I agree with both points and will add that Digimon exemplified that era of the internet. The Digital World had a beach full of phone booths that only called the same sarcastic operator for some reason. That's early 2000s internet right there.
I'm actually less surprised by his take and more surprised that people were into digimon as late as 2006
How's the Adventure 01 remake? I'm a huge weeb for the first three seasons of Digimon and the remake has me interested.
Season 3 fucked me up seeing it when I was 11 or so.
I love those games, cringy dialogue and all, i still have them on my vita
might be time for a replay
The internet was so much better until around 2014-2015 with Gamergate, the rise of the alt right, Trump and the complete polarization of every community. The alt right managed to outright take over and radicalize so many forums and communities. People only began to notice it until after the transformation was complete or close to it and by then, it was too late.
I used to hang out on every Doom forum and it wasn't until 2014-2015, they all became polarized and had so much drama on them. It reached a boiling point in 2017 with ZDoom and their mods finally having enough of all the politics and completely banning it for good and enacting strict rules to prevent the discussions. Every gaming forum is overrun with the alt right. Even on Steam, you see iron cross avatars on their forums when looking for troubleshooting help for running old games.
Gamergate sped up the shitty on gamer internet, but platforms like reddit etc. replacing independent-ish sites and forums created the conditions. The same reactionaries were there but didn't share a website with actual humans. Web 2.0 fucking sucks/
Yeah, Reddit was always a shit hole. That's the ironic thing to me when people talk about how they miss Chapo on reddit like it was some how better than over here.
The MRA movement basically started on reddit and it was a radicalization site for that reactionary movement. They predate Gamergate and more than anything, Gamergate and the Alt Right was a culmination of all these reactionaries snowballing into one another.
The "redpill" philosophy BS got it's start on Reddit with the MRA. Redpill sub at one point had over 200k members, and it was only one of many anti-feminist subs.
The reactionaries have always been there, but they got louder and crazier around 2014-2015. I still remember when the reactionaries were Ron Paul bots.
It wasn't just gaming forums they took over either. Basically all entertainment, hobby and sports communities. People forget that 2015 was the year that Colin Kaepernick began kneeling. NFL forums were always a hell hole of jackass conservatives cause the sport has always had a chud fanbase, but the anthem protests sparked a change and they have never been the same again. Gone were the actual football discussions and it was just endless arguing over nationalism and DISRESPECTING DA TROOPS. Every forum would have several thread about individual players who kneeled and the threads would be filled with dog whistles for racists and accusations of hating America and the military. It got so bad that even the stat nerd sites started talking about it. The NFL handled this so badly and just poured gasoline on the fire to incite the moron fans to get even louder. 5 years later, nothing has changed. This year has sparked all of that to come back with the NFL's laughable PR stunt of putting anti-racist slogans on fields (the irony of a league that most of their owners voted for Trump yet they put Black Lives Matter on the fields), and these fans still haven't learned anything.
The internet was so much better until around 2014-2015 with Gamergate, the rise of the alt right, Trump and the complete polarization of every community. The alt right managed to outright take over and radicalize so many forums and communities. People only began to notice it until after the transformation was complete or close to it and by then, it was too late.
I'm not gonna argue that things weren't different back then, because they were, but they also weren't good either. Gamergate didn't create its frothing hordes of chuds from whole cloth, it provided a rallying point and radicalization path for disaffected men who were already self-serving chauvinist pigs: it was a breaking point where politically ignorant western chauvinists were functionally made to acknowledge their biases and bigotry and either embrace or reject them, and most of them embraced it and started exalting the vile bullshit they'd always carried with them but hadn't thought about or had consciously kept in private.
Social spaces were still dominated by shitty sexist, racist, homophobic, and transphobic guys, it just wasn't a fucking crusade for them yet; they wanted to intrude upon and silence conversation about anything outside their perspective as a function of their ingrained biases, but they lacked the militancy and focus that the reactionary movement behind Gamergate would later give them..
the internet has somehow grown in scale massively yet has narrowed in scope. Does anyone else feel that way? Maybe that was just the youthful curiosity I had 20 years ago, maybe also symptomatic of growing up in a small town with a stagnant culture. It felt like stepping onto another planet where no matter where I'd look, there's something I'd never heard of or seen before.
It also used to give off the sensation of expertise. I could go to a forum for anything and someone there would have encyclopedic knowledge about emulating games or books I'd never heard of, anything I wanted to find was there. That part is still the same, but it's been stripped of that personal, intimate characteristic I used to feel from it.
There was a lot more tinkering too. Websites used to be a lot more experimental, but my childhood memories might be glossing over the jankiness of it all. Everything was a lot more individual. Nowadays a social media profile will look identical to everyone else's: sterile, laid out identically, pictures and everything in the same format. Back then you had no clue what you were in for. Someone's website would play music when you open it, they'd play around with the html to flash colors, there'd be gifs floating around all over the place. If you liked part of someone's website, you could copy the html from the source and put it on your own site.
