【Ａｎｉｍｅ　Ｗｅｂ　Ｔｕｒｎｐｉｋｅ】

【Ｎｅｔｓｃａｐｅ　Ｎａｖｉｇａｔｏｒ】

【１９９７】

Image by azagoth, from the 3/1996 iCE Advertisements artpack, rehosted on 16colors.

I didn't plan this, but I seem to have queued lots of Nineties nostalgia and little else.

back in the 00s a single dancing anime chibi gif would feed us for months on end

Here’s the template. Go forth and recreate the dancing anime chibi gif. Revive the old ways.

As crazy as it sounds, Caramelldansen seems too new to me. This post harkens back to the heyday of forums, fan sites, and file-sharing. That's the era of otakudom I look back on wistfully. Before the rise of social networks, fan wikis, and Youtube. When I tried to get back into anime fandoms around 2006 it didn't feel like the same community.

Anyway, here's Lum.

i need the pic of the fucked up looking little dog from a web 1.0 site that’s caption “March Madness”

artist’s rendition

I made a vow years ago to always have this image on hand when someone needed it because I was in your shoes once. Enjoy, stranger.

thank you. it is now march madness time.

I’m sorry but the photograph does not meet the expectations raised by the artist’s conception.

Okay, I don’t want to be a buzzkill, but it’s really starting to get my goat seeing folks who are absolutely old enough to know better romanticising the Internet circa 2000. Like, yeah, the Internet was smaller and less commercialised twenty years ago, but it was absolutely not a friendly place. You want to know what the Internet circa 2000 was like? There were popular Flash videos memeing on photos of Nazi death camp victims, and the latest viral trend was tricking people into looking at a high-resolution image of a man’s gaping anus. True, there was some great stuff, too, but acting like it was Hamster Dance and Homestar Runner as far as the eye could see is a pretty severe mischaracterisation.

None of that’s really changed, though.

Sometime within the last few years (I wanna say 2020 or so) there was a viral trend on twitter where if you disagreed with somebody’s fandom opinion you posted a video in the replies of their tweet–and the video would cut to what looks like genuine footage of something horrific. I personally saw child abuse and a hostage being executed, and I’ve heard tell of worse still.

There was also an MLP fan animation that was pro-Nazi complete with Nazi ponies and everything that made the rounds.

People livestream their suicides–and those go viral. Sometimes people even try to trick others into watching them (I recall seeing multiple different warnings in the 2010’s of “don’t click a video with this thumbnail or title because it cuts to a graphic suicide taken from this person who livestreamed killing themselves”)

Back then, in the lawless wasteland that was 2000’s internet, I (a kid lying about my age online)–and everybody I knew–was aware that you needed to take care because you’d come across horrifying stuff people would send you for shits and giggles and even the greatest care wouldn’t be 100% preventative of seeing disgusting or horrifying stuff.

But now it feels like a lot of people have lost that awareness and mindlessly trust every link or video they come across or get sent because they’re under the mistaken assumption that just because things look more respectable on the surface the internet truly is a safe place now where the don’t need caution.

The internet wasn’t all rainbows'n'Rapidash back then, yeah. But isn’t now, either, despite people assuming it is.

Don’t forget the extremist echo chambers, misinformation campaigns, callout culture, cyberbullying, and doxxing.  The Internet has caused much more harm and stress in recent years than it ever did at the Turn of the Millennium.

remember when you were 10 and you would hang out with your friends in order to Look At The Computer together like you went to their house and experienced the information superhighway together. and then leave

“There’s this ‘website’ where you can ‘beat up’ this guy named ‘Bill Gates.’”

Today’s mood: Feeling a deep nostalgia for early 2000s forum culture while at the same time being keenly aware that early 2000s forum culture fucking sucked.

I don’t remember it being near as bad as 2020s Tumblr culture.

Just your basic multimedia package.

Know what UART stands for?

U AR’T GETTIN’ ONLINE!

That’s surprising.  Everyone talks about Canada being a number of years behind the U.S.