wow! windows was around 96 years ago?  /s
(sorry i had to)

Im glad you can be yourself here! If anyone has a problem point me toward them and I'll straighten em out with a 20 page thesis on the social construct of sex and gender and the role it plays in enforcing strict hierarchies in society.

seriously tho im glad to hear it! i only hope everyone around here feels comfortable to assert their true self.

Oh boy do i have thoughts on the backrooms I had a really extensive conversation back in 2021 before there were really ANY backrooms content on youtube. Before Kane Pixels anyway. We were entirely talking about the backrooms wiki. I definitely feel like it misses the point of the original screenshot, populating the backrooms with explorers and creatures and distinct fun-to-explore environments. There definitely a tangential community of "Liminal Space" enthusiasts

Pretty much what you were saying in your own cohost of course let me be clear these felix colgrave ass looking creatures are quite a bit older than the youtube videos.

Said friend still likes certain aspects of the modern backrooms and has been close to the fandom for years now. I asked her her feelings and while those slides and what I termed "The cocomelonification of backrooms" was not up her alley she still watches some original backrooms content on youtube. She says that the idea of exploring these places, potentially with a small group of people with similar interest in strange environments like what is found in the backrooms, and making the place habitable is appealing to her. I suggested that the exclusive nature of the SCP foundation might push amateur authors into different communities to express their horror ideas, and that's really it, these ideas are from amateurs. You shouldn't take every listed entry as canon, my friend sure doesn't, she has a vision of the backrooms in her mind that is entirely her own, influenced by many forum posts and wiki pages and youtube videos, but ignorant of the vast majority.

I understand the frustration with the state of the backrooms, you find out there is something new made about a thing that you like, and when you look at it there's nothing of what you liked about it left. I guess my only consolation is that this effect will always happen. It's why SCP had to become exclusive and stingy with entries, If you look at the "Every sm64 cart is personalized" community I'm sure you will see the same trend. hell if you really went back to the hay day of slender man I'm positive you'll find countless silly and lame ideas for the mythos. If you want the pure idea that inspired so many people, you gotta just cherish the original and the specific feelings it gives you.

Anyway since no one posted it here is an excellent video by Super Eyepatch Wolf on the topic of the backrooms

I love that one! i own a few of the books shes very cute.
I scrolled a little ways for skillskill and found this for you

I meant to update this a while ago with a picture of my virtual pet. i honestly haven't touched this since around christmas and my bunny-turned-snail or my snunny is still perfectly healthy, there's not even any mess to clean up or illness to cure or anything. this pet just goes into stasis when I'm not looking at it.

Hi! I love crows too. Its nice to meet you and im looking forward to see you around. and i love your site im working on my own id love to make it something similar to that.

whole

I actually bought myself a virtual pet game, its very barebones though and I don't know if I just have rosy memories of my old old tamagotchi or if it's always been like this but this virtual pet is very boring. All you can do is wash it or feed it for free, any games or activities you can do your pet is never in the mood for more than once, so its a constant back and forth between playing, feeding, playing, feeding, playing, cleaning, feeding, playing all just to get enough coins to buy a present.

I will say the main appeal of the game is the sheer variety of creatures you can own. each pet is displayed as a small grid of pixels but in so many shapes, you can have a bunny, a snail, a bird, a squid, a dinosaur, original blobby creatures, and indecipherable messes of pixels its a real bootleggy sort of thing so theres also pokemon looking pets and straight rips of tamogotchis. In fact the presents that you work your ass off to be able to afford don't do anything except change what sort of creature your virtual pet is. That is the game, was a ripped off? no it was way cheaper than a tamagotchi, and I'm not sure if I'd even be happier with that product, I wanted a toy that would beep and I could pet it, that's what I got.

Is there anything significant that I'm missing from my experience? I don't want to write off my memories of tamagotchi as being an easily entertained child but I cant pin point anything other than being able to "evolve" your tamagotchi and in some cases being able to have others interact, which I wouldn't be able to do being the only one with one of these anyway.

I still try to fit in xD and rofl. its more common to see xP though when im being silly. I loved emoticons and i try to incorporate them when it feels appropriate. I really feel like the internet today feels more disingenuous, a lot of "gen z slang" is just blatantly taken from irl black communities whove been using it forever because these tiktok kids think its funny so i feel way more comfortable using phrases and words that i came across in the communities i grew up in, aka mid-late 00's forum culture. its hard tho cause that part of my language is so buried

My unpopular opinion is that if you type with the font Mrs Monster I will read everything you say in an over the top screaming Dr Frankenstein voice That's not a bad thing either, I love it. having different fonts makes everything feel more lively in here. I need to get around to personalizing my text and sig.

Most of these unpopular opinions are mine as well, i love ketchup flavoured chips, I love spotty bananadanas. I guess my biggest unpopular opinion is that Canada has better chocolate bars than america, you dont have aero bars, you dont have coffee crisp, you dont have peace by chocolate, you dont have caramilk. hell America doesnt even have smarties or kinder eggs. big smh moment here americans. take the L.

