while i was goofing around with #globalTalk, I ended up searching for some old Simpsons icons for my classic Macintosh (an LC 475), and stumbled upon an entry on the garden called Banned Simpsons Icons. (Who could resist downloading something with a title like that?)
They were called the "Banned Simpsons Icons" because Fox once sent the artist - Jeanette Foshee - a cease & desist letter for her uncannily perfect renderings of the copyrighted characters. they planned on suing her for every penny she made ($0.00) on them. this was back in 1995.
i thought - hell, what a wild story. why don't I get a hold of the artist - jeanette - and find out more about her banned icon set?
what i stumbled upon broke my heart, and i ended up spending a week digitally preserving what i could find.
some of you know that i've been working on a decentralized reddit-like that uses an ancient ambrosian protocol called nntp, minus #usenet, called #tomo
after several requests for a project status page, and lacking the courage to build a fancy web portal that is 190mb and 20,000 javascript calls, i did the exact opposite:
i stayed up until 2am and wrote a #homepage is absolute raw satan-approved php. it generates the webpages from text files with a tiny markup language i wrote at the same time
for now, the tomo homepage is a plain old .plan file (when's the last time we heard that word, since the carmack vs romero wars?), and you can have any colour you want as long as it's amber and looks like wordperfect 5.1 running on some godforsaken library terminal on the #worldwideweb
is it like a blog? kinda. i'll set up some more static pages for project-related stuff in the coming days
if people really, really want to, and someone asks nicely, i'll even run a fingerd server so you can finger me and pull down the .plans down yourself 😅
after watching doug block's Home Page (1999) documentary a half-dozen times over the past year, i realized how much i missed having a personal home page.
not an itch.io page. not a github repo. not an imgur album.
an actual personal home page full of links to interesting places and people, and a little blog area to write personal stuff in. i haven't had a personal blog since the early 2000s.
i wanted to have some fun, so I hauled my dusty ol' iMac G5 out of storage and installed Macromedia Dreamweaver and Fireworks. i hadn't used any of them in almost 20 years.
i thought it might take me a week to build a home page...
... it took me a year 😅
so this is my little attempt at rebuilding what we lost in the 90s. let me know if you've got a little homepage i can link back to in my hyperlinks area.
i've been sitting on this gem for 25 years. i think it's time.
so back in 1997, i was a first-year undergrad and dial-up was finally rolling out to the general public in most of canada.
with every new welcome package, u of a students received a 25 page manual on setting up smtp/pop for eudora lite, and a copy of netscape navigator.
the Computing and Network Services department decided that the best way to onramp students to the world wide web was via an interactive multimedia tutorial for win95 and macOS that they built themselves with macromedia director
last year an old buddy was cleaning out his basement, and he found his NetSurf '97 CD. couldn't resist capturing some of the 👌 performance by virtual paul
i have a really bad habit of polishing a turd until it gleams like japanese fake food, so i've decided to launch my new game studio's web site before i'm happy with it:
as i promised in an earlier post, i am documenting every step of the process of building a new game studio, and a new game at the same time.
i'll post at least once a week on the journal, and expand the site with game development tutorials in the coming weeks. 😅
oh and - for you #WorldWideWeb nerds out there: the entire site is generated on-the-fly with handwritten shaitan-approved PHP from text files, using a vile markup language i invented on my own without asking an adult first. it also features an #rss feed on the journal page, for those of you who find browsing profane
30 years ago, in April 1993, the World Wide Web commenced.
Glad to have been there in those earliest days of the public internet. I was a young Amiga game developer, fighting for development freedom on Usenet, as Commodore was pushing developers to not take over the system. 🙂
it took me two years to remember the name of this palm pilot/pda piracy website that was wildly popular in the early #2000s
MrTAXI was the grand central station of palm pilot #warez in the day. like Home of the Underdogs, it also acted as a kind of repository for obscure pda software that was difficult to find, nevermind purchase.
jeff vogel's Spiderweb Software website, in march 2000. creator of the Exile and Avernum series, jeff previously took mail orders and telephone orders. the web site introduced the concept of ordering shareware games over the internet to his fanbase.
5 years after its disappearance from general use in HTML, it is surprising still using a server-side imagemap to handle navigation clicks on the menu 😆
a couple of times a year i re-watch doug block's 1999 documentary Home Page.
filmed in the late 90s during the #worldWideWeb craze, it occupies this fascinating intersection of history and excitement. and unlike the technofetishists of that era, block's uneasiness about what the web would do for our sense of selfhood, relationships and privacy is refreshing and timely.
most of all, it feels good to remember how genuinely excited everyone was in the 90s about what the web might bring. while there were no shortage of corporatists looking for a free meal at someone else's expense, there were massive numbers of people who just wanted to figure out what it might do for us.
the doc captures that feeling very genuinely, and it's a shame that it remains rather obscure more than 20 years later
That has my running joke, whenever someone asked, how long I have been using the internet. These days, most people don't ask such questions, because many people cannot imagine a world without the internet. But by pure luck of birth, I was born geographically where the Internet began.
The slang term to describe the network before the Internet was the proto net. That is not what it was actually called, but it was something newcomers on the internet called the early prototype.
The biggest surprise to most people is in the begging, the internet was free. I am not talking about a free trial. You simply called up the local access number, and you were connected. There were no usernames or passwords, and you did not have to sign up with an ISP (internet service provider). This was a very brief time, and it did not last long.
