical "feminazi", around the time when aggressive online "feminism" was reaching its peak. All playfulness and subtlety vanished and were replaced with sometimes straight up calling men inferior or evil, sometimes with metaphors on the level of a woman standing inside falling code from The Matrix that says subtle words like PATRIARCHY. The author also became hostile towards his fans who were not happy about this.
Then something else happened and he switched from hating men and patriarchy to being a stereotypically far-right populist hateful. So now you have admiration towards tradwife-like values and hate towards transsexualism and any sexualization of anything in general, and seeing those as firstly one and the same and secondly an attempt to brainwash the population from either the government or some secret cabal.
The one connecting point of those two was being staunchly anti-porn and sex-negative in general (and obviously hateful, though that increased as well), otherwise it was like two flicks of a lightswitch. Nowadays he added antisemitism to the mix, for obvious reasons.
Various articles were written about this in the webcomic fandom over the two+ decades. The only thing that gives any hints about what could have possibly happened is that he seems to be a dude who spent his entire life drawing a comic that has to come out every day, and yet he never really became successful, so he kind of scraped by until he realized that it's not going to happen and perhaps thought it was too late to change careers, so he became a hateful shut-in. And those two ideological changes are just a way to channel that bitterness that he found in online communities. But who knows.
At one point I decided to write a script that would download all of his comics, run them through OCR and do simple statistics on the words used, to identify the points of ideological change. But I quickly realized that the overwhelming majority of words used were non ideological and I'd have to filter out the relevant ones by hand, which is firstly a lot of work and secondly not trivial to do without introducing my own biases. But I may try to finish it in the future.
This sounds very much like the Dave Sim situation with the Cerebus the Aardvark comics. Hot take: Egocentric creators work out their post-breakup issues as political expressions in their artwork,...
Hot take: Egocentric creators work out their post-breakup issues as political expressions in their artwork, alienating the fans who preferred the artist's original ideology.
i am not sure if i should thank you for helping me waste time on the internet at this point in my life, but thank you!! going to start reading now edit hmmm this seems very familiar actually, no...
i am not sure if i should thank you for helping me waste time on the internet at this point in my life, but thank you!! going to start reading now
edit hmmm this seems very familiar actually, no idea how much I read but this would've been like 2005 at the latest so not even close to current
True, the material can be dated, but still either retro funny or just funny in its own right. Not to mention more convoluted, twisty story lines than you can count. It is quite the ride.
True, the material can be dated, but still either retro funny or just funny in its own right. Not to mention more convoluted, twisty story lines than you can count. It is quite the ride.
ah I meant more, I was not even close to current when I read it. I still laughed at the Alanis Morissette joke, contrary to this strip that joke will never get old
ah I meant more, I was not even close to current when I read it. I still laughed at the Alanis Morissette joke, contrary to this strip that joke will never get old
I'd argue that they were the 'good old days'. Yes, we were younger and the whole world wide web project was still fresh, but aside from the obvious, the internet has this great 'slow food' thing...
I'd argue that they were the 'good old days'. Yes, we were younger and the whole world wide web project was still fresh, but aside from the obvious, the internet has this great 'slow food' thing going for it.
Sponsored content aggregators and video are what changed it for me. Text is no longer the top dog on the web and the magic of finding something original is all but gone now that content is made for its own sake.
It's fun, but Jesus Christ how many meme reels can a guy watch before he realizes that it's just cheap attention farming?
I feel like the sugariest parts of the web are being spoon fed to me now, and that the thrill of 'stumblingupon' some weird, wonderful community of people making a unique thing is not the norm anymore.
That, and why would I willingly create something that big tech can just ingest into an AI and claim ownership over?
I want to highlight shite: static sites from shell, one of the sites listed, because I think they sum up well the curses of the modern internet. Namely, a lot of us were kids and we were writing...
I want to highlight shite: static sites from shell, one of the sites listed, because I think they sum up well the curses of the modern internet.
Namely, a lot of us were kids and we were writing hyper-optimized HTML/CSS only websites for fun and they were great. And it was not difficult to do.
View the source code for the example template page. It's not really any harder to modify that source code than it is to use Word.
When everybody makes their stuff from scratch, everything is a little bit more unique. Myspace was better than Facebook, in part because Myspace provided the tools to let people do it. But even myspace was less-fun than pure personal websites.