There is nothing I can say about this game that fully encapsulates the feelings I had playing it. You play as a young trans girl on the early web, posting on a forum about an anime you watch. There are themes of community, hate, abuse, but ultimately a happy ending. This is not my experience, but it feels raw and true. and I don't think it could have been possible if it wasn't set in 1999 and based around forums and instant messengers. I genuinely cried at this game and I'll tell you that does not happen often.


Terranova is another game that I haven't finished. (I kinda stopped playing games for a while) But i really want to pick it back up. It has a very similar premise as Secret Little Haven, I don't know if it'll make me cry as well, but it shares themes of LGBT and the experiences are much closer to mine (set in 2000s, roleplaying communitites). if you play either of these, or have another game with similar framing let me know!

I didn't mention Hypnospace Outlaw because there is already a thread for that here, one of the earliest threads on this forum. Definitely if you like Hypnospace go read that thread, give it the revival it deserves.

Saint Pepsi was one of my jams back in 2014, same with Clams Casino! I never saw Clams Casino as vaporwave, though. That's interesting.

I see what you mean, typically vapourwave doesn't have drumkits with the samples, maybe we missed that timeline by a hairsbreadth. While I don't listen to as much hiphop as I maybe should, Clams Casino produced a lot of cloudrap which arguably has influenced and been influenced by vapourwave.

Again I haven't listened to much but the name popped up again and again when researching this post I wanted to say something.

Oh great! Melonland has spoilers now. CW for traumatic events and economic trends and genocidal politics.

Spoiler

So It's time to address the elephant in the room, which is a joke of course. I'm not even American and I associate conservatives with elephants. But yes there are things that should be addressed when talking about vapourware (sorry again, Canadian remember:evil:). The world in which vapourwave was born, the world it pulls inspiration from, and the world today are very different places. Sure in the distant past or the distant future the past 4 decades would probably feel like a blurry haze. But right now, in the shit, its impossible to look at vapourwave and not see the anachronism. So to really talk about this thing we'll need to jump around a lot, chronology breaks down and maybe that's the point. We can start where most people start, Oneohtrix Point Never - Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1

2010... Just listen to the first track. Slowed down, pitch shifted, repetitive. This is Vapourwave. Chuck Person didn't form this album from the aether, there has been a long long tradition of remixing music that could go back to old DJs like DJ Kool Herc and the 70s hip hop scene all the way to DJ Shadow. The technical mechanics of Eccojams is certainly important though not as important to the aesthetic enjoyment of the music as the emotional influences though. Chillwave was big at the time. The "Summer of Chillwave" was just recently passed in 2009. I should note right now that to get the real experience of our travel through music in time you HAVE to find artists FROM the era. Chillwave still exists today in a different form, As does Vapourwave, But there has been so much that has happened in the past decade, so much cross pollination, so many meme movements and even a fascist movement influencing the sound of all of these genres today. I'll touch on them but to listen to the real music being played in the day. check out this Pitchfork article to listen to chillwave here.

Eccojams took off in its own little niche and spawned many other artists mimicking the style and establishing Vapourwave as a genre and not a one-off. The article mentions about chillwave what can be said about vapourwave. The culture was staring down the barrel of an economic recession, people were out of work, people were losing opportunities, people were nostalgic. That nostalgic sound was cemented in the genres foundational album Macintosh Plus- Floral Shoppe by Trans artist Vektroid.

At this point Vapourwave was still very new, the sound was still developing, but the templates were established. Music from the '90s looped and slowed down and corrupted, some pop, some jazz, some ad music, even some startup jingles from early personal computers. The Genre was Firmly planted in the '90s, rarely pulling from music earlier than '89 and that is sort of to be expected. It is a common assumption that cultural nostalgia works in cycles of 20 years, someone could certainly dispute that. But It is certainly true that young adults in their 20s experience their most foundational media in their childhood, that is fairly uncontroversial, and the Adults in their 20s in 2010 experienced their childhood in the 90s. There is something deeper here though, I think, something that transcends individual experience. I was born in '96 I barely got the chance to experience the '90s and there are kids born in 2005 who have never experienced the '90s, and we also enjoy vapourwave. I'll have to talk about Hauntology in more detail later but I'll be bastardizing some ideas from Jacques Derrida here. The Berlin wall came down in '89, McDonalds came to Russia in '90, and the USSR disbanded in '91. People were talking about the end of history, the victory of Capitalism, and with that comes strong propaganda. The cold war was cold, violent, paranoid. The '90s were prosperous, peaceful, innocent. there wasnt a time as good as the '90s since the summer of '69, and this time its going to last forever, and forever, and forever.

Anyway, here's one of my favorite Vaporwave albums, that I've listened to hundreds of times. It gives me warm fuzzy feelings inside.

I'm really happy that this album makes you feel warm and fuzzy, I don't want to ruin that for you so if you want to protect that feeling I suggest you stop reading here.

