Tag: internet

Recovered: Furnitures the Great Brown Oaf

It’s April 1st again, and I’ve taken to doing a change of pace post on this day every year. Two years ago, it was a plea for returning to the old days of the web, or at least the good, rose-colored parts of it. Last year, well, I forgot last year.

I want to return to the subject of the OldWeb. It is certainly true that it was fairly exclusionary, the home of a lot of sexism, and a bit of racism (although, I think, not as much as recently, at least not overtly). But there was also the feeling that, if you just went out and created something silly and wonderful, that it would find its audience, somehow.

If you go out looking for lists of old websites, you might happen upon this one. Don’t follow it yet: it uses a word that it probably shouldn’t, and you shouldn’t take this link as an endorsement for that. The reason I link it is that it’s a big long list of fun websites.

I checked through the list, and something like 95%, 19-in-20, of them are broken links, completely different sites, or squatted domain names. There are a handful that survive, but they’re in the minority. So it goes. Someone who cares could possibly hunt up old archived versions from out of the mighty Wayback Machine.

Many of the links, well, not many people will weep for them, but there was one site in particular of which I rued the passing: the homepage of Furnitures, the Great Brown Oaf. This guy:

Hey kids, it’s Furnitures! The Spongebob who never was!

Have you ever seen such a charming drawing? Don’t answer that: you probably have. But I think there’s a lot to like for this creature-thing. His coarse fur, his too-wide smile, and his vacant expression.

Furnitures is the star of a children’s show, called Furnitures the Great Brown Oaf. It is a show that doesn’t exist, has never existed, and unless the nature of the world changes substantially will probably never exist. Despite these facts, a person called Henry Stokes created a fansite for it.

Somewhere Henry called the show “slightly demented,” and that fits. In its backstory, an “anonymous philanthropist” found Furnitures (actually a sea mammal) in his travels, and was so charmed by it that he captured it and dragooned it into hosting a kids’ show, despite the fact that Furnitures is only vaguely aware of its surroundings.

Furnitures was last seen on the living internet in 2009. But… on the site was an email address for its creator. And I tried emailing that address. And surprisingly, I got a response. Henry Stokes is not only still with us but he answers his email!

I told him of my fond memories of the (very weird) website, and asked if I could revive it. And he said yes!

So I have. I have dredged up the files for the fake-fansite for fake-show Furnitures, the Great Brown Oaf, removed the edits made by the Internet Archive, further modified them to (slightly) adhere to modern web practices, and put it all up on Neocities, a wonderful free host for silly little web projects like this one, in the mode of late, lamented Geocities.

If you want to have a look, just go here! You might enjoy it for a few minutes! Maybe the obsession will, like a contagious disease, leap from me to you, and the legend of Furnitures will live on! Someday, when Henry Stokes and I are gone, and Neocities has shut down, as it someday must, maybe one of you will remember this site, and revive it again. It’s already the first hit on Google for “Furnitures the Great Brown Oaf,” whereas before it was mostly sites selling housewares.

If we work together like this, Furnitures the Oaf may have a lifetime longer than any of us. This Great creature will grow and, have a reality greater than any human being, which would be an awesome thing for a totally made up being to be.

So please, follow my link, and let the invented Oaf and his friends live in your brain, as it does mine. Despite his size, he doesn’t take up much room.

Yetso the Fiend, a pirate, who has a baboon for a heart. (The character does, not the actor who plays him.)

Aftermath Looks Back On One Year of Operation

Two whole days in a row of non-Youtube links? Who’d have thought it possible! Shame yesterday was on Nintendo-related things, the other over-frequent subject of our little blogmachine, but I guess you can’t have it all.

Aftermath is composed of just five webugees (original word plz steal) from various other bigcorp contentboxes, and is one of a whole wave of similar creator-owned outfits that also includes Second Wind, 404 Media and Defector. All seem to be doing pretty well… for now… but we’re hoping all the best for all of them, at least until they grow into Kotakus, Escapists or Washingtons Post of their own, and come to oppress an entirely new generation of writer. But that’s the future, and there’s still time to avoid it, at least according to my good friend, the Ghost of Collective Ownership Future.