I thought of a way to explain this: The early internet was more like a videogame. The modern internet is more like cable television.
I went to an elementary school in a rural district that was very forward thinking in the early 90s. Large computer labs for all the kids. They had funding programs for families to buy personal PCs for their kids, and our little neck of the woods had far higher ownership of PCs in the mid-90s than most other areas, especially among the lower classes. By middle school, even kids who would later drop out of school were hand-crafting personal websites.
That has largely died in favor of quick, readily forgotten blurbs and passive consumption of content.
When my family got an internet connection back in the late 90s, our ISP gave ever customer a little free web server space for us to upload HTML sites via FTP. And all those sites were listed on...
When my family got an internet connection back in the late 90s, our ISP gave ever customer a little free web server space for us to upload HTML sites via FTP. And all those sites were listed on the ISPs webpage. That was a fun thing to explore, but the web was also massively smaller back then. While it was still massive enough that one couldn't see everything, it was still sort of manageable and stuff wasn't changing every minute.
And the thing is: There's no reason it can't be like that again. The large stuff can still exist, but fostering that local-first internet could solve many ills. Instead of...
And the thing is: There's no reason it can't be like that again. The large stuff can still exist, but fostering that local-first internet could solve many ills.
Instead of Facebook/Discord/Nextdoor, you have your local ISP's web index and IRC service.
I sometimes like to post this link to a page about some online systems from 1988, because the costs are pretty high, but also because it talks about what it was like. And the next page is about...
on the glory days of the early internet,
I sometimes like to post this link to a page about some online systems from 1988, because the costs are pretty high, but also because it talks about what it was like. And the next page is about BBSs. (The whole book is interesting and Internet Archive have got a good scan.)
This thread made me realize how many webcomics I've lost touch with over the years, and sent me on a journey of rediscovery that ultimately led me back to the bizarre misadventures of Pokey the...
This thread made me realize how many webcomics I've lost touch with over the years, and sent me on a journey of rediscovery that ultimately led me back to the bizarre misadventures of Pokey the penguin. HOORAY!
The only thought that comes to mind, which hasn't been covered by others, is that the early internet was a very different environment. Before the propagation of "high speed" internet, almost...
The only thought that comes to mind, which hasn't been covered by others, is that the early internet was a very different environment. Before the propagation of "high speed" internet, almost everything was text based, which inherently created a selection bias for who invested the time and energy into the internet. The modern user population no longer reflects that inclination, seemingly being focused around low-attention requirement multimedia content. This perspective may just be a product of my biases though.
I'm really sceptical of this idea that the internet was better in the good old days. For me at least, most of the change seems to have come as much from myself as from the internet. If I tried to go back to the "good old days", I'd just end up disappointed - indeed I have tried it a couple of times.
When I was a teenager, my internet hub was NationStates, which is an online political simulation game created by the author Max Barry to promote a book he'd written. The core gameplay is pretty light - you get 1-2 decisions to make each real-time day, then you choose a response and your nation has its stats updated to reflect the decision you made. But on top of that there was a lively community that built all sorts of minigames on top of that idea, mostly different forms of roleplaying, but also there was a guild mechanic that allowed "raiders" to invade other guilds and overthrow their leaders; a UN-like concept where you could write resolutions that affected everyone's nations; and an active off-topic forum.
The point is, there was a lot to do, and between the ages of about 15-20, I spent a lot of time there. Particularly when I went to University, I was involved a lot of the "defending" minigame, which involved a lot of hanging around on IRC at very specific times of the day, waiting for things to happen then pressing buttons very quickly when they did. And by hanging around on IRC, chatting with people in the off-topic forums, and occasionally, very badly, roleplaying, I had a bit of a community - people who knew my name, and whose names I knew (and still know). I really appreciated that time, and for me that was the heart of the old internet, at least as I knew it.
Then I moved on, I ended up mainly browsing Reddit, and at some point I just stopped interacting with NationStates. (I think part of that was scrambling my password at one point to prevent myself from logging on while I was revising for exams?) And moving on was sad and I miss a lot of the people there, but it was also around the right time where I was doing other things. NationStates still exists - they've just had a big event where everyone crashed the servers, so it sounds like nothing much has changed! - but I don't know that I want to go back. I don't want the community aspect that I had before, because I've got new communities, mostly offline, and I don't feel the need to rebuild that on NationStates.
