Fandom Snowflake 2021 #12: Nostalgia Trip
Jan. 23rd, 2021 08:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptChallenge Number 12 asks us to remember a time before and bring back some of its games.
Which, as the Great Old One of the Internet that I am increasingly becoming, I feel is a little bit like the recognition that the songs that I used to listen to when I was in high school are now the songs that are playing in the grocery stores. I have become the demographic that gets marketed to, in a lot of ways. That said, I'd say I'm still not the generation that's being catered to, because if that were the case, "ok, boomer" wouldn't be nearly as much of both a diss and a meme as it has become.
The flavor text for this is both good at making you feel old, but also at reminding you that the Internet that has been around for a while, and it wasn't always the intensely monetized, commercialized, and data-mined place that it is now. (There are some good things about the way things work now, in that things tend to just work now, but there's a lot about the Internet as it is now that's gone in a bad direction.)seleneheart remembers a significant amount of that space in this accompanying text.
Flash, on the other hand, was something that was useful when the Web decided it wanted to have more interactivity and multimedia and HTML couldn't do it. It became an accessibility problem, and a security problem, and we're pretty well glad it's gone, but a lot of Web standards had to rework, evolve, and make new versions of themselves so they could handle all the types of content that were being asked for on the Internet. And, eventually, we started getting things done with frameworks that would allow us to use all sorts of different programming and scripting languages to get things done. It's better now that we're not all relying on Flash.
Okay, on to the games part, the things that we're supposed to be doing for this challenge, now that I've wallowed in a little bit of nostalgia for some of the good things of the past. These were usually the sorts of things that were and are intended to spark discussion or to tell other people on the Internet about yourself. Which, for me, was very much the era of "choose a good pseud and don't tell anyone but the very closest people you know anything about your offline self that could be identifying," because we were told the Internet was full of people who were looking to exploit or kidnap young people and harm them. There's still lots of people looking to harm others around, but it's a lot less of stranger danger and a lot more of both corporate advertising and trolls, doxxers, and assholes looking to drive you off the Internet for having the temerity to have an opinion that isn't theirs.
The challenge link has some games to play from older times that still are with us. Some of them I see around still, like the "first line of entries" one, some of them are very much the "what member of this fandom are you?" style that would eventually be the province of Buzzfeed. I'm trying to remember the sorts of things that I would have done back in those times, but even going back through my archives and performing random sampling and subject line analysis, I was still much more news and commentary focused than in playing the journal games. I still think it tells people plenty about who I am and what I believe in, but it's not the easiest or most digestible form of it.
I decided, because why not play to stereotype, to select the Dewey Decimal Classification game, which came back with the designation that I'm in General Knowledge, classification 009. Here's what it has to say:
And, as usual, I've gone and gotten all analytical on something that's supposed to be a bit of harmless fun. Which might be why I haven't done a whole lot of them, because I'm still possessed by the idea that when I post, it has to be something useful, meaningful, or at least funny, because if I'm going to shitpost, I at least want to get a laugh or two out of it. And that, probably, says a lot more about me than most journal games.
(One last thing, I realized, as I'm looking at the results in other journals - I'm reminded a lot about how I used to (ha-ha, still do) look at the results codes blocks and go "Why? What's all this stuff here for?" when a lot of it was tables and stuff to make sure that everything got formatted correctly so it would look right. Those were the days when tables were easier and better supported than CSS was, so everything was rendered in HTML with very specific tables to make it all line up. I'm still super-glad for CSS being a lot better now, but I'm sure for some people, there's some retro-nostalgia for that incongruity between page / journal layouts and these table-filled quiz results from elsewhere on the Internet.)
Which, as the Great Old One of the Internet that I am increasingly becoming, I feel is a little bit like the recognition that the songs that I used to listen to when I was in high school are now the songs that are playing in the grocery stores. I have become the demographic that gets marketed to, in a lot of ways. That said, I'd say I'm still not the generation that's being catered to, because if that were the case, "ok, boomer" wouldn't be nearly as much of both a diss and a meme as it has become.
