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Comment by alexjplant | Hacker News Reader

This page reminds me of the old web. I kind of miss it, auto-playing MIDI songs and custom cursors and all.

I'll take that over having to wade through Reddit 12 times out of 10.

As the creator was born in 1999, it's interesting to me because she's nostalgic for a period she did not fully experience. It's something I did, and it's neat yet strange to see it being done to a part of my past.

I'm not a lot older than her and have a similar fondness for that æsthetic. While it's true I didn't fully experience it, a lot of late 90's sites were still online, more or less untouched, in the late 2000's, so they were there to be appreciated even though they were a relic by then. At that time, IE stagnation was still a thing, and MIDI playback was still in browsers, so the 2008 experience of a 1998 site was probably fairly authentic.

Similar to how I did not experience the late 70's but gained a fondness for it by watching "Taxi" and listening to Television.

I am in a similar age range and I am drifting towards this aesthetic. I think it's the counterculture of the increasingly sleek websites, with their overcomplicated 3D animations. Not saying either is better than the other, just it is the opposite end of the spectrum and way of still having fun when creating a website while making it feel personal.

it reminds me of the phenomena of parodying 'I Love Lucy!'. Even though it hasn't seen new episodes since 1957 it is included or mentioned in some way in nearly every popular media.

The constant revitalization of the parody through new works ensures that the future will also include some mention. I think 90s aesthetic/internet-culture is a bit like that -- the projects that include those themes beget new similar projects in the future as long as they have some level of audience exposure.

I feel this. It seems like somewhere I would have thrived and immensely enjoyed, and I hear people's nostalgia for it, but it's something I never got to experience myself. (~18yo).

Yeah, it was freakin' awesome. All my friends and I made websites. We linked to each other, shared sources of good GIFs and images, chatted on IRC, eventually shared mp3s when those were a thing. It was a seriously badass time to grow up. I regularly feel very thankful/lucky to have grown up in that time period and have my own online computer to experience all that stuff!

>It's something I did, and it's neat yet strange to see it being done to a part of my past.

Agree. I read recently that digital cameras have been taking off among younger people in the way vinyl took off among millennials. I'm excited to see how people that grew up with excessive, toxic social media manage to find better solutions for dealing with the internet

This is common among the younger people joining the internet. An the creator of SpaceHey.com was nostalgic for the days of old social media that happened when he was too young to experience it.

Add me if you have a SpaceHey account! https://spacehey.com/josh

I have a soft spot a mile wide for SpaceHey, there's just something about the whole idea that's really nice. I'm not sure how much of it is because building a whole social media platform out of nostalgia is a very hacker-like thing to do and how much of it is just because it's nice to see a social media platform that's not so aggressively monetised and manipulative but either way I'm really happy it exists.

I'm nostalgic for the Amiga despite being born in the late 90s!

You might have liked Lulzsec's website. They had an auto-playing audio clip of the Love Boat TV theme and an ASCII ship above text lyrics that replaced the word 'love' with 'lulz'. It was refreshingly amusing.

Sadly archive.org doesn't have a copy from its live state—however I saved the home page at the time (MHTML ftw) and here's a video capture of it*: https://streamable.com/zon5wy

* Expires in one day

Edit: for context Lulzsec were a hacking group a decade back responsible for various headline-making leaks and website hacks.

Until they flipped Sabu

It's been a long time since I had the sensation of going from a site with a brightly/strongly coloured background to another on white/beige and my eyes not being able to handle it. I really quite enjoyed it.

They were born in 1999, so it's more like what a new generation's impression of what the old web was like.

You don't really have to know what specific year they were born in, the refusal to capitalize is a dead giveaway they did not experience that time at all. Anybody of that time period would be embarrassed to do so on a public site.

Kind of funny how we carry these different meanings to mostly meaningless things.

I had an all-lowercase website for a couple years on the early web. So did many of my friends. Archive.org snapshots are 2000-2001, but they'd been around before that in many iterations.

