I'm still not the biggest fan of emojis. I'm not put off by them, but I don't really use them. There's definitely something weird about it being non-standardized; when you're trying to communicate nuance in text using an emoji expression, it's kind of worrying knowing it'll look different depending on your device. If you take a peek at emojipedia, you can see that holy moly, they show up a lot of different ways!

I do think non-expressive emojis for making pictographs are neat, though! For example, if I want to say something like "you can let the cat in the house, but not the dog," I can very quickly make something like 🏠⬅️🐈✅🐕❌, and that can be communicated to anyone regardless of language. Really useful!

It's a great idea, but in my experience, it hasn't been terribly useful to me. I get streaming for free with Game Pass; most of the titles available for download on Game Pass are also available for streaming, and your progress carries over. Same with GeForce Now; if you buy a game on Steam, Epic, or elsewhere, you can use GeForce Now to stream it from their servers for free. Really cool that it's available! But the big draw of streaming is being able to play your games on the go, anywhere-- and this just doesn't work when you need a rock-solid, high bandwidth internet connection. Mobile data won't cut it, and Starbucks won't give you the bandwidth you need. And with portable tech getting cheaper and cheaper (look at the Steam Deck, for example), it's getting easier to play your games on the go and keep them offline.

One really useful application though, even though it's a server you run yourself and not a streaming service, is Parsec (or alternately, Steam Remote Play Together). I love having this available-- it lets other people access your PC, so you can play a game together on the same screen. You can play anything in your library together in realtime, just like you were having them over for a pizza & games night. You can even take turns playing a single player game, and so on.

I think like Melon said, streaming services will likely lead to new types of games, rather than offering a better or more convenient way of playing existing games. You can develop games that require massively powerful PCs that are way out of the reach of consumers, but you can stream those games into the home. I figure it'll be an experience akin to PLATO games; we'll all be "terminals" connecting to a "mainframe" to play an online game that's way, way beyond what our hardware can do.

Hi! So I've made a few posts here and I figured I should introduce myself.

I'm Kutan! I really like video games, virtual worlds, and raccoons. I got into the Internet in the mid 90s, was absolutely obsessed with exploring the web. It was so neat seeing all these personal spaces on display, and seeing what creative things people could make within the confines of early WWW. It was also a blast getting to meet and interact with people-- AOL chat rooms, and eventually within the context of game environments, like EverQuest.
But my personal favorite online spaces were ones that allowed you to create and explore virtual worlds in realtime with other people: Furcadia was a big one for me, as was The Palace, and many years later, Second Life. I think Second Life came the closest to realizing the dream of a "3D Web," at least in its early days. Lots and lots of people making their own little spaces where they could showcase their interests and hobbies, and you could fly across a vast , continuous landscape of creations until you saw something that caught your eye, all in realtime with other people. That's definitely the kind of experience I seek out nowadays.
I found this site completely on accident, and I absolutely fell in love with it. It's such a treat to have a web space where you can just wander without a destination in mind, never really knowing what's going to be behind the next click, but finding all kinds of interesting things as you go. And it's been really exciting seeing that there's a whole community of "Web Revival" people making more spaces like this! It's going to be a ton of fun for me getting to explore all this.

Oh, as for the raccoons! I just really like raccoons. I spent a bunch of years feeding raccoons in the backyard every night. The yard was right up against an abandoned golf course, so we had all manner of wildlife out there. The raccoons in particular loved to come into the yard and play in the pool, and once I started feeding them, they became a regular part of my nightly routine. They're such curious and social animals! They acclimate to people so quickly, and they just "hang out" in a way most wild animals don't really do. Once they're fed, they're not in any rush to leave! Nowadays I just watch them online-- there's a really cool webcam I watch with nightly raccoons, and you can even donate to have an automated dispenser give them peanuts.

Here's a picture I took of a mom and her two fuzzbeasts!

Oh man, there's so many in this topic that I agree with! A special shout-out to "crappy cheap tech." I bought stuff like the Game.com and the Cybiko because I really, really wanted some form of internet in a portable form factor, but those things never delivered. Now you can buy a TracFone for $20 at a Walmart checkout endcap and go online no matter where you are. Incredible!

Ooh, and I don't miss video game prices. Man, you adjust for inflation, and games were REALLY expensive. Digital downloads have made things soooo much cheaper and more convenient.

