This book looks great, I put my email down to be notified when it comes out I had a Performa too! But it was around 2006 when my mums office was dumping it, I had it setup on my desk for ages, but sound of the CRT drove me away from using it much. I think a lot of my inspiration comes from this era although Iv not really explored it as much as I should.
The inspiration definitely shows! I had a lot of fun exploring the site when I first found it; it does harken back to that "multimedia CD" design in a lot of ways. The way it felt to me is that user is expected to explore without guidance, and not necessarily know where each click is going to take them. You don't really have a destination in mind, you're just kind of wandering and stopping to look closer when something piques your interest. I think it's a lot of fun! There's a feeling of excitement and suspense with each click, and it's easy to spend a bunch of time going from page to page wondering what's behind the next door.
And yeah, I ended up taking home a Mac too when the school my Mom worked at was clearing them out. One of those "pizza box" under-monitor designs. The problem is that it was password locked, and I didn't want to nuke it and start from scratch-- it had all kinds of neat educational software I wanted to preserve! One of these days I need to take another crack at it...
Toy Story was my favourite because it blew my mind how they did the 3D effect!
Man, same! A friend had it and we could never make any headway legitimately, but we definitely cheated our way through once or twice and man, it has some really cool showpieces. One of the developers of the game is on YouTube, and he makes videos about the kinds of coding wizardry they did to pull it all off. Fascinating stuff!
Oh, how cool! I grew up on the very same Mac stuff-- my family had a Performa 550 (System 7 color with CD-ROM) and my mom had a Powerbook 100 for work. I loved exploring games on the Mac on shareware CDs and coverdisks (MacAddict!), and years later when my mom retired the Powerbook and handed it down to me, I copied lots of B&W games over to floppy and had my own little collection of stuff to play in my room. I'm so happy that nowadays old Mac stuff is getting the coverage it deserves, with cool books and blogs!
But yeah, I'm not sure what the very first game I played was, but it was definitely Mac stuff from that "multimedia CD-ROM" era. It's an aesthetic I still find charming today, where everything you click produces some animation or video or sound effect. Designers just going MAD WITH POWER with their 680 megabytes!
i remember being a part of a couple of furcadia roleplay forum communities
Come to think of it, is your avatar a Furcadia portrait? I always appreciated those custom portraits; that low res, low color depth pixel art is super cool to me!
Oh, I'd love to see where Crab RPG goes! It reminds me of stuff I used to read like Problem Sleuth and Ruby Quest. I really like the perspective of, like, looking over the shoulder of someone else playing a game. Would definitely be cool if you kept working on it!
So, I think about this stuff a lot too-- this same discussion comes up in video game preservation circles. The term "abandonware" gets thrown around a lot, which is a pretty loose term, and generally means that it can be shared without damage, but not shared legally. It's typically the case where the rights holder either can no longer be found or contacted (generally a solo developer that's vanished), or the rights have been shuffled from company to company to company over decades of aquisitions, and the rights can't be traced-- likely being held by someone that doesn't even know or care that they hold the rights. Anyway, the point is: a huge swath of this stuff would be lost forever if people weren't continuing to share it with one another, and so it's generally agreed upon that it's a Good Thing that we continue to do so, even if copyright law doesn't agree. Law aside (since that's not really the topic here), is it ethical? I personally think so; I feel that most people that work on a creative endeavor would like to see it preserved and continue to be enjoyed. Occasionally, people in the abandonware scene will hunt down old developers to do an interview or somesuch, and the devs are both shocked and delighted that their games are getting played all these years later, even in a less-than-legal capacity.
With all that said, the sharing of gifs is a weird one. I think everything I said about abandonware relates to gifs-- I think we should continue sharing and enjoying them, even, for example, the ones that were distributed on commercial CDs as part of web design asset packs. I think the people that said "do not redistribute!" in 1995 would be pleased as punch to find out people were still enjoying their art decades later, even without permission. The part that is unique to the gif situation is that yes, gifs don't have credits. There's no metadata, nothing of the sort. Except for the rare gif that's watermarked with a tiny pixel signature in the corner, it's extremely difficult to find out who a gif's creator is.
The thing is, this isn't a new problem, or one that's come up because of the passage of time. Gifs have always been shared on the web largely without credit. It was a good faith gesture to link back to a gif author's page if you got it directly from the source, but as soon as one person failed to do this, the author was lost for every website that followed down the viral chain. Some gifs would absolutely blow up and spread virally-- how many times did you see that Pikachu balancing a pokeball on its head?-- but the author was already buried at the peak of its popularity.
The thing is, at that point in the Internet's life, concepts like digital rights management didn't even exist, and the idea that you shouldn't right-click-save a gif you like and use it yourself was still really alien. I think within the culture of personal web designers, it was generally accepted that if you saw something you liked, it was free to use. People weren't attempting to profit off of sharing these gifs, and weren't trying to claim them as their own; they were only trying to share something they saw and enjoyed. And I have to assume that gif authors knew this was the culture, and knew that by releasing their gifs on the web, they likely wouldn't be credited, and most certainly wouldn't have control over their creation. I don't recall seeing any virulent rants about "stolen art" on the pages of gif makers (though I am ABSOLUTELY sure they're out there, somewhere.)
All that said, should the authors be credited? Ideally, yes. Even in the Neocities era, I think it's a very good practice to have some kind of attribution section and link back whenever possible. Even if the author is long gone, it's for the sake of the people browsing in the here and now: frankly, it's cool to see where these decades old gifs came from. It's not really a moral responsibility so much as it shows that you respect the art and want your viewers to be able to see more of it if they so choose. But that's a best case scenario, and a rare one at that: generally, we're finding these gifs from pages that aren't the author's, and who knows where they originated. I don't feel it's meaningful to give credit to these people that are just reusing them.
