~Everything copyright me
Haven't drawn too many comics lately, but have been doing some solo shots that I think are pretty neat! These things go back and forth I suppose. Did a bit of work on the ghost's shell too, I need to get back into that... just two more general poses, then I need to do the special poses like for hitting/petting, pausing, their bad route... once those get done then it's a matter of doing all the writing, which will also be it's own whole thing, haha. But that can also be expanded in updates, so I don't have to do ALL of it...
Anyway, recently I've been playing Hypnospace Outlaw, which is a game that feels like it was specifically made for me, haha. I have a specific kind of nostalgia coming into it, being that I actually made one of those ugly late 90s pages that are featured in it in one of the big three free website services. Everyone always goes to Geocities when thinking about the style, but Angelfire and Tripod were also out there! And each site had preconceptions and stereotypes about the others, haha. In a way, there are certain things about the internet that haven't changed at all... things about human nature and how we interact and communicate with each other that are universal, even when the tools we use to do so change around us. Hypnospace Outlaw is a kind of time capsule of a certain era of the internet, at once a nostalgic look into the past and also commentary on the internet of the present. It would have been easy for it just to be a "lol old internet was so ugly and stupid wasn't it" kind of surface-level parody, but there's more to it than that. There's a lot about it to dig into. I've been trying to get my thoughts about it in order, haha.
There is a lot of nostalgia for that time period of the internet (netstalgia, I've heard it called) among a certain set, and I definitely have a lot of it myself, having been there at the time, haha. For some it's a kind of abstract period in time where you can only imagine what it was like, but I can remember all of it pretty clearly. I went looking through my files after playing it and even found my old website files from back then. I kept dates about what I was doing! So I know that I made my old site back in December of 1997, which is kind of astonishing to me. It doesn't feel so long ago... one of the things that tends to happen to me when I read these old pieces of my life, chatlogs or old pictures or old entries or things like that, is that my current sense of time becomes skewed, and it feels like those things have just happened, or weren't so far away.
At the same time, looking at those pages brought up a kind of painful nostalgia, one that almost brought tears to my eyes in a way. Not for a lost era of the internet, a general picture of how things used to be, but for myself in particular. I was so young then, and I had so much energy and passion for what I was writing about. I was excitable, friendly, desperate to talk to other people (begging people to sign my guestbook or email me), running tiny little contests to try and get people to interact with me. In truth, at that time in life (really... through the vast majority of my early life) I was just so, so lonely. I didn't really have any friends outside my family, I was bullied at school mercilessly, I had no one to really talk to and didn't fit in anywhere. The internet presented something to me I couldn't even imagine at that time, something that seemed really magical - a chance to interact with other people who could really know me, who'd be interested in what I wanted to talk about and who'd want to talk to me in return.
I was so lonely back then. It's hard to even put it into words. I wanted a place I could belong, I wanted to find some people who accepted me. I wanted to be a part of this online world that seemed so new and fascinating. Having a website, having your OWN website, just seemed so amazing and cool. It was like you were special, like you were part of some new and amazing thing. I wanted to be part of that. I wanted to make friends, I wanted to talk to people. More than anything that motivated me back then was that loneliness and that desperation for some kind of attention and validation. And the sad thing is when I look back at that little kid I used to be, she doesn't even know some of the awful things that are going to happen to her. She's innocent in her own way, but still, she's hurting. But you can't see that so obviously on her pages, I was so excited and I wanted friends so desperately, I didn't talk about that kind of thing.
I did talk about being rejected from an art archive I was applying to at the time, which devastated my little self. To be fair, my art at that point wasn't very good at all, but I was still really hurt by it (and they mocked me in their rejection email, which I still think was uncalled for). It could have driven me to quit, but instead, it just motivated me to try harder and get into it someday. I got rejected again, but I kept going at it, and I THINK at one point I actually did get accepted many years later, but I can't remember now, the archive got wiped, haha. "I'll show them all!" I said at the time, and it's kind of satisfying to think... hey, I did show them after all! I didn't give up, and look where I am now! In a way, I achieved my younger self's dream. I wish there was some way I could go back and tell her.
Anyway, this personal tangent brings me back to Hypnospace, and the kind of fond melancholy some of the pages brings to me. I see myself in them, I see that desperate loneliness and that frantic desire to connect with others. Little pages talking about yourself, talking about your family, asking people to add you on ChitChat, forming little communities and connections with each other... and in the end, all of it comes from the same place. We want to talk to each other... we want to make communities where we can be accepted, where we can feel like we belong. And it's in our nature as humans to try and make those places wherever we can, to find friends and people we relate to. To look for support and understanding, to reach out to others.
