The Brain Dump

8-10-24

Back When Stuff Was Cool

I remember the good old internet days when everything seemed cool. As we get more "sophisticated" in taste, we end up eschewing those "lame" things. What kind of things? Well, like these things:

Marquee

My introduction to dynamic content on the internet was Internet Explorer's exclusive tag. WTF does that mean? Well, you see, back then there were the two big browsers: Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Microsoft had actually starting building proprietary HTML tags into their browser which became pretty popular with the DIY website builders. These days with the introduction of CSS & HTML5, the marquee tag is "grandma played with a hoop with a stick" kind of boring. Sure, I'll admit that it isn't the most flashy, but I think that now it's more universally supported it's still a fun & easy little tool for more dynamic content if you're starting out with being a webmaster. To save you all a few clicks, here's an example of whatever it is I'm rambling about:

Thanks to wikitechy.com for the snippet.

This is the ghost of internet past

GIFs

The natural addition to more dynamic content on a website is GIF files. Before I begin, let's put to bed the pronunciation argument. Yeah yeah, I have my own opinion on the topic, but mine is actually correct so I won't state it here as to not rock the boat. When I mean GIF, I don't mean like the high framerate things you see on Reddit or whatever; I mean the old-fashioned capture from a video game in a loop with frames in the single digits. I do see the clever use of these old-school GIFs on occasion on certain websites, but they're definitely not the staple they used to be. Just in case you don't know what kind of GIF I'm referring to, here's an example I would have referred to as "bad-ass":

Thanks to Neocities neighbor The Horror GIF Necronomicon for the GIF.

Chat Rooms

Anyone who had the internet in the 90s knew the mating call of the bored teen on a Friday night: "A/S/L?" (Age/Sex/Location). That was the standard protocol to follow when wandering into one of these chat rooms to eventually jumping to PMs. I still remember my first time. It was like 8 p.m. and I think my mom was cooking hamburgers. I jumped onto some random chat room and proclaimed to them proudly my A/S/L. I was immediately chatted up by a hot Aussie chick (no, there were no pictures but everyone on the internet was hot back then). She told me about what she had for dinner and about school or something. My mom was flabbergasted and intrigued. After that it all descended into meeting all sorts of random script kiddies and other types who used to terrorize Chatropolis for fun.

Now I've gotten that out of my system, I need something else to bitch & moan about. That's going to take me some time. Until then.