Ultimately, I've moved on - not necessarily "grown out" of NationStates, but I'm just not in that exact state in my life any more. And going back would just be trying to resurrect the old feelings that I had, which seems like a futile exercise in itself.
I feel like a lot of these "new old internet" projects - Tildes included - aren't necessary rebuilding that particular period of the internet for me, they're instead starting new smaller communities. And sure, the internet used to be made of smaller communities, but I think this is a weak link to the past. In a lot of other ways - the things we talk about, the people we are, the time people are willing to spend on these sites, etc - these new sites are completely different. That's not necessarily a bad thing - there's no point debating the merits of Ron Paul 2012 over a decade after that happened! - but it also means that trying to bring back those older communities feels like a fool's errand.
Sorry, this is a bit long. I think I really just miss NationStates...
I think you're right that at least a portion of the nostalgia for the old internet is just a reflection of normal human nostalgia for the "good old days" of anything. And I feel it too, so I'm not criticizing that nostalgia so much as cautioning that we need to be aware of what it is - because there's no recapturing that feeling. Objectively, were janky 90s websites with questionable functionality really better than what we have today? Was the discussion on Usenet (mostly between young, white, male, Americans) really better than the diversity of viewpoints you see on something like tildes?
No, definitely not. It was not about the sites, it was about going on an adventure in a space that was unexplored. You cannot do that anymore because you cannot unexplore something. It is the same as a with popular tourist destinations. Once they were special, interesting and fun. Nowadays, they are not because both our frame of mind and the actual destination are changed by the influx and experience. There is no way to convert it back to that special, interesting and fun place.
Agree strongly here. I was just watching a very long history of rpgs video and it was interesting to think how going back to the old games it was always a shock of seeing something you never thought could exist when new things came out. After a while the games were more about how they use different features together and overall production values or volume of content. It was a shock of new tech, that is long gone.
The same with the internet now. There is no reason the small web or all the things we had in the 90s couldn't exist now, and honestly are significantly easier to create now. It's just that having a web page isn't cool and novel like it was when I created my first geocities account way back when. Now that the world is online I feel like I don't have much to day or any gaps to full that others are doing a better job with. Perhaps that is defeatist but I just don't feel the same excitement level that I used to.
Another factor is that tech breakthroughs today feel over my head or are done at a scale that is untouchable for the novice. Back in the day you can learn all you need to in a short period of time output what professionals are outputting. But now the bleeding edge takes a lot of pre knowledge, money, or both.
Computers will always be magic to me but the time of it being really approachable and easy to get into are starting to be a thing of the past.
I'm not sure I follow. The internet is constantly changing and evolving, there's always new stuff to explore.
Sure there is. But there is a difference between exploring new books in the library and stumbling into a library for the very first time, slowy realising what kind of place it could be. The former you can repeat ad infinitum, the latter you can do only once.
Fair enough. That's a good example, I feel like I understand better.
I’m isolating at home with Covid and booted up my ancient laptop to play Old School RuneScape — and it’s not the same, you’re right. Even if I was somehow approaching it from the same place, the kinds of people playing the game today are mostly veterans who remember the good old days, and therefore also know off by heart the most efficient methods to level up the various skills. I’ll never again be the noob who thought a level-12 pure mage pvper was the epitome of cool, and I’ll never again be able to live the experience for the first time of creating a brand new character to try out being that cool mage, because I’ve lived it and done it and it can’t ever have that same sheen as it once did.
That said, I’m still having fun, because it’s still a game I enjoy regardless of how easy it is today to look up perfectly verifiable facts about the game on the wiki.
In this vein, here's a great (7+ hours for parts 1 and 2) video of Day9 playing Classic World of Warcraft for the first time in 2024.
He explicitly rejects backseat gaming, does not seek out guides and such. Veteran players will cringe so hard at what's happening, but this is what games used to be like. There was this extended period of self-discovery and exploration that doesn't happen anymore.
In that sense, the old internet was definitely more fun. For every niceity of the modern internet, it sucks that its mostly dominated by the 10 most popular sites. And that for a lot of it, the primary use case has become shopping and paying bills. And the internet has optimized the fun out of a lot of gaming, especially multiplayer gaming.