It's really cool hearing that someone else stumbled across it! As for its current state, I figured as much-- I haven't been on in ages, but I didn't exactly expect it to still be active. The number of idle avatars is interesting though, and I guess there's an observation to be made there: it's incredibly easy now to just log into something like The Palace nowadays and just run it in the background, but that didn't used to be the case. Not only was it demanding enough on your hardware that you couldn't really multitask, but you were also tying up the phone line (or paying by the hour!) by staying connected. So there wasn't an issue with AFK people just taking up space, but I'm sure that's different now.

I love that study you linked, too! I just stumbled across it earlier when looking for screenshots for this topic, and there's both some really silly and really insightful stuff to be had there. I liked this in particular:

At the Palace users automatically have something in common with everyone else. They are USERS! They share an interest in computer technology and the internet, which offers the strong possibility of instantaneous camaraderie and a sense of belonging.

Which is absolutely true about meeting people on the early Interent. If you were having a conversation with someone online, even if you had nothing else in common, you still could bond over just being online. It was like being part of an exclusive club, and it definitely helped everyone feel a lot closer.

I had a webpage I made that was just a guide to Final Fantasy 7's chocobo minigame, and it got a decent number of hits! I actually hosted it through my ISP (was getting free webspace from your ISP a normal thing back then?), but once my ISP got devoured, my web page did too. Awww. It didn't get archived, but I've been able to find other pages that link to it, so at least there's some record of it having existed!

So, there was this avatar chat client that came out around '95, and it was a big deal to me when I was first getting onto the internet. I thought I'd make a thread about it!



You'd upload your own custom image as an avatar (or procure one in other ways), and you'd get plonked into a little room you could move around in and chat with other people. Speech came out of your avatar in a little speech bubble, and you could even specify different comic book style speech bubble effects (like a spiky bubble or a "thinking" bubble), or have sound effects play alongside your chat message. If you were on a Mac, you would even get text-to-speech options! You would navigate from room to room by clicking on regions of the background, and a lot of Palaces were pretty labyrinthian in nature.

It was all decentralized, so you just paid for the client, and then anybody could host their own Palace server. Which is great, because it means there's still servers online today! They were all built from the ground up, all with unique rooms and features. All the different servers were typically for different special interests, and each one had dozens or even hundreds of rooms to click your way through. It was fun getting to explore them even if you weren't there to chat, and see if there were any rooms with props (avatar pieces) to collect, or any interactive bits and bobs. The Palace had a really robust scripting system, and server operators did some really creative things with it. Some people made entire games in The Palace-- the one I played was Balamb Garden's colosseum, which was a 5v5 JRPG battle simulator featuring characters from Squaresoft games. In the days of dialup internet, it was so cool playing something like that and getting live updates on it every week without even having to download anything. There was just constantly new features and new content, and it had a really dedicated fanbase that went for years and years.



Collecting "props"-- avatar pieces-- was a huge part of Palace culture, and was one of the things that every Palace community had in common. Avatar editing was really fiddly in The Palace; you could make your own avatars using the client's built-in drawing software, but this wasn't ideal. You could also import images into The Palace, but they had to conform to a really specific palette, or the colors would come out all wrong. Props were also only 44x44 pixels in size (the size of one of those yellow smiley faces in the first picture-- that's the default avatar!), so to make bigger avatars, you had to make a 3x3 grid of them. It was all super fussy, so few people made their own. They'd ask for people to copy and share their props, or trade for them. Most Palaces also had "prop rooms" with scripted prop dispensers, or donation rooms, where you could leave your props for others. Some people would even screenshot props, and painstakingly edit the transparency pixel by pixel and import them back into the client, just so they could steal someone's look! (Avatar theft was a serious accusation and a bannable offense.) If you've seen Palace props around the web before, it's definitely because of Dollz-- this type of avatar was massively popular, due in part to how easy it was to customize their look by adding and removing parts, flood filling the colors, and so on. They crept off The Palace and onto the web at large, and lots of web page creators collected and customized them too. They were unavoidable! (I was part of a Pokemon communtity on The Palace, and we mostly despised the things-- we were all too busy trying to complete our collections of 151 individual Pokemon props :omg:k: )



I'm wondering if anyone else out there had heard of The Palace before? It was a cool little community, but it didn't exactly set the world on fire. It was only supported for about five years, and then official development stopped. Even There.com lasted way longer! It was definitely a huge part of my formative internet days though, and holds a really special place in my heart.

Yes! There's an old forum I signed up in 2004 that's still active today. I don't post there any more, but every few months I go and check in on it. It's a weird situation where registrations are closed, it's only readable with an account, and the guy paying for hosting stopped communicating years ago. But it still has a loyal base of users that post there, even though the plug will probably get pulled any day now.