Aftermath’s principals have an article up describing their experiences, and its variously enlightening and illuminating. Running a small business is a process rife with pitfalls, and when you’re just five people, most working part-time and not able to afford to just pay others to take care of the hard parts, it can be difficult, especially when at your last jobs you could just focus on doing the thing you’re good at, the thing you like doing. Another problem that being only five people creates is fragility. Not intending to jinx them at all, but if one of them were to suddenly pass away, could the remaining four keep the banner held aloft?

But they are doing it. It’s working! And they have plans to expand next year. If you want to follow them and help keep them afloat, they have a trial subscription going where you can read them for one month for just $1. And their monthly rate is just $7 anyway, $10 for commenting privileges and Discord access.

Reading the article, especially the bit about how sites like this tend to slowly bleed subscribers over time just as a fact of their existence, as life happens to their readers in the aggregate, but gain them in lumps as new features are introduced or bursts of publicity occur. It feels like we could all stand to recognize this, and remember these sites need subscribers to survive. Aftermath’s rates are quite reasonable I think, considering that the New York Times charges $25 a month for their output, and as a bonus Aftermath doesn’t even publish frequent transphobic op-eds from right-wing jerks. Huh!

Surviving Forums in 2024

Chris Person on Aftermath (a site that, to warn you, sometimes blocks articles behind paywalls) gives us a big list of web forums that still exist, and are even popular, today. There’s many categories there, but indeed gaming is one of them. We have a vested interest in the survival of as many non-social-media sites as possible, so here is the whole list of gaming boards from the article:

That’s a lot! There’s a lo more links there too, including a big list of technology and compute forums. By all means, click through, to the article, for more!

Sundry Sunday: Sonic History Lesson for Future Aliens

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

From Newgrounds, that hotbed of gaming stuff for twenty-eight years now, which suggests to me that it might be better called Oldgrounds by now, but that is not here, there, nor anywhere. This video, from user PoultrygeistGame (I have not checked if that is on their driver’s license, if they have one), is about Sonic the Hedgehog fandom, and how difficult it is to properly deduce the general opinion of that fandom of its series just from the content. Here is the video, for which I have to try using a new form of embed in order to present here, since Newgrounds embedding isn’t as automated as is with the Tube of You. Note: contains profanity, if that is of concern. Also alludes to certain unhealthy aspects of online culture. You’ll see.

On Finding and Preserving Discord and Youtube

This editorial doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of this blog. However, blogs don’t have views anyway, so what would that even mean?

This is a slightly edited version of a diatribe I emitted on mefi.social. I really want people to see it and think about what it means though.

A dismaying thing is how much of current gaming culture is locked behind Discords, and/or is revealed to the world only through Youtube videos.

These two phenomena are the result of the Myth of the Benevolent Corporation, which was largely started by early Google and their “Do No Evil” policy, which sustained the early web for a good while but itself did huge damage to online culture, and yet promises to do much much more, when they decided that profits mattered more.

When Youtube started, everyone saw it as a kind of miracle. In the early days videos were limited to 10 minutes, but even so they began attracting a huge amount of material. When they switch to just letting people upload anything for free, that exploded.

I love this page, at http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/archive/icons/iconolog/pavilion/iconHall.html. I’m really sad that the world depicted within has shrunken so much, and of the list of links on this page only three survive.

It’s not just gaming stuff that I’m talking about really, although as a popular fixation for people it’s kind of a hint of things to come. Lots of information is currently exposed to the world through Youtube videos and minidocs.

From U Can Beat Videogames’s video on Shadowrun. It’s great, but some day it’ll be gone. How will people beat an ancient obscure SNES game like this then?

