I don't think I will take part though because my main hobby is computers, and currently my focus in that is web design and establishing myself in the retro web so that'd just very much limit my enjoyment of a day. Last year's challenge sounds fun though! I have the perfect machine for that lying around... dang. Well, another time.
Well, I have met my current girlfriend on the German Minecraft forum (that has since shut down) and we are still together after more than seven years, so yeah, I appreciate forums a lot! Haha.
Has anyone here heard of Terraria? Well, its developer, Redigit, actually made that game right off the heels of a fan project called "Super Mario Bros X", or SMBX for short. It was a full-fledged UI for building Super Mario Bros-style levels, and even full games (called episodes), with flexibility reminiscent to even RPG Maker. I used to go to a forum called "Cloud's Forum", which was dedicated largely to SMBX content, and I loved it there. People would post their levels, and even the occasional episode, there. They'd post graphics, music, works-in-progress, and just casual posts whenever they felt like. It had a chatbox- and I love chatboxes, man, because they integrate real-time interaction with the forum itself. I'm browsing the forum? Let's check the chatbox and see who's online! It was a great way to get in touch with people, especially before the days of Discord. I've had a good chat with a lot of people over it, talking about recent events and what's up with everyone and all!
Sadly, the community of Cloud's Forum faded away after the owner, Cloud, merged it with a rival forum called "NSMBX" and everyone left or transitioned. It came back as "Cloud's Observatory" later, and still had a section for SMBX, but it just wasn't the same.
Oh my God, hi! I just joined this forum but... well, I was part of the SMBX community for my entire teenage years! Remember the Knuckles98 (or whatever his name was) split, where there was big drama between the dot-org forum and Knuckles' offshoot? Remember when GFX Requests were closed for five years? It's so cool to find someone here randomly who remembers SMBX. We're still around, by the way! Wohlstand's custom platforming game engine has practically reached maturity and is a super solid alternative to SMBX now, and there are several redevelopments and binary hacks of the original SMBX now that gained traction that can do cool shit with scripting and custom powerups and all. Almost noone plays the original anymore.
God, I need to check my old GFX and episodes... haha. Thanks for this trip down memory lane. I think your name rings a bell too! Were you at any point part of SquishyRex's CGFX pack?
I actually think that my generation is the youngest generation to have somewhat-experienced some significant parts of the old internet themselves.
I'm 21 now, born in 2001, and I was raised on scouring bulletin boards/forums, sliding phones and MP3 players, webchats, early YouTube, the pre-Facebook internet, child-targeted search engines with tons of gifs and educational articles, flash games, mailing lists, Skype and Teamspeak, just to mention a few.
I am aware that this is a far cry away from the likes of Geocities, newsgroups and what many in the retro web revival movement are trying to emulate, but there is a huge difference regardless between what I experienced and what people who are just a bit younger than me did experience.
I have tutored fresh face college kids who are just like two years younger than me, who grew up on YouTube prank channels, streaming services, smartphones, do not know what a forum is, and for whom even concepts like a file or a folder are totally alien (because they no longer use computers , but instead tablets, phones and chromebooks).
That said, I will echo the sentiment expressed in this thread so far. Not everything was better during those days. In fact, you can only really appreciate the cultural difference that progressive movements have made in the past decades when looking at posts in your favorite communities that lie just ten, twelve years back. Slurs were absolutely commonplace, the kinds of bigoted and mean spirited jokes we would make at each other and at others would be shocking nowadays. It was a generally accepted opinion that neurodiverse and queer people were "attention seeking lunatics", nerds were either supreme human beings or worthless losers depending on who you asked, there was homophobia and racism everywhere, and there would be no counter-current whatsoever to these comments at all. Even the affected communities themselves that nowadays thrive in self acceptance, used to be self-deprecating and underdeveloped. It would be common for a young trans woman in 1999 to misgender and constantly belittle herself, bemoaning that she's always going to be a guy with a taboo hobby, having a blog drenched in sexist stereotypes because she had never learned it a different way. Had a Livejournal where you wrote down your deepest thoughts? Wake up to a mail spambot, a mocking blog of your face crossed out in MS Paint and people laughing at your feelings, and people doxxing you on (precursors of) 4chan.
The old internet was more creative, more playful, more unique, less commercialized, more content-focused than metric-focused, but it was also a space for people to gather who sometimes were outcast from real life activities for a good reason. Now, the internet is mainstream, and people like you and me can be here. Back then, you needed to be a hobbyist to even get that far.
All we can do is make a BETTER web that combines the good parts of the olden days with the good parts of the modern days. Postmodern irony, or something.
I finished my university semester-long presentation on a language today!
My task was to introduce my peers to the morphosyntactic features of a language of my choosing. I chose a dying language called Tayap from Papua New Guinea, spoken by only like 45 people anymore. A linguist called Don Kulick lived among the people of their village (Gapun) on and off for thirty years to document this language and finally published all his findings in a huge book (A Grammar and Dictionary of Tayap) which is a great, great work honestly. I read the entire thing and I feel so connected to this language now in a way. super fascinating stuff!!