One of the things I like about Hypnospace is that it isn't just little personal vanity pages like that... there are ugly places in Hypnospace as well, just as there are in real life, haha. Mocking websites that poke fun at others, teens sniping and making hate pages for each other, a whole underground thing of people trashing other people's sites, incredibly insensitive mocking art about actual tragedies, snobbery and control freaks and people shooting each other down. There are also really beautiful places in Hypnospace, little pages just meant for people to gather and share their pain, to be kind to each other for no reason. GearHeadGregg, for example, just truly wants to help others on Hypnospace... he runs a page just for hints and tips for how to use it, and he helps A LOT of people clean up their pages and make them readable and teaches them how to use the page maker, all for apparently no reason other than he likes helping people. So many pages thank GHG for his help with how things work, or formatting, or layouts or things like that. And even that is nostalgic for me - I remember thanking people profusely back in the day for helping me figure out html, how to set up a page, how to link to things properly, just little simple things. I always wanted to thank people who helped me, and seeing so many people thank GHG really brings that back for me. That feels very real.
Hypnospace feels very real to me, which is part of why it sticks in my mind I think. Not just the style and formatting of the pages, but the people behind them and their behavior. Sandy is another one of those kind people who just genuinely wants to help people feel better, who supports people who seem to be having a hard time out of nothing but the kindness of her heart. When someone is suffering she sends them a SandyCard, which was just such a sweet thing to do but also something I saw back in the day, haha. The nature of the old internet was that there was very little chance for any kind of immediate feedback, much less any that was obvious to anyone passing by. There were no likes or comments - if you wanted to talk to someone, you had to email them personally or sign their guestbook, or talk to them on a chat client if you had one. Things back then were a lot more private, and establishing a relationship with someone or reaching out to them required more work and effort, and it was by its nature a single, solo thing. Sandy saw these people and took the effort to reach out to them with her SandyCards, just a level of investment and effort that the modern internet doesn't really understand. I've had people reach out to me personally when I seemed to be going through a tough time, even if it was through the message system of a site instead of an email, although people still do that too. It's just a lot easier to do that nowadays. But that people were willing to put in the effort to do it back then really says something, I think.
There are a lot of little details in the relationships that people have with each other in Hypnospace, which makes the entire thing feel more connected, more like a greater community. Each zone tends to keep to themselves, but not all of them, and the connections in those zones feel tighter and closer, like a real community of people. The old people zone, for example, has sites that are all fairly similar in style and scope, and they all talk to each other and link to each other's pages and do things for each other. When one of them gets upset, the others get upset too, or disagree with the people who are upset. Their pages are solitary places where only they can post things, without any way to directly contact each other. Notes on a fridge door, I remember reading that comparison. And yet, at the same time, they're still connected. They still communicate and talk to each other via their individual pages, their little personal spaces not entirely isolated... just controlled and private, to an extent. It's different to have a blog or site and communicate with certain people through that, rather than talking to them directly through comments or a chat client. The lack of any kind of visible engagement is also a change - there aren't even hit counters on the page (which were ubiquitous back in the day... that's something that's missing although I know why, haha) so there's no real way to tell how people are reacting to what they're posting or if anyone's even reading it. They're just saying things and those things are just standing where they are on their own. No ratios, no likes, no obvious response to any thing directly. Just their number of friends on ChitChat to give you an idea of how connected they are to others, or how popular they are.
One of the things about the old internet that's also hard to describe if you weren't there is that it was still a lonely place, where interaction with others was rare for just those reasons. No comments and no likes meant it was hard to talk to others or tell them you were there. That's why hit counters were so common, it was a way to know people were out there, even if you couldn't see them. So many people were lonely or desperate for attention, and the difficulty in getting that was hard and at times painful. But if you have no other place to turn to, if you're not getting it anywhere else... then you'd settle for what you can get. It's a particularly heartbreaking aspect of many of the old people's pages... particularly Mavis. :( She mentions in her page that she's in an old folks home and can't move around anymore, and she thinks it's amazing that she can talk to so many people via the service that she wouldn't get to talk to otherwise. I think that ability is one of the most beautiful things about the internet, that it allows people who otherwise wouldn't have anyone to reach out and have some connection with someone else, however sparse. Even when the internet was just beginning, still humans were seeking each other out.
Another thing I think felt very realistic about Hypnospace is that the level of page building varied depending on the person. Some pages were total messes of course, but there are some pages that were very neatly laid out and easy to navigate, even easy to look at. There were people out there that knew what they were doing, who knew how to create a site. And one of the great things about it is that you're able to follow these people over time, and you can see some of them learning! One site that's a mess at the beginning gradually becomes neater and more sleek and well-designed with the help of others, you can see people learning how things work.
There is something kind of childlike about the early internet, in that so many didn't really realize what we were doing, what we were putting across, how things should look. It was a new place with social norms that were still being defined, so many things still being learned. Another detail I like about Hypnospace is that real pictures are really rare, which was also true to the time - scanners were very rare back in the day, so it was unusual for anyone to have an actual picture of themselves, haha. That's one reason with GIFs and clipart and pictures were so common. There weren't many real ways to make art to put anywhere (art programs were expensive and also rare), and so people pulled from group resources to decorate their pages and express themselves. And one of my favorite details was people not crediting very well for those pictures, haha. A lot of "copyright their respective owners" or "I don't own any of these pictures" or "I dunno who did this but isn't it neat?" or "Everything but the skeleton is copyright me", which was absolutely everywhere, haha. I did it myself! I just didn't keep track of where I got things and I just reposted them without even really thinking about it. There were so many random social norms I just didn't know at the time.
