Gyokuyoutama

This is such concentrated 00's energy that it reads as a modern parody of the decade, but no, it's actually from 2008:
 
 
As a side note, if you want proof of how much culture has stalled out about half of the comments are from this year from people saying "this video is so ahead of its time!!!"

McDonnell Douglas's website pre-Boeing merger is so 90's I could cry.
 
https://web.archive.org/web/19970706184231/http://www.mdc.com/
 
 
 

Pompeii graffiti vibes:
https://www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/acspc/acspc_rpc12.htm
 
From another question:

I think that the animated Disney movies that still hold up today are:
- Robin Hood
- Aladdin
- Goofy Movie
- Mulan, for the most part
- Emperor's New Groove
- Atlantis
- Lilo & Stitch
- Incredibles
- WALL-E
- Toy Story 2
 
I did enjoy others like Toy Story 1, Brother Bear, Treasure Planet, Monsters Inc., but these are not something I would sit to rewatch.
 
The Nightmare Before Christmas and Book of Life are also good, but these aren't Disney (yet)

Just had a feature length movie one.
 
Immigrant family of mother and son* move to a new country with nothing and fall on hard times, inciting incident is eventually having to commit murder just to survive (doesn't really show it but implied it was a corrupt landlord). Somehow, though this kinda shows dream logic jumps, the two eventually join the military to change their fortunes, though there's several issue where their documents aren't clean and they are guilty of a murder, though the case is obviously cold by now. They have moments of tension where they have to mess with records before being sent to their commanding officers, keep their lies straight, etc. While life abroad in the military isn't great, they obviously like it more than abject poverty, and near the end of their tour of duty abroad there's a moment where someone asks the younger boy if they'd have a smoke and gamble with them after all is said and done and they're back in the country. I remember the scene gets really intense as the line comes up.
 
And that was the exact moment that the movie cut for me, right before the boy gave an answer, and I remember seeing threads being made complaining "SO WAS THAT THE FUCKING DEVIL TEMPTING HIM OR SOMETHING WHAT" and there was this whole wild raging debate about whether the end was artistic genius or a complete anticlimax, and/or some kind of weird religious grandstanding by the director. I remember thinking the power went out in my house for a moment.
 
*I think in hindsight it makes more sense if they're sister and brother, considering how their ages would have to be similar to join the military, but I remember they were originally mother and son. Just another dream gap I guess.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=X3sQHWRgwfw

One of my favorite things to think about with stuff like gambling (unboxing crates or IRL) is that both players and the corporations will only share the big wins, thus making it seem like people win often.
 
But like, unusuals in TF2 are 1 in 150 (wiki said 1/100 for many many years). Strange knifes in CS:GO are 1 in 1500. CS2 and TF2 don't even announce to people what you unbox unless you're in a server doing the unboxxing (though valve did take the "advertise big wins" with the golden frying pan).
 
I kinda wish it was a rule for forums and stuff to say how many attempts it took to get their epic heirlooms or australium drop to help dissuade people from wasting money. But as is, people will unbox an unusual and go OMG MY FIRST UNUSUAL and post a phone picture of their screen. Which is fine, it's exciting being lucky! But many times people will reveal "yeah I'd unbox once per paycheck".

I am playing on my own map, all I changed was increasing stamina, exp and health regen on Palbox.
 
I'm ok with the hunger mechanic and the feed bag, I just feel it drains a bit too fast on attacks. Just a few attacks from my Bushi shouldn't drain half of their hunger meter, and he doesn't has any bad traits to make it so.
Meanwhile, Pals that attack passively like my Dazzi don't drain hunger.
 
The thing about repairing weapons is more because I had uncommon ones that require ancient parts (also because getting ore is a bitch since you can't automate that). After using my crossbow for a while, I try to repair it when it reaches 50% durability, and that alone costs 2 ancient parts.
Also, I am probably handcapping myself because I have no idea if the Fire/Poison variations of the bow and crossbow do more flat damage, since I had that uncommon. Why do you even have to research a new crossbow to fire the same arrow but on fire anyway?
 
