Favourite "Old Internet" stuff - Let's reminisce about the Wild West days

[Dysnomia]

It's not ancient internet old but I miss the info heavy style of Let's Plays. These were done by people who already played the game, who walk the viewer through acting as an outsider's commentary track. They go straight to the point, no reaction nonsense, blunders are edited out, they sprinkle in the history of the game and its development, and often all the easter eggs plus weird references too. The best known example is probably the Jurassic Park Trespasser one.
There are a lot fewer who do this today and their vids are drowned out by the thousands of low effort reaction playthroughs and pseudo intellectual gaming "video essays".

These people always shout now. I know 10 year olds love loud noises but Dear God, do you have to sound like a retard too? Every time I hear these tards shouting about "INSERT REALY POPULAR GAME", in my head I hear Krusty the clown shouting "HEEEEEY Kids!"

Also, if you yell at me to like and subscribe it greatly reduces the probability that I will do so.

I've had my own videos buried by idiots like this because I'm just not cool enough. I guess if I was willing to look like a thot things would go better. But I ain't doing that. I prefer to be anon online and not have my face and name plastered everywhere.

Also, stop begging for donations for low effort content. I can tell that video cost you nothing monetarily and very little of your time. If you are regurgitating a wiki page about Mario stuff everyone already knows, complete with clickbait thumbnail then I'm not interesting in even watching.

Fan shrines on Geocities, Angelfire or Tripod or whatnot. They were just freaking everywhere, and a lot were low effort, but they were just made out of love for a character or series. Although some would take it a bit too far in being open about wanting to fuck those characters as part of the "worship", but that was something I didn't really notice when I was younger.

I think they still exist somewhat in terms of character-centric blogs on Tumblr or whatnot, but it's just not the same.

I really miss those shrines. Some were really good and even the bad artists were often better than today's CalArts vomit. Now they just plaster Twitter and Tumblr with hairy legged, top surgery scar/binder versions of female characters and everyone is fat and raceswapped with a nose that looks like an over ripe berry. Ick.

Also, you could enjoy some unintentionally hilarious fanfiction. Self insert romances were always good for a laugh and cringe.

 

[potatoGelato]

Playing flash games on Miniclip was pretty fun. There was also no more need for buying books for cheat codes anymore when gamesradar launched. Playing Math Blasters on one of those old G3 Macs with a hockey puck mouse is an even older memory. I don't miss walking home from school after missing the bus because a dial up connection blocked me from calling home.

 

[Dysnomia]

Playing flash games on Miniclip was pretty fun. There was also no more need for buying books for cheat codes anymore when gamesradar launched. Playing Math Blasters on one of those old G3 Macs with a hockey puck mouse is an even older memory. I don't miss walking home from school after missing the bus because a dial up connection blocked me from calling home.

For awhile Nippon Ichi had a browser puzzle game version of the geo panel mechanic in Disgaea. It was a grid of squares that you had to figure out how to turn all one color. I assume it was flash and naturally long gone.

While dialup made the phone unusable unless you had a second line, I find the once annoying AOL dialup noise comforting now. I also miss trying to prevent those little DSL adaptors from becoming cat toys. Now I just use a hot spot that is smaller than my phone.

 

[Blitzsneed]

Picard Song

picard.ytmnd.com

Didn't know that it still exists. Also Moonman originated from this site.

 

[JULAY]

Picard Song

picard.ytmnd.com

Didn't know that it still exists. Also Moonman originated from this site.

YTMND was great back in the day. I used to laugh my ass off at all of the stupid shit on there, especially all the Brian Peppers memes and the variations on Nigga Stole my Bike.

I remember when eBaum stole a bunch of content from there and Fark and SA and basically the entire internet gangfucked eBaum's World out of existence for a day or two.

And we got this jaunty tune as a result:

 

[Titty Figurine]

Shock sites that were funny and not just edgy gore. Everyone in those circles now is like fifteen and namedrops rotten and ogrish for clout but you can tell an oldfag if they're reminiscing about snc or cj. There was a great mix of gross, weird sex and gore and you never knew which one you were going to get when you clicked.