I mentioned that Hypnospace is sort of a time capsule of a current time, but there are also themes in it which I think resonate strongly still with the internet as it is currently. There are things in Hypnospace that are still present today, a kind of sickness at the heart of it that was there almost since the very beginning and has today metastasized out of control. It's easy to idealize that era, but there were problems then that are still problems now, which is another thing that I think Hypnospace does really well.
The primary one, and one that has just raged out of control over time, is that the internet isn't a free space. It's owned by corporations. I mentioned before that people want to make communities... we want to make friendships, we want to find people we belong with, we want attention and validation from others and to talk to people, no matter how hard it is to do. Even the people who hate hypnospace and trash people on it constantly talk with OTHER people who hate hypnospace... even they create their own communities with people with similar interests to try and connect with each other. It's a very human urge, and it's not one that's compatible with the fact that Hypnospace is owned by a corporation that only really cares about the bottom line. This is obvious right from the very beginning... your job in general emphasizes this in that it ignores any context or explanation or who people are or what they want. The people on Hypnospace aren't supposed to be seen as people to you - they're problems, they're faceless beings that are breaking rules and you need to enforce the rules. It still breaks my heart to report that first violation since it's in an entirely harmless context, and the person doing it is, at that moment, crying about her lost child. :< Her site, everything she posted, everything emphasized that she was a person. Every site on Hypnospace belongs to a real person and you can see that in every little flourish and detail they put into their site. Every little aspect of their pages informed by who they are and how they want to represent themselves and what they want.
The corporation that runs Hypnospace doesn't really care about any of that... the only value of Hypnospace to them is the money they get from investors and keeping those investors happy at any cost. The real value of Hypnospace are the things the people on it create... these personalized little places where they create art and form connections with each other, help each other, these communities they built in this new and untamed place. All these people, and everything they made, is what really matters... that's what engages you as you play, that's what people are nostalgic for nowadays when we talk about the old internet. Not the corporations that created or maintained the service, but the temporary little unique things that people made. Creating communities in a space that is not meant for them, is not designed for them, and does not care about them, only leads to heartbreak. All these beautiful castles all made of sand, able to be swept away by people who don't care about anything other than money. And you can see this in so many places in Hypnospace, all these little personal pages and communities destroyed or shoved away or messed with just to further the bottom line. It's a callous disregard for what the actual value of these places is, and I don't have to tell you that it's a massive problem in the current day as well. I think people tend to forget just how hard the old sites used to press their old advertising as well. Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod... they had pop-ups and banner ads and all of those, all these sites built on the faultlines of a corporation trying to make money for their investors, and that's an awful place to try and build a home and community with others but we do it anyway. We can't stop doing it, even now, and people can't stop preying on that for their own gain, even now.
People in Hypnospace are often mad at the moderators or the people in charge for what they're doing, and often for very legitimate reasons. Some sites are put into the wrong zones for no apparent reason. Five zones just randomly get deleted and shoved into one zone without any warning with a bunch of data capping, and there's nothing anyone in those zones can do. One of the sadder things you see are people who are on a trial version of Hypnospace, so they have a banner forcibly stuck on their page, and then when their trial runs out, their page is blacked out and eventually deleted. So you get to see these personal little places people carve out, these parts of themselves they put out there, their attempts to reach out to find others, and you see them get destroyed over time for want of money. Poems, interests, pictures... all gone without any concern for who they were. An old format for sites before the new one in Hypnospace comes up isn't at all supported - their pages are garbled and broken, even old ones that are fixtures of their community, and their demands for some kind of explanation or for it to be fixed are totally ignored. They aren't profitable, so they don't matter. Even if they were important, beloved places on the internet... not profitable, can't be bothered, don't matter.
This conflict in what matters has led to such awful things in the present. Algorithms deciding what matters and what doesn't, lack of moderation because those in question pay enough money, casual damage caused to countless people, places with years of history just shut down without warning... Geocities itself was a victim of this, a relic of an older time that was deemed too much of a burden, irrelevant, disposable. Castles in the sand.
There are so many things in Hypnospace that feel so real. There are people in the communities that do the jobs that the corporation behind it SHOULD be doing - one guy in the old people's zone runs a scam watch page to warn other people about viruses and tell people about hidden malware, and he even says that this is something the corporation SHOULD be doing, but they're instead passing it off to volunteers they aren't even paying because all they care about is money, and protecting and caring about the people using their service doesn't make them money. Malware does get them money by forcing advertising on the user via an infected system, so they let that slide, but monitoring what people are doing doesn't. They don't explain how things work, so users take it on themselves to write tip pages or record videos explaining things for others. They find ways to see the garbled pages and tell each other, because the corporation won't fix them themselves. They distribute software to do it for free for each other, because the corporation only cares about jacking up prices to let people look at their own pages. The corporation pushs niche interests in zones because the people behind those niche interests have the money to want it pushed so they can make more money. So often in Hypnospace you can see the true value of that place, the people and what they make and who they are, and you can see the grasping greed that works against it, that is at odds with it at every step.
