Lately I was thinking, we don’t get to “surf the web” anymore like we used to. During the 90s the internet could be an exciting adventure. I kind of miss that.
It's definitely more rabbit holes now more then ever, the statement don't even make sense the Internet was never just entering random urls to see were you went, there's always been gateways to the Internet, that's how the whole thing works @@THICCTHICCTHICC
@@LunchsackTheWiseyou mean entertainment, no fuckin way there's someone following Q un ironically in 2024 hasn't he proven himself to be a bs artist years ago, how TF y'all still eating that up lmaoooo then he had the nerve to call it knowledge hahahahahaha
those personal homepages really hold something special that a lot of the modern internet lacks. you can personalize things pretty far but theres really nothing quite like the level of freedom you could get with those kind of sites. the bubbles of community too, having specific places for your favorite things and people to share it with is also much less in these times. everyone is kind of all in the same place overlapping and in some ways thats good! i think just in general the modern internet feels very restrictive and trapped especially compared to what we get to see here
@@rhedosaurus2251 those still dont feel quite the same imo. much less organized and harder to find old topics or specific things. its still the closest weve got at least
Once when we were in the 5th grade, one of my friends printed out a bunch of character stat pages from a Buffy the Vampire Slayer Geocities fan page for me and matted them on red and black construction paper and everything. I still think about that sometimes, how that was just normal fan culture behavior at the time. There was no tumblr to reblog gifs of your favorite characters, you just had Geocities fan pages and if you wanted to share them with your friends who didn't have internet yet you had to physically print them out.
not quite the same, but I used to print out cheat codes for some friends who didn't have internet back in the days. my 10-years-older brother was an early adopter of the internet so we were connected since like '93 or '94
reminder that the false dichotomy of american politics has been manipulated specifically to keep people fighting each other while the uber corps keep taking away more and more of your choices and rights
I started a site about philosophy there when I was like 14 , I never did it for real though. Sad. The internet back then was truly a creative space, now you're stuck with predefined boxes called "social media" where you can write your stuff but within the confines of that space's aesthetic and limitations. I think this is why I love vaporwave so much, because it brought back the feeling that you could be as corny as possible when creating your own pages with all those weird graphics combos, fonts and sound effects.
Making me feel old while reminiscing about the old times. Miss the old days where I coule actually legitimately code a website before it all became streamlined and less creative than it is now.
I miss the open feeling of Groceries; I also had one that I didn't really finish either! Looking back on it, I'll never understand why all of us seemed to favor text on clashing backgrounds and a different background for each individual page on a site! It was just sorta taken for granted that each page on it had to look unique rather than a standard background.
Geocities totally served alot of memories for most netizens from my generation. Good times spent exploring the unknown during the Internet's infancy stage.
despite being born in the late 2000's and having very limited internet access most of my life, i never got to experience exploring sites like these (or a lot of great stuff about the 2000's), yet i still have a strange sort of nostalgia for this kind of stuff; i'm glad videos like these and archives exist bc i love seing how things were before i was born/when i was little :3
Even being born in the late 90's I still didn't get to experience things like this. I grew up in a rural area and our technology was a bit behind more populated areas... A lot of people have no idea what I'm talking about when I say "remember when you had to log into the internet?"
Oh under construction pages were a common place staple. Made many geocities sites and it's also worth pointing out that it was up to the author to pick the correct section for their page. Once you did, I don't even think you could (easily) move it
5:19 Those soundbites really took me back!! Ive gotten the chance to go to disneyworld with a family and man, ive never cared much for disney but the haunted mansion ride was SO GOOD. I genuinely was in awe of the audio/visual experience. Another great video btw
I never got to be on geocities, but I've recently started making a neocities page-I hope that neocities can bring some of the same sort of joy and exploration that the original did.
I was in my early teens when I made my Geocities site. I was obsessed with the first X-Men movie, and made a little fansite dedicated to it. I had a gallery filled with my favourite screenshots, a small BBS for my friends and I to talk about the movie (it eventually turned into general chatting and early internet memes), and a copy of the movie's script that people could download as a TXT file. It's fun to think back to the kid I was then, wish I'd saved a copy of that site.
Sometimes I get really nostalgic for my teenage years, and luckily I remember my xanga url. I can only see a few photos and no posts these days, but it's still cool to see my own time capsule on the internet.
I was a kid when GeoCities was a thing, it was full of circuits and projects that I used to build with my dad. Now I'm a certified power electronics engineer. It was so much more fun than the new internet, the pages had so much personality, it honestly felt like you were talking directly to someone. I really miss how intimate the internet used to be.
Why has Hot Moneyz got me cracking up so much dgjkfngjsdn, thank you so much for bringing such a range of websites to our attention! It's so nostalgic and heart warming to see personal projects being maintained despite the passage of time, and intriguing to see the weird entries and unfinished projects too! Great scripting and editing as ever 💖
I had a Geocities website a long time ago. I don't remember what it was though, and even if I did, I can't channel my inner child to remember what went through my mind back then. I really feel like I lost a part of myself by losing that small website. A little part of me that will never come back.
One of my favourite comics growing up was hosted on Geocities, so sad it's no longer accessible - It was a Sailor Moon-inspired fancomic about the author and her friends. It was more than a 100 pages long, all about their wishfulfillment of being cool superheroes... it inspired me so much, definitely shaped me. Thanks for looking at some of these old netizen-homes, I'd love to see more!