That's cool that you did a pan and scan of your own! I'm just curious, what kind of mixtape project was it a part of? I have a lot of fun watching the ones forgotten_vcr puts together, so if there's others out there, I'd love to know about them.
But yeah, not to stray too far off the original topic: I was thinking back to when widescreen started becoming available in the home, with big chonky widescreen projection TVs and stuff, and how they had a button to pillarbox the display if you were watching stuff in 4:3. Which was cool that you could switch back and forth, but you had to buy the movie in the aspect ratio you wanted-- which was really frustrating when you were, like, getting gifts or something. There was regular 4:3, there was 16:9 letterboxed (for 4:3 displays), and then 16:9 anamorphic (for widescreen displays). And the packaging always made it really confusing which one you were getting, too; you usually had to find something that said "enhanced for widescreen televisions" or similar; if you bought regular widescreen and played it on a widescreen display, you'd end up with black borders around the top AND sides. Ack!! That whole transitional period was a mess. It only got resolved when dual-sided DVDs came out with a different aspect ratio on each side, and nowadays everything's standardized, thank goodness.
But I think the most offensive practice of all as far as ruining a movie's integrity? People that watched 4:3 stretched.
I used to hang out with people that insisted on watching movies this way, and aaaaargh, I couldn't stand it! Pan and scan is, like, totally tame compared to this abomination of a viewing experience.
I actually find the practice fascinating, and I think about how a modern film or online video could be Pan and Scanned a lot now.
Oh man! So I actually have a neat little anecdote about this-- this guy I used to talk to actually made a pan & scan version of Zootopia, and put together a bunch of VHS copies with proper packaging and inserts and stuff. But he said the edits were an enormous undertaking-- like, over a thousand individual edits-- and it was something he would never, ever do again. When he was showing off some of the more complex scenes, it really made me appreciate the work that used to go into these!
My closest gas station has one of those Coke Freestyle machines, and their fountain drinks are only a dollar, so I've kinda made a ritual of stopping in and treating myself to a diet drink before I start work. Man, lemon coke is EXCELLENT. Why can't you get it in stores any more?
I've been meaning to check out BeamNG Drive for ages! I saw a video about it way back in 2013 (from LGR), and I thought it looked super cool.
My partner really likes sandbox games, so there's some stuff we play together, mainly Minecraft, Rust, and DayZ. Rust has a savage community and I don't recommend it to the faint of heart, but DayZ is more of a "survive in the wilderness simulator" and it's actually pretty chill. I thought it was gonna be a whizz-bang zombie shooter, but it's more about scavenging quaint, abandoned Central European villages for supplies, with the goal of tending a camp out in the wilderness. And there's lots of downtime where you're mending your injuries and waiting for your clothes to dry and stuff, so you just kinda get to hang out while you're doing Survival Chores. :omg:k:
Oh wow, I didn't know about this! Nice new features too, like the upload to imgur and the history window (what a godsend)
The one I found out a few months ago and had fun with was the browser version of Kid Pix; as a kid that grew up with a Mac, hearing all the sound effects and stuff again punched me right in the nostalgia
I don't think the era of RPGmaker games ever really ended! They definitely got a new lease on life through Steam. There's so many good modern ones. LISA is brilliant, and I've been meaning to check out Omori (waiting on the Switch port).
I did make my own RPGmaker game ages ago, on the PS1 version! It was about a dog doing dog things. Mostly I got it so I could play other people's games, but I could never get my DexDrive working...
Man, was everybody online at that time part of a South Park community? I definitely was :omg:k:
That's so cool that your ISP gave you a way to find some local people! I still think the idea of local chat rooms is great-- though Telegram tried that (GPS enabled) but it just got demolished by bots :'(
There's not a single thing in there I disagree with, Hiraeth. The distrust, the jealousy, the "never forgive, never forget" mentality, the algorithm guiding you towards "engagement" by suggesting upsetting content.
I signed up for Twitter to stay notified about my hobbies, and I ended up in a warzone. It took me a while to realize it, but I managed to get recruited to a "side," and I started viewing my old acquaintances in terms of "us" or "them." I was going on Twitter just to be upset, and I was using the List feature to stealth-follow tons of people I disagreed with, just so I could silently be mad at what they were saying. And it made me distrust new faces in my daily, real life; if they hadn't proven some kind of allegiance, I assumed "ah, this person would hate me if they knew me." People on Twitter are so vicious with their threats, dogpiling, and weaponizing of personal info, I felt like if I got close to someone and they turned out to be on the side of them, surely they'd enact the same kind of retribution on me.
It was really, really miserable, and I'm glad I made a clean break. I feel like I'm more fortunate than most, since that whole period for me was only a year and a half or so-- but my mom, for example, has made herself miserable going down the rabbit hole, and it's been hard to watch.
I loved IRC! I used it for a really long time, initially for a IRC channel for a forum I posted on. Later, I became a part of this weekly IRC meetup, where every Sunday, everyone would pile in to chat while we watched a live puppet show in realplayer (no joke).
I think the only thing I dislike about IRC is the lack of logging-- it was annoying joining a new channel, and being out of the loop for a while because you couldn't read what everyone had been talking about.
Its biggest strength, though, is that absolutely everything can run IRC. I used to connect to IRC on my Dreamcast! And my very first feature phone had IRC on it. So if you're into vintage tech, it's super neat that you can still hop into chat rooms in this way.
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I had a Performa too! But it was around 2006 when my mums office was dumping it, I had it setup on my desk for ages, but sound of the CRT drove me away from using it much. I think a lot of my inspiration comes from this era although Iv not really explored it as much as I should.