The Freelands are another thing that definitely felt familiar to me. People revolting against mods, against rules, against decisions made without their input that don't take any of them into consideration. And they strive to make their own places, defined by their own rules to try and grasp some kind of power, but they're still stuck in the same place. They're still built in the same sand. As long as the service is owned by a corporation that only cares about money, these places are never going to be safe. They're never going to saved, they're never going to be appreciated for their own worth, or their own role they play in history.
It IS history. It's sad to watch time go by and watch people's pages disappear or fall apart, watch things slowly fail, watch things creep forward towards more control and less freedom, as the grip of the corporation gets stronger and people fight but can't win. This is history, this place as a whole is history, but it gets deemed as nothing by those in charge and it disappears. Geocities was a part of internet history, and it almost disappeared. So many parts of internet history have disappeared, seen by so many as iminently disposable, even as they were invaluable, irreplacable records of people venturing into this new and unknown world without any preparation and forging the customs and norms that would later come to define it. Tripod still lives, but so many others have disappeared. All those communities, those connections we made, all gone. There's something very melancholy about it, that these things are all so beautiful and so meaningful in their sincerity, and they're so temporary. No one knew what the internet was going to be like. In those little personal spaces, even then we weren't safe... we could get shut down, reported, invaded by banner ads and the like... we didn't have complete control. We were at the whims of the people who owned the hosting services.
And people back then were still mean, still put each other down, still harrassed and felt superior and waged little flame wars against each other. But it's one thing to get angry emails or guestbook entries from one person, and another to send a hoard of thousands of people to harrass someone instantly, constantly, until they destroy their life. The capacity for the internet to cause damage has increased so much, while the ability to control it has barely changed at all. The risk of putting yourself out there is so much greater than it was, and it can be genuinely dangerous to your health and your livelihood. My younger self put terrible art on her page without fear of someone dunking on her for their thousands of followers. The worst she could imagine was someone personally sending her a mean email, or mocking her in a single email rejection from an archive. Her little personal space in the internet was mostly silent, but in a way, it was a place for her to explore and grow on her own, without fear. Hordes of people couldn't descend on her without warning, but that could very easily happen to someone now.
People want to communicate. We want to connect to each other. Comments, likes, communication got faster and faster and more immediate, and it's not like it was forced on people. People wanted it, we craved it, we jumped onto it at the first opportunity. We still want it - it's incredibly hard to go from a place as addictive as social media for those lonely, attention-seeking people to a place with little to no active feedback like a blog or a personal site. Coming to this point of immediate connection may have been inevitable, but I don't think it had to be like this. I wonder sometimes what it'd be like if the internet had been a public service from the beginning, if it hadn't been at the mercy of corporate investors scrambling to find ways to monetize these things and places and communities we created. Without outside pressure to make money, what would the internet be like? It's become such an essential part of our lives, and the amount of control a few commercial sites have over all discourse and personal expression isn't healthy, or safe. Not just in terms of mental health, but just in the permanence or solidity of those places we build. I have years of history here, and it could all be gone in an instant of Livejournal went down. Years of history on Devart, all gone in seconds. Tumblr, Twitter, even Tripod... all these places, all this history, this personal journey I've made over all this time... all of it at the whims of these greater companies, all at someone else's control. We spend so much time making these beautiful castles, and they could so easily be swept away. It's tragic that so many precious, irreplacable things could be destroyed so easily, and so carelessly.
There's just something melancholy about Hypnospace to me, this place and these people lost to time. This picture of a place that once held a lot of promise, even for all its faults and that fragility and callousness at the foundation that held it up. It's that same kind of sadness when you look into the past at people who have died, people who have disappeared. A kind of loss that never goes away. It's really an amazing game if you had a site just like that back in the day, but I think it's also good otherwise, haha. It just made me think a lot about what the internet was and what it's become, and what it could have been, and what it meant to me. All those people out there, looking for someone to connect with and a place to belong... even now, with everyone connected more tightly than ever, still we reach out to each other and still lonely people seek each other out. Still people are lonely. There are still people trashing and hurting each other, and there are still people helping and supporting each other. Our fundamental nature hasn't changed, it's just the places we express it. It's the places themselves that have changed, weaponizing our worst qualities against each other, preying on our weaknesses for attention and validation to keep us on those sites as long as possible, to feed that eternal greed for money regardless of the pain and damage it causes their users. It's such a dehumanizing way to look at and treat something that is just so painfully, sincerely human by its very nature.
There are still those beautiful little places on the internet where we reach out to each other, help each other, support each other, in spite of the sickness all around us. There's something really beautiful about that, I think. Even when they get destroyed again and again, we keep making them in every new place we go. There are always ugly things, and there are always beautiful things. I just wish the places where we built these things were more solid. I wish they belonged to the people who actually give them value, rather than the people who want to extract value out of those places just to make more money for themselves.
