I suggest changing some of the smiley codes that interfere with commonly used text smileys. Either that or replacing them with somewhat more sensible smiley choices.
These text smileys are part of older internet culture and sometimes there is no better way to express something than using the ASCII shape; they are timeless and universally understandable. Plus, I like the vibe: elaborate text based constructions to make beautiful little one-line faces and text art have a long history and culture.
Even if we keep on replacing these codes with graphical smileys, I think some of them, while good smileys on their own, do not particularly represent the contexts well in which they are used. For example, :D is playful-cute, not comparable to the more smug-looking , and :P is normally used for "tongue in cheek" things, not being bratty like .
For me, being able to treat my Steam Deck as a "Gamecube Portable" is what I have wanted out of gaming for the last 20 years. I remember when the Gamecube Portable was just a hoax, now I essentially have it in my hands! Its wild.
In the same way, a modded PS Vita with Retroarch for all retro consoles. ;P
Excuse the clickbaity title, but I have recently thought about alt-texts and captioning, and how it can help people beyond """only""" being accessible.
Obviously, accessibility. Blind people and people with bad vision can enjoy your content which they otherwise couldn't. This extends not only to entertainment, but also education, troubleshooting, socializing and much more.
No more image/link rot. Don't you hate that smug Photobucket smiley looking straight in your face stating that an image is no longer available? Hate broken image links because the hoster went down? Many old websites are now unusable because images with vital content in them (e.g. tutorials with images) were taken down upon the death of an image hoster. There aren't many good ways to combat that particular problem, but captioning images can help people in a few years or even decades understand what you meant, even if the accompanying picture is now gone.
Machine readability. Words are keywords, images are useless. Want to be indexed by a search engine? Well, your picture of text won't matter unless you have either alt text or captioning. Also, language research projects can use your text as data - how cool is that?
Backwards compatibility. Some browsers, especially old ones, cannot display images, or have serious formatting issues with them. Some others display only text by design, like text based browsers for your terminal; some computers are so old that they do not have a graphical interface at all, or are designed that way. I use Lynx sometimes, a text based browser, and I love when a site is simple and straightforward and displays without loss of information right in my terminal.
Inclusivity towards people with slow internet connections. Ever tried looking up a website with a 500B/s connection? They can turn off image loading to make it bearable, but then they might miss vital information.
Hopefully this can motivate some of you to use alt-text and captions more on your websites.
I can see some of your points but would disagree with some others, tbh.
1. I agree, in theory, but we all want some way for people to interact with us, and that will necessarily produce social networks again. Any network of personal websites will grow into a clique that needs to communicate, building a social network all by itself. Guest books turn to chatrooms turn to multi-media chatrooms turn to forums turn to profile-based pages, and there you have a basic social network again. I think the type of social network is important: federated services have their own problems but are usually better than others. In the end though, social media and what it is is a product of our environment, and with sufficient time to grow, any social media alternative will turn back into exploitative social media.
2. I don't see your point here. I am under the impression that the retro web is opposed to "cringe culture". I am just so sick and tired of people calling what other people enjoy "cringe" because it makes them feel better about themselves. Not you in particular, but people at large. If you really think about what people think is and isn't cringe usually boils down to either things that are bad independently (advertising trying to appeal to younger generations and failing, for example), or people enjoying and being themselves. For many people, the retro web would be considered "cringe": bad web design, isolationism from the rest of the internet, full of neurodiverse and queer people, colorful, experimental. If kids like some trends or music or media you don't like - let them. They're kids. Let them be happy and enjoy themselves. Unless it tangibly hurts anyone else, there's no reason to beat down on someone's self expression just because it doesn't fit in what society at large thinks is "cool" and what is "pathetic"; these standards change anyway, and all that accomplishes is hurting people. There's a nice little proverb for our times: "Kill not the part of you that's cringe; kill the part that cringes." Things that are unique and off the hook a bit, that are part of our identities, are usually what makes us be "cringe" in front of insecure people.
3. Why would you ban underage people from the internet? Same as before; just let them enjoy themselves. There's no reason not to be welcoming to them. Sure, sometimes minor-dominated spaces are prone to drama and childish toxicity, but they're not all like that, and there is no reason why a 16 year old or even a 12 year old cannot have a neocities site and talk about their love for the Sonic games, for instance. Live and let live. They're kids.