It took me a while to learn that shields meant "equipable recharging FPS shields" and not "placeable shield domes"

This site has done more for my understanding of past culture than any history book:
 
https://www.myretrotvs.com/

This site has done more for my understanding of past culture than any history book:
 
https://www.myretrotvs.com/

Gentleman, behold: I have discovered a new source of licensable music!
 
 

I swear to god people need to start tapping into fucking ANTS already. There are so many fucking different species of ants and they're all wildly diverse and unique. There is so much you could do.
Deterministic ant roguelike with upgrades and trees based on the abilities of real ant species. Ant strategy game or RTS with various unique factions of ants and caste unit classes. Ant RPG with a myriad of different ant species. Utilize their different strengths to build your party. Simultaneous mass-co-op ant puzzle platformer. Cooperate as ants to reach your goal using your combined might. They write themselves.

Sometimes I think I'm just getting overly cynical as I get older and that the internet wasn't any better than it is now.
 
Then I go on Gopher and find some guy's personal webpage and I legitimately feel happy just browsing through it.  Can't chalk it down to nostalgia either, since my first experiences with the internet were on the world wide web.  I can get a similar experience browsing sites off of Curlie or Wiby.
 
I think there's a few reasons for the distinction:
 
1.) Personalization - In most modern sites, like Twitter or Reddit or Youtube, 90% of the design is already done for you.  Beyond that, there is a strong centralized culture pushing you to post certain things in a certain way.  The chase after "the algorithm."  As a result even when people are being passionate, they all end up sounding pretty similar.  On an actual personal website way off the mainstream you can literally find anything.  The layout, topics, files available, etc. are a whole new experience every time you find something new.  Even on Gopher, which is basically text only (you can post images, but only on links) you see a lot of variation.  Some people put ASCII art, some people litter pages with quotes, others just have things as no-nonsense as possible.  This leads into:
 
2.) Lack of Bots - Yeah, a bot could make any of these pages.  But there is so little benefit in doing so that they do not.  The webpages they make are more along the lines of "How to fix **** causing high CPU" with the same 8 suggestions and links to sketchy "anti-malware" scans.  If you find some guy's homepage from 2009 talking about Sailor Moon or playing D&D solo or cataloging Finnish folktales or whatever, the chances of it not being made by a human are pretty slim.  But beyond that, on modern social media there's always the threat of getting a bunch of bot replies, even when you are initially interacting with real people.  This is always annoying to me because it's just a reminder of how dead the internet currently is.  You don't get that on classic homepages.
 
3.) Exploration - There's actually a sense of finding something new and cool.  It's hard to feel that on a centralized site when everything looks 90% the same, since even if you do actually find something neat it will look nearly identical to everything else you've seen.  There's also the limited tools for exploring sites.  Search engines are pretty borked as a rule, to the point that even if you search for the exact title of a video or the exact quote occurring in a post it still might not come up.  General topic searches are even more useless.  And you usually don't have much in the way of tools outside of those things, other than relying on "the algorithm" allowing you to see something.  When it comes to classic homepages you also often don't have search; they're either too old or too small to implement such things.  But because people were aware of this being an issue, you'll find a lot more links to other pages, which allows you to actually go exploring.  On top of that, when you actually do follow a link it could go literally anywhere, not just to a single post or video that was sort of interesting.
 
Webrings are the best for this, but unfortunately most classic homepages ended up using external webring services which have since went under.  Let this be a lesson to anyone making a webring now: just do hardcoded HTML linked lists, because these are more likely to last through time.

I think I've mentioned once that I accidentally complimented a novice/indie music maker back in my CS:GO days when I complimented the person's music on their Tumblr page (they were like "i made that ty so much").
 
But another similar story is that when they first added the emotes to steam, I saw and joined the "emote art" steam group where people were making art with emotes on their profiles. I saw this thread (https://steamcommunity.com/groups/emoticonart/discussions/0/666827974867330650/) and I had to get those guncraft emotes for myself.
 
I've had this Mario on my page since the week it was posted, 2013

 
I know a lotta people here were victim to my "hey can I send u a Link" and then I'd post an Emote-Link (from legend of zelda) afterward.
 
