What do you miss from the old internet?
What do you miss from the old internet?
i think we need Cracked-style articles back. desperately. or like, a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it. sites like those are declining faster than the glaciers.
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There's a certain scrappyness that has been lost. I think back to SomethingAwful, Newgrounds, that sort of stuff where people just made things, didn't matter if they couldn't draw, some of the best things were stick figure animations. Even on Youtube now people are doing ad reads to camera like a 1950's talk show host.
I also miss the sort of folk mythologies that emerged from what I like to call the Contextless Era. The Napster/Limewire explosion pre-iTunes led to a lot of things being shared with no context except for chronically incorrect file names. Which is why at least one person who reads this sentence still thinks System Of A Down wrote a song about the Legend of Zelda.
I kinda miss the PC first internet. Just in general. I miss instant messenger clients. MSN, AIM and Yahoo! Facebook fucked it up. As Tom Scott once said, those style of messengers had the benefit of requiring users to log in, which meant being online was a signal you weren't busy.
Link, he come to town!
He come to save!
The princess Zelda!
Wait was that not system of a down???
Called it!
No; the song - simply titled "Zelda" is from the album Rabbit Joint, by the band Rabbit Joint. Singer Joe Pleiman wrote the lyrics to the tune of the Hyrule Overture by Nintendo composer Koji Kondo.
Back in the day, little known bands would attempt an early form of SEO, they'd put the names of more famous bands or artists in the file names of mp3s they would upload. Say you were an obscure (and for my purposes, fictional) metal band named Scorn Town, you might upload your newest track as "Blood of the Night - Scorn Town (metallica).mp3" to kind of trick Metallica fans into downloading and listening to your song.
But you did a stupid: It's one of those songs whose title isn't in the lyrics, but you wrote the band's name into the chorus because you're trying to get people to know who you are. So people think the file name is of the pattern "Flagpole Sitta - I'm Not Sick But I'm Not Well (Harvey Danger).mp3". Actual title - what you think the actual title is (band name).extension. So a lot of small time acts accidentally attributed their own songs to more famous groups by incorrect titles. Or their fans did it for them; any prank phone call skits were attributed to the Jerky Boys, and any white man performing stand-up comedy who was even slightly southern (especially Bill Engval) was credited as Jeff Foxworthy.
And because this was the contextless era, no one even thinks to question this and if they do they don't find anything because Scorn Town doesn't and never will have a website and even if they did Alta Vista can't find it. So it gets written into digital folk history at face value.
Pleiman's vocals did bear quite a resemblance to that of System of a Down's Serj Tankian, and Chop Suey was HUGE at the time. And some unknown individual uploaded Zelda by Rabbit Joint to Napster with a file name similar to "SOAD - Legend Of Zelda.mp3."
Similarly, "The end of the world" aka "H'okay, so. Here's the Earth, s'chillin..." was NOT made by Group X.