I dunno, it just makes me think.
I also posted this at dreamwidth. Comment here or there, don't matter to me!
Anyway, recently I've been playing Hypnospace Outlaw, which is a game that feels like it was specifically made for me, haha. I have a specific kind of nostalgia coming into it, being that I actually made one of those ugly late 90s pages that are featured in it in one of the big three free website services. Everyone always goes to Geocities when thinking about the style, but Angelfire and Tripod were also out there! And each site had preconceptions and stereotypes about the others, haha. In a way, there are certain things about the internet that haven't changed at all... things about human nature and how we interact and communicate with each other that are universal, even when the tools we use to do so change around us. Hypnospace Outlaw is a kind of time capsule of a certain era of the internet, at once a nostalgic look into the past and also commentary on the internet of the present. It would have been easy for it just to be a "lol old internet was so ugly and stupid wasn't it" kind of surface-level parody, but there's more to it than that. There's a lot about it to dig into. I've been trying to get my thoughts about it in order, haha.
There is a lot of nostalgia for that time period of the internet (netstalgia, I've heard it called) among a certain set, and I definitely have a lot of it myself, having been there at the time, haha. For some it's a kind of abstract period in time where you can only imagine what it was like, but I can remember all of it pretty clearly. I went looking through my files after playing it and even found my old website files from back then. I kept dates about what I was doing! So I know that I made my old site back in December of 1997, which is kind of astonishing to me. It doesn't feel so long ago... one of the things that tends to happen to me when I read these old pieces of my life, chatlogs or old pictures or old entries or things like that, is that my current sense of time becomes skewed, and it feels like those things have just happened, or weren't so far away.
At the same time, looking at those pages brought up a kind of painful nostalgia, one that almost brought tears to my eyes in a way. Not for a lost era of the internet, a general picture of how things used to be, but for myself in particular. I was so young then, and I had so much energy and passion for what I was writing about. I was excitable, friendly, desperate to talk to other people (begging people to sign my guestbook or email me), running tiny little contests to try and get people to interact with me. In truth, at that time in life (really... through the vast majority of my early life) I was just so, so lonely. I didn't really have any friends outside my family, I was bullied at school mercilessly, I had no one to really talk to and didn't fit in anywhere. The internet presented something to me I couldn't even imagine at that time, something that seemed really magical - a chance to interact with other people who could really know me, who'd be interested in what I wanted to talk about and who'd want to talk to me in return.
I was so lonely back then. It's hard to even put it into words. I wanted a place I could belong, I wanted to find some people who accepted me. I wanted to be a part of this online world that seemed so new and fascinating. Having a website, having your OWN website, just seemed so amazing and cool. It was like you were special, like you were part of some new and amazing thing. I wanted to be part of that. I wanted to make friends, I wanted to talk to people. More than anything that motivated me back then was that loneliness and that desperation for some kind of attention and validation. And the sad thing is when I look back at that little kid I used to be, she doesn't even know some of the awful things that are going to happen to her. She's innocent in her own way, but still, she's hurting. But you can't see that so obviously on her pages, I was so excited and I wanted friends so desperately, I didn't talk about that kind of thing.
I did talk about being rejected from an art archive I was applying to at the time, which devastated my little self. To be fair, my art at that point wasn't very good at all, but I was still really hurt by it (and they mocked me in their rejection email, which I still think was uncalled for). It could have driven me to quit, but instead, it just motivated me to try harder and get into it someday. I got rejected again, but I kept going at it, and I THINK at one point I actually did get accepted many years later, but I can't remember now, the archive got wiped, haha. "I'll show them all!" I said at the time, and it's kind of satisfying to think... hey, I did show them after all! I didn't give up, and look where I am now! In a way, I achieved my younger self's dream. I wish there was some way I could go back and tell her.
Anyway, this personal tangent brings me back to Hypnospace, and the kind of fond melancholy some of the pages brings to me. I see myself in them, I see that desperate loneliness and that frantic desire to connect with others. Little pages talking about yourself, talking about your family, asking people to add you on ChitChat, forming little communities and connections with each other... and in the end, all of it comes from the same place. We want to talk to each other... we want to make communities where we can be accepted, where we can feel like we belong. And it's in our nature as humans to try and make those places wherever we can, to find friends and people we relate to. To look for support and understanding, to reach out to others.
One of the things I like about Hypnospace is that it isn't just little personal vanity pages like that... there are ugly places in Hypnospace as well, just as there are in real life, haha. Mocking websites that poke fun at others, teens sniping and making hate pages for each other, a whole underground thing of people trashing other people's sites, incredibly insensitive mocking art about actual tragedies, snobbery and control freaks and people shooting each other down. There are also really beautiful places in Hypnospace, little pages just meant for people to gather and share their pain, to be kind to each other for no reason. GearHeadGregg, for example, just truly wants to help others on Hypnospace... he runs a page just for hints and tips for how to use it, and he helps A LOT of people clean up their pages and make them readable and teaches them how to use the page maker, all for apparently no reason other than he likes helping people. So many pages thank GHG for his help with how things work, or formatting, or layouts or things like that. And even that is nostalgic for me - I remember thanking people profusely back in the day for helping me figure out html, how to set up a page, how to link to things properly, just little simple things. I always wanted to thank people who helped me, and seeing so many people thank GHG really brings that back for me. That feels very real.