One embarrassing thing though: I wanted to, while presenting the language, play sound snippets of the language so the people in my class could immerse themselves a bit more. But the only sound snippets (obviously recorded by the same guy that documented the language) are a closed source on a multi-university project that's like UNESCO associated. You can't listen to them, let alone play them for others, without explicit and written permission that gives you access. Super important people! But nonetheless I wrote them, asking for access on this obscure language's material.
A week later (tonight) I got a mail and it was a forwarded EMAIL THREAD of the guy from the project emailing the actual linguist behind it all (Don Kulick) asking for permission! And apparently it was so unlikely for me to be a simple student (I kept that part ambiguous and only said it was for a class) that the linguist assumed that I was a capital-P-Professor and constantly called me Prof. [last name]!
I mean, I am super grateful, and I did get access, and I am only going to use it for the purposes I stated (for the class, once), but this was so embarrassing XD I am just a meek student, don't judge me lmao
I did do a little happy dance though once I got the mail, not gonna lie
I thought we should build up a general thread for people who are into GNU, Linux and free software in general to chat and share what we are working on/have discovered recently! There probably is a somewhat sizable overlap between GNU/Linux hobbyists and retro web enthusiasts simply because of the nonconformist tech aspect, so I hope we can make this a huge thread
As for me, I have been using GNU systems on a Linux kernel basis nonstop for the past years, practically since I got out of high school. For some time, I have dualbooted with Windows for gaming purposes but I was fed up with it pretty soon and switched to full time GNU/Linux.
Right now, I have the following machines:
Laptop: ASUS Zenbook 14X OLED w/ Arch Linux, XFCE4
Gaming Computer: Custom built w/ EndeavourOS, Budgie DE
I have a special admiration for Wii/DS/3DS era Nintendo, but I have kind of lost the spark of actually playing them nowadays. It's a "you had to be there and live in the time to understand it" thing. It was so playful, so full of physical, tangible design. It made a user interface into a physical playground, and I always thought that was super cool. Like Microsoft Bob, or Melonking itself! I spent my life imagining life in and "lore" of those interfaces, as silly as it sounds. I loved filling my Mii Plaza with characters I invented. I loved the quirky randomness of Miis and the design language of including actual photos of real life objects alongside them, especially if combined with random generation for humor like Tomodachi Life. If the Mii Channel had a town building feature I would have spent the entire day in front of it. Actually, that was pretty much Tomodachi Life anyway.
Maybe it is just nostalgia because I was a kid at the time. It probably is just nostalgia.
They are both totally valid, and they are both forms of expression; one is an emotional expression (the mood you feel on a site) and the other is intellectual expression (the idea of minimality).
Oh I gotta say though that designing websites such as yours with all the fancy stuff on it is super impressive and much much more technically and intellectually advanced than something like mine, which is literally only simplest XHTML ! Browsers take care of the rest for me.
I actually think it might be the other way 'round: the retro web requires a much deeper understanding of technology and design and programming and scripting and browser technology just to make things work, while the minimal web mostly is an expression of an emotional desire for simplicity, customizability and "wholeness" if you get what I mean.
But I guess it's all intertwined and just different kinds of expressions for oneself. x) I feel happy in either! And I have a retro web styled website up and coming anyway sooo x)
Anywayyy, welcome to the forum! I see you've already made some great posts, so Im glad your not shy about posting. When I saw you're name first I was like "wow I wonder if that breaks the forum" but it seems to be fine!
I was surprised too! Originally I wanted to go with "noplacelikeroot" but the forum software understandably banned use of the word "root". I was excited when this one worked x)
Im always super impressed by anyone who can do anything with linguistics because I literally cant learn languages
Lemme tell you a secret: most linguists don't actually learn additional languages. In the same way that asking a doctor "sooo how many illnesses do you have?" would be silly, it doesn't really make sense to ask linguists how many languages they speak (which we get EVERY TIME loll) because, well, we study languages and how they work, and often not even specific languages but instead how language as a whole works (for example, how the brain can understand and parse spoken words or how communication in a conversation works!)
I struggle with learning languages too even though it SHOULD be easier for me since I know more about how they work internally.
I also love your site, its super clean and cozy (I think you were working on it because the links were broken, but they work now)
Oh I didn't actually change the links in a long while! :O Whatever must have broken them was out of my control. Thank you for the warm welcome though x3
Nice clean website there /home/! It looks really nice, and thanks for that recipe website.
Oh yea one question, do you like portal 2?
Hey thank you for the warm welcome and the compliment I have played Portal 2 a long time ago but wasn't really getting anywhere so I quit it. But that was also when I was like 14, so I should probably try it again XD
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Haha.
It's so cool to find someone here randomly who remembers SMBX.
I'm Lian.
