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.
XKCD cares.
I thought they had been dead and buried a long time ago. Shrug.
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.
To be honest, I didn’t even know what they were, although I had heard heard of them.
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.
Visit them while they still last, because once Geocities goes, all traces of this nine-year old meme will disappear forever. 
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.
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.
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. :smack:
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.
Wouldn’t having one’s balls eaten lend one toward blues rather than jazz?
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.
www.geocities.com/argenttowers is still up.
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.
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. 
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.
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