Those category headers weren't added after archiving, that's exactly how geocities worked when it was up and running. It was pretty random back then to find stuff, but that went for any place on the internet. When you went on the internet in the 90s geocities was probably 80% of what you looked at. Also, if you found a page you liked, you had to bookmark it or you would probably never find it again.
Man this video elicited such strong old feelings I used to have when I was on the internet back in the day. Nothing compared to the anticipation when waiting for your modem to connect online nor the rush of dopamine you'd feel when it finally did. It was the literal wild west with very little oversight or corporate control. Everyday was a new mystery to be found and a new wonder to be seen like you were an explorer finding a new untouched continent everyday.
The "headings" and "subsections" as you keep calling them were the Cities and Neighborhoods, respectively. When you created your account, you picked which city to be a part of and then you looked for a Neighborhood that you wanted to join. In each neighborhood there were something like lot numbers. So you could be at lot 4120 making your full GeoCities Address something like "Area 51, Dimension, 4120." This is why the site was called Geo _CITIES._ And there were a limited number of lots in each neighborhood, meaning they could fill up. As more neighborhoods filled up, more were created. Occasionally, new cities were also added. And in the earliest days of GeoCities, each neighborhood was supposed to have a more specific genre or area of interest, but almost immediately the idea of having specific niches be in their own specific neighborhood was abandoned. EDIT: Maybe it was Region instead of City? I honestly can't remember anymore. But the "subsections" were definitely called neighborhoods.
Couldn't help but notice that Brian's Home mentioned the Bristol Ren Faire, which is my local ren faire as well, and he listed a few of the foods you can get there at 11:29 It's good to know the menu hasn't changed much at all since this website was created
Thank you for including the WH40k site. As a huge fan myself and seeing the massive development the franchise has gone through throughout the year, this one has been like a real time capsule for me!
@@DebunkFilei have been watching since 2018 but on a different account so it may not make sense at first but this is why. You guys just make interesting videos about topics that I and many others like but you guys approach them in a unique way.
Man I fucking miss those fan sites. The Halloween site really gave me a blast from the past. Everything "fandom site" is just super sterile wiki's nowadays and everything reads exactly the same.
I was too young to be creating websites but I'd surf every ninja turtle fan page I could find. At that young age I was convinced some of the fanfics were actually real. I thought some female fan turtles were real like Venus Demilo was. Yeah I was a huge fan of Next Mutation. And there was a site dedicated to bringing the show back after it was canceled with page of sad fanart.
"they memorized it from the ride!" bro, they have audio recordings on the site you are on, pretty sure they were listening to those to get the transcript; coulda recorded on ride too
Yeah I was just thinking about how I had a little handheld audio recorder with a AM/FM radio and flashlight on one end and I used it all the time I don't remember how much audio it held. They were pretty affordable so I'm assuming somebody dedicated to Disney might have bought a better one than what I had but still yeah you're not wrong.
i still have the old coding for my first website back then. oh i was so proud of it - made little pixel art decorations and had made my own gif animated buttons and all sorts. the coding to make text scroll around felt magical
First off: I loved this!!! I hope to see it become a series on this channel. I'm in that weird Millennial-Gen Z (Zillennial?) gap. I wasn't old enough to have used Geocities, but I was definitely around in the late 2000s when that level of personalization of pages was still rampant on DeviantArt. I still suck at coding, but I knew how to insert Journal Dolls, page backgrounds, plz accounts (we had minimal emoticon/proto-emojis on the site, so people made accounts with some, so you'd just mention the account and it would show up as their icon. The plz was present in every single one: I assume it was an identifier, but as a kid I thought it was sort of like treating the computer/site like it was semi-sentient/like if you thanked an AI chatbot today: "give me the image of [x], please"). I remember my entire account page was just widgets with a background of this checkerboard pattern that was black with interchanging rainbow glitter, a real sign of the times lmao. It also warms my heart to see the preservation of stuff like this, as well as content that shows the amazing things you find just getting lost in it all. I work in an archive of specifically pop culture material, and it's our job to try to convey this sense of wanderlust (but for the journey itself and it being via media of the past versus physical travel) to our visitors and to the world. We have an entire section dedicated to comics, and some are extremely rare and/or old. I sometimes wonder who used to own them: if they had Action Comics #1 as a kid, are they still alive? Was this their favorite character? The same questions come to me with this video: where are they now? Is that Renaissance Fair still going on all these years later, or is it defunct? Does the owner of Diznee Girls watch Defunctland now? Was DJ Hot Money Smooth a real person, or an Icy Hot Stuntaz clone? So many questions remain unanswered.
So glad you enjoyed! This video actually IS part of a series. Including this video, we have 3 “Exploring the old Internet” videos, and they’ve definitely been some of my absolute favorite videos to make. There truly is something so special about digging through these!
I ❤ Debunk File, you kind of remind me of ScareTheater, one of my favorite youtubers. I've been watching since 4Chan Deepdive #10 (or #11 or #12, i dunno😭), Keep up the good work and good content!!! (Also, quick question, what happened to Jiff?? (i think thats his name??) I haven't seen him in videos in a while!!!) Also, i like how in volume 1 of the 4Chan deep dive you pretended you were a robot, it was cool🥶
I really love the first website, as a massive horror and halloween fan these types of old fans sites are really charming and interesting to me, there's many just like them that I love digging through the archives of, I remember stumbling upon this one not to long ago, glad you included it.