It didn't last forever. The '90s threatened to extend into the distant future in America, It's not that people didn't know what was happening outside the country but people didn't ever think it could affect them. America had won, now every one gets to catch up. So what a shock it must have been to wake up one summer morning to watch the news and feel that prosperous, peaceful, and innocent music for the very last time. The News of 9/11 was a mass traumatizing event that got soothed and dulled by smooth inoffensive jazz, a trend in news that would stick. That's what I think News at 11 is about. By the time 猫シ Corp (Neko Shisutemu Corp) released this album Vapourwave had gone through half a decade of experimentation and crystallization and had branched off into even more subgenres. Vapourwave had seen its way through the Obama administration vibing in economic vulnerability, day dreaming up an imagined past where you could just forget all about the world outside yourself.

These three albums kind of encapsulate all of the points I enjoy about Vapourwave. there is a bit that I dislike but the worst of it can be quarantined off into it's own section. I think most vapourwave that stays true to the "soul" of the genre has some sort of awareness of the role of Capitalism in the creation of their source music. weather station Muzak, pop played in malls, etc play a heavy role in what sound vapourwave wants to emulate. Explicitly music that is meant to be heard but not listened to, toothless opiates making consumers feel good and passive about their role in society. Vapourwave then escaped its niche subculture and spread like an algae bloom to just about anyone with an internet connection. People who are not primed to question manufactured culture, people who do not see value in art as politics, and people who actively work against any progressive messaging, The results are vapourwave artists who just don't get it. this isn't me saying anything about the quality of the music itself, sometimes I like to listen to music without thinking about the cold war too and some of these albums are great for that, just that these albums miss the message that the original fans were talking about.

Vapourwave has gone in many directions, its been around for almost a decade and a half now. Eccojams is as old as some of the samples were when it was made. The Genre has split off into countless sub-genres within vapourwave. Simpsonswave which may have at one point had the potential for potent critique but quickly descended into simpsons memes and sad songs played over sad scenes without even making original music. The same can be said about all memewave and vapourwave memes. Futurefunk which fetisizes capitalism by portraying an american fantasy of 80s japan with happy advertisements and bright beautiful mornings and dancable music. How many futurefunk listeners do you think even know what the singer is singing about? That's the point, you can hear someone singing without thinking about their experiences.

Then along came fashwave, Fascists loved vapourwave. You have to do a lot of heavy lifting for a genre that began anti-capitalist and featured trans artists in 2011 to make nazi's love it, and by 2015 the internet at large defanged and neutered and stripped everything but aesthetics from the genre wholly enough that it seemed natural for millennial nazis to love this genre that looked as if it loved the archetypal past, the beautiful 90s, after communism fell, before social justice arose.

Don't feel bad about the fate of vapourwave though, The genre has gone really cool places too. Below the spoiler line I'll give my favourite notable mentions and evolutions of the genre.

[close]

Notable Mentions:
SAINT PEPSI - Hit Vibes
SAINT PEPSI blew up with its Mac Tonight song that sounded very vapourwave The artist also makes Futurefunk and other Electronic music

Blank Banshee - Blank Banshee 0
Blank Banshee sounds radically different from other vapourwave artists and for a good reason. He combines Vapourwave with Trap.

haircuts for men : 壊滅悲しみ
Haircuts for men is another late entry to the canon of Vapourwave and listening to it you can hear the point it transitions from traditional vapourwave and into lo-fi hiphop. Do not confuse these two, Lo-fi has a much longer history, for more info listen to Nujabes - Modal Soul

Clams Casino // I'm God
Clams Casino was a very early artist in Vapourwaves history but never mentioned in anyones favourites or retrospectives. For whatever reason they were overlooked and passed over when Vapourwave got big in favour of newer or more mainstream artists.

[EDIT: posted too early... WAY too early]

I wonder what kind of drink Teatime has been enjoying lately
I love tea, I prefer King Cole Black tea but thats just because thats what ma parents drink. I haven't had much of that lately its mostly coffee in the morning and lots of water through the work day. I already had two coffee's already today with cream and sugar. I take my tea straight.

The refined palate of this thread... I've been drinking alot of Schweppes Ginger Ale since I ran out of Canada Dry and I'm realizing that ... well... Schweppes is superior. In an ideal world I would be drinking White Russians in the evenings but circumstances keep me from being able to have my own personal Kahlua supply

I'm also trying to drink more water because I've been Critically Dehydrated for years. I am failing this mission, but at least I'm trying!

BUTTERSCOTCH SODA:dunno: I feel like I've wasted my whole beverage-drinking life now that I have this information. Need to find some of that expeditiously.

Canada Dry is pretty good but after trying Sussex Golden Ginger ale (same company) its hard to go back. personal preference but once I knew there was a difference, there is nothing like golden ginger ale compared to dry ginger ale. Definitely if you have the chance to give it a taste try it.

[EDIT: added a reply to tyoma]

This is a really funny bug but also makes the forum kind of unusable for me.
The entire recent posts page acts like a marquee. the whole thing scrolls by with entire paragraphs one line with no breaks.

[EDIT: looks like its your post about peanut butter that is turning the entire paage below that into a marquee, thats really funny]