Too late.

The good internet still exists, and is pretty damn good even now. The problem is social media and a handful of bad-but-popular sites.

I tell people this every so often, but in terms of percentage of the world population, there are far more people on the good internet than there were back then. The problem is, with the advent of smartphones, social media use exploded, and Facebook and Twitter became gigantic, far exceeding the size of the good web. Your aunts and uncles with little net savvy and a bucket of bad opinions swamped Facebook, and never really changed. The popular tech media, which tends to follow the biggest crowds to the exclusion of all else, began treating Facebook as if it were THE internet. It’s the tyranny of crowds.

Once it became evident that you could be successful by doing it, everyone started chasing the favor of those largely clueless users. Google began to prioritize a handful of websites like Reddit, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia and their own Youtube, and largely gave up the fight against SEO abusers like Fandom. Sites that had been considered internet utilities decided to cash in.

There are still fun web games being made, if you know where to look for them (some places to look: Vole.wtf, Neal.fun, Ferry Halim’s long-running Orisinal and hey Newgrounds is still around). There are great free web hosts still, like Neocities and Nekoweb. (Although note, I just learned that Angelfire shut down in April.) A version of the old good Google still exists through the Web search option, a.k.a. udm14, but now there’s multiple other search engines that aren’t so bad. There is the Fediverse, of course. And if you look around you might find out about these awesome things called tildes, free Linux machines you can apply for a shell account on just to mess around, often with internal chat, bulletin boards, web space, community games and even weirder things like Gopher and Gemini (not Google Gemini) sites.

All these things exist. You just gotta know where to find them, amidst all the suck out there. They CAN be hard to find, but that’s one reason why I linked to some of them above. Seek out sources of links! Metafilter, the venerable community weblog, is one of them. A few other places to look: Andy Baio’s Waxy, Rusty Foster’s Today In Tabs and even Mozilla’s own Ten Tabs. You can also find a good RSS reader to keep up with many websites at once.

It takes work to find things now, it is true, it takes the realization that you can’t be passive about finding the good things out there. But, truly, it’s always been like that. The good days of Google were an aberration. The natural order of the internet is, the great stuff has never been, and will never be mainstream.

The term came from Usenet, after AOL opened up internet access to its users.

Spotted a typo, it refers to “Apache Foundation’s OnlyOffice,” when that product is OpenOffice (as one can discover by following the link). This is different from the OnlyOffice mentioned earlier in the paragraph.

Nethack is very different, I expect, but great. You can even play it on public servers like alt.org and Hardfought

The image reminded me of this monstrosity.

I verify this, some years ago when my laptop’s hard drive died, I installed Ubuntu Linux from a USB drive (with a live image on it) to a USB drive. It took a while for it to boot but it worked and I used it as my main machine for a couple of months.

But beyond that, there are Linux distros made specifically for running off of external media, Puppy Linux is an example.

That is strange. Which version are you playing? 5.0 was recently released, it may have bugs but I don’t think that’s one of them?

What platform are you playing on? At the moment the main way to play it on Linux distributions is to compile it yourself.

Homestar Runner’s website still works through the use of Ruffle, an open-source and secure Flash reimplementation. The loss of the easter eggs is a big drawback, but on the other hand it does mean that you focus more on the content than constantly looking for things to click on.

(sits in the corner wearing a sign that reads “Ask me about Nethack”)

I used to like Monopoly, before its many problems became evident to me. I notice that even in the official excessively mythologizing biography of supposed-creator Charles Darrow, it notes that Parker Brothers didn’t believe the game would sell well, and it had to be proven to them from the sales of 5,000 units of the game through department store Wanamakers.

The reasons Monopoly is popular are several, most of them pretty dumb. At this point Monopoly is a part of the culture and lots of people buy it because they don’t know there are many much-better games out there. Hasbro merchandises the hell out of it, there’s over 4,000 themed versions of Monopoly now. It pushes a pleasing narrative that people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and become successful (ignoring that all but one of the players will go bankrupt during the game).

