The Wisdom of the Ages

This is really two mini-rants I've been meaning to throw together for some time, neither of which would be long enough by itself. Of course, I say this before I start writing, and never edit out statements like this as a personal rule, so I may very well talk about both at length. In any case, on with the show.

Once upon a time, I considered creating something of a museum, archiving and honoring those websites which really made an impact on the internet. I'm not talking about sites like eBay here, or the search engine that bears my name. I'm talking about those sites that everyone knew about in the era when the internet was not yet full of sites that exist mainly to raise awareness of such oddities. Eventually I scrapped this idea for a number of reasons. For starters, these things are still all out there, I don't want to blow bandwidth mirroring these, and one I outright refuse to link to.

However, seeing as the list of sites which truly deserve to be honored in this fashion is so short (although there's tons if I lower my standards just a little), and most people no longer seem to be aware of them, I can give them a bit of a treatment here.

Unfortunately, by doing this I am potentially starting off a new trend where we can all get nostalgic about the internet, finally creating the sort of pop cultural singularity that will destroy us all. Appologies in advance if that happens.

1. "All Your Base"- This one, I certainly hope you've all seen. If you haven't, don't spread it around, because the rest of us are sick to death of it. This little flash video has been shoved in my face more times than all other strange links put together. At the height of its popularity, people were asking me if I had seen it 20-30 times a day. Even before this, I was sick to death of it. Someone took the intro to a random, poorly translated Genesis game, which honestly was not noteworthy in any way, and somehow introduced it to the sort of proto-community of photoshoppers that existed at the time. After being tossed around for a while, this little flash video came about, everyone passed it around, and had a good laugh... then some time later, it started circulating again, on a much bigger scale, to the point where it was featured in nationally televised news stories. To this day I ponder why it happened with Zero Wing and not a popular game, like say, Zelda.
2. Timecube- Timecube is... difficult to describe. Essentially, there is this raving lunatic with a crackpot theory about (I think) 4 simultanious parallel timelines out of sync with each other by 6 hours. He decided back in 1997 to create a webpage about this, and thanks to his very thin grasp on reality, spelling, grammar, and sensible web design, this is the result. A massive, garrish, continuous sprawl of deranged exclaimation. It still has regular updates, but thankfully the format remains unchanged, so the experience is still the same. Reading it all in one sitting is hard these days though.
3. Hamster Dance- There was never a time when embedded audio files or animated gifs were considered anything other than hideous. There was however a time when they were everywhere you turn. Hamster Dance then somehow came about, and while it was literally nothing but a looping audio file and row after row of small animated gifs, it was strangely hypnotic, and had an odd appeal. Looking at the original url now however, I see that somehow it has mutated into a truly horrific corporate monstrosity aping The Chipmunks. Horrible turn of events that.
4. goatse.cx- I am NOT linking to this one. There was a point in time, I think, like most of these, around 1997-2000 when this site was used as a sort of hazing ritual in internet communities. A fresh faced newbie, still using an AOL account and circulating pointless e-mail petitions, would be told to click a link to this infamous url. Thankfully, I personally never fell for it, but by all accounts, the url in question takes you to a highly magnified photo of some guy with a grotesquely stretched out anus. I've also heard that at one point, the image was changed, but seeing how the only way to verify that would be to look.

Staying on the subject of things that have been around forever, here's something that gets under my skin. People who act like experts about things when they really have no experience to speak of. It happens all the time. For a nice recent example you're likely to have the proper background to appreciate, look at the author's thoughts on almost any webcomic about videogames around the time Nintendo was first showing off the DS (then if you want a real laugh, read straight through, watch them pull a 180, and then go on to make the exact same comments on the Revolution controller).

Odds are, what you're going to find is these people saying that Nintendo has no clue what they're doing, isn't a driving force in the industry, and weird gimmicks never get you anywhere. These people are, simply put, self-obsessed idiots. When your "expertise" about videogames just means to you got into them five or ten years ago, and now you play them non-stop, it's excessively stupid to believe you know more than someone who has been working in the industry for decades, and been successful enough at it that the industry wouldn't exist without them.

Does this mean I put the judgement of people with more experience than me before my own, always assuming "they know what they're doing" and so forth? Of course not. Everyone makes mistakes, and my own judgement serves me pretty well. All I'm saying is that when someone obviously knows more about something than I do, I'm not going to suggest otherwise. For instance, I know next to nothing about comic books. I've read a handful, I can tell you why I like those. I'm not going to say they're the best ever written though, and I'm sure as heck never going to say they're completely original in style, as I don't have the grounding to say that.

On the other side of the fence, I am an expert on certain subjects, at least to a far greater degree than the average person. So if I start listing off, say, the first videogames in various series, and you haven't heard of half the things on my list, you should trust me on it. Unless of course the creator of that series contradicts me.

So, the moral of this little lecture, if it has one, is this. When someone gives you a line like this: "You weren't there man! You don't know what it was like back then!" Believe them.