In your own space, resurrect an old meme. Have fun with it! Which is the goofiest meme you can think of? Put on your party hat and be silly!!
The flavor text for this is both good at making you feel old, but also at reminding you that the Internet that has been around for a while, and it wasn't always the intensely monetized, commercialized, and data-mined place that it is now. (There are some good things about the way things work now, in that things tend to just work now, but there's a lot about the Internet as it is now that's gone in a bad direction.)
seleneheart remembers a significant amount of that space in this accompanying text. Remember the early oughts? Remember Web 1.0? And Geocities and blinkies? What about Flash games? It was only last month that Adobe Flash finally died its ignoble death.There are a lot of parts about this that are familiar to me, but the thing that's most clear and terrible about it is that most of the things that are mentioned there are gone. And while a lot of people focused on design are glad to see the blinkies and some of the less aesthetic designs of the 3.0-4.0 era of HTTML, Geocites was really useful at giving people the ability to experiment and code simple pages and otherwise learn how to build things without having to monetize it (even though Geocities was monetizing things with ads) and without having to do the work of administering all of the server parts behind it. Hosted blogs, Livejournal, and even Dreamwidth, have Geocities to thank, in at least some small way, for showing that all of us have the things that we're interested in and would showcase to the rest of the world, so long as the technical barrier is low enough for us to get in. It's really rather terrible that the pressures of keeping the lights on and the servers running have resulted in three distinct ways of raising the mnoey - paid services, donations solicited, and selling the data of users to people who want to pay significantly for it. Capitalism. *shakesfist*. (Also, obligatory NeoCities plug, because the project is excellent and is trying to replicate what the good things were about Geocities without the bad things that came with it. They should get some donation love.) It's weird to say, but over the last several decades, it's been almost a truism that if Yahoo! buys something, it won't be long for the world, since they bought and killed Geocities and they've most recently shut down their groups. And more recently, Google seems to be running in the same direction, with killing things that they buy, and also occasionally killing things that are really useful and that lots of people use. Nowadays, though, we're more likely to notice when platforms reveal that they're always going to choose the money over the users, and content purges happen. Which is, in itself, also an older thing than fans might think. It's cyclical, and part of the reason that Dreamwidth can avoid a lot of those things is because people pay for the service, which makes Dreamwidth responsible to the users, instead of the advertisers, so it's another service to support with money, if you can. And if you want additional points for your dollars, if you buy your services in December, you get the eleventh year free for buying ten. It's not much, but it's something to consider.
In the spirit of those times, let resurrect some old LJ memes! (Think Buzzfeed quizzes but with less data mining (not to say that didn't happen)).
When I looked at my tags page, there were 159 entries tagged ‘meme’ which I guess is because memes were what I used to say when I didn’t know what to say. In the early oughts, I wasn’t new to the internet, but I was new to the interactive version of it presented by LJ and its clones. In order to seem interesting, I did a *lot* of memes.
As I explored back in my journal, I found a lot of memes that are now defunct, but I wish were still functioning. Like the Friends Icons collage, which seemed to be a bit of code that gathered all your friends’ default icons into one picture. And Quizilla seems to be a Teen Nick site now. Other links looked extremely sketchy.
Flash, on the other hand, was something that was useful when the Web decided it wanted to have more interactivity and multimedia and HTML couldn't do it. It became an accessibility problem, and a security problem, and we're pretty well glad it's gone, but a lot of Web standards had to rework, evolve, and make new versions of themselves so they could handle all the types of content that were being asked for on the Internet. And, eventually, we started getting things done with frameworks that would allow us to use all sorts of different programming and scripting languages to get things done. It's better now that we're not all relying on Flash.
Okay, on to the games part, the things that we're supposed to be doing for this challenge, now that I've wallowed in a little bit of nostalgia for some of the good things of the past. These were usually the sorts of things that were and are intended to spark discussion or to tell other people on the Internet about yourself. Which, for me, was very much the era of "choose a good pseud and don't tell anyone but the very closest people you know anything about your offline self that could be identifying," because we were told the Internet was full of people who were looking to exploit or kidnap young people and harm them. There's still lots of people looking to harm others around, but it's a lot less of stranger danger and a lot more of both corporate advertising and trolls, doxxers, and assholes looking to drive you off the Internet for having the temerity to have an opinion that isn't theirs.