One old internet thing that I’ve never heard anyone talk about is the MUCK. Basically, it’s a primitive kind of chatroom/roleplay forum. But to be fair, even I wouldn’t want to see if there are still ancient furries active down there.
There are with high probability. Source: I'm a furry and know how much into technology a lot of us are.... And also that we do have IRC stuff still going
I was surprised to see a link to OverClocked ReMix in the home page section. Their TH-cam channel is still active and I'm just now finding out how far back it goes.
I'm very young and also grew up without the internet for most of my life until very late 2012. My parents always worked jobs that didn't require a computer, so we never owned one until I started middle school. I've always been interested in old stuff like this. The internet seemed so much more friendly back then compared to now. It's kinda sad.
I miss these, i miss people having their personal little space, passion projects etc on the web that had their distinct look, now everyone is on the same platforms, and everything is so uniform, even by being different.
My great-grandfather had a geocities on our family's ancestry, as far back as you can possibly go. It's an amazing website. Quite a few pictures of the family on it, including me as a baby.
I had a decently successful Angelfire website about No Limit Records back in 1998/1999 called Da No Limit Battlefield. Sadly, I haven't been able to find anything about it and think it's lost to time. I really loved the internet in these days. I'm 44 and glad I got to grow up and see the internets Wild West infancy. Sadly it's so heavily moderated now, it's nothing like it used to be. (not all of that is bad, the lawlessness of 90's internet had way too many unfiltered creeps).
I used to be a chat room roleplayer. Like D&D stuff but not official stuff. I made pages for my characters so other players could see their stats and background and whatever image I stole for their appearance
I had one . I think I created it when I was like 17... With the name... SoCo Lush (wth was I thinking). Anyway what in remember the most was the counter showing how many people visited. I would create it everyday... It was like Twitter likes before Twitter lol
Holy Emperor, the last thing I was expecting from this video was a 3rd edition Blood Angels fan page. I remember the codex because there was a hero Death Company Furioso Dreadnought named Moriar The Chosen. In the lore they modified his dreadnought to allow him to drink blood to satisfy The Red Thirst.
I actually attended my first Ren faire last year and I really got tickled over Brain's page ! I really wish we had the ability to go down rabbit holes like we use to. And fairly safely at that... I admire the fact that anyone passionate about anything could easily make a site.. without commercial and all. I was trully at the dead end of this being born in 95 and only getting a computer when I was 12. Even at the late stages, it was still a much more fun and engaging place to be. (and a place to be slightly traumatized aha ) It's a shame how even I know how empty it feels now. I can only imagine if I was just a couple years older and had more access then , how truly saddened I'd be at the state it is now. I remember when GeoCities died , same year Michael Jackson passed!
I once had a Geocities page about my interests, mainly vampire and philosophy related at that point. One of those pseudo-edgy goth teen sites, OF COURSE with the spinning upside down pentagrams and some very weird GIFs I found allover the web. Man, I miss the days when you would just browse and explore weird web pages. The Wild West of the internet was glorious.
Ive definitely said before that browsing lost websites should be archived. The more bizarre the better. Shows how weird things always was online but was disconnected to the wider Internet.
Woahhhhhh I’m 39 now, and in high school I made a geocities site for a comic book series I created in high school called East Village Gutter Bomb that was kind of my imagined future of a super cool punk rock slacker in NYC made by some queer Black girl in NC. Well I did it, and I actually have been thinking heavy about that gif-happy homepage for weeks now. I really wonder if I can find it because of your vid. Thanks for this!!
This video appeared around the perfect time since im making an arg around a website from Geocities called Delightful Heart of Gold and its a website dedicated to a lost greek myth by the same name and it was privated and deleted in 2006 by the author
Jesus Christ saves He had mercy on me he can save all who all seek him today He made away through calvery repent of all sins today Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Come to Jesus Christ today Jesus Christ is only way to heaven Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today Holy Spirit can give you peace purpose and joy and his will today John 3:16-21 16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God. Mark 1.15 15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel. 2 Peter 3:9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. Hebrews 11:6 6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. Jesus
When I was a kid in the 90sbwe received dragon ball z in the states, at that time it was the ocean dub so it never went passed the episode when Goku comes to Namek and fights off the Ginyu Force. I went online and found DBZ characters and villains I had never seen before. I then found out that DBZ was originally made in Japan. Wanting to know more I went online amd would gind many snippets in MPEG format of whatever I could find. There was a website that I would frequent called Goku's Super Saiyan Website that had DBZ music that played as soon as you went to its landing page. There was one MPEG that showed a blonde Goku fighting a Blonde Vegeta, that little clip of them fighting burned into my mind. I believe this was in 97 or 98
What we gained in Search Engines, we lost in adventure. I miss the old Internet, but progress is what it is. Note that it looks like these rustic old sites didn’t try to sell you anything. 😅
12:57 yeah we used to put those Style Dollz all over our websites lol Edit: In 7th grade my two best friends & I made a geocities page dedicated to Wayne’s World 1 & 2 😂 I wish I could find it!
Back in the day, it was pretty common for websites to have broken links or links to “under construction” pages as a joke. DJ whatever’s page with the “Thoughts on World Peace” page under construction was probably one of those jokes. The idea was that the link would be something totally incongruous with the other content of the page and then of course there wouldn’t be anything there. Just letting you know that you’re not missing out on a treatise on world peace 😅
I had a geocities, tripod and angelfire. I can't remember which one I used the most but it basically was just pics and outcomes of a backyard wrestling group my friends and I had back in HS.
