2023 Reddit Refugee

On Decentralization:

“We no longer have choice. We no longer have voice. And what is left when you have no choice and no voice? Exit.” - Andreas Antonopoulos

  • 2 Posts
  • 59 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Nice start, this is very nostalgic! If you ever had an old Geocities, Tripod, or even MySpace back in the day, check out the Way Back Machine and look for that old URL for some inspiration.

    I recommend the following suggestions to build upon this better:

    • Good if you can make this an HTTP site rather than HTTPS, although I’m not sure if that’s possible on Neocities.
    • Fix the font choice - back then in CSS you would list a series of fonts that would render - Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, Verdana, Times New Roman. It’s too legible, so switch it to a color pink that is a bit harder to discern from the background. You need black rectangle backgrounds for some of the text.
    • The framerate on the GIFs is too high. More pixels and less frames - preferably no more than 15 FPS if possible. I used Macromedia Fireworks back in the day and some other Macromedia animation program, good if you could have terrible color profiles on some of the GIFs).
    • Affiliates sidebar linking some sites. It may be good to link to other retro 90s-inspired sites. They’re out there, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head.
    • Include some fake banner ads and sidebar ads - not pop up ads as those were the bane of existence. Maybe old banner ads for Rack Nine web hosting, or something similar (and of course they shouldn’t link anywhere).
    • “Jump to Top” anchor hyperlinks.
    • You need a low quality midi that plays in the background automatically - no user choice.
    • Add a Favicon.
    • Plenty of links on the page that don’t go anywhere. And more under construction signs.
    • Adjust the resolution of the background tile - it’s too big and too high quality. Get it to something like 128x128 or 250x250.
    • Add a Shoutbox. Remember those? Although I’m not sure how to keep it secure.
    • A link to “Bookmark this site”.
    • You need a fan art page that only has 4 fan arts, says “under construction”, and possibly steal other people’s fan art and credits them so it looks like there is actually content on the page while hiding the fact that you have no time to work on this web site but you’re hoping a million visitors will one day come here.
    • I already see marquees which is great. Good if you can another marquee that has text moving in a wave/ripple pattern as it slowly (and keyword: very, very slowly) moves across the screen. I don’t remember if you could have alternating color text as part of it, my old HTML, PHP, and CSS knowledge escapes me from 20 years ago.
    • A link to your PHPBB or Invision Power forum that, when clicked, only takes you to a blank white screen with the typical MySQL error. The hyperlink should have a badly inserted text next to it that says “This is currently down, we will fix it with a new Forum software after Finals Week!”, the more ASCII art the better. I recommend something like the below.
    General Error
    SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]
    
    Table './that90ssite/phpbb_sessions' is marked as crashed and should be repaired [145]
    
    An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.
    

  • This is something I’ve thought about too. I have some rare items on old DVDs that should be preserved. I’d love to upload it to Archive.org, but I’m hesitant because I don’t know if personal identifiers get attached to the media.

    If I use a program like MakeMKV to rip my DVD to a computer, how do I check the file if there’s any personal identifiers? I’m aware I can right click and pick “Remover Personal Information” or whatever in Windows, but is there anything else that would attach any hardware identifiers to it? I want to preserve some of these discs since they’re long out of print and the company that distributed it is no more and you can’t buy this anywhere. I just don’t want my uploads to be linked back to me.



  • Marc Benioff: “Indeed, and rest assured that, with some form of emotions, I announce today that this is truly one of the days we’ve ever had. Despite this departure of our 700 wage slaves, we must continue to strive for greatness, adjust for new demands in this market, synergize our corpo-speak, become leaner, agile, and more aggressive, and certainly pad the coffers of the owner class.”

    “We must be ready to innovate in our space. For this fiscal year, our teams need to be ready and work themselves to their bones. I expect our sales force to sleep on our SalesForce factory floor, with no detours forever more for sure.”




  • The first 3-D gaming consoles. What an era. I had the N64 in the late 90s and was lucky enough to get a used PS1 in the early 2000s.

    Mario 64 was the best for me. That opening title screen where you could stretch Mario’s face was hysterical. And then the opening cinematic was so breathtaking, just having that 3-D camera navigate around, with a musical crescendo ending with Mario Yahooing out of the warp pipe. I’ve never been so blown away seeing 3-D gaming. Then came Star Fox, and Ocarina of Time - Magical experiences that I’m getting goosebumps just reminiscing about them.

    And of course PS1 when I got to play FF7. Wow. While I hated the graphics (apart from cinematic) since I got this console late into the end of the N64 generation, this was a formative game.

    Getting all nostalgic here for simpler times. Having the magic of extremely senior and experienced devs bumping out amazing 2D masterpiece games on SNES, only to immediately shift into 3-D was great. Great time for gaming… before the dark times… before Horse Armor, live service, pay to play, “cut-and-paste-apology-letter-we-promise-to-do-better” broken games, and FOMO battle passes.



  • Shout out to the 3DS. What an amazing portable! I have so many memories with it, and it was the only gaming device I carried with me EVERYWHERE because of street pass and spot pass. I bought all the bundle games for StreetPass because it was so much fun having iterative improvement with visitors to your 3DS. Integration into other mainline games was pretty great too.

    Not everything took advantage of the 3D aspect, but the games I played creatively innovated with it and provided new perspectives to solving puzzles.

    I freaking love my 3DS. Right now Steam Deck has surpassed it, but man what an era of gaming.

    Note: If you’re nostalgic for StreetPass, look up “Street Pass 2”. Despite Nintendo shuttering all the services, you can still work your way around and get StreetPasses to your console, but you’ll have to homebrew it.

    Other runner ups: SNES (I was a kid that wasted away on that console), Wii, Wii U. I used to throw Wii Guitar Hero parties with friends. Great times.