Anyways, come 2019 I find a thread of some person making a bunch of fixes for L4D2 maps using pretty advanced techniques with the hope that one day Valve will add them to the game (https://steamcommunity.com/app/550/discussions/1/1651043320659915818/?tscn=1598588468). 2020 hits and The Last Stand update gets announced for L4D2 and I was like "wow those map changes listed on the announcement video... I bet I know who did those!"
So I added him after making a post.

 
It was then that he complimented my Mario ascii art on my profile... then we both realized that he had made that same pixel art 7 years earlier. A shame he didn't know I did L4D2 mapping stuff cuz I would've been on the community update team and had my name on the update page/in the game (and I would've been able to work on the update - damn!)...
 
At least I'm on that same community update team now, but even we must abide by Valve time. Most of the map-related bullet points on this update: https://steamcommunity.com/games/L4D2/announcements/detail/3646280012042428637?snr=2___ were done by me!!!

Hopefully we get a new community update, at some point.

This is the part of the 90's that you'll never see in "90's nostalgia" media:
 
 

Finished playing Mischief Makers recently and it was lots of fun. Very solid game, I dunno why you don't hear more talk about it. Probably ancient persisting stigma of a 2D platforming game on a 3D console.
 
General
 
The whole game is about grabbing things. You can grab things, shake them, and throw them. This takes quite a logical progression throughout the game. You can grab objects, people, projectiles, the bosses, even lasers of pure energy, and toss them around or shake them to some effect. You can even "grab" to parry certain moves which feels great. Combined with the fact that the direction you grab in sort of matters depending on where the thing is coming from, it actually creates a lot of fun depth to the mechanic, which the boss battles spare no expense in highlighting, from parrying giant fists to shaking rockets to charge them up before tossing them back.
 
I've heard some bellyaching over the controls for this game, but I honestly thought they were fine, and even interesting. It doesn't use the stick at all, it's all D-pad and buttons, which I guess is input overload for some people cause of the C-buttons, but I found it fine. The platforming mechanics have a lot of nuance which I love in platformers and I wish I saw more of in games. For instance, you can boost in all 4 directions by using the C-buttons or tapping the D-pad. But C-boosting has a high acceleration and low top speed, while D-boosting has a low acceleration but high top speed. Or, if you hold up on the D-pad while you jump, you will actually jump even higher. These are the types of tiny micro-mechanics I love to see in platformers.
 
Story
 
The presentation is very much like a Saturday morning cartoon or anime and it's quite endearing, following "chapters" of the game's story. The story, however, is frankly kind of...scatterbrained. Which did eventually grow on me and create a sort of charm in itself, but man it's just so bizarre. You play as Marina, a super-strong robot maid on a vacation or some sort with her inventor, Professor Theo, to the planet Clancer, which is inhabited by Clancers, who kidnap him. Later you learn the Clancers are kind of in a civil war between an evil emperor and their exiled king, but it's never really explained what the Clancers are...they look kind of like machines, but I'm pretty sure they're organic somehow? I think they might be made of clay or something based on their death animations? Everything on planet Clancer has the Clancer face, from the animals to the buildings (even the planet itself), which are constructed out of geometric shapes with glowing Clancer faces. It's a really bizarre aesthetic choice.
 
Anyway, the game constantly introduces new major plot points as though they are completely normal and you should already understand them, and the levels sometimes feel disconnected from each other or the overall plot, like stuff is just "happening". One level has you riding on an ostrich for no reason whatsoever, while the next has you riding on a bee miniboss that you defeated multiple chapters prior. One random guy sort of off-hand mentions to you that another guy you met a few levels ago passed away the other day. These events and others like them are never ever explained, they just happen. I am not joking when I say that the game continues throwing random plot points out of nowhere right up until the credits roll. The story really is just so bizarre and pieced together, it almost feels like they made it up as they went along, or a large amount of it was lost in translation, but the translation seems fairly solid, certainly not so rough so as to make me think that it would be any more comprehensible in its original Japanese. It's honestly hard to say if they went absurd with the story on purpose, or if it just seems that way because they had a larger vision that was simply constrained by having to make a game, which I think the anime-esque presentation may suggest.
 