4. Lots of things are memes, and they have been around for almost as long as humans have - it's just communicating an idea by reference, without outright stating it. We could bring back old memes if you don't like the new ones.
5. I can also recommend BigBlueButton as a Zoom replacement. I like the idea of free hobby based education online. Could be a better way to "create content" than being a generic YouTuber.
Hope this didn't come across as mean or anything, I just wanted to give some input C:
But behind that mundane facade is not only a malfunctioning nuclear reactor that you could see from the house I grew up in (the scandal that was its end was gross mishandling of the technology, leading to several magnitudes of cancer rates, huge corporate coverups, plus a school kid literally finding little Thorium balls lying around in the grass during a class project; read https://www.reaktorpleite.de/ with a translator if you want more info), no, that is not all our little village is hiding.
No, not only that! It was also some years ago that a Hindu priest took our village's highway exit by accident and finally thought he reached the holy land, and decided to buy a plot in the middle of our dull industrial quarters for a gigantic Hindu temple; and thus, the Sri Kamadchi Ampal temple was born, the at the time biggest Dravidian temple in the entirety of Europe.
Every year, TENS OF THOUSANDS of people come here from the entire world to partake in their annual celebration, involving the entire otherwise-completely-mundane village. They even declared our industrial coal barge canal their holy river to perform washings in.
It's beautiful and always a joy being around these wonderful people. It's also super, super bizarre, because this is a random-ass village in Germany without any real redeeming qualities otherwise.
I currently have a wonderful lil' Nokia 6500 slide, alongside my aging OnePlus 6. Originally, I got this little Nokia phone out of an old drawer at my parents' house, and it belongs to my late grandmother.
Picture mine:
[Picture description: A silver and black old sliding brick phone with a backlit dial pad. It is turned on, showing a Marijuana-themed green background and various UI elements on top: some quick access icons including messages, music, contacts among others, as well as statuses for the music player and a radio.]
If you're wondering what that terrible cannabis theme is, it's because when I acquired this phone I looked up themes online and they all were wonderfully early-2000s horrible. It was one that embraced the "cool around Y2K" theme the most.
My partner and I share an Xbox Series S and it has really been one of the best investments we have made over the past years. Gamepass alone is worth it, and the price point is very low.
I'm curious whether you had an Xbox One before and upgraded, or started out with the Series S because in my mind they serve pretty much the same purpose. I love using my Xbox as an entertainment hub and am leaning toward a Series X as a replacement when the time comes.
We had a PS4 before that saw barely any use aside from video, but no Xbox One. The Series S was the first Xbox console in our household.
Having studied modernist (and postmodern) literature in university, I've literally never heard anyone describe the modernists as "anti-intellectual" before. They were actually very elitist and with often fascist leanings (this being before WWII when fascism was first becoming popular worldwide). I think we can definitely associate the current fascist movement with anti-intellectualism, but not the likes of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein or James Joyce. In fact, they would have derided the "proletarian realism" you describe as "middlebrow."
I am aware that modernism stems from "elitist" culture, attacking the perceived meaninglessness and mundanity of being constrained to the material, tangible world. What I meant with "anti-intellectual" had more to do with their general tendency to deconstruct the idea of creating in the first place in the late Modernist phase, the idea that attempting to use art as a means of communication or to portray something beautiful, new or meaningful is worthless and futile; the charred canvas, for example. And I can hardly take movements like situationism or dadaism seriously as intellectual expression when most of it was, by all means, drug-fueled hatred on the material world, and the embrace of the meaningless. At some point, that intellectual elitism turns into non-intelligibility and idealist nonsense far from any reasonable outlook on the world. That is what I mean with anti-intellectual: the opposition to the idea that we can understand and improve the world, and the turning to the absurd.
Maybe you're conflating this with the modernist rejection of Realism, but that's not to say they rejected the idea of objective reality (they were actually all about that epistemology).
Yet at the same time their leading ideologies were idealist - such as the French anarchists who believed they could change the world's order by creating disruptive and subversive performance art, and creating absurd situations to influence ideas of the masses to eventually change the material world. That's very un-materialist of them.