Hypnospace feels very real to me, which is part of why it sticks in my mind I think. Not just the style and formatting of the pages, but the people behind them and their behavior. Sandy is another one of those kind people who just genuinely wants to help people feel better, who supports people who seem to be having a hard time out of nothing but the kindness of her heart. When someone is suffering she sends them a SandyCard, which was just such a sweet thing to do but also something I saw back in the day, haha. The nature of the old internet was that there was very little chance for any kind of immediate feedback, much less any that was obvious to anyone passing by. There were no likes or comments - if you wanted to talk to someone, you had to email them personally or sign their guestbook, or talk to them on a chat client if you had one. Things back then were a lot more private, and establishing a relationship with someone or reaching out to them required more work and effort, and it was by its nature a single, solo thing. Sandy saw these people and took the effort to reach out to them with her SandyCards, just a level of investment and effort that the modern internet doesn't really understand. I've had people reach out to me personally when I seemed to be going through a tough time, even if it was through the message system of a site instead of an email, although people still do that too. It's just a lot easier to do that nowadays. But that people were willing to put in the effort to do it back then really says something, I think.
There are a lot of little details in the relationships that people have with each other in Hypnospace, which makes the entire thing feel more connected, more like a greater community. Each zone tends to keep to themselves, but not all of them, and the connections in those zones feel tighter and closer, like a real community of people. The old people zone, for example, has sites that are all fairly similar in style and scope, and they all talk to each other and link to each other's pages and do things for each other. When one of them gets upset, the others get upset too, or disagree with the people who are upset. Their pages are solitary places where only they can post things, without any way to directly contact each other. Notes on a fridge door, I remember reading that comparison. And yet, at the same time, they're still connected. They still communicate and talk to each other via their individual pages, their little personal spaces not entirely isolated... just controlled and private, to an extent. It's different to have a blog or site and communicate with certain people through that, rather than talking to them directly through comments or a chat client. The lack of any kind of visible engagement is also a change - there aren't even hit counters on the page (which were ubiquitous back in the day... that's something that's missing although I know why, haha) so there's no real way to tell how people are reacting to what they're posting or if anyone's even reading it. They're just saying things and those things are just standing where they are on their own. No ratios, no likes, no obvious response to any thing directly. Just their number of friends on ChitChat to give you an idea of how connected they are to others, or how popular they are.
One of the things about the old internet that's also hard to describe if you weren't there is that it was still a lonely place, where interaction with others was rare for just those reasons. No comments and no likes meant it was hard to talk to others or tell them you were there. That's why hit counters were so common, it was a way to know people were out there, even if you couldn't see them. So many people were lonely or desperate for attention, and the difficulty in getting that was hard and at times painful. But if you have no other place to turn to, if you're not getting it anywhere else... then you'd settle for what you can get. It's a particularly heartbreaking aspect of many of the old people's pages... particularly Mavis. :( She mentions in her page that she's in an old folks home and can't move around anymore, and she thinks it's amazing that she can talk to so many people via the service that she wouldn't get to talk to otherwise. I think that ability is one of the most beautiful things about the internet, that it allows people who otherwise wouldn't have anyone to reach out and have some connection with someone else, however sparse. Even when the internet was just beginning, still humans were seeking each other out.
Another thing I think felt very realistic about Hypnospace is that the level of page building varied depending on the person. Some pages were total messes of course, but there are some pages that were very neatly laid out and easy to navigate, even easy to look at. There were people out there that knew what they were doing, who knew how to create a site. And one of the great things about it is that you're able to follow these people over time, and you can see some of them learning! One site that's a mess at the beginning gradually becomes neater and more sleek and well-designed with the help of others, you can see people learning how things work.
There is something kind of childlike about the early internet, in that so many didn't really realize what we were doing, what we were putting across, how things should look. It was a new place with social norms that were still being defined, so many things still being learned. Another detail I like about Hypnospace is that real pictures are really rare, which was also true to the time - scanners were very rare back in the day, so it was unusual for anyone to have an actual picture of themselves, haha. That's one reason with GIFs and clipart and pictures were so common. There weren't many real ways to make art to put anywhere (art programs were expensive and also rare), and so people pulled from group resources to decorate their pages and express themselves. And one of my favorite details was people not crediting very well for those pictures, haha. A lot of "copyright their respective owners" or "I don't own any of these pictures" or "I dunno who did this but isn't it neat?" or "Everything but the skeleton is copyright me", which was absolutely everywhere, haha. I did it myself! I just didn't keep track of where I got things and I just reposted them without even really thinking about it. There were so many random social norms I just didn't know at the time.