It reminds me of 1995, I got my first computer and it was a world full of geocities pages. I had like, 10 GC pages, I'd hang out making fairy tribute pages while IM'ing my best friend on ICQ "Uh-Oh!" Lol dawww
Since you asked... for us at the time, those websites were annoying garbage. When we'd search for trustworthy information and we'd be led to one of those crappy homemade-by-a-kid pages, it was frustrating. It was an immediate back-to-the-search. I quickly figured out that when I saw the word "geocities", there was no need to bother clicking the link at all because it would be a chaotic mess of rambling junk in unreadable typefaces with second-grade-level grammar quality. The pages were usually full of so many flashing graphics that it would freeze your computer and crash your internet. Geocities was also well-known for their "pro-ana" pages made by teen girls who encouraged each other to take drastic measures to be skinny, posting pictures, diet menus, quotes, etc. I was an adult before I ever saw internet, since I'm an older person. Internet existed when I was in high school but was not widely available until I was in college, and we didn't even have a computer when I was a kid. In college it was difficult to find anything useful on the internet since it was mostly that child-level homemade cacophony of misinformation and selfish please-notice-me-random-celebrity-I-worship nonsense. There was one in particular that is worth mentioning, though. I came across this one by mistake. (I don't remember what I was looking for, but this wasn't it!) It was a page made by someone who claimed to be an adult female who was a high school French teacher in the US. Her pages were filled with poems she'd written about Eminem and his daughter, who was just a little girl at the time, so that alone was creepy. The poems were so bad, I'm pretty sure the page was actually by a young child, not an adult. The page had a long rambling intro of attempted tough-girl talk, as she told readers that she was sick of being accused of stealing the poems since they are so good that no one can believe she wrote them herself. Her mission was to attract the attention of Eminem because she was sure that if he saw her poems, he'd want to record them as raps. However, the poems were the kind of thing a child would write in school. They were really really really bad. Sure, rap is terrible, too, but these poems were so bad they were worse than rap. And the poems could never be raps since rap is based on long strings of rhyming words, not childlike sentences written in awkward structure to force the last word of each sentence to rhyme with the one before it. It was a very bizarre page. If the word "cringey" had existed back then, I think that would've been the word for that page!
Sorry for bad English but thank you for the comments, it really puts things into perspective and how the romanisation of the past clouds our view on how people really saw things back then.
If it isn’t Lamenters we can’t be friends. Unless its Flesh Tearers or honestly the Blood Drinkers. Who am I kidding the BA have the best successor chapters.
Lately I was thinking, we don’t get to “surf the web” anymore like we used to. During the 90s the internet could be an exciting adventure. I kind of miss that.
Right on!
Reminds me of surfing the radio dial for faint stations.
Yeah it's a shame. You never knew where you'd end up. Now it's rare that my rabbit holes venture beyond Wikipedia or Reddit.
get into Q then brother you're sure to find some rabbit holes to fill with your sweet juicy lust for knowledge
It's definitely more rabbit holes now more then ever, the statement don't even make sense the Internet was never just entering random urls to see were you went, there's always been gateways to the Internet, that's how the whole thing works @@THICCTHICCTHICC
@@LunchsackTheWiseyou mean entertainment, no fuckin way there's someone following Q un ironically in 2024 hasn't he proven himself to be a bs artist years ago, how TF y'all still eating that up lmaoooo then he had the nerve to call it knowledge hahahahahaha
thats my Sailor Moon Gallery there in the video. I was a weird little kid.
Hey
Sailor Moon is great
There's no shame, Sailor Moon is rad!
Yea, hopefully u got bullied out of it
Time stamp?❤
Did this episode remind you that your old Sailor Moon website was preserved, or did you always have access to it?
those personal homepages really hold something special that a lot of the modern internet lacks. you can personalize things pretty far but theres really nothing quite like the level of freedom you could get with those kind of sites.
the bubbles of community too, having specific places for your favorite things and people to share it with is also much less in these times. everyone is kind of all in the same place overlapping and in some ways thats good!
i think just in general the modern internet feels very restrictive and trapped especially compared to what we get to see here
No more forums, everything is a Discord server. I feel like we need to stop relying on social media.
@@OPSECHerohow is a forum any different lmao
@@TheDsRequiem It's much easier to archive and it's not as secretive.
@@OPSECHero Either that or Reddit forums.
@@rhedosaurus2251 those still dont feel quite the same imo. much less organized and harder to find old topics or specific things. its still the closest weve got at least
Once when we were in the 5th grade, one of my friends printed out a bunch of character stat pages from a Buffy the Vampire Slayer Geocities fan page for me and matted them on red and black construction paper and everything. I still think about that sometimes, how that was just normal fan culture behavior at the time. There was no tumblr to reblog gifs of your favorite characters, you just had Geocities fan pages and if you wanted to share them with your friends who didn't have internet yet you had to physically print them out.
not quite the same, but I used to print out cheat codes for some friends who didn't have internet back in the days.
my 10-years-older brother was an early adopter of the internet so we were connected since like '93 or '94
Honestly, Yahoo is one of the worst vandals in modern history. Geocities closed, Flickr ruined. Eugh.
AND WIX!!!! they ruined DA
reminder that the false dichotomy of american politics has been manipulated specifically to keep people fighting each other while the uber corps keep taking away more and more of your choices and rights
100%.
Yahoo is also behind the issues with Tumblr (the modern day Geocities IMO)
They're a menace.
And how is it people still even use Yahoo? I'd have thought that its purpose would have been served long ago.