They simply didn't believe art had to depict things in a natural way as we see them, and we could in fact derive more of the truth about something by inspecting it in new ways. A lot of it looks like confusing gibberish as a result, but all that chaos is done with meticulous purpose. Cubism, for example, (as employed by Picasso and Stein) was an attempt to depict things from multiple angles at once.
Yeah, I agree. I think we are both talking about different things - I am talking about the very late Modernist phase, the deconstruction of art and , bleeding into early postmodernism such as the Frankfurt school, philosophically. I enjoy the Modernist interpretation of pushing boundaries of what art can be, but I despite the Modernist interpretation of laughing at the concept of meaningful art, materialism and construction in the first place.
As for the manifesto, I think it does fit with the retro web revival. A lot of the websites people are making on Neocities are trying to replicate the chaotic style of the early web. It's a top-down approach to intentionally design "badly", which I think is very neomodernist; whereas the actual artifacts they're recreating were decidedly postmodern, relying heavily on pastiche and ground-up design to make the product fit the pieces rather than the pieces fit the product.
Yet isn't that more post-modernist than anything concretely modernist? I believe it's a perfect example of postmodern irony, where you take what once was in the past, "remix" and parody it with modern influences, to make a point. That is, of course, when it is done self-awarely, and not as a complete imitation of the 90s internet. I think web badges such as anti-NFT blinkies have a wonderful postmodern aspect to it, mixing the old and the new in an ironic mashup, making the idea of "product of its time" meaningless and subverting the idea of a web badge.
Usually inspiration just happens. I research some ancient Greek for a language project, come across an interesting historical fact, research from there, and suddenly I make a Mycanean-style website. Or I suddenly get this "what if" style idea when doing something unrelated and write fanfiction about that.
But if I deliberately go out for inspiration, I usually do the same things you do: look for old media of all kinds, and abstract their structure to the point where I can apply it to other contexts. Say, taking Romeo and Juliet, understanding how it relates to Shakespeare's time, and imagining how those same relations would work in today's world. In a way, that's how postmodern art works: understanding the past and its aesthetics, and remixing it in a contemporary context.
You've put it really well here. Some types of games definitely need to be open world. I loved Red Dead Online and don't think it could have worked without being open world. You need it to evoke the feeling of being on the frontier. But slapping the Zelda or Souls formula on an open world left BotW and Elden Ring feeling hollow and stretched thin.
Yeah, exactly.
Open world games also allow you to explore a culture or a world freely; in the same way that all of us have probably daydreamt about after reading, watching or playing something in a fascinating setting. People who tend to be into genres and worlds rather than characters exemplify this: they are fascinated by the implications and atmosphere of this or that specific setting or genre, not just a specific plot or narrative, and they draw, write and otherwise create in that fictional world to immerse themselves. Just look at science fiction/starship design fans.
I think that is why open world games are so appealing to us in the first place: they allow us to live out that fantasy, to take in a plausible world in a fantastical setting to a degree. That is why people were so disappointed with Cyberpunk 2077: it wasn't particularly the bugs, or the lackluster story, it was that they expected a game where they could finally immerse in a cyberpunk world, with flying cars, backstreet gangs, taking a train at night as the neon reflects in the raindrops on the windows, getting a shitty apartment and drive a cyber-Volvo. Perhaps sit down in a cyberpunk café and drink an artificial decaf as they look at people walk by. And when it came out and delivered a decently linear story with some gameplay-oriented side content, and no immersive content at all, they were disappointed.
It's also the same reason some people like Star Citizen despite it not being a particularly good game: it allows you to live in such a world it represents, and live out the fantasy of owning a corporation, starship, and interact with other players as that character, in a science fiction immersive world. They don't care that the gameplay doesn't hold a candle to gameplay-oriented games, because they are in it for the daydreaming.
But some games just do not have worlds that lend themselves well to this kind of immersive fascination. I never wanted to live in the universe of Zelda games, because I think they are decent fantasy worlds only rarely very unique or fascinating (other people might disagree, but these people tend to like BOTW more than me, anecdotally). I don't think Mario needs an open world platforming game, if at all, it should be of another genre if open world. I never wanted to live in the world of Metal Gear, or Hotline Miami, or XCOM, so they work linearly.