I mentioned that Hypnospace is sort of a time capsule of a current time, but there are also themes in it which I think resonate strongly still with the internet as it is currently. There are things in Hypnospace that are still present today, a kind of sickness at the heart of it that was there almost since the very beginning and has today metastasized out of control. It's easy to idealize that era, but there were problems then that are still problems now, which is another thing that I think Hypnospace does really well.
The primary one, and one that has just raged out of control over time, is that the internet isn't a free space. It's owned by corporations. I mentioned before that people want to make communities... we want to make friendships, we want to find people we belong with, we want attention and validation from others and to talk to people, no matter how hard it is to do. Even the people who hate hypnospace and trash people on it constantly talk with OTHER people who hate hypnospace... even they create their own communities with people with similar interests to try and connect with each other. It's a very human urge, and it's not one that's compatible with the fact that Hypnospace is owned by a corporation that only really cares about the bottom line. This is obvious right from the very beginning... your job in general emphasizes this in that it ignores any context or explanation or who people are or what they want. The people on Hypnospace aren't supposed to be seen as people to you - they're problems, they're faceless beings that are breaking rules and you need to enforce the rules. It still breaks my heart to report that first violation since it's in an entirely harmless context, and the person doing it is, at that moment, crying about her lost child. :< Her site, everything she posted, everything emphasized that she was a person. Every site on Hypnospace belongs to a real person and you can see that in every little flourish and detail they put into their site. Every little aspect of their pages informed by who they are and how they want to represent themselves and what they want.
The corporation that runs Hypnospace doesn't really care about any of that... the only value of Hypnospace to them is the money they get from investors and keeping those investors happy at any cost. The real value of Hypnospace are the things the people on it create... these personalized little places where they create art and form connections with each other, help each other, these communities they built in this new and untamed place. All these people, and everything they made, is what really matters... that's what engages you as you play, that's what people are nostalgic for nowadays when we talk about the old internet. Not the corporations that created or maintained the service, but the temporary little unique things that people made. Creating communities in a space that is not meant for them, is not designed for them, and does not care about them, only leads to heartbreak. All these beautiful castles all made of sand, able to be swept away by people who don't care about anything other than money. And you can see this in so many places in Hypnospace, all these little personal pages and communities destroyed or shoved away or messed with just to further the bottom line. It's a callous disregard for what the actual value of these places is, and I don't have to tell you that it's a massive problem in the current day as well. I think people tend to forget just how hard the old sites used to press their old advertising as well. Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod... they had pop-ups and banner ads and all of those, all these sites built on the faultlines of a corporation trying to make money for their investors, and that's an awful place to try and build a home and community with others but we do it anyway. We can't stop doing it, even now, and people can't stop preying on that for their own gain, even now.
People in Hypnospace are often mad at the moderators or the people in charge for what they're doing, and often for very legitimate reasons. Some sites are put into the wrong zones for no apparent reason. Five zones just randomly get deleted and shoved into one zone without any warning with a bunch of data capping, and there's nothing anyone in those zones can do. One of the sadder things you see are people who are on a trial version of Hypnospace, so they have a banner forcibly stuck on their page, and then when their trial runs out, their page is blacked out and eventually deleted. So you get to see these personal little places people carve out, these parts of themselves they put out there, their attempts to reach out to find others, and you see them get destroyed over time for want of money. Poems, interests, pictures... all gone without any concern for who they were. An old format for sites before the new one in Hypnospace comes up isn't at all supported - their pages are garbled and broken, even old ones that are fixtures of their community, and their demands for some kind of explanation or for it to be fixed are totally ignored. They aren't profitable, so they don't matter. Even if they were important, beloved places on the internet... not profitable, can't be bothered, don't matter.
This conflict in what matters has led to such awful things in the present. Algorithms deciding what matters and what doesn't, lack of moderation because those in question pay enough money, casual damage caused to countless people, places with years of history just shut down without warning... Geocities itself was a victim of this, a relic of an older time that was deemed too much of a burden, irrelevant, disposable. Castles in the sand.
There are so many things in Hypnospace that feel so real. There are people in the communities that do the jobs that the corporation behind it SHOULD be doing - one guy in the old people's zone runs a scam watch page to warn other people about viruses and tell people about hidden malware, and he even says that this is something the corporation SHOULD be doing, but they're instead passing it off to volunteers they aren't even paying because all they care about is money, and protecting and caring about the people using their service doesn't make them money. Malware does get them money by forcing advertising on the user via an infected system, so they let that slide, but monitoring what people are doing doesn't. They don't explain how things work, so users take it on themselves to write tip pages or record videos explaining things for others. They find ways to see the garbled pages and tell each other, because the corporation won't fix them themselves. They distribute software to do it for free for each other, because the corporation only cares about jacking up prices to let people look at their own pages. The corporation pushs niche interests in zones because the people behind those niche interests have the money to want it pushed so they can make more money. So often in Hypnospace you can see the true value of that place, the people and what they make and who they are, and you can see the grasping greed that works against it, that is at odds with it at every step.