But Youtube has always been a time bomb for all this content. It’s inevitable that Youtube will someday begin deleting things. If not sooner, then later. Yet there are few entities capable of preserving all of it, or even most of it. All of this will [get destroyed] like [crying] in [a downpour].

Of course, it’s not like videos like these have any other hope as it stands. A collection of the incredible size of Youtube’s is so big that only a government could realistically do it, and most of those have their own issues when it comes to continuity of mission and funding.

But combined with Discords as a means of communication, and (bizarrely) information, a lot of online culture is currently a black box to outsiders, unless they sign up to dozens of miscellaneous Discords. And there is a limit to the number of servers you can follow, which is reputed to be 100. (It used to be that Google could get you a quick answer to a question like how many Discord servers can one user follow, but now I’m not sure.)

Social media companies, who all seem to be racing each other to make their services as crappy as possible to non-paying users, are no solution either.

There used to be a Mastodon search engine, at search.noc.social. This is what remains of it. (Yes, it’s just a white page with the text “project has been removed.”)

Fediverse to the rescue! But no, a lot of it is transitory, sometimes intentionally so! In some circles even suggesting that Mastodon be just searchable, let alone preservable, will subject you to a storm of criticism. It’s true that being opaque to general search helps protect vulnerable users, a noble cause, but it also makes Mastodon’s discoverability very low. (One solution, which I think I mentioned here before, is an opt-in search solution called tootfinder, but it currently only goes back three months.)

And I don’t see many other people talking about this, even though the sudden decay of Twitter and Reddit has made this essential problem more visible than its been for a long time.

I feel like going onto every Discord I follow, gaming research ones in particular, and ringing alarm bells, but it’s a task just to find them out, and really what good would it do. People use Discord because it’s free and easy and they even maintain the server for you. These kinds of spaces have always relied on some patron to uphold them; the only real differences are before they were visible to search and the Wayback Machine, and now, it’s a single company that will increasingly hold access to these places obscured behind a storm of pleas to subscribe to Nitro, and someday will delete them entirely.

The Zelda II Randomizer Discord. As a community, it works okay. As a way of storing information, well, it sucks rocks. As a way of preserving everything, it’s DOOOOOMED.

If you think I’m being hyperbolic, there are vast swaths of online culture that are already lost permanently: the Compuserve forums of the era immediately preceding the rise of the web. Compuserve was once the biggest online presence. And AOL, which grew to eclipse it in size, likewise holds (still? I don’t know, it’s on AOL!) a vast amount of early internet culture.

Newsgroup archives are a bit better off because of their openness, although nowadays it’s mostly seen as just a way to enable piracy.

Still, essential web services are at least preservable. The Fediverse resembles those, at least in principle, so it’s immediately better off than Discords and Youtube, for making old information findable, even if it’s currently really hard to do it (and some people are outright opposed to it).

It is time to wrap this all up. I say things like this frequently these days. Maybe someday someone will listen. The power and reach of the internet doesn’t have to rely on big companies. I also have qualms about the ability of a even a horde of individual servers to keep things going, mind you. All those dead links on all those surviving old websites, they once represented living projects too.

I think what we ultimately need is an independent organization that can keep up old sites and communities, and provide a place for new ones, maybe supported by donations, without the explicit profit motive of the bigcorps. Something that looks like the Internet Archive or Wikipedia. There’s places where you can host plain websites even today, like the Tildeverse (but its individual pieces, like Fediverse servers, always feel like they could vanish at any time), ancient-yet-still-here Angelfire (of which, like the Lycos it’s a part of, it’s amazing still survives), or the newer, enthusiast-focused Neocities (which too has no guarantee of longevity).

Companies can live longer than people, or their interest cycles. It doesn’t feel right that something like a website require someone to dedicate their life to maintaining it, but due to the dysfunctional way our economic has come to see companies (involving the hateful words fiduciary duty) are also vulnerable to the winds of change. It feels like a non-profit, or at least a durable privately-held company that isn’t pushed by rapacious groups to chase every profit lead no matter how disastrous, may be a solution. I don’t know if it really is, though. I’m just watching this, mostly from the outside. I hope someone can do something though, to overturn the cold tides of entropy. I really do.

Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection

This is Slant. I could tell you so much about Slant, but I think a lot of the fun of these puzzles is figuring out a good process for solving them yourself.
Loopy

I got a treat for you people today, a genuine treasure of the internet, a collection of forty computer-generated puzzles of wide-ranging types, from Sudoku (called “Solo” because of trademarks) to Minesweeper. And they’re not only all open source and free, they’re free for many platforms. Not all the puzzles are yet available for all platforms, but it’s continually being worked on, with new puzzles added from time to time. It has been for nineteen years; when it got started it only had five puzzle types. It’s one of the best things out there, and I’m amazed it’s not better known generally.

Galaxies

I can’t overstate what a wonder this collection is. All the puzzles are their own executable, if you don’t just play them on the web anyway. Each one of these puzzles offers many hours of happy puzzling. My own favorites are Loopy, Slant, Bridges, Dominosa, Galaxies, Net and Untangle. Most of the puzzles are of a type that should be familiar to fans of the Japanese puzzle magazine Nikoli, but they’re all randomly generated, and playable on multiple difficulty levels.

If the name Simon Tatham sounds familiar, he’s the guy who also created and maintains the popular networking tool PuTTY.

Here’s the links, all of these are free:

Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection main site, which has implementations for Java, Javascript and Windows

Here’s some other HTML implementations

Dominosa

For Android on the Play Store

For iOS on the Apple App Store

On the Windows Store

In the Debian and Ubuntu package repositories (and it should be available in your own distribution’s repository, too)

Flathub

And here it is for Windows again, but distributed through Chocolatey

Set Side B Changes Formats!

I’m thrilled to announce that today marks the beginning of big news for Set Side B. We’re switching our theme! We’re no longer providing the most eclectic and interesting of retro, indie and niche gaming information. No, starting on this auspicious day we’re going to all old websites and ancient meme videos!

We’re talking zombo.com! We’ve got YTMND! The Onion! I Can Has Cheezburger! Know Your Meme!

You like wikis? Have you heard of Everything2, or The Earth Edition of the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? I hear there is also another upstart wiki-based knowledge site out there somewhere, we look forward to the day when it’s nearly as content-packed as E2 or H2G2.

Remember Slashdot? Remember Digg? I mean the Digg after the Digg that succeeded Digg! Have you been to Fark lately? How about MetaFilter? For some reason I’m still there! The twin fonts of news, Salon and Slate! Liberal infozones Dailykos and Talking Points Memo, they still exist, thumbing their noses at ennui and entropy!

Project Gutenberg is still gamely trying to give away a trillion ebooks! Snopes debunks all the worst misinformation out there, and Cecil Adams’ The Straight Dope column stopped running, but seems to be now running again, and new columns debut on their message boards! And the Internet Archive, in particular their Wayback Machine, is an essential tool for any thinking netizen, and I hear they could really use your support!

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency still brings a droll sort of funny. The IMDB may be owned by Amazon now, but you can still get a ton of information on nearly every form of visual media there. Rotten Tomatoes still aggregates movie reviews from critics and viewers alike.

Game stuff? GameFAQs, although owned by Gamespot, is still around, and StrategyWiki is the good version of what Fandom ruthlessly exploits. The Cutting Room Floor provides info and esoterica on hundreds of games!

There are webcomics too! Let’s see. XKCD, Argon Zark, Dork Tower, Order of the Stick, Penny Arcade, PvP, Bob the Angry Flower, Girl Genius, Megatokyo and The Perry Bible Fellowship! Also Maakies and Red Meat (although they’re a tad edgier, and Makkies is sometimes NSFW).

We hope you’ve enjoyed this April Fool’s Day post! Happy thoughts! It’s intended as a real and useful post and certainly isn’t just an excuse to write whatever I wanted today!