I think plot and character oriented games are good when linear, and appeal-of-the-atmosphere oriented games are good when open.
It is what makes Mafia I and Mafia II so frustrating, because they are worlds that lend themselves extremely well to an open-world game, but they are staunchly linear, while giving the illusion of being open.
Sounds about en par for most of the anti-intellectual modernist movements of the very early 20th century (situationism, avant garde, ...).
I am not particularly impressed at the implied defeatism; the idea that there is nothing left to innovate, that art is dead, and that everything needs to be corrupted to the absurd. It has a goulish, apocalyptic implication that I am not too fond of. It is certainly an imprint of its time though - the First World War, the advent of the large city, unseen horrors and incredible indulgence, the first capitalist subversion of the common way to live.
I think that modernism had its place in human history, but we are at a point now where real artistic radicalism is to believe in the mundane idea that art can, in fact, innovate, be artistic and beautiful without subversion, and that the future is not, in fact, terrible. A postmodern reinterpretation of the past to reflect the rules of history from the past and project them unto the future, as postmodernism without postmodernists.
I personally would like to see a new take on proletarian realism: no pretense of deconstructing art or modern human nature, no attempt at sentimental reflection of the past nor present, just a naive portrayal of the current world and the envisioned future, built from and about the tools available to and around us during our daily slog: labor, alienation, war. That is what I think the retro web revival is also capable of, in some strands, hence why I like all this. It is art built from and with the tools available to the common person, built as an antithesis to the mainstream internet, carrying within its social critique, but not as a pretentious work of art subverting what it means to be a webpage (or art, in the simile), but as a naive vision of a webpage, the archetype, the historical origin, remixed to take into account our postmodern world. That is, I think, radical.
I am on Youtube because there is barely any spam protection or quality content on most Peertube instances. I wish I had the server space to host my own, but alas.
My partner and I share an Xbox Series S and it has really been one of the best investments we have made over the past years. Gamepass alone is worth it, and the price point is very low.
I really enjoy open world games for immersive and/or sandbox games. Games like GTA, Watch Dogs, Minecraft, Just Cause, Red Faction, various MMOs, Red Dead Redemption, Mafia, Elder Scrolls, EVE Online, and many more, really profit from the open world, because it feels more like a portal into another world that you can do whatever you want in than a train ride in a theme park. In Watch Dogs and GTA titles, I spent days just walking around the world taking in the culture and the little NPC interactions, pretending to drive like a civilian, making up my own stories in my head. For me, it was a portal into a city I was never in.
But at the same time, some worlds just don't inspire getting immersed in them, and some games do not have gameplay loops that particularly support open worlds. I don't feel like a Mass Effect game needs to be open world, for example, unless they turn it into a different genre. I don't think a Myst game needs to be open world, or a Soulslike game, a Mario game or a Zelda game. Sure, these worlds and universes would be cool in an open-world game, but a game is more than a setting, and many times they just translate the same gameplay haphazardly into an open world, which just doesn't work.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was, in my opinion, a game that profited a lot from the open world, but its main issue was that the open world was just so visually boring. I would have loved to immerse myself in it, but I felt like it consisted mainly of endless low-poly stretches of completely empty grassland, and the bit of variety in biomes and structures came too late in the game and too little. It all felt very... tech-demo-y. It did not blow me away at all.
The bottom line is: We need more spin-offs that differ in gameplay significantly. I think a huge portion why people love certain franchises is the setting and theme, and the visions developers and some fans have is basically like "wow, imagine being able to explore the world of <insert franchise> on your own terms", but fail to consider the gameplay implications. More spinoffs could satisfy that: having a Watch Dogs themed linear puzzle game would excite me as a Watch Dogs fan, and having a Soulslike cards game would be awesome, too. That way, there could be big open world spinoffs that are DESIGNED gameplay-wise for the open world, which avoids the pitfalls many games have nowadays trying to cram their linear gameplay into an open world for the novelty.
Posts: 100/24hrs 
Show Posts
, and :P is normally used for "tongue in cheek" things, not being bratty like 
.
It was one that embraced the "cool around Y2K" theme the most.