The challenge link has some games to play from older times that still are with us. Some of them I see around still, like the "first line of entries" one, some of them are very much the "what member of this fandom are you?" style that would eventually be the province of Buzzfeed. I'm trying to remember the sorts of things that I would have done back in those times, but even going back through my archives and performing random sampling and subject line analysis, I was still much more news and commentary focused than in playing the journal games. I still think it tells people plenty about who I am and what I believe in, but it's not the easiest or most digestible form of it.
I decided, because why not play to stereotype, to select the Dewey Decimal Classification game, which came back with the designation that I'm in General Knowledge, classification 009. Here's what it has to say:
Main Class: 000 Computer Science, Information & General WorksSo there we are! As with many scrying opportunities, what comes back is careful not to be too specific about you, and it talks about positive qualities that someone is much more inclined to believe about themselves. Being the library person I am, though, I also know that the information provided here is very generalized to the 000-099 block. A cursory search says that the 009 block is not in use, which seems like a bad result to give to someone. Admittedly, all of the results here are generalized to the hundred blocks for this quiz, which makes sense - it only means you have to program 10 results for potentially a thousand elements, and maybe do a quick specific lookup of certain numbers if they match an actual DDC heading. (We note The Other Wiki has a published list of the thousand sections, the hundred divisions, and the ten main classes, even though, since DDC is a proprietary system, specific call numbers will require getting access to the system, so you don't get any of the cutter numbers that provide more specific placement. Not that you need it for something like that, but it would be kind of neat if there were some specific cutter stuff involved, so that people would get a more specific placement. And some more personalized messages, and by that point, you've put a lot more work into the situation than you really want to for a fun game, and you would do better turning it into an oracle or some other thing.)
009 Contains: Encyclopedias, magazines, journals and books with quotations.
What 009 it says about you: You are very informative and up to date. You're working on living in the here and now, not the past. You go through a lot of changes. When you make a decision you can be very sure of yourself, maybe even stubborn, but your friends appreciate your honesty and resolve.
And, as usual, I've gone and gotten all analytical on something that's supposed to be a bit of harmless fun. Which might be why I haven't done a whole lot of them, because I'm still possessed by the idea that when I post, it has to be something useful, meaningful, or at least funny, because if I'm going to shitpost, I at least want to get a laugh or two out of it. And that, probably, says a lot more about me than most journal games.
(One last thing, I realized, as I'm looking at the results in other journals - I'm reminded a lot about how I used to (ha-ha, still do) look at the results codes blocks and go "Why? What's all this stuff here for?" when a lot of it was tables and stuff to make sure that everything got formatted correctly so it would look right. Those were the days when tables were easier and better supported than CSS was, so everything was rendered in HTML with very specific tables to make it all line up. I'm still super-glad for CSS being a lot better now, but I'm sure for some people, there's some retro-nostalgia for that incongruity between page / journal layouts and these table-filled quiz results from elsewhere on the Internet.)
no subject
Date: 2021-01-23 09:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-23 09:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-23 09:56 pm (UTC)…not for lack of trying…
no subject
Date: 2021-01-23 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-23 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-23 10:12 pm (UTC)And Yahoo! apparently also owned Flickr for a bit, and it still survives, although as a diminished version of what it was. Which is also applicable to Tumblr, as well.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-24 01:38 am (UTC)As to your last point, I think on Livejournal that the S1 system layouts were all based on tables (html), but with S2 they started implementing CSS.
One of my most GRRR things about current 'social media' platforms is their insistence on uniformity. Twitter used to allow you to do a wallpaper behind your feed. And Facebook, ugh. But they decided that no one needed to know how to code things, and disallowed all that.
I love visiting people's journals for the Snowflake challenge and look at the things they've done with them, such a reflection of individual taste and personality!
no subject
Date: 2021-01-24 04:18 pm (UTC)