Neocities.org

I enjoyed many applications of YT's annotations. Episodes of MST3K uploaded by Shout! were annotated with expository notes that explicated references throughout. This may read as an insufferable attempt to cater to you hopelessly, obliviously inscient millennials and zoomers, but those annotations were actually succinctly entertaining, and not terribly disctracting.

I didn't know mobile users were the reason this went away. Phone users really are a cancer that needs to be removed from the Web for good. Removing features to appease phone zombies is akin to abolishing stairs because wheelchair-bound people can't utilise them.

lolwut fears the phoneposter...

It is pretty sad that mobile phone use was predominantly behind the removal of annotations. My own personal bugbear involving their removal is that I can no longer play 'The Dark Room'.

Robert, I also enjoyed annotations, and very rarely ever turned them off. Koshka and Club Nintendo Archives, I know -- I will never understand the reasoning behind that decision. They could have at least left existing annotations intact to preserve all that history. Froge, "loathing" or "contempt" are more accurate words regarding my attitude towards mobile users...

koshka: any comparison of subhumans to the disabled constitutes cruelty toward the latter. Shame on you.

This was an excellent read. I've never seen this movie before now, although I vaguely remember hearing people talk about the Project Chanology debacle when it was happening. I do recognise most of the references despite never having been a huge meme buff.

I do miss back when people could joke and make goofy videos like this about events, instead of taking everything seriously and trying to destroy other people's lives and livelihoods over disagreements.

Oh noes! The Biting Pear of Salamanca has come to eat the site!

I love that banner!! I haven't seen that goofy Pear critter in ages. I'm not sure if the IRC thing was in your Contact page previously or not, but good on you for sticking to the principles of the Old Internet and not using Discord like some hypocrites on here do.

Koshka, no, my IRC nick wasn't there before; I added it silently yesterday. Also, the banner is not mine, but was made for me by a friend; see https://humanraccoon.com/

Version 1.0 of Ruffle dropping is the real joke. Couldn’t even play my damn Homestuck porn correctly. No, it still wasn’t worth it.

Why don't you all use Gnash or Lightspark? I must be the only web geek who's wholly indifferent to Flash, but I LOLed at the post on /f/...

Superb article! I fully agree with all of the points you made. The smear campaign against Flash to me is one of the most profound symptoms of the normiefication of the Internet. Nobody cares about the creativity or freedom that Flash provides; it's straight to "WE MUST PROTECT THE NORMALCATTLE OR THEY MIGHT GET A VIRUS OR GET CONFUSED TRYING TO VIEW FLASH ON THEIR MOBILE TOY!!! :("

Quick related (?) question. Since you are by far the largest Flash buff that I am aware of, you may know. Do you recall the name of this big Flash (?) game from the 2000s that featured a shirtless Australian (?) bloke who had to fly around to every planet in the Solar System to defuse some bombs or something? I remember him using a jetpack while on the gas giants, but most things beyond that sadly elude me...

Froge, you could simply download the SWF and then play it in the Flash Player projector if you're not willing to enable Flash Player in the browser. Robert, I've been able to get the official Flash Player plug-in working flawlessly, so I have no need for any alternatives. Koshka, unfortunately, nothing comes to mind; on what site (if you can remember) did you first encounter that game?

Lolwut, I can't even remember any more sadly. It's a blur, and the fact that no one else seems to have heard of this game makes me suspect that I've gone insane. I definitely remember seeing it multiple times back in the early 2000s or thereabouts. Might not've been Flash.

fuck my bright yellow lego ass. you just reminded me after an over decade long burial in the recesses of my degenerate brain of that harry potter game

That picture frame feels like a fancier version of the end-screen in the good, old version of Solitaire.

Nota bene: 32-bit versions of (Klondike) Solitaire, Spider, Freecell, etc. from Windows 95 through XP will still run on current versions of Windows, requiring a fraction of the resources gorged by their contemporary counterparts.

Congratulations on the domain name!! Moving up in the world, I see.

Congratulations on wasting $20 on a domain name!! Moving up in the world, I see.

Very nice. info and us are my preferred tldns.

Aha, it was only around $8, Froge. At least I don't "Like" my own comments! :^)

one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind

Thank you for putting all of this information together! It's obscene how coordinated of an effort there has been to forcibly block the masses from using a harmless piece of software that they legally downloaded on their computer. My computer, my rules! This "nanny state" crud is exactly why I've been avoiding smartphones, and now it's happening on PCs. Sad!

Part two (the list of browsers and whether they will still continue to support Flash) is an excellent summary of who cares about people's personal freedom, and who cares about trampling them underfoot.

The last time I enabled Flash Player for anything was a Homestuck porno in 2016. It wasn’t worth it. This is to say a mention of Blue Maxima’s Flashpoint is worthwhile due to its 200,000-strong archive of Flash games and animation, including the ever-important ZONE parodies, and I believe it’s a practial application for the vast majority of user needs for the vast majority of content, albeit absent some obscure ones.

Koshka, it was precisely that paternalistic attitude of Adobe and other software companies that drove me to detail at length the available methods to defeat the Flash Player time bomb. In regards to browsers, the pattern seems to be that the various Firefox forks (e.g. Pale Moon and Waterfox) have the best, most Flash-friendly attitude; Internet Explorer 11, of course, is also an option.

Froge, I cannot imagine having gone over four years without viewing a single Flash in the Web browser! And, yes, Flashpoint is a very valuable and commendable project, but for any missing content, you'll have to simply view it the correct, old-fashioned way: in the Web browser with the Flash Player plug-in, like how we all did back in the 2000s.

In all verity, I don't recall that I viewed any Flash content (unrelated to YouTube anteceding their transition) since 2008.

Since 2008? Robert, how could you... :'(

The Devil (Bill Gates) was not so bad compared to what came after him.

That was a nice morning dose of nostalgia. Windows 98 is still my favourite OS, but I dearly miss XP and the simpler, nicer times that it represents. The aesthetics of 95, 98, and XP truly gave the impression that computers and the Web were this majestic new frontier of limitless potential. Windows 7 and onward just feel like cold, clean corporate OSes and accurately represent the normiefication of the Web.

God, I miss everything pre-2012 so much, but especially the 2000s internet.

Otaking, Bill Gates is most certainly *not* the devil, but rather our Lord and Savior: https://lolwut.neocities.org/comp/microsoft/lord-and-savior.html . TWH, me, too; it's precisely that feeling which has motivated me to write every page on my site. Truly, it was a better time.

Koshka, I mostly agree, but I would also say that Windows Vista and 7, though maybe not as endearing as 95, 98, and XP, are still overall solid operating systems with the sleek, refined, and futuristic aesthetics characteristic of 2000s rich design. It is Windows 8 and after, with their childish flat design garbage, that, for me, really embodies the normification of the Web and computers.

After the iWank came out everything went down. 4chan is full of phone-posters. Yeah the flat design cancer is only matched with calarts in ugliness on the web.