I never thought I'd say it, but there was something so pure about linking people on instant messenger convos to bigbag, which was just a saline inflation nutsack guy sitting on a kitchen floor jizzing pina colada mix everywhere that he probably got a bladder infection from. A lot of the lesser known looping clip catfish links like that are gone for good.

Also jj.am. There were so many weird gifs on it before everything was video instead.

 

[Load Bearing Drywall]

Picard Song

picard.ytmnd.com

Didn't know that it still exists. Also Moonman originated from this site.

Okay, that's stuck in my head for the rest of the evening now.

I was inspired to see if some of my ancient favorites were still around in some form, and it turns out they are!

Someone mirrored the infamous YouAreAnIdiot/Offiz trojan we used to prank each other with back in the early aughts.

http://youareanidiot.cc

Youtube explanation of the whole phenomena:

The GI Joe PSAs edits -- remasted in HD

And possibly the first ever meme format, Mr. T vs Everything:

http://hamburgsteak.sandwich.net/mirrors/mr_t_vs/MrTEverything.html

 

[Lady Adjani]

 

[frap]

I got my start in Yahoo chat rooms. Specifically the Buffy and Angel chat rooms, which had two regular user groups that had basically colonised them. We never talked about Buffy or Angel, and I've never watched either of them, and any poor fool who wandered in to talk about either TV show would be ignored or shouted out. The Buffy group were mostly British users and the Angel group were mostly American, and they were mildly antagonistic towards each other. Good times.

I used to read the kvetch boards on IndieBride (RIP) for the drama over bachelor parties and cheating fiancés. I would occasionally browse SA and Misc on Bodybuilding.com. I was especially fond of the old demotivational poster meme format and some of the failblog videos like this one:

 

[NOT Sword Fighter Super]

The Super Friends "Whazzup" recut.
I thought it was the funniest thing in the world.

And here's the link to the YT video since TOR embedding videos is mad gay.

 

[Elysian]

I’m really nostalgic for Club Penguin.

As a kid I went through this phase where I had a big fascination with castaway survival themed media and there was this secret agent mission where you get stranded and have to survive until you get rescued. I used to replay it all the time. I guess it appealed to my latent hunter gatherer caveman brain instincts or something.

I was also a black belt in Card Jitsu (the only competitive online multiplayer game I haven’t sucked at lmao) and a pro at the Ice Fishing minigame, which was my main method of grinding coins because my trash tier dyspraxic reaction times meant that I was shit at the minecart racing one (which was the objectively best strat for grinding coins IIRC).

 

[AgendaPoster]

Erowid and Lycauem were the two sites of the 90s young psychonauts. Glad I lived it, glad I outgrew it.

 

[Matt Damon]

What a fall from grace. Can't believe I used to like that guy.

Maddox was funny when I thought his persona was a schtick for making amusing articles. When I realized he really took himself that seriously, it suddenly wasn't very funny at all.

And we got this jaunty tune as a result:

Oh man, I forgot about that one! Remember those heady days when people still thought Lowtax was cool and an anti-establishment hero?

 

[Baklava]

The Gallery of Regrettable Food. Can't believe it's still around!

 

[Instant_Pot_User]

Spineworld, a quirky little Swedish MMO-chatroom that was killed by the 2008 financial crash. It had an inimitable sense of style and a great soundtrack for a browsergame; I'm pretty sure the Spineworld soundtrack influenced my taste in music. There have been multiple attempts to revive the game, but it's long gone now, except in memories and in the portfolios of the people who worked on it.

 

[melty]

Like others, I miss the random character shrines and shitty fandom sites, as well as livejournal. I've recently been poking around neocities and some people still do character shrines, which is really cool.

 

[glass_houses]

The Gallery of Regrettable Food.

Oh, that reminds me of Steve! Don't Eat It! It's still up but it's been decades since it was updated. I laughed myself sick over it.

I really miss a very old blog called 'Fugly Horse of the Day'. It was hugely popular for a while, then it was accidentally deleted, came back, and was sold to some random, and then died in obscurity. A horse owner used to blog about horrendously misbred horses, and tear into the idiots who kept reproducing the things. She was savage and very funny and sharp, and really knew her shit. I'm not a horse person generally, but it was just such an engaging series that I got really into it.