But pleaase remember: the internet isn’t forever. The sites you love now won’t always be around. Ask me about Suck.com, Plastic, or the Brunching Shuttlecocks someday. But not today, I’ve got this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side.

Have a few ancient Youtube videos from our voluminous files! (Yes, we keep files of cool Youtube videos. We’re awesome that way.)

That should be enough for now. Gotta keep some of it in reserve. For later….

Sundry Sunday: CUBE

It makes pocket calculators look like the cotton gin

It’s coming….

It’s fifteen years old now, but I still love the old “funnymovieinternet” video CUBE, which is a promo video from an era of video games that never really existed. In our little circle of friends, PREPARE YOURSELF FOR CUBE is still a signifier and in-joke all to itself. The site it came from is long defunct, but fortunately it hasn’t been hit by a spurious Youtube takedown notice yet, which as time approaches infinity, appears to be the ultimate fate of all videos on that frog-forsaken website.

Remembering Orisinal

We’ve been remembering old game sites lately, not the big ones like Newgrounds, but the little ones. Specifically, Ferry Halim’s Orisinal.

What Comes Around

I hesitate to offer that link because everything on Orisinal is programmed in Flash, and not in way that works great with secure Flash emulator Ruffle, but the site survives today, even if it’s difficult to play anything on it. The games to the bottom of the list are more likely to work well with Ruffle.

Orisinal is a collection of very simple games with a laid-back vibe. Nothing too demanding or upsetting. Just a lot of clean and fun amusements for passing a few minutes in a pleasant way.

Bubble Bees

In internet terms, Orisinal is ancient, and the internet is not forever. Quite the opposite in fact. The oldest games on it date to around 2000. That it’s still up, even if it hasn’t seen much new content in over a decade, is a miracle. I keep harping on this I feel like, but things vanish from the internet every day, and the Wayback Machine can’t catch all of them (and itself isn’t guaranteed to not disappear someday). Enjoy it while you can.

Cats

Orisinal

Remember EYEZMAZE and GROW?

There was a time when these short Flash games were the toast of the internet. There is very little cultural memory online for anything that isn’t absolutely huge (and almost no quality control over the things that become huge) so no one talks about GROW anymore, or its Japanese creator On, which is a tremendous shame.

EYEZMAZE took a tremendous blow when Flash shut down. I really hate how people generally accepted its demise as good and necessary when it obliterated so many great things, like Homestar Runner’s original website, that are only now sort of becoming available again. There were serious problems with Flash, it’s true, but not all the reasons it was shoved out the airlock were good ones. Fortunately On has converted many of his games to work with HTML5.

The art is great for its own sake, but the games, available by clicking on the icons at the top of the site, are the highlights, and foremost of those are the GROW series. I was going to link them individually here, but most of them are GROW in some form of other. You should probably start with the first.

The object is to figure out the best order to click on the various items to add to the GROW planet. Every time you add something, things that were already on the planet may “level up” depending on the other things that are with it there. Some things being added too early may harm the development of other things. Usually there’s one specific order that will result in a perfect score (and an animation that goes with it). Figuring it out, using the visual clues from your failed attempts, will usually take many tries, but a run through only takes a couple of minutes at most. All off the GROW games take this general form, although most of them aren’t as complex as the first.

Bitrot has not been kind to GROW. There was an Android version of Grow RPG that appears to have succumbed to Google’s awful app culling policy, where if something isn’t updated, for whatever reason, in a certain time they just delete it. (Not nearly enough has been said about his hostile this is to software preservation. It’s horrendous.)

On has had health struggles over the years, which have interfered with his creation of new amusements. He still seems to be up and active though, and we hope he continues creating both his games and his art for a while to come.

EYEZMAZE (some games may require Ruffle)

On’s Twitter feed

On’s Bilibili page (Bilibili is a Chinese video site)

News 7/24/22: Knockoff Internet Lego

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

At TechRadar, Jeremy Peel is set on telling us about Rogue Mage, an expansion to the Gwent card roguelite game set in the Witcher universe. Hey! Did you know there are roguelike games that don’t involve building a deck? It’s true!