The first consumer ISP was called, "The World" and my family's account number was in the double-digits.
There were no photos or videos or even dot com domains, as you had to remember IP Addresses the same way you had to remember phone numbers. Shortly afterward, there was a listing website, which acted more like a phone book or index, than how you would think of a search engine. On that note, I still own, an old copy of the Internet Yellow Pages (2nd edition).
The first photos were text art, also known as, ASCII art.
It would be easy to say in the beginning there were no ads on the Internet, but technically, in the beginning most websites were little more than business and government listings.
Entertainment would not come for a while. But arguably the first "social media" sites were known as "post boards" which latter become known as "bulletin boards" and eventually were called, "forums."
In the beginning, people used their real name for everything. It was thought strange and creepy to use an anonymous screen name. And for a brief time, everyone did indeed know everyone on the internet, it was so small in the beginning when most of the world had not yet even heard of it. It was technically possible to even download the internet (all of it).
I sound old, but I am only 43, and whether you believe that is old depends on how old you are, I guess, but I sure do not feel it. But I am old enough to know, we have come a long way. The Fediverse is something I enjoy, because it is a concept I once imagined would happen. It was considered a radical idea of a dreamer. And although I had no part in its creation, I am still glad it exists.
while doing some hypercard research, i stumbled upon jim stephenson's classic Hypercard Heaven site, which used to be found at members.aol.com/HCHeaven/ back in the 90s and early 2000s. thankfully WBM kept a copy mostly intact.
it is a treasure trove of old hypercard articles and news. i've archived a copy here. hopefully jim won't mind:
i discovered an awesome hack for hi-DPI/retina displays when you're building websites using lo-dpi displays
one of the downsides of working in lo-dpi is that you're generally working at 72ppi... and while graphics look pixel-perfect on your lo-dpi monitor/browser, they look like shit when a hi-dpi display auto-scales them (bicubically).
this is shown in screenshot #1 taken from a retina display. you end up in an ugly mix of two different resolutions - low-res button images, and high res text. mixed res is super distracting to the eye.
i stumbled upon one solution to this completely by accident. if you render out the image to hi-dpi (say, 300 ppi) and then scale it down to the desired size in html/css (e.g. <img width=25% height = 25%>)... it will render at 72ppi on lo-dpi displays, and 300 ppi on hi-dpi displays at the proper size.
screenshot 2 shows the result on a retina display - a nice sharp icon, with sharp text below it.
little story about when you get to see films that make you glad film exists
when i was first dating my wife over a decade ago, i was teaching and used a lot of documentary films in my classes. students had to learn how to observe and interpret people in a safe space.
it was getting late in the year, and i was running out of footage. so my wife and i would stay up until 2am some nights, trying to find enough footage that i could screen the next morning. she'd dig through my old film studies textbook ("A History of Narrative Film"), websites and old forums and imdb, calling out names, and i'd dig them out and watch a minute or two to see if they'd be good candidates.
most of the newer docs were plain bad - more shiny editorials than anything else. people acting instead of being. totally useless for students whose job was to interpret real human behaviour. so i tried to rely on older, more cinéma vérité -style docs.
it was hard to find old docs though - not only because many weren't digitized, but also because young people weren't aware of them, which meant that the web wasn't yet aware of them. imdb might have an entry for it, but only a few thousand people in the world might know the name of the movie.
my wife's secret weapon was a site called jinni. it had some truly solid algorithmic fundamentals that produced high quality recommendations based on what you watched. these weren't the google/amazon garbage recommends you have now: these were based on film qualities, and could produce pretty novel results.
one night it was beyond late, and i was shooting down every movie she recommended. she was getting pissed, and i was getting even more neurotic about finding the right one. she started randomly clicking around jinni in frustration, and came up with a black and white doc from the late 90s with a graffiti title. it looked bad, but i pulled up a low res mpeg someone had stashed on IA
we watched about 3 minutes together and forgot about finding anything else. we watched the entire thing that night, neither of us went to sleep, and i couldn't think about anything else before i taught a few hours later.
it was a movie called Dark Days, about the people living underground in the tunnels beneath NYC: https://vimeo.com/66989517
a decade later jinni's gone, we're married, and no one makes documentaries like this anymore.
if you had a #macintosh in the early 90s, you probably played the multiplayer tank battle game, Bolo.
and if you played Bolo, you probably visited jolo's Bolo Home Page. it was the bolo resource on the web, and it began its life on the authors' Duke University Med School web space, before it moved to lgm.com where it lived for ten years.
lgm.com was cybersquatted in the late 2000s, and the bolo home page disappeared from the public consciousness.
the site has hundreds of individual pages, and exploring its pages truly feels like an exercise in hyperlinking.
i spent the last few days recovering the site from IA and rebuilt its absolute link structure. please enjoy the Bolo Home Page for the first time in 15 years :)
The #WorldWideWeb was launched into public domain to connect people all over the world, yet the goodwill went unheeded, as it has become more and more monetized. I suppose the #WWW is indeed a reflection of humanity in general - #SurveillanceCapitalism for #greed, #influencer culture for #envy, and uncivility for #wrath. 30 years later, I wonder if we really deserve new #technology if we don't use them to improve ourselves as sentient beings?
FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore (arstechnica.com)
Chair proposes 100Mbps national standard and an evaluation of broadband prices.