That's something pretty recent, as I understand it, I think it's connected to the last big event they were running. I'm sure NationStates will be back.
But I don't want to just go back and relive part of a time in my life that is over - the people there will be different, I'll be different, the things we'd do will be different. I could go back and create a new era in my life, but I don't really feel the need to do that - I've got plenty going on right now, I don't feel the need to add NationStates to that. But nostalgically, of course I want to go back, because I remember all the happy times from back then without any of the negative aspects.
While I do think we see the earlier internet with rose-tinted glasses, I think there's a lot worth remembering and carrying onward. I think there's validity to looking back at earlier internet and seeing parts of it that we're nostalgic for and also technical parts of it that some of us want to see carried forward. I did thoroughly enjoy it when small communities, blog/personal sites, etc were more prevalent and there's thankfully a resurgence of that (and I'm trying to contribute also)
The biggest thing for me is somewhat aesthetic, somewhat functionality- I'll take a janky 90s HTML site with under construction gifs, a tiled background, and mostly text, almost any day over the javascript bombs we call websites today- especially for things like forums, news, aggregators, blogs, personal sites, wiki sites (see fandom for a glaring example of how shitty these can be). Sure, it depends on the purpose of the site (shopping carts/sites feel better these days IMO) but in many cases I definitely prefer the smaller, more text-focused web not the absolute piles of garbage we experience now. That said, it's not always true. I have no real nostalgia for Java (not Javascript, just Java), Silverlight, or Flash for web content. Some people made neat things but I'm glad they're mostly gone.
Modern web bloat and complexity is one of a plethora of reasons I got out of web design / web dev pursuits. I escaped before all the web-app / SPAs / react-style stuff became a thing and it was moving so fast at the time that I quickly got left behind skill-wise so I gave it up entirely, not liking the direction things went. These days if I build anything, it is extremely lightweight and doesn't use any of that- and that's why right now I've decided to only do web stuff for myself- I used to do it at a hobbyist level for a couple of local businesses and even that I got sick of.
I hope to see the small, personal, information-dense web carry forward forever where a bunch of people have their own sites and get together in webrings, forums, and what not. It is, without exception, my absolute favorite part of the internet and I hope we never lose it.
Addendum:
Also- thanks OP for posting this site. It's a prime example of why I love the small web- I am keeping that site open and slowly going through each of these linked articles talking about the small web- and then clicking around and learning about the people behind these articles- and these bloggers also have links to blogrolls and other sites they enjoy.
What always happens is something like this starts this hours-long jump down the rabbit hole of personal internet content and I thoroughly enjoy my time spent there. It inspires me to be more creative myself and it connects me to new people whose work I may want to follow. Artists, devs, musicians, writers, and more. I end up finding small teams making neat, lightweight web projects, cool new ways of re-imagining things on the web. It gives me things to sit and think on in how I can proceed with the next era of my own work life, and so on.
It's just an experience of gem after gem and it has this hard-to-articulate personality and value that I absolutely cherish. A thousand minutes spent on social media can't match the feeling I get from sixty minutes exploring the personal web.
I think this is proof that something like this still exists, should exist, and is something we can explore and maintain in a modern form that echoes the old sites (and IMHO, still allows us to have that joy of exploration- there's still a fun, interesting, and special side to the web, and it's more diverse than ever )
I still read webcomics before anything else in my RSS feed. But it's the same ones I read 5-10 years ago: Girl Genius, Questionable Content, El Goonish Shive, Bad Machinery. There were others I used to read, but they ended.
I assume there are more out there. What am I missing?
Hopefully not derailing here, but what is everyone using for RSS reading these days? I sort of stopped using RSS regularly after the loss of Google reader and now I'm thinking I might want to give it another try.
I selfhost a FreshRSS, but I think Inoreader has a pretty good free tier as well and not a bad place to start.
I've had a Newsblur subscription for many years. It works as a desktop web app, and also has Android and iOS clients. It does what I need and there are lots of features I don't use.
It's going to really depend on one's sense of humor, but I really enjoy Poorly Drawn Lines, Extra Fabulous Comics, Safely Endangered, and Mr. Lovenstein.
Wilde Life is the best one I'm currently reading.
That's a good one. Thanks!