I started a site about philosophy there when I was like 14 , I never did it for real though. Sad. The internet back then was truly a creative space, now you're stuck with predefined boxes called "social media" where you can write your stuff but within the confines of that space's aesthetic and limitations. I think this is why I love vaporwave so much, because it brought back the feeling that you could be as corny as possible when creating your own pages with all those weird graphics combos, fonts and sound effects.
username is my spirit animal
Making me feel old while reminiscing about the old times. Miss the old days where I coule actually legitimately code a website before it all became streamlined and less creative than it is now.
I miss the open feeling of Groceries; I also had one that I didn't really finish either! Looking back on it, I'll never understand why all of us seemed to favor text on clashing backgrounds and a different background for each individual page on a site! It was just sorta taken for granted that each page on it had to look unique rather than a standard background.
Geocities totally served alot of memories for most netizens from my generation. Good times spent exploring the unknown during the Internet's infancy stage.
Netizens hell naw bro that was gross take it back, I can't believe that's the first time I've heard that term
Lmao netizens? Hell nah
From someone who was chronically online from 1998.. that’s weird.
I definitely remember the term “netizens” nothing weird about it
despite being born in the late 2000's and having very limited internet access most of my life, i never got to experience exploring sites like these (or a lot of great stuff about the 2000's), yet i still have a strange sort of nostalgia for this kind of stuff; i'm glad videos like these and archives exist bc i love seing how things were before i was born/when i was little :3
Even being born in the late 90's I still didn't get to experience things like this. I grew up in a rural area and our technology was a bit behind more populated areas... A lot of people have no idea what I'm talking about when I say "remember when you had to log into the internet?"
Oh under construction pages were a common place staple. Made many geocities sites and it's also worth pointing out that it was up to the author to pick the correct section for their page. Once you did, I don't even think you could (easily) move it
5:19 Those soundbites really took me back!! Ive gotten the chance to go to disneyworld with a family and man, ive never cared much for disney but the haunted mansion ride was SO GOOD. I genuinely was in awe of the audio/visual experience. Another great video btw
I never got to be on geocities, but I've recently started making a neocities page-I hope that neocities can bring some of the same sort of joy and exploration that the original did.
I was in my early teens when I made my Geocities site. I was obsessed with the first X-Men movie, and made a little fansite dedicated to it. I had a gallery filled with my favourite screenshots, a small BBS for my friends and I to talk about the movie (it eventually turned into general chatting and early internet memes), and a copy of the movie's script that people could download as a TXT file. It's fun to think back to the kid I was then, wish I'd saved a copy of that site.
I’ll never get over the loss of Geocities, my entire childhood was on there(and neopets)
Do yo regularly access oocities? Thousand of geocities pages were saved there.
Ah! Neopets. What a beautiful fucking mess that site is.
Sometimes I get really nostalgic for my teenage years, and luckily I remember my xanga url. I can only see a few photos and no posts these days, but it's still cool to see my own time capsule on the internet.
I was a kid when GeoCities was a thing, it was full of circuits and projects that I used to build with my dad. Now I'm a certified power electronics engineer. It was so much more fun than the new internet, the pages had so much personality, it honestly felt like you were talking directly to someone. I really miss how intimate the internet used to be.
Why has Hot Moneyz got me cracking up so much dgjkfngjsdn, thank you so much for bringing such a range of websites to our attention! It's so nostalgic and heart warming to see personal projects being maintained despite the passage of time, and intriguing to see the weird entries and unfinished projects too! Great scripting and editing as ever 💖
I had a Geocities website a long time ago. I don't remember what it was though, and even if I did, I can't channel my inner child to remember what went through my mind back then. I really feel like I lost a part of myself by losing that small website. A little part of me that will never come back.
One of my favourite comics growing up was hosted on Geocities, so sad it's no longer accessible - It was a Sailor Moon-inspired fancomic about the author and her friends. It was more than a 100 pages long, all about their wishfulfillment of being cool superheroes... it inspired me so much, definitely shaped me. Thanks for looking at some of these old netizen-homes, I'd love to see more!
There will be more!
Do you still remember the name or have some PNGs saved, I would love to see it
Those category headers weren't added after archiving, that's exactly how geocities worked when it was up and running. It was pretty random back then to find stuff, but that went for any place on the internet. When you went on the internet in the 90s geocities was probably 80% of what you looked at. Also, if you found a page you liked, you had to bookmark it or you would probably never find it again.
Man this video elicited such strong old feelings I used to have when I was on the internet back in the day.
Nothing compared to the anticipation when waiting for your modem to connect online nor the rush of dopamine you'd feel when it finally did.
It was the literal wild west with very little oversight or corporate control. Everyday was a new mystery to be found and a new wonder to be seen like you were an explorer finding a new untouched continent everyday.
The "headings" and "subsections" as you keep calling them were the Cities and Neighborhoods, respectively. When you created your account, you picked which city to be a part of and then you looked for a Neighborhood that you wanted to join. In each neighborhood there were something like lot numbers. So you could be at lot 4120 making your full GeoCities Address something like "Area 51, Dimension, 4120." This is why the site was called Geo _CITIES._
And there were a limited number of lots in each neighborhood, meaning they could fill up. As more neighborhoods filled up, more were created. Occasionally, new cities were also added. And in the earliest days of GeoCities, each neighborhood was supposed to have a more specific genre or area of interest, but almost immediately the idea of having specific niches be in their own specific neighborhood was abandoned.
