Tag: neocities

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.)

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.