Penny arcade
Recently, I started reading these:
Freefall also seems pretty good but I'm still in the 1999s with that one and there are new strips released even this month ! Amazing commitment
I plan on keeping this list up to date: https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/journal/blob/main/lists/comics.list
Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures, or DMFA, is one I'm still following. Don't worry about the name, it's safe for work, and while the premise has drifted it was originally about Furcadia and the author's friends. The early stuff is really amateurish in quality, but at some point it undergoes a dramatic evolution.
There's also Goblins, if you can tolerate that one's shortcomings.
If you haven't read them yet, I can also recommend 8 But Theater, as well as Bob and George, the two comics that started the sprite comic trend of the 2000's. They've both ended, but they're hilarious, and I'd even say worth a reread if it's been a long time since someone last read them.
I have been wanting to respond to this post for a minute, but haven't both been in front of my computer and remembered to at the same time :-/
I'm old. I've been on networks since arpa/fido/gopher/bbs days. I wasn't super informed in those days, so I couldn't tell you which network I was using (bbs were obviously over the phone), but I was on some kind of network that linked universities, govt, some businesses (including old services like compuserve and The Source, which would become AOL, and also probably The Well), and some really weird cats. I can tell you that was fun, a lot of fun. But when the web hit in the early 90s, it was a new game. It was a way new kind of fun. I was on some kind of WYSE terminal connected to I don't know what at the backend learning everything I could about HTML (using lynx as a browser), and then there was NCSA Mosaic and the next decade were a blur of drugs, cyberpunk, being way overpaid for tickling a few network tricks, rock and roll, women, The Grateful Dead, and The Matrix.
Part of the fun was my age, carefree salad days spent excessively and recklessly. But there was something really cool in the air, the web was something truly new and different. TV was the same probably in the early 60's (Arthur C. Clarke), VCRs/PCs in the 80s (Dick), Radio in the 10s (Lovecraft), but we had Gibson at we were fixing to really leave the planet by going inside. Websites were not just informational, they were art. People pushed the limits. My favorite example was a site called superpants.
Like @ewintr pointed out above, experience a library for the first time is not repeatable, until you find a museum, a chemistry lab, a computer lab (ahem). The internet has matured, and sadly, become infected with capitalisms worst traits. But some of its early charms persist, Tildes is a good as any bbs forum, better than a lot of newsgroups. It's not all nostalgia, though, those early times were filled with exuberance and hope, that somehow this new medium and sets of tools could really advance the needle on civilization. And it has, and does. Wikipedia has proven exceptionally useful in the dissemination of information that entrenched players would love to keep quiet. When decoupled from corporate controlled backbones, the nature of the internet allows for very robust networked communications. It's not as glamorous now, though, maybe kindofa shame, but also not nearly as elite, (or l33t), which is good progress. Regular folks can now benefit. My conceit has been that once empowered, regular folks would suddenly become elevated and effete and pursue with us the highest ideals of aesthetics and goodwill. Instead, they just want to get through the day, be reasonably well fed, and feel like their kids are safe. And good on them, the more I emulate that lifestyle, the more at peace I am. A few, however, mostly in places far worse than I have ever even visited (and I've been to East St. Louis), have taken these mundane applications and put them in the service of real change for better, the nobility of which is practically a fairy tale to me.
The early internet is gone, and so are my 20s (which I extended well into my 30s). I have realized my many limitations, and the extent which I was living in a fantasy life. There is no blame, much like Mr. Robot, my rich dissociative denial and imagination kept me alive through horrible circumstances. But when the circumstance abated, I did not release the defense mechanisms, and here we are. But in my 20s, and during the internet's early days, I could more easily ignore my limitations and focus on the fanstastical places I was going to go.
I still have utopian leanings, however. The technology is there to alleviate so much suffering, we just have to find some way to create a collective will. The old ways, unions and 20s progressivism, will not work today. There are too many disparities, too much focus on individualism. Some of that may need to be rolled back, but the variegations will persist and deserve celebration and inclusion. Democracy will not work, and manufactured persuasion (aka Public Relations, Marketing, and Advertising) cannot unite enough of us on enough stuff. No, there must be a new, simultaneous, spontaneous, and widespread recognition of commonalities, trust through desperation or exhaustion or surrender, release of the fear of insecurity, humility and cooperation. The ideal truism from the old days is still useful, repeat it wherever you can: from each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need.
