AKA: why YOU should get your friends together to look at old stuff online
To start us off: I am, and always will be, a huge proponent of keeping the Internet weird and independent. I grew up at a strange time for the internet where we were kind of caught in a transitionary period between the forums and webrings of eld and social media/the Internet as we know it; in middle school my dad taught me how to code a dinky little website with HTML but we gave up like halfway through because geocities had died a few years back and my dad just couldn't be assed to walk me through hosting with another provider, I guess) what forums and web pages I did visit had this mystical, almost otherworldly quality to them by virtue of kind of already becoming relics by the time I was really old enough to "get" the internet
That is to say, I fuckin LOVE cataloging and exploring spaces and media that really capture the feeling of the early internet. It was always a hobby of mine to pick through whatever random ass forums I could dig up or browse websites that had long been abandoned for some reason or another; sometimes I search YouTube chronologically for videos from that early period shortly after it first went live
This was all just an idle thing I did, though! I never really applied or shared it. Until around this time last year. Feeling heavily inspired by RTVS's "Sonic Forum Simulator" and streamer Socpens/Scorpy's work in general, I got together with a group of friends in a small community discord I run and we decided to simulate a forum of our own, donning characters in line with archetypical forum/internet users of the time, masquerading as a fan forum for the game series "Kingdom Hearts"
It was, SUCH. A fucking blast to tap back into that good ole digital magic, weird bullshit and everything included! Eventually the forum went dark because well, the play had run it's course after a month or so! But that feeling really stuck with me. So, eventually. I took to hosting "Vidz Nite: a virtual seance", a monthly little get together where we would all contribute a handful of videos that captured the essence of a "living internet" to a playlist. We'd then sit down and just, watch for a couple hours! Old YTPs, YTPMVs, personal vlogs, AMVs, shitty old videogame trailers and playthroughs/walkthroughs, archived DVDs and VHS tapes, that sort of thing! It's since evolved to allow more recent videos/content so long as it still has that off-the-cuff/organic feel to it but man I cannot recommend hosting one of these kinds of events for your own friend group enough. Comb through a few old videos, slap em in a list together and just, behold! Experience it as earnestly as you can approach it, it is a really rewarding experience to engage with these sorts of things beyond irony or going "lol old thing dumb/silly"
Seriously, try it!!
And with this all being said, rather than jus preach at my pulpit I also wanna open the floor for a bit of discussion here: I've been thinking of expanding my own Virtual Seance nights to be a little more than just video. I've been thinking about taking us through some older webpages and stuff as well as the videos we've all come to love and enjoy. To that end, I open the floor to you, dear reader: got any interesting/cool/funny websites? Relics of the old Internet -OR- newer creations that still capture that living internet magic? By all means, please, do share here in this thread! Share with me your digital baubles, your interwebbed trinkets.... Your.... Neat things!!
And hey! If you try a virtual seance of your own with your friend group, report back here! Lemme know how it went, if you did anything different or tried something new with the idea! I'd love to hear how everyone's experiences with hosting events like this turned out!
"I'm deercowsheepie!"
She deercowsheepied, deercowsheepishly