Gah.. it's all embarrassing to look back on for other reasons...

Don't be shy, bring it back, you're ahead of the curve!

Making advisories hard to read has been a thing since forever. Remember Gobbles?

https://github.com/thinkitdata/GOBBLES/blob/master/advisorie...

Very true, trends after all come and go.

Specifically about this style though, I feel it fits right into the blog series about "domestic cozy"[1]. It aims to be exactly that, imply super casual/low effort tone, make it feel a bit more personal, and simultaneously about ignoring social traditions that feel redundant to them. Like all trends, it takes effort to follow, and part of this is encouraging friends to turn off auto-capitalization on your phone.

So I would say it's a bit more than just trying to make something hard to read, and focusing on that bit might make you miss the rest of their storytelling process!

[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/series/domestic-cozy/

Was the author the girl that owned the TSA in the past year?

Iirc it wasn't the TSA directly but an airline and their copy of the nofly list.

FYI, the author uses it/she pronouns.

So it uses it/she pronouns? Usually the object pronoun is second; does that mean that it wants people to call she "it" unless they're doing something to she? That's off the chain, and sounds like meta-trolling.

There are two forms of pronouns. The correct form is multiple pronouns, “he/them” or “it/she”. They are alternatives, both can be used. I think the first is preferred.

The second form is different cases, “he/him”. I have theory that people started using that because they didn’t want to put just “he”. They were following the multiple case form and it stuck. People aren’t really specifying cases because nobody uses different cases and nobody puts cases in the multiple pronouns form.

It's legendary.

Live journal-esque.

You should check out the game Hypnospace Outlaw, which is set basically in a geocities-forum hybrid environment. It's basically a love letter to this old very personal internet.

Yes. But I also do not like people younger than me.

No one's mentioned it yet and knowing the HN demographic I'm just gonna say: Turn on javascript for the cat.

Other than the colours being difficult to read, I really enjoy this webpage.

Now I want to go demake mine.

0 times out of ten for me. First I blocked the annoying cat, then I got to the bottom, was assaulted by blinking buttons and decided I didn’t need to know what else they were saying anyway.

Oh my, assaulted? By that single blinking icon? I hope you're ok.

Interestingly, had this complaint been about an ad, parent would have been upvoted with hundreds of comments agreeing with them.

In other words, what OP is trying to say is that websites should be designed with the users goals in mind, and IMO it's fair to say that this website wasn't designed that way.

If anything this just shows that people don't hate ads because they're obnoxious, they hate ads because they're ads.

Ads are generally not nostalgic references (and when they are, you still know that it's someone ultimately trying to push your emotional buttons to get you to give them money).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)

"assault on the senses" is a well-known idiom. Or so I thought. Apparently it’s offensive to quite a few of you, I’m sorry.

Yet everyone on HN complains about ads

Yes I blocked it with ublock

Because at the end of the day, the problem with ads isn't that they're annoying, or get in the way, or are garish, or whatever else. The problem with ads is that they are ads. They're an overt attempt to hijack your attention implant ideas in your head, ideas that are antithetical to your own wellbeing.

A little cat chasing my cursor is just plain fun. No malice involved.

> A little cat chasing my cursor is just plain fun. No malice involved.

There’s a browser setting, "prefers reduced motion" for accessibility reason. And yes, I have that enabled.

https://crimew.gay/notice/AVXaTbTamC92MLk1ei

the cat following the cursor should now apparently be properly disabled with the reduced motion acessibility setting

I decide what is annoying or not for myself.

You would not have enjoyed the late 90s.

It was okay back then, I was young and didn’t know you could design websites that are easier on the eyes.

Have you tried Firefox Reader Mode? It renders this website (and a lot of others) without a lot of distractions.

I should remember to use that more often …

Oh man, never visit Tumblr

That’s actually not as bad, as it’s usually just some big meme gifs that I can disable with my animation blocker extension.

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