The Freelands are another thing that definitely felt familiar to me. People revolting against mods, against rules, against decisions made without their input that don't take any of them into consideration. And they strive to make their own places, defined by their own rules to try and grasp some kind of power, but they're still stuck in the same place. They're still built in the same sand. As long as the service is owned by a corporation that only cares about money, these places are never going to be safe. They're never going to saved, they're never going to be appreciated for their own worth, or their own role they play in history.
It IS history. It's sad to watch time go by and watch people's pages disappear or fall apart, watch things slowly fail, watch things creep forward towards more control and less freedom, as the grip of the corporation gets stronger and people fight but can't win. This is history, this place as a whole is history, but it gets deemed as nothing by those in charge and it disappears. Geocities was a part of internet history, and it almost disappeared. So many parts of internet history have disappeared, seen by so many as iminently disposable, even as they were invaluable, irreplacable records of people venturing into this new and unknown world without any preparation and forging the customs and norms that would later come to define it. Tripod still lives, but so many others have disappeared. All those communities, those connections we made, all gone. There's something very melancholy about it, that these things are all so beautiful and so meaningful in their sincerity, and they're so temporary. No one knew what the internet was going to be like. In those little personal spaces, even then we weren't safe... we could get shut down, reported, invaded by banner ads and the like... we didn't have complete control. We were at the whims of the people who owned the hosting services.
And people back then were still mean, still put each other down, still harrassed and felt superior and waged little flame wars against each other. But it's one thing to get angry emails or guestbook entries from one person, and another to send a hoard of thousands of people to harrass someone instantly, constantly, until they destroy their life. The capacity for the internet to cause damage has increased so much, while the ability to control it has barely changed at all. The risk of putting yourself out there is so much greater than it was, and it can be genuinely dangerous to your health and your livelihood. My younger self put terrible art on her page without fear of someone dunking on her for their thousands of followers. The worst she could imagine was someone personally sending her a mean email, or mocking her in a single email rejection from an archive. Her little personal space in the internet was mostly silent, but in a way, it was a place for her to explore and grow on her own, without fear. Hordes of people couldn't descend on her without warning, but that could very easily happen to someone now.
People want to communicate. We want to connect to each other. Comments, likes, communication got faster and faster and more immediate, and it's not like it was forced on people. People wanted it, we craved it, we jumped onto it at the first opportunity. We still want it - it's incredibly hard to go from a place as addictive as social media for those lonely, attention-seeking people to a place with little to no active feedback like a blog or a personal site. Coming to this point of immediate connection may have been inevitable, but I don't think it had to be like this. I wonder sometimes what it'd be like if the internet had been a public service from the beginning, if it hadn't been at the mercy of corporate investors scrambling to find ways to monetize these things and places and communities we created. Without outside pressure to make money, what would the internet be like? It's become such an essential part of our lives, and the amount of control a few commercial sites have over all discourse and personal expression isn't healthy, or safe. Not just in terms of mental health, but just in the permanence or solidity of those places we build. I have years of history here, and it could all be gone in an instant of Livejournal went down. Years of history on Devart, all gone in seconds. Tumblr, Twitter, even Tripod... all these places, all this history, this personal journey I've made over all this time... all of it at the whims of these greater companies, all at someone else's control. We spend so much time making these beautiful castles, and they could so easily be swept away. It's tragic that so many precious, irreplacable things could be destroyed so easily, and so carelessly.
There's just something melancholy about Hypnospace to me, this place and these people lost to time. This picture of a place that once held a lot of promise, even for all its faults and that fragility and callousness at the foundation that held it up. It's that same kind of sadness when you look into the past at people who have died, people who have disappeared. A kind of loss that never goes away. It's really an amazing game if you had a site just like that back in the day, but I think it's also good otherwise, haha. It just made me think a lot about what the internet was and what it's become, and what it could have been, and what it meant to me. All those people out there, looking for someone to connect with and a place to belong... even now, with everyone connected more tightly than ever, still we reach out to each other and still lonely people seek each other out. Still people are lonely. There are still people trashing and hurting each other, and there are still people helping and supporting each other. Our fundamental nature hasn't changed, it's just the places we express it. It's the places themselves that have changed, weaponizing our worst qualities against each other, preying on our weaknesses for attention and validation to keep us on those sites as long as possible, to feed that eternal greed for money regardless of the pain and damage it causes their users. It's such a dehumanizing way to look at and treat something that is just so painfully, sincerely human by its very nature.
There are still those beautiful little places on the internet where we reach out to each other, help each other, support each other, in spite of the sickness all around us. There's something really beautiful about that, I think. Even when they get destroyed again and again, we keep making them in every new place we go. There are always ugly things, and there are always beautiful things. I just wish the places where we built these things were more solid. I wish they belonged to the people who actually give them value, rather than the people who want to extract value out of those places just to make more money for themselves.
I dunno, it just makes me think.
I also posted this at dreamwidth. Comment here or there, don't matter to me!