A work in progress; this page is under construction.
One of my hobbies is to surf old web archives and try to recover old media. I have uploaded some of the media I have found to this website, and you can find them here and on the sidebar. I am still trying to figure out the best navigation strategy for these files.
Okay, but why?
I honestly just think it's neat! The fact that some of these images pre-date 9/11, the shift to a modern web, and made with such limited resources and kept for so long is amazing ot me. An image can be 25 years old and still usable, we as humans are still able to encorporate the art made by such limited technologies is amazing to me. I mourn the loss of all the data that has been skipped over, including my own old websites, blogs, art and graphics. This time of the internet felt like a time before knowledge reigned supreme and authenticity had taken over. I remember when I would save a file to the smallest bandwidth possible and optimization was key, so it's interesting to contrast how modern websites treat images like text and old webites use them so carefully.
How does it work?
I spend hours browsing sites like Oocities, Webarchive, Arquivo.pt and other archives for old sites I remember visiting, then see what is indexed and scour through it manually until I find something interesting. I find some images on other Neocities sites, too. These images get sorted into their proper section. For the no context gallery, there truly is no context because for some things I only have a list of links to archived files, most of the files I find are only referenced once and only saved once, generally between 2000 and 2009, which is when I spent the most time on the internet as a kid.
Contemporary News
Quick Link - Sometimes in my deep dives into the old web, I find political humor, news clippings, and things that only seemed to be relevant to the time period. This page serves as an archive for these finds.
Old Web Resources
Quick Link - This is an index of all the graphics and resources I have collected from my old web searches. Gifs, backgrounds, blinkies, MIDIs, all sorts of things!
No Context Gallery
Quick Link - A gallery of images presented without context. Generally, I do not get context or webpages for these images, they are pulled from bare text link lists of archived data. Sometimes they are shockingly strange or absurd, and sometimes it is just a random nude. I've made a safe gallery, and I think they are particularly interesting because they have no context at all, and without the context they seem particularly odd and somehow 2000s-coded.
Boomer Humor
Quick Link - Part of being on the old web was being absolutely shoved out of your chair by the cringe of boomers and their humor, though it usually was relegated to endless email chains. Boomers must have been around 50 at the time.
Contemporary Design / Neat Sites
Quick Link - These websites are examples of contemporary designs for the 2000s, mostly around 2005-2009. Some of them are hot messes, some are expertly coded to suit a certain aesthetic. Taking them all into consideration, they show a fairly accurate view of what I remember the web being like in the mid-2000s. There was certainly a style of design at the time, and I would love to break down more of what made it feel this way. I particularly remember collecting and using a LOT of stamps for Photoshop, and using heavy overlay/background removal to make things fancy, for graphics. I was never a glitter girly, so these are mostly non-glitter sites. I am sorry if the archived links go down. Most of these have personal blogs from the 2000s that you can read, including archived photos and comments.