Half Life 2 skin for the Windows Media 9 Series (2003)

"Inside it holds your average media player essentials such as a folder to fetch your media, a playlist feature, seeking and volume functions, tuning and of course pausing and skipping. Surprisingly as a bonus this media player contains a section where you can access beta screenshots from Half-Life 2 from early level designs to concept renders. Here you can also find a link which brings you to the Half-Life website (here) and the Windows XP website as well (now defunct) (here). With videos you can change the brightness, hue, contrast and etc." - 9 Hour Work Day on Steam.

[DOWNLOAD LINK!]

Note: I'm unsure if this works on Windows 11! I've read that it does, but I'm yet to try it myself.

Frutiger Retro/Scrollcore/Sepia grunge/Archive2k/Vintage Web aesthetic websites

....Fine, let me fall down some godforsaken rabbit hole of the Distant Past™

Did you know there was a Playstation 1 Escaflowne game? Here are some screenshots from a walk through of this whole game on Youtube. Has anyone played this game before, and if so what did you think? Some commenters in the Youtube video suggested that the clips in the game were from actual "lost episodes" or at least partially animated episodes axed from the TV series runtime. This is the companion piece to the “deleted scenes and video game cut scenes” video I posted a while ago. I think the graphics are very attractive for a game from the late 1990′s and authentic to the look of the anime. I wonder if Escaflowne would have been more popular if this game had been released in English around the time of the initial broadcast in North America?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCsxSf0mgRg&t=6213s (watch the whole play through)

COFMETA - Activeworlds (1995) A digital virtual world representing the Metaverse of 1992's "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson.

ohhhhh my god. oh my god

Bandai Digirobo Tokima

Robot Watch 1998.

I accidentally stumbled upon this elderly gay man's website last night, it's been active since the 90s and has pages talking about his personal life as a gay cowboy it's super interesting! he has webcams running on it that refresh every minute or so and pages about his experiences with HIV and cancer - he also has a massive archive of gay magazine scans (18+) from the 70s up to the 90s! 

iwako eraser sticker sheet ~☆

SO I’ve been trying to diversify where I find fanfics and, as a part of that, I have been going through ye olde fanfic websites (affectionate) and I have to admit I am so so enamored and so very fond

The one I’m going thru right now as a lot of fics from 2010 and earlier and there is something just so interesting in seeing the different trends in writing and fan-spaces on the different sites! If they have covers or not, what tropes or tags are prevalent, how users were expected to find and retrieve different fics, even just reading the comments and seeing the conversations that were happening there years ago is so so fun. I genuinely am enjoying the hell out of my explorations therein - from the fun jpgs and web elements to the writing guides posted by the mods

I am simply thoroughly enjoying getting to spend some time w the older, less centralized aspects of fan culture. Some of the sites I’ve found are still decently active which has been a treat but I am also loving just wandering around the now, as far as I can tell at least, largely defunct or inactive sites

tldr I am having the time of my life!! if anyone sees this and has any (niche or otherwise) fanfic sites that aren’t AO3 or fanfic dot net they’d slash-gen recommend I would love to wander around them :) so far I’ve been using google to track them down but I know that’s only gonna get me so far lmao

(also as a grad student taking courses in cataloging right now I am very much enjoying seeing how different sites arrange their databases lol, icing on the cake really)

Where I post from

Macintosh SE, clear display unit, 1987

instagram: cheri.png

I can’t express how much I love these bizarre “old web” anime fansites that still lurk on the internet. It feels like finding some obscure but valuable artefact at an antique shop or car boot sale (garage sale for North Americans). Here’s one all about my favourite group of characters in Escaflowne, Dilandau and their Dragon Slayers. All the sections still appear to be functional and there’s even some surprisingly appealing fan art to admire. Enjoy and feel like you’ve travelled back in time 20 years or more!

What strikes me on these vintage sites is that no body ever explores Dilandau’s fascinating gender identity from a LGBTQ perspective. It’s nice to see how fandoms have evolved to become more enlightened towards these types of characters in the 2010′s onwards. 

pikacollection001 - January 2005