I did not mean exactly to turn this into a mildly revolutionary manifesto, except maybe I did. This kind of random, unifying, perhaps too glittering meandering is exactly the kind of spirit that seemed to flow over the deep in the first seven days of the World Wide Web. Maybe there's nothing wrong with naivety, excitement, and nerdery, and that absence is what's most missing from those days to this.
Unions are exactly the sort of thing that can help with many of the problems you've identified here! Communities that fight for each other and against Capital are the first step toward any sort of meaningful change in the US.
I always tell my interns that if they really want to get hired somewhere, start a blog. Write about your personal projects. It may seem like ancient internet, but it works in a way new internet doesn't.
Having a social media presence is fine, and having a github is even good if you're wanting to get into a field that uses that, but as someone who hires nothing is a surer way to the top of a stack of similar applications than a blog. It shows your work and personality in a way that no other format (save for maybe a long-format YouTube channel) does.
What sorts of things interest this person? How do they approach problems? How do they communicate? What's their personality like? If there's a link to a blog on the resume, I have pretty good answers to all of these questions before even starting the interview.
The trouble with the resume is they're practically meaningless: You can get someone who can barely create anything listing 100 different skills that they saw in a book one time and have used for all of 30 seconds, and they're up against others who list only a tiny handful of skills that they're insanely competent in, and whose pride won't allow them to list things they see as merely intermediate skills. The education and experience sections can somewhat legitimize those, but I've seen plenty of people with long lists of impressive-sounding titles who can't actually do what their title says.
A blog skips right past all of that and proves it, and does so with an air of legitimacy and depth that social media is just lacking in most cases.
I really miss the days of reading webcomics and Project Wonderful advertisements leading me to new webcomics and adding all these webcomings to my RSS Reader extension that was integrated into my Firefox sidebar.
I still vaguely remember a couple that had continuous plots that I never found out what happened, and I'm vaguely dissatisfied by this, even though I don't remember what was happening at the time that I stopped reading them...
I was curious about what happened to sinfest, but nothing could have prepared me for what it turned into. Super weird right wing TERF stuff now.
Wall of text for those who haven't heard this story, because it's almost mindblowing for me. It's like watching indirect everyday reports of somebody's mental health in real time.
The original Sinfest used to be basically a playful, lighthearted webcomic that often made fun of relationships, sex and various religions in a relatively non-aggressive way.
Then something happened and the author suddenly became a stereotypical "feminazi", around the time when aggressive online "feminism" was reaching its peak. All playfulness and subtlety vanished and were replaced with sometimes straight up calling men inferior or evil, sometimes with metaphors on the level of a woman standing inside falling code from The Matrix that says subtle words like PATRIARCHY. The author also became hostile towards his fans who were not happy about this.
Then something else happened and he switched from hating men and patriarchy to being a stereotypically far-right populist hateful. So now you have admiration towards tradwife-like values and hate towards transsexualism and any sexualization of anything in general, and seeing those as firstly one and the same and secondly an attempt to brainwash the population from either the government or some secret cabal.
The one connecting point of those two was being staunchly anti-porn and sex-negative in general (and obviously hateful, though that increased as well), otherwise it was like two flicks of a lightswitch. Nowadays he added antisemitism to the mix, for obvious reasons.
Various articles were written about this in the webcomic fandom over the two+ decades. The only thing that gives any hints about what could have possibly happened is that he seems to be a dude who spent his entire life drawing a comic that has to come out every day, and yet he never really became successful, so he kind of scraped by until he realized that it's not going to happen and perhaps thought it was too late to change careers, so he became a hateful shut-in. And those two ideological changes are just a way to channel that bitterness that he found in online communities. But who knows.
At one point I decided to write a script that would download all of his comics, run them through OCR and do simple statistics on the words used, to identify the points of ideological change. But I quickly realized that the overwhelming majority of words used were non ideological and I'd have to filter out the relevant ones by hand, which is firstly a lot of work and secondly not trivial to do without introducing my own biases. But I may try to finish it in the future.
This sounds very much like the Dave Sim situation with the Cerebus the Aardvark comics.