At NintendoLife, Jim Norman (hey! a new guy!) informs of a blatant knockoff of beloved indie perennial Mini Metro on the Switch eShop. Boo! Hiss! Burble! Splorch! It’s like some folk on your planet were born without shame glands.

Jorge Jiminez at PC Gamer tells us the FCC is trying to get everyone in the US good internet. As a one-celled life form from a distant planet I don’t have much stake in the matter, but I can be happy for people by proxy, and do you know why? It’s because I’m not a jerk, drebnar! Glad to see the agency is trying to recover from that horrid stance against Net Neutrality back during what I understand Earth people call “the years of the carrot monster.”

Meow

At Kotaku, John Walker (another new name!) sounds a harsh note about Stray, a game that most of the internet has enthused over, by mentioning how, while it starts with you playing as a very cat-like cat, by the end you’re also playing as their robot companion a lot, and shooting things all zappy zappy, and doing a lot of video game stuff. It still doesn’t sound at all like a bad game, but just, something a bit different by the end than people may expect?

Bunches of people have been talking about the new Lego set that lets you build a plastic Atari 2600, our link to the subject is CapnRex101 at Brickset, a Lego fansite. It looks like a great model that is full of detail, although notably it retails for $240. For that price you could probably get your hands on a real VCS, although at the cost of it being actually playable, at least if you have a CRT lying around. But if you were going to go that far, you’d probably just look into getting a Flashback.

Surfing with a Dreamcast Web Browser in 2022

The Sega Dreamcast was ahead of its time in many ways. It was possible to load web pages on a Sega Saturn Net Link, but the Dreamcast had a built-in dial-up modem and came with a web browser included in the box. In the US it was created by PlanetWeb; Japanese users got DreamPassport, . Further, several games had built-in web browsers to connect with websites online that offered hints, forums, DLC and special functionality. Sonic Adventure allowed you to upload the Chao from your Chao Garden to a day care service. All of those services broke when a game’s servers were taken down, although in the case of Sonic Adventure, a fan bought the domain when it expired and put up the original content so that Dreamcast consoles can find it.

While several versions of the PlanetWeb browser were released during the system’s short life, they all have some pretty significant limitations. The Dreamcast itself only has 26 MB of RAM, of which only 16 MB is of general use. Plus many sites rely on scripting, which the Dreamcast wasn’t equipped to handle even at the time. On top of it all few people use dial-up internet any more, so that modem isn’t too useful. The Dreamcast Broadband Adapter is an effective workaround, but is hard to find. The Dreamcast also had keyboard and mouse peripherals release for it to aid in internet use.

Dan Wood on YouTube recently plugged a Broadband Adapter, keyboard, and mouse into his Dreamcast and took it online with a 2008 browser release, and the video above shows the results. If you’re curious to see how much the web has changed since then it’s worth the 22 minutes out of your day it takes to watch it. (Less time, if you speed the video up! Another minute less if you skip past the ad!)

How many people used the Dreamcast for serious browsing? It was a fairly clunky experience even back then, when most web pages were fairly lightweight and most didn’t rely on scripting. I had it back then and I only put it in a few times. The PC experience was much better even then. Internet Explorer launched in 1995, and of course Netscape Navigator and Mosaic came before. Compare that to the Dreamcast’s 1999 release date for some hint that, even though it was the first console that was internet capable out of the box, it was already a little late to the party.

That’s okay though. We’re publishing a gaming blog in 2022. Old things are okay with us.

A few more links if you want to find out more: Sega Retro’s page on the Dreamcast Web Browser, here’s a Wayback Machine link to how the browser’s default landing page would have looked at the time, and here’s an archive of how the page looked in 2010, near the end of its life, after a fan had taken it over.

Browsing the Web on the Sega Dreamcast in 2022 — Is It Possible? (YouTube video, 22 minutes, contains Squarespace ad)