 

[cybertoaster]

One of the things I miss is the lack of porn. People say the internet was popularized by porn but this is BS, back then porn was behind a paywall and it was mostly to sell VHS and DVDs. It wasn't until the mid to late 2000 when video streaming became a thing that you really had free porn everywhere. The consequence is that now porn has permeated into internet culture, everything has a porn meme, every conversation gets a porn reference like a goldwin law but instead of hitler its porn. I used to think that the "20 year old coomer" was a meme but people who were kids back in 2005 got mindbroken by porn. I didn't see any hardcore porn until my late teens, but now you got kids who were watching a girl getting fucked in the ass when they were still in elementary. Those kids are now coomers wearing hentai hoodies and thinking that getting SRS will turn them into an anime girl.

I miss Internet forums, man.

I joined so many that when tapatalk came out it seemed like a life saver, nobody did push notifications back then so I either logged in daily or missed out on stuff. RSS feeds barely worked most of the time.

And now its all gone, like old save games after the battery dies...

I miss the variety of old fashioned forums like this one. There's barely any left and just about all of them are nearly dead.

I also miss my cringe days in various fandoms; there was something about the participation in the community surrounding something I loved that really struck a cord with me. I loved reading other people's take on fandom lore and characters, and the intense speculation that used to arise when everyone was waiting for the next installment of insert-geekdom-here, all the debate and anticipation was delicious. Now every fucking character is a tranny, and fandom discussion is largely controlled by the media owner.

I miss the heyday of LiveJournal; not just for geek shit, but for the friends I had there who've since moved on, and the odd communities of interesting shit.

Like @Kari Kamiya said, I miss character shrines; a few of them are still around but they haven't been updated for literal decades, and the entire fandom has moved onto Facebook and Tumblr and Reddit and ad-infested wikis.

I miss the anything-goes approach to the internet. Now everything has the absolute fuck moderated out of it. It's not that I miss saying 'nigger', because I never actually said the word before people told me I couldn't. In the wild days of the internet, places that enforced a code of conduct did so because it was good manners and made for a harmonious community. Now, absolutely every single letter, numeral and punctuation mark is rigorously scanned for the vague scent of insert-phobia-here. Mere mild statements of a different point of view will get you kicked off multiple sites because invariably, some snowflake will feel 'unsafe' because you questioned their cherished reality. I miss being able to tell people that they were full of shit and need to toughen the fuck up. I miss being able to have a mild debate without being called an "-ist", or even being able to say, "I still disagree, but I respect the way you defend your position." In so many places now silence is a crime, because if you don't loudly support the current thing, well, "silence is violence."

I miss lesbian communities that aren't filled with troons or straight girls calling themselves 'queer'.

I miss not tripping over some underemployed wanker proclaiming themselves to be some kind of 'activist' every second paragraph.

I miss little random websites of... well, random.

I miss 4chan when it was good (but then 4chan was never good.)

The irony of the overmoderation is that the internet is way meaner than back in the day. You go to twitter and people there are just fucking awful to everybody, not even in a jocking way they do hate anyone for no reason. They give you shit over their feelings but then behave like complete sociopaths.

In the old days we all joked around but it was all banter, now the shit you see its just mean spirited, there's no punchline, you get me?

Okay, that's stuck in my head for the rest of the evening now.

I was inspired to see if some of my ancient favorites were still around in some form, and it turns out they are!

Someone mirrored the infamous YouAreAnIdiot/Offiz trojan we used to prank each other with back in the early aughts.

http://youareanidiot.cc

Youtube explanation of the whole phenomena:

The GI Joe PSAs edits -- remasted in HD

And possibly the first ever meme format, Mr. T vs Everything:

http://hamburgsteak.sandwich.net/mirrors/mr_t_vs/MrTEverything.html

This "randumb" humor is actually one of the things I don't miss.

 

[Load Bearing Drywall]

I think I have a huge soft spot for it because I was a middle schooler in the late 90s early aughts. I bet if I was a little older I wouldn't remember it so fondly!

Part of the nolstalgia though is that you weren't consuming it alone -- your online friends or RL friends would be there with you, laughing about it. It wasn't the same kind of completely passive doomscrolling style consumption that seems to be the standard now.

 

[Xenu Warrior Princess]

This reproduction was the first thing I thought of.


Well, untrue.
Goatse,cx was first...