Levels
 
The levels have a lot of variety to them, which I enjoyed, but I felt also led to some inconsistency. The levels range from full and fleshed out, to brief and simple. From platform gauntlets, to puzzle boxes, to minibosses, heck, some of them basically only exist for exposition purposes. It doesn't feel like there's an overall complexity or difficulty curve from start to finish, it all varies pretty starkly, it's very much a big collection of ideas. One of the stand-out levels to me is probably this one where they have you compete in a sports festival, where you literally have to play multiple events and score well for your team in order to win the level. Though honestly if I could change one thing about this game, it would be the general level aesthetic. I really don't know why they went with the look of having almost all artificial level geometry consist solely of multi-colored blocks with glowing red Clancer faces. Maybe because it's easier to design and work with? But there are actually a decent amount of levels which use a greater abundance of more natural terrain tiles, which I thought looked beautiful in isolation especially combined with the game's gorgeous backgrounds, and created a more immersive environment. I would have loved to see more of that.
 
The boss battles in this game are definitely a highlight, and are visually impressive even still, with some amazing effects and animation. They are seriously just insane and intense. The one sour note to them is the 3rd boss fight, Sasquatch Beta. The fight is very slow and unimpressive, and its 2nd phase is sorely unintuitive. The boss fights recover after that though. Many of the bosses have multiple ways you can damage them through various grabbing and shaking actions as well, which is cool. My favorite boss is probably the 1st one, Migen, which has you parrying and grabbing his giant fists to send back at him. I think it's a rare example of a background boss done right; it's so engaging and thrilling, his attack patterns are unpredictable but you're given juuust enough time to react to them and grab-parry in the direction he's swinging from. He can also throw in mixups by shooting fireballs (which you can also parry) in-between punches, switching which fist he uses, or just straight up faking you out. This game probably has some of the best 2D platformer bosses I've ever fought, owing to its unique and inventive mechanics.
 
Final and Etc.
 
Finally, each level also has 1 golden gem to find. The condition ranges from level to level, sometimes you just have to find it, other times you have to shake something specific...and for the bosses you have to beat them without getting hit even once. Yeah, if you're just trying to "beat the game" then it doesn't really expect much from you, but you won't walk away satisfied...because how much of the game's ending you're allowed to see is directly tied to how many golden gems you collect. Now you don't need ALL of them to see the normal ending sequence, but there is a bonus scene afterward, and so to see the full ending you do need every single one. I did it though, and it was honestly worth it. There's even a bonus secret golden gem you can get if you A-rank every level, but it doesn't do anything and the time requirements for the levels in this game are actually fucking insane (even just S-ranking the tutorial level is ridiculous), so I didn't do it. Honestly getting them all was not too bad, but only because I could look them up now. I cannot imagine trying to get some of these gems back when this game first came out; one of them is pure RNG for instance, requiring you to shake a miniboss at a 1/64 chance of making the gem appear. Mischief Makers is not exactly Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time; I doubt kids were sharing many schoolyard secrets about this game, so in-context some of them are definitely a bit brutal.
 
Overall, I'd give Mischief Makers a 7.8/10. It's a little on the shorter side, is a big box of ideas rather than a smooth curve of level progression, the aesthetic is weird, and the story feels like a mishmash of stuff. But it's got heaps of charm and character, the levels are rarely boring or uninteresting, the boss fights are spectacular and make you feel so cool, and it has lots of mechanical depth for players who decide to seek it out, which it has a way of nudging you into. The grabbing, throwing, and shaking is such a novel idea to centralize the game around and it just works, it feels like a truly unique platformer in that regard.

The insight was remembering "if it's from that era, someone probably put .wmv after it ironically."

The insight was remembering "if it's from that era, someone probably put .wmv after it ironically."

Took me forever to find this video again, so I am preserving this important bit of TF2 history:
 
 

Took me forever to find this video again, so I am preserving this important bit of TF2 history:
 
 

Took me forever to find this video again, so I am preserving this important bit of TF2 history:
 
 

Took me forever to find this video again, so I am preserving this important bit of TF2 history: