Geocites shuts down today. Anyone care?

[gaffa]

The long time home of some of the crappiest web pages known to man shuts down today.

It's baffling that they are just going to delete all this stuff, and are not going to hand a backup of the full site to archive.org. I've saved a site I'm interested in that appears to be abandoned, but all the rest of it may just disappear.

[bup]

XKCD cares.

[Patty O'Furniture]

I thought they had been dead and buried a long time ago. Shrug.

[Reply]

It's about time, really, but still a little sad. Geocities was a huge part of the web's history.

RIP, freakin' blinkin' animated GIFs.

[Khadaji]

To be honest, I didn't even know what they were, although I had heard heard of them.

[Beware of Doug]

Originally Posted by gaffa

It's baffling that they are just going to delete all this stuff, and are not going to hand a backup of the full site to archive.org.

It's not baffling to me in the least. It took centuries to get business to recycle paper. They still destroy information the minute it becomes useless to them, if for no other reason than to save a few pennies in costs.

Besides, the intellectual property status of anything on the Internet Archive is uncertain at best. Who's to say that one - count him, ONE - former content creator who wanted to make trouble couldn't someday sue Yahoo! for not zapping his site out of existence?

Not to mention that every site archived would have meant potential lost revenue for Yahoo! paid hosting.

[elmwood]

Ate My Balls sites

Visit them while they still last, because once Geocities goes, all traces of this nine-year old meme will disappear forever.

[Beware of Doug]

That's just fine.

Put it in perspective. Jazz is one of the greatest contributions American culture has given the world. It has been studied, critiqued, subsidized, preserved and enshrined. And still - at this point, the best of it is of interest only to the saddest sort of obsessive basement-dwelling fact-hoarders, with most of the rest in the control of incestuous low-level marketing goons.

And do you really think Ate My Balls deserves one nth of the preservation that jazz does? By that standard, even toilet paper is too good to reprint it.

[Contrapuntal]

Originally Posted by Beware of Doug

Put it in perspective. Jazz is one of the greatest contributions American culture has given the world. It has been studied, critiqued, subsidized, preserved and enshrined. And still - at this point, the best of it is of interest only to the saddest sort of obsessive basement-dwelling fact-hoarders, with most of the rest in the control of incestuous low-level marketing goons.

What the fuck? I know lots and lots of above ground regular folks who are interested in jazz. Do you have any kind of cite for that bullshit?

[Beware of Doug]

Originally Posted by Contrapuntal

What the fuck? I know lots and lots of above ground regular folks who are interested in jazz. Do you have any kind of cite for that bullshit?

Yes, myself. I was a jazz fan for 20+ years, mostly orientated to the pre-modern variety. I left it behind when I realized how badly I'd been kidding myself. I've since realized that I'm an antisocial, obsessive sack of pigeon shit, and that anyone who shares my tastes in music is too.

Look, just because a cultural form is uplifting and inspiring doesn't mean it uplifts and inspires. It just might be so alien to well-adjusted "normal" society - as alienated as that society has become from any real cultural content and meaning - that just getting into it is an automatic demotion to the underculture.

[HazelNutCoffee]

Awww, Geocities! The xkcd page made me shed a tear of nostalgia.

I was in middle/high school just as the internet was becoming more common, and I remember the first time I made a webpage, saved it on my hard drive, and tried to send my friend a link.

[tumbleddown]

I spent more time than I had this afternoon, saving the website I abandoned on Geocities 11 years ago, haven't looked at since maybe 2002 and that was still getting random people (in Ghana! Thailand! Venezuela!) signing the guestbook as recently as April of this year. Goodbye little website that could.

[Muffin]

Wouldn't having one's balls eaten lend one toward blues rather than jazz?

[Small Hen]

Goodbye, Geocites. Let us all shead a tear for the many X-Files and Star Trek fanfiction webrings that will be lost to the ages.

[Tours d'Argent]

www.geocities.com/argenttowers is still up.

[elmwood]

Originally Posted by Contrapuntal

What the fuck? I know lots and lots of above ground regular folks who are interested in jazz. Do you have any kind of cite for that bullshit?

Off-topic, but check out many Harvey Pekar comics about his almost compulsive obsession with jazz, mainly record collecting. He describes a large community of jazz obsessives.

[Spoons]

Originally Posted by Argent Towers

www.geocities.com/argenttowers is still up.

Maybe not for very much longer. I had a look, and while I did manage to see a couple of the links at the bottom, there came a point where they linked to a "service temporarily unavailable" page from Yahoo. Even the ones that came up OK at first linked to the "service temporarily unavailable" page a few minutes later.

[Covered_In_Bees!]

Originally Posted by Spoons

Maybe not for very much longer. I had a look, and while I did manage to see a couple of the links at the bottom, there came a point where they linked to a "service temporarily unavailable" page from Yahoo. Even the ones that came up OK at first linked to the "service temporarily unavailable" page a few minutes later.

The homepage Towers linked to is down now.

[Beware of Doug]

Originally Posted by elmwood

Off-topic, but check out many Harvey Pekar comics about his almost compulsive obsession with jazz, mainly record collecting. He describes a large community of jazz obsessives.

Harvey, and his illustrator R. Crumb, are about as highly evolved and well-rounded as it is possible for human beings to be in that particular fan community. And that ain't sayin' much.

Honestly, I hung with men like this for years. The oldest of them were pretty okay, but the later generations made all those cosplay and comicon stereotypes we hear about look like the friggn Algonquin Round Table. At least those nerds had some notion of fun.

[Stranger On A Train]

I'm in Los Angeles. We demolish historic landmarks and monuments faster than you can get a 4x3 Flying Dutchman at the In-N-Out. GeoCities was long past its due-by date, like Marilyn Monroe in Let's Make Love. Good riddance to bad HTML, though I'm lost as to how this saves Yahoo! (also long past its due-by date) any money.

Oh, and I'm a would-be jazz obsessive, although I have yet to live in a basement per se. I'm definitely an anti-social sack of pigeon shit, though.

Stranger

[GuanoLad]

If Geocities had evolved into something useful, instead of laying as a stagnant reminder of how primitive the web once was, it might be worth preserving. As it stands, or stood, considering it's now gone, it represents the worst of amateur web "design" and I can only hope MySpace, its spiritual successor, shares a similar fate.

[Death of Rats]

Farewell blinky GIFs we hardly knew ye.







Ok, I'm over it now.

Originally Posted by Stranger On A Train

4x3 Flying Dutchman at the In-N-Out.

I refuse to believe that this phrase is not used as a sexual euphamism somewhere in the world.

[Icerigger]

Geo-cities websites would always lock up my first computer, a Compaq Presario so I was always phobic about anything geo-cities. The one I miss is Deja-News. Have you ever tried to search for old usenet posts using Google? Oh my God what a mess.

[artemis]

I care, as I had a Geocities site which I still kept track of (although I could no longer edit it using the Geocities site building tools, for some odd reason). I've saved the materials posted there and have them up on LiveJournal now, but it's still sad to see my old site disappear.

(I miss Deja News as well, Icerigger. There was a lot of great stuff posted on Usenet back in its day, which is all but impossible to find now. I think future historians are going to be pretty upset when they think about what was lost during the early days of the digital revolution because we casually threw it away as "worthless.")

[Chicken Fingers]

I just took a little trip back in time to the few Geocities sites I still have in bookmarks. So long, Brother Theodore, instructions on how to make a Walkalong Glider, and other assorted oddities.

[Push You Down]

Originally Posted by Covered_In_Bees!

The homepage Towers linked to is down now.

...just went there... worked fine.

[Troy McClure SF]

Originally Posted by Beware of Doug

Put it in perspective. Jazz is one of the greatest contributions American culture has given the world. It has been studied, critiqued, subsidized, preserved and enshrined. And still - at this point, the best of it is of interest only to the saddest sort of obsessive basement-dwelling fact-hoarders, with most of the rest in the control of incestuous low-level marketing goons.

You need to get out more. There's five jazz clubs within walking distance of my apartment.

[Covered_In_Bees!]

Originally Posted by Push You Down

...just went there... worked fine.

Just went there and it's still not working.

[gaffa]

Originally Posted by Icerigger

Geo-cities websites would always lock up my first computer, a Compaq Presario so I was always phobic about anything geo-cities. The one I miss is Deja-News. Have you ever tried to search for old usenet posts using Google? Oh my God what a mess.

Huh? I'm able to find all my old posts to Usenet with no particular difficulty. Newsgroup name and the e-mail address and I've got it. I did it the other day and realized just how much stuff I used to know that I have almost completely forgotten about - old software that I was an expert in and stuff like that.

[snailboy]

I'm gonna miss it, in a nostalgic way. It reminds me of the way things were when I first got the internet. Everyone had either a Geocities or an Angelfire website. You were lucky if you could get 28k. Those were much simpler times.

[Derleth]

Jason Scott cares. Perhaps too much, but he's actually doing something about it.

Everything that's been said in this thread about jazz could be said about rock or classical with precisely as much truth.

[Rigamarole]

I care because the first webpage I ever made, over 10 years ago when I was 14 years old, was on Geocities. It was a guide for a video game (Everquest) I was playing at the time. And it was still indexed by Google as the top result if you searched for the particular part of the game I wrote the guide for. So with Geocities, a little piece of my childhood died.

[Regallag_The_Axe]

Geocites dies, the internet responds with a resounding 'meh'.

[Mindfield]

Originally Posted by Regallag_The_Axe

Geocites dies, the internet responds with a resounding 'meh' 'Wait, they were still around?'.

There, fixed.

[Marley23]

Originally Posted by Mindfield

There, fixed.

Please don't change text inside quote boxes.