EDIT: Maybe it was Region instead of City? I honestly can't remember anymore. But the "subsections" were definitely called neighborhoods.
Couldn't help but notice that Brian's Home mentioned the Bristol Ren Faire, which is my local ren faire as well, and he listed a few of the foods you can get there at 11:29 It's good to know the menu hasn't changed much at all since this website was created
Thank you for including the WH40k site. As a huge fan myself and seeing the massive development the franchise has gone through throughout the year, this one has been like a real time capsule for me!
Jesse Pinkman's page lol
I literally said the exact same thing and giggled 💀 all it’s missing is the BITCH.
You'll never know the pain and suffering of dial-up internet and 1 phone line in the house!!! Lmao
Awesome video! Been a fan of y’all since 2018.
Love seein the OG status thanks for stickin around for so long!
Glad to see you still around!
@@DebunkFilei have been watching since 2018 but on a different account so it may not make sense at first but this is why. You guys just make interesting videos about topics that I and many others like but you guys approach them in a unique way.
Thank you so much for putting the musics in your description. I've been looking for that intro song for a long time now.
Man I fucking miss those fan sites. The Halloween site really gave me a blast from the past. Everything "fandom site" is just super sterile wiki's nowadays and everything reads exactly the same.
This is gold please do more guys!
The reception has been amazing there will be a part two on the way very soon!
this was exactly my Internet era (i was a teen in the late 90s). this was such a nice throwback. very cozy. 10/10
I was too young to be creating websites but I'd surf every ninja turtle fan page I could find. At that young age I was convinced some of the fanfics were actually real. I thought some female fan turtles were real like Venus Demilo was. Yeah I was a huge fan of Next Mutation. And there was a site dedicated to bringing the show back after it was canceled with page of sad fanart.
It's a good day when you upload man, glad your doing alright
"they memorized it from the ride!" bro, they have audio recordings on the site you are on, pretty sure they were listening to those to get the transcript; coulda recorded on ride too
Yeah I was just thinking about how I had a little handheld audio recorder with a AM/FM radio and flashlight on one end and I used it all the time I don't remember how much audio it held. They were pretty affordable so I'm assuming somebody dedicated to Disney might have bought a better one than what I had but still yeah you're not wrong.
i still have the old coding for my first website back then. oh i was so proud of it - made little pixel art decorations and had made my own gif animated buttons and all sorts. the coding to make text scroll around felt magical
First off: I loved this!!! I hope to see it become a series on this channel.
I'm in that weird Millennial-Gen Z (Zillennial?) gap. I wasn't old enough to have used Geocities, but I was definitely around in the late 2000s when that level of personalization of pages was still rampant on DeviantArt. I still suck at coding, but I knew how to insert Journal Dolls, page backgrounds, plz accounts (we had minimal emoticon/proto-emojis on the site, so people made accounts with some, so you'd just mention the account and it would show up as their icon. The plz was present in every single one: I assume it was an identifier, but as a kid I thought it was sort of like treating the computer/site like it was semi-sentient/like if you thanked an AI chatbot today: "give me the image of [x], please"). I remember my entire account page was just widgets with a background of this checkerboard pattern that was black with interchanging rainbow glitter, a real sign of the times lmao.
It also warms my heart to see the preservation of stuff like this, as well as content that shows the amazing things you find just getting lost in it all. I work in an archive of specifically pop culture material, and it's our job to try to convey this sense of wanderlust (but for the journey itself and it being via media of the past versus physical travel) to our visitors and to the world. We have an entire section dedicated to comics, and some are extremely rare and/or old. I sometimes wonder who used to own them: if they had Action Comics #1 as a kid, are they still alive? Was this their favorite character? The same questions come to me with this video: where are they now? Is that Renaissance Fair still going on all these years later, or is it defunct? Does the owner of Diznee Girls watch Defunctland now? Was DJ Hot Money Smooth a real person, or an Icy Hot Stuntaz clone? So many questions remain unanswered.
So glad you enjoyed! This video actually IS part of a series. Including this video, we have 3 “Exploring the old Internet” videos, and they’ve definitely been some of my absolute favorite videos to make. There truly is something so special about digging through these!
I ❤ Debunk File, you kind of remind me of ScareTheater, one of my favorite youtubers. I've been watching since 4Chan Deepdive #10 (or #11 or #12, i dunno😭),
Keep up the good work and good content!!! (Also, quick question, what happened to Jiff?? (i think thats his name??) I haven't seen him in videos in a while!!!) Also, i like how in volume 1 of the 4Chan deep dive you pretended you were a robot, it was cool🥶
Hey thanks for watchin! JIF actually is in this video funnily enough he plays DJ Hot Money!
@@DebunkFile Your welcome, i just got to that part LOL😭🥶, keep up the good work, and have a good afternoon/night/day!!!
I really love the first website, as a massive horror and halloween fan these types of old fans sites are really charming and interesting to me, there's many just like them that I love digging through the archives of, I remember stumbling upon this one not to long ago, glad you included it.
One old internet thing that I’ve never heard anyone talk about is the MUCK. Basically, it’s a primitive kind of chatroom/roleplay forum. But to be fair, even I wouldn’t want to see if there are still ancient furries active down there.
There are with high probability. Source: I'm a furry and know how much into technology a lot of us are.... And also that we do have IRC stuff still going
Oh, I remember that. I spent a little time on there but knew people who were very invested in that.