Hot take: Egocentric creators work out their post-breakup issues as political expressions in their artwork, alienating the fans who preferred the artist's original ideology.
You should try using tfidf, its quite simple — usually getting the data is the hard part and will filter out the nonrelevant words
A good tip, thanks! I'll look into it if I have the time.
I had to see it to believe it. It's almost unrecognizable.
For hours upon hours of enjoyment, even on a re-read, I commend to you Sluggy Freelance
It started around 1997, and is still active today.
i am not sure if i should thank you for helping me waste time on the internet at this point in my life, but thank you!! going to start reading now
edit hmmm this seems very familiar actually, no idea how much I read but this would've been like 2005 at the latest so not even close to current
True, the material can be dated, but still either retro funny or just funny in its own right. Not to mention more convoluted, twisty story lines than you can count. It is quite the ride.
ah I meant more, I was not even close to current when I read it. I still laughed at the Alanis Morissette joke, contrary to this strip that joke will never get old
I'd argue that they were the 'good old days'. Yes, we were younger and the whole world wide web project was still fresh, but aside from the obvious, the internet has this great 'slow food' thing going for it.
Sponsored content aggregators and video are what changed it for me. Text is no longer the top dog on the web and the magic of finding something original is all but gone now that content is made for its own sake.
It's fun, but Jesus Christ how many meme reels can a guy watch before he realizes that it's just cheap attention farming?
I feel like the sugariest parts of the web are being spoon fed to me now, and that the thrill of 'stumblingupon' some weird, wonderful community of people making a unique thing is not the norm anymore.
That, and why would I willingly create something that big tech can just ingest into an AI and claim ownership over?
I'd rather just check out completely.
I want to highlight shite: static sites from shell, one of the sites listed, because I think they sum up well the curses of the modern internet.
Namely, a lot of us were kids and we were writing hyper-optimized HTML/CSS only websites for fun and they were great. And it was not difficult to do.
View the source code for the example template page. It's not really any harder to modify that source code than it is to use Word.
When everybody makes their stuff from scratch, everything is a little bit more unique. Myspace was better than Facebook, in part because Myspace provided the tools to let people do it. But even myspace was less-fun than pure personal websites.
I thought of a way to explain this: The early internet was more like a videogame. The modern internet is more like cable television.
I went to an elementary school in a rural district that was very forward thinking in the early 90s. Large computer labs for all the kids. They had funding programs for families to buy personal PCs for their kids, and our little neck of the woods had far higher ownership of PCs in the mid-90s than most other areas, especially among the lower classes. By middle school, even kids who would later drop out of school were hand-crafting personal websites.
That has largely died in favor of quick, readily forgotten blurbs and passive consumption of content.
When my family got an internet connection back in the late 90s, our ISP gave ever customer a little free web server space for us to upload HTML sites via FTP. And all those sites were listed on the ISPs webpage. That was a fun thing to explore, but the web was also massively smaller back then. While it was still massive enough that one couldn't see everything, it was still sort of manageable and stuff wasn't changing every minute.
And the thing is: There's no reason it can't be like that again. The large stuff can still exist, but fostering that local-first internet could solve many ills.
Instead of Facebook/Discord/Nextdoor, you have your local ISP's web index and IRC service.
I sometimes like to post this link to a page about some online systems from 1988, because the costs are pretty high, but also because it talks about what it was like. And the next page is about BBSs. (The whole book is interesting and Internet Archive have got a good scan.)
Page 75 of Signal, a Whole Earth Catalogue .
$10USD in 1988 is about $26USD today.
Compuserve = $11.75 per hour
The Source $8.40 per hour
Delphi $6.60 per hour
Byte Information Exchange $9 per hour
Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link $8 per month plus $2 per hour
Of course if you were, ah, "enterprising," you could have these sorts of things for a reduced rate.
This thread made me realize how many webcomics I've lost touch with over the years, and sent me on a journey of rediscovery that ultimately led me back to the bizarre misadventures of Pokey the penguin.
HOORAY!The only thought that comes to mind, which hasn't been covered by others, is that the early internet was a very different environment. Before the propagation of "high speed" internet, almost everything was text based, which inherently created a selection bias for who invested the time and energy into the internet. The modern user population no longer reflects that inclination, seemingly being focused around low-attention requirement multimedia content. This perspective may just be a product of my biases though.