What positive attributes does Monopoly have? Well it’s ultimately a game about trade, what causes someone to win at Monopoly, in ideal situations, isn’t how they move but what trades they make. In nearly every game of Monopoly I’ve ever played few people ever traded, causing games to run long and winners ultimately decided by whoever managed to make a natural color group, but in principle it’s an interesting idea. And it’s open-ended, as that mythologizing document I mentioned notes at the time of its origin you couldn’t get a game published unless it adhered to certain dogmatic rules, one of which being that it had to have a clear ending. Open-endedness is interesting in a board game, even if, as in Monopoly’s case, it can make a game excessively long.

I sometimes muse about how Monopoly could be improved. I think it’d be interesting to make the trading less ad-hoc and random. Maybe only allow trades at certain times, so players would have to think more about when to make them or else lose the chance, and make trades more formalized, maybe with a randomized element? Maybe fewer properties, reduce all color groups to two, make railroads and utilities a bigger part of the game. Maybe an explicit mechanism by which a player can resign from the game. Definitely make bankrupting a player less of a windfall for the person causing it. Definitely increase the costs of owning lots of properties. Definitely set an end point rather than just meander on until all players lose. Maybe add additional reasons to play than just winning; at their best board games tell these little stories about how the game progresses. Maybe have awards for players who circle the board the most times, who spend the least time in Jail, etc. Maybe one or more of these could be a “bar goal,” by which I mean, if the players agree ahead of time the players might have to buy the player who wins/gets a specific award a drink or some other minor forfeit.

What really should be preserved is the entirety of Homestar Runner.

If you want to have fun with an internet newbie tell them to watch to the end, it gets really good.

Long ago he worked with Sergey Brin to develop PageRank, the revolutionary web search engine, all so someday his life would put him in contact with Jeffery Epstein.

Let’s be honest, if it starts to look like that’s a possibility then these fuckers won’t appear anywhere in public without their own personal Secret Service accompanying them, complete with high-powered weaponry, and to smooth over the resulting massacre they’ll fill the media with hand-wringing about violence and awfulness and how could this be prevented, and the answers won’t at all be about fixing the conditions that led to the riot in the first place.

Oh, and the Earthworm Jim cartoon was really funny! It kind of rests these days in the shadow of the much more popular Freakazoid and The Tick, but it deserves to be rewatched now.

The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin had surprisingly good animation and writing.

In the early 80s there was a weird cartoon called Pandamonium, about three pandas who could merge together to make some kind of superpanda. They traveled the world with a couple of humans trying to protect it from an evil alien called Montragor. It was an early production of Marvel Animation and little of it survives online now.

Saturday Supercade adapted arcade games (and also Pitfall) into short cartoon episodes. It featured the first cartoon version of Mario and Donkey Kong, long before any others. Pitfall’s supporting characters Rhonda and Quickclaw made appearances in the Pitfall II: Lost Caverns game.

The Real Ghostbusters wasn’t really obscure, but J. Michael Straczynski wrote for it, and he wrote an episode involving Cthulhu. (He also was story editor on He-Man, and penned the episode it was revealed that Teela was The Sorceress’s daughter.)

There are a number of cartoons that Cartoon Network hyped up then just kind of forgot about: Mike, Lu and Og, Sheep in the Big City and Whatever Happened to Robot Jones are three in particular.

Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings

A rule of thumb I use is how desperate the software is to tell you the weather even when you never asked for it or even set it up to report it.

I have an acquaintance (not sure if qualifies as a friend) who made news for getting fired for, when they were ill, asking an AI to get a quote out of an article for them, which it just out-and-out made up and got them fired. They aren’t stupid, but maybe a bit too trusting. The world lambasted them, which is a huge shame because they do really good work. One strike, you’re out.

So I am not unsympathetic to people who get, in essence, betrayed by AI. (not literally so, because AI is not a person) But yes I think people should be very careful, more careful they they’re being now certainly.

They also should be ready for if it all falls apart, as training costs increase and becomes harder. Already websites like IMDB are putting CAPTCHAs on their site just to browse it. It used to be an accommodating site to scripts that used it to gather information automatically, but those days seem to be over now. Expect to see that more and more, and in the process, the web becomes that much more annoying to use for plain old human readers too.