"Ancient"... lol
I was surprised to see a link to OverClocked ReMix in the home page section. Their TH-cam channel is still active and I'm just now finding out how far back it goes.
I didnt know you were a 40k nerd! Thats awesome! You should make a warhammer channel talking about your favorite factions and stuff!
Throne, don’t tempt me
Forgot about Geo! Amazing video! :D
I'm very young and also grew up without the internet for most of my life until very late 2012. My parents always worked jobs that didn't require a computer, so we never owned one until I started middle school. I've always been interested in old stuff like this. The internet seemed so much more friendly back then compared to now. It's kinda sad.
I forgot how interesting the internet used to be. Its kinda boring and sterile now. You could get lost down the rabbit hole of surfing the web.
I miss these, i miss people having their personal little space, passion projects etc on the web that had their distinct look, now everyone is on the same platforms, and everything is so uniform, even by being different.
My great-grandfather had a geocities on our family's ancestry, as far back as you can possibly go. It's an amazing website. Quite a few pictures of the family on it, including me as a baby.
i love undertime slopper
I had a decently successful Angelfire website about No Limit Records back in 1998/1999 called Da No Limit Battlefield. Sadly, I haven't been able to find anything about it and think it's lost to time. I really loved the internet in these days. I'm 44 and glad I got to grow up and see the internets Wild West infancy. Sadly it's so heavily moderated now, it's nothing like it used to be. (not all of that is bad, the lawlessness of 90's internet had way too many unfiltered creeps).
Wasn't expecting some retro Warhammer 40k but it's always a welcomed.
I’m straight up exploring my shit rn. Straight up debunking it. And by it well let’s just say my lost websites 🥵
😂😂😂😂😂😂
Excuse me wth
Don't look too close. The past is an anomaly.
I used to be a chat room roleplayer. Like D&D stuff but not official stuff. I made pages for my characters so other players could see their stats and background and whatever image I stole for their appearance
I had one . I think I created it when I was like 17... With the name... SoCo Lush (wth was I thinking). Anyway what in remember the most was the counter showing how many people visited. I would create it everyday... It was like Twitter likes before Twitter lol
- never forget, angelfire.
Both Tripod and Angel Fire, still exist til this very day.
dude you sound so different now lol, love your pl4ygrnd review, peace out champ
Geocities was a true gem from the old web, sad not many peoples remember it.
This is such a fucking cool video. Also, finding a 40k themed site in this manner is SO 40k lmaaaooo. I guess you're officially a Tech-Priest now!
The Omnissiah smiles upon us
I miss this era a lot. The internet felt so much more personal and exciting.
Holy Emperor, the last thing I was expecting from this video was a 3rd edition Blood Angels fan page. I remember the codex because there was a hero Death Company Furioso Dreadnought named Moriar The Chosen. In the lore they modified his dreadnought to allow him to drink blood to satisfy The Red Thirst.
14:03 your voice instantly becoming less deep when you laugh is absolutely amazing.
Man Geo Cities was the end of the human internet. The internet is truly dead
for sure, it was so inspirational and creative to so many levels.
I actually attended my first Ren faire last year and I really got tickled over Brain's page ! I really wish we had the ability to go down rabbit holes like we use to. And fairly safely at that... I admire the fact that anyone passionate about anything could easily make a site.. without commercial and all. I was trully at the dead end of this being born in 95 and only getting a computer when I was 12. Even at the late stages, it was still a much more fun and engaging place to be. (and a place to be slightly traumatized aha ) It's a shame how even I know how empty it feels now. I can only imagine if I was just a couple years older and had more access then , how truly saddened I'd be at the state it is now. I remember when GeoCities died , same year Michael Jackson passed!
My geocities sites were active trashfires. Absolute cognito hazards.
I once had a Geocities page about my interests, mainly vampire and philosophy related at that point. One of those pseudo-edgy goth teen sites, OF COURSE with the spinning upside down pentagrams and some very weird GIFs I found allover the web.
Man, I miss the days when you would just browse and explore weird web pages. The Wild West of the internet was glorious.
That intro... perfection
Ive definitely said before that browsing lost websites should be archived. The more bizarre the better. Shows how weird things always was online but was disconnected to the wider Internet.
I gotta check out This GeoCities Archive!
Woahhhhhh I’m 39 now, and in high school I made a geocities site for a comic book series I created in high school called East Village Gutter Bomb that was kind of my imagined future of a super cool punk rock slacker in NYC made by some queer Black girl in NC. Well I did it, and I actually have been thinking heavy about that gif-happy homepage for weeks now. I really wonder if I can find it because of your vid. Thanks for this!!
I could smell the fedora at nine minutes in
I adore this series
This video appeared around the perfect time since im making an arg around a website from Geocities called Delightful Heart of Gold and its a website dedicated to a lost greek myth by the same name and it was privated and deleted in 2006 by the author
Brians Game reminds me of the Quiz game Encarta Mind Maze you could get on your PC
Jesus Christ saves
He had mercy on me he can save all who all seek him today He made away through calvery repent of all sins today
Romans 6:23
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Come to Jesus Christ today
Jesus Christ is only way to heaven
Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void
Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today
Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today
Holy Spirit can give you peace purpose and joy and his will today
John 3:16-21
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.
Mark 1.15
15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.
2 Peter 3:9
The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
Hebrews 11:6
6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Jesus
I remember geocities! It wasn’t the only one like that. There was also angelfire and others.
wild seeing the 40k stuff, i remember alot of stuff like that back in the old days
The Emperor always protects
When I was a kid in the 90sbwe received dragon ball z in the states, at that time it was the ocean dub so it never went passed the episode when Goku comes to Namek and fights off the Ginyu Force.