I think that's why there was so much ambient oddness. The only people who were bothering to learn how to navigate this incredibly unreliable, impenetrable thing would have been odd themselves. The only other things to do on the internet were read the news or send emails, so the average user had nothing to gain. Odd, obsessive folk had everything to gain. There's a forum about my obsession? And I can pretend to be the main character? And I can set up a geocities shrine that plays their theme song? Sign me up.
I remember the sanguinous forums. People thought they were vampires. When someone lost their cool and acted out vampirically, it was refered to as twoofing.
Or in the way of teenagers, they liked being a vampire and couldn't keep clear in their mind the distinction of putting on a role and being the role.
One guy accidentally killed his dog trying to steal it's blood and was instutionalized.
I remember the sanguinous forums. People thought they were vampires.
Where can I read more about these forums? And when were they?
Were vampires a big thing in the 90s/00s? Is that why the Blade trilogy was made?
Vampires were definitely a thing in that very very very brief period where dressing like a Matrix character was genuinely a cool look and people who's names were Chip hadn't all died in 9/11.
I've never seen Fairly Odd Parents and had to search the name (was a pre-teen when it came out and liking non-violent kids stuff was taboo) but holy shit that dude is definitely a Chip. But yeah, during the mid-late 90s Chip was a name you wouldn't even bat an eye at and post 2000, even the Chips that were big faded.
That much I can't help you with. I am sure they exist somewhere.
They were a very big thing in the 90s. Urbam fantasy as a genere was just being invented and popularized. The PnP RPG/Larp system Vamlire the masquerade hit. Along with the show Buffy the vampire slayer. It combined the goth sensability with the fantasy appeal. The internet wasn't really real yet so sprawling dark lore and secrets were passed person to person in clandestine meeetings at malls and parks and under large trees after school.
Shit was kinda lit actually. Look up vampire larp stories. I am sure there is a big youtube compliation at thia point. It'll cook your noodle for sure.
I had one time played a table top version of the vampire game, where a guy was in game fucking with me to make me look bad so that a girl I was seeing would leave me, ostensibly for him. Which looking back would be the most perfect distalation of that era. I think that guy unironically wore a cape all the time but he was really tall so no one fucked with him about it.
otherkin literally still exist. that's a subculture that goes back to those usenet days, still pulling in new people, still loopy as you want
Are they still going strong? I thoight hey would ahve gotten folded in with the furries by now.
On one hand, the internet is closer to being a universal database of knowledge and communication and it's good that more people have access to it, on the other hand, less secret clubs. :(
I do miss having lots of tight knit communities online.
I wasn't being snarky. I do genuinely miss having a "secret" club for the same reason that you said.
Let me introduce you to this great little forum website, Chapo.Chat. It has that nice old school internet feel but with a sleek modern design.
it's mostly a tool of mass pacification and surveillance now
I was on the net from an early age, enough to just predate the Eternal September.
Until 1998, or even 2005, it was a different world, almost a culture of its own and mostly a bunch of ancaps and ancoms in flamewars with each other.
Also, Otherkin. Remember them?
I lived with a group of otherkin not that long ago, so they're definitely still around. Mine in particular believed themselves to be spirit wolves.
And how forums pretty much forms their little cliques of similarly themed forums that shares a number of members with each other and have petty rivalries and such.
Every forum I remember would have at least one far too dedicated power-user, often two. People who would have 100,000+ posts, something like 1,000x more than the average user. In really small forums, you'd sometimes see them talking to themselves for days.
why would they have wings? literally the only point a balrog appears in the trilogy it falls into a pit
Since they were Intelligently Designed for warfare, that would be a strange engineering decision.
The myth of Intelligent Design is Noldor propaganda. Please do not repeat the lies of the Elvish Deep State on my Chapeau Dot Chat.
It is pretty sus that Melkor's initial sin that made him basically satan was just being the universe's first solo noise side project.
My take on this is that they don't, but the wings look cool so I don't care.
I was on this forum around 2002ish. It was basically kids being cryptid people but for Digimon. It was fun as hell and Digimon are real in the same way that a lamp in a film is still a light source when you watch it on a TV.
I was there and don't think many people really thought it was real, more of just a fun pretend thing. That being said if there's anything I still hold onto for outlandish childhood fantasy is Digimon being real..
I gave it a revisit as an adult a while back and still watch it on occasion cause it holds up big fucking time. There's the escapism angle, but the characters are solid, the story itself is well thought out (except season 2 where they just kinda ran out of episodes and brought up more than they could conclude) and there's a lot of really great messages in it especially for kids.
Season 3 is straight up Lovecraft inspired psychological horror and probably shouldn't have been aimed at kids.