I went online and found DBZ characters and villains I had never seen before. I then found out that DBZ was originally made in Japan. Wanting to know more I went online amd would gind many snippets in MPEG format of whatever I could find.
There was a website that I would frequent called Goku's Super Saiyan Website that had DBZ music that played as soon as you went to its landing page. There was one MPEG that showed a blonde Goku fighting a Blonde Vegeta, that little clip of them fighting burned into my mind.
I believe this was in 97 or 98
I miss webrings and website awards
Technology really peaked in the 2000's
I love this. Are you okay down there?
You should look into the Web Revival movement
What we gained in Search Engines, we lost in adventure. I miss the old Internet, but progress is what it is. Note that it looks like these rustic old sites didn’t try to sell you anything. 😅
12:57 yeah we used to put those Style Dollz all over our websites lol
Edit: In 7th grade my two best friends & I made a geocities page dedicated to Wayne’s World 1 & 2 😂 I wish I could find it!
I like this specific old internet video
Angelfire was where i hosted my ralph bakdshi fan site....only got a few hits.
Finding things was actually better back in the day though
Back in the day, it was pretty common for websites to have broken links or links to “under construction” pages as a joke. DJ whatever’s page with the “Thoughts on World Peace” page under construction was probably one of those jokes. The idea was that the link would be something totally incongruous with the other content of the page and then of course there wouldn’t be anything there.
Just letting you know that you’re not missing out on a treatise on world peace 😅
Love these
Anyone remember Stumble Upon from the old internet days? It used to take you to a random website so you can find cool stuff
"Which permanently destroyed the most amount of history ever on the internet" is such a clunky sentence
I had a geocities, tripod and angelfire. I can't remember which one I used the most but it basically was just pics and outcomes of a backyard wrestling group my friends and I had back in HS.
Im not drunk enough for the end of this man
It reminds me of 1995, I got my first computer and it was a world full of geocities pages. I had like, 10 GC pages, I'd hang out making fairy tribute pages while IM'ing my best friend on ICQ "Uh-Oh!" Lol dawww
I used to have a Street Fighter site in geocities
Who do you main? Personally I love me some Sagat!
@@DebunkFile Lately a lot of Marisa and Cammy. Sagat is one of me faves tho
You should look up caverns of blood and castle quest. Classic Html games I played as a kid in 1999
3:49 "I wonder if its a prop or home made"
...the text literally says it was his made by a guy named Paul converted from a 1999 William Shatner mask
I'm kicking myself of never making one as a kid. I do miss the old internet for that more personable and more amateur vibe at points
I miss these days of the Internet… it was such a better time
Yahoo ruining things it buys is nothing new
Are you saying tumblr isn't going to be the new PDF? D:
HELL YEAH TERMINATOR INTRO
13:20 this is so reminiscent of jesse pinkman’s mySHOUT website from breaking bad
Since you asked... for us at the time, those websites were annoying garbage.
When we'd search for trustworthy information and we'd be led to one of those crappy homemade-by-a-kid pages, it was frustrating. It was an immediate back-to-the-search. I quickly figured out that when I saw the word "geocities", there was no need to bother clicking the link at all because it would be a chaotic mess of rambling junk in unreadable typefaces with second-grade-level grammar quality. The pages were usually full of so many flashing graphics that it would freeze your computer and crash your internet. Geocities was also well-known for their "pro-ana" pages made by teen girls who encouraged each other to take drastic measures to be skinny, posting pictures, diet menus, quotes, etc.
I was an adult before I ever saw internet, since I'm an older person. Internet existed when I was in high school but was not widely available until I was in college, and we didn't even have a computer when I was a kid. In college it was difficult to find anything useful on the internet since it was mostly that child-level homemade cacophony of misinformation and selfish please-notice-me-random-celebrity-I-worship nonsense.
There was one in particular that is worth mentioning, though. I came across this one by mistake. (I don't remember what I was looking for, but this wasn't it!) It was a page made by someone who claimed to be an adult female who was a high school French teacher in the US. Her pages were filled with poems she'd written about Eminem and his daughter, who was just a little girl at the time, so that alone was creepy. The poems were so bad, I'm pretty sure the page was actually by a young child, not an adult. The page had a long rambling intro of attempted tough-girl talk, as she told readers that she was sick of being accused of stealing the poems since they are so good that no one can believe she wrote them herself. Her mission was to attract the attention of Eminem because she was sure that if he saw her poems, he'd want to record them as raps. However, the poems were the kind of thing a child would write in school. They were really really really bad. Sure, rap is terrible, too, but these poems were so bad they were worse than rap. And the poems could never be raps since rap is based on long strings of rhyming words, not childlike sentences written in awkward structure to force the last word of each sentence to rhyme with the one before it. It was a very bizarre page. If the word "cringey" had existed back then, I think that would've been the word for that page!
Sorry for bad English but thank you for the comments, it really puts things into perspective and how the romanisation of the past clouds our view on how people really saw things back then.
I hope where ever Brian O'Connell is, he's doing okay.
Was working on a BA successor chapter when the warhammer site came up lol
If it isn’t Lamenters we can’t be friends. Unless its Flesh Tearers or honestly the Blood Drinkers. Who am I kidding the BA have the best successor chapters.
Im so glad neocities exists for the reasons so many people in the comments have brought up