oldweb rabbit hole adventures
i don't remember where i found this blog, i think it was on someone's neocities bookmarks page, but anyways i have been following this tumblr blog called "one terabyte of kilobyte age photo op" here, which has a long name but it's a blog of screenshots of old geocities websites lol. i have been looking at the posts in chronological order (from their first post in 2013!) when i'm bored, just taking in the design choices, personal opinions, and photos people used to put up. i am on page 189 of... *checks notes* um 22,718. maybe one day i'll see them all but i'll probably die first. but this isn't about seeing every single one, altho i would like to, this is more about filling time and satiating a curiosity about what kinds of things people thought would be cool to put on their geocities page.
this is a very small slice of the early web, in my opinion. i just want to state that because while geocities did host a large portion of personal pages, there were other popular webhosts like tripod and angelfire. and it was also common to see isp's providing webhosting for an additional fee, which is how my dad had his website. (i haven't been able to find it sadly). AND there of course were people who simply hosted websites through their own dedicated servers, & privately hosted pages for their friends etc. if there was a blog that documented it all, i'd be on that one.
ok anyways, this page is for documenting all of the funny and interesting things i find. a lot of the time, a website will also be archived through our lord and savior, the internet archive, which means i can visit the pages and navigate them. i get excited when a website is archived thoroughly, all pages, photos, and audio and video files. i will be writing sort of blog style, and doing my best to link everything, so we can hold hands and walk through the oldweb together, eating unlabeled cake and taking mysterious potions.
eye kandy
december 14th 2022
where i'm at in the blog, it is early 1997. web shrines exist and are a pretty popular type of webpage, but surprisingly i don't come across as many as i expected. so i love when i find one. shrines of side characters who don't get enough attention in the fandom seems to be a running theme with many shrines. here is one dedicated to sailor saturn from sailor moon. you can view the webpage on the archive here!
ok this is a silly one but when i saw the screenshot and it had a popup, i nearly fell over hahahahaha
so this next page was pretty unassuming, until i scrolled down and found this odd little graphic. luckily for me it was linked to a page called "just another useless page", a website dedicated to linking... useless personal pages hahaha. i will probably find myself back on this website, linked here to see if there are any good archived links in there for me to ogle, even if they are useless pages. i love that energy, like yeah make a useless page and i'll link it sure.
ok, now on to the biggest rabbit hole i fell down not just in this session, but ever since i started looking at pages.
the screenshot was pretty devoid of content, but i sort of have a rule that if there are skeleton graphics i have to see what type of badass owned the page. the original post with the screenshot that lured me in is here. much to my surprise, i was greeted with an even larger skeleton .gif, smoking and directing me to come closer, with the words Wasteland of Hate above him. how can i say no?? you've charmed me
when you explore the page, linked here, you discover it's a page for a band. their main band is called Eye Kandy, and their side project being Wasteland of Hate. on their mysteriously linked "data" page, they list all of their songs. i got butterflies in my stmoach when i saw some were linked as .wav files, because i was secretly dying to hear their music. i clicked each one open in a new tab just for the web archive to inform me that it wasn't archived, one after another... until one finally works, called "the only thing left" (irony not lost on me). it's a 30 second clip of an angsty young man singing about being misunderstood. it's not a great listen but it brings me joy anyway because i was just excited to find that one worked haha.
now. the rabbit hole. before i closed the tab and moved on, i began googling. i find out they are from new jersey, and most of their fan base is local. (which is cool). but i can't find much. one of the first things i find is a review of one of their live shows (with amazing photos!!) linked here. they got a pretty good review! i found a link to another one of their pages, which has even more information, but a lot of broken images, here. i had a lot of fun reading their bios, esp jen's haha.
finally, i find some more photos of them, on another webpage for their band linked here. altho the photos are small, they are still great to me because of the flash of the camera, the fashion, the musical instruments, even how dark the room seems to be all really adds to the ambience. except jen paying the bass with a pick. tsk tsk.
my next goal was to see what they were all up to now. i found that jen, the bassist, has a livejournal that she kept updated for seven years, here. she is the most difficult to find anything else about. she did leave the band at some point in the early 2000s, that's all i can find. i might skim her LJ for what she was working on, it could provide more leads, but i also might not haha.
next i found their facebook, which was last updated in 2018 but gave me a link to their bandcamp, where they posted all of their old music!! i haven't given it a full listen but i probably will at some point. there's even a demo album i can't wait to hear.
my next discovery was one of my favorites, which is the vocalist's kaliss' soundcloud from 2012. i have listened to the song "awakepiemx" several times now as i really enjoy it, and his vocals have of course improved over then ten plus years since eye kandy's first recordings.
next i find the guitarists' next project working with someone named gus yoo aka azreal trigger, here. (gus yoo recorded eye kandy's demo album in 1997.) kaliss is credited on one song which i thought was cool they were still working together.
and finally, i find what i think is their most recent project, symbiotic. their bandcamp is here. they had an album under this project name in 2006 as well as 2020, so the overlapping and intertwining of all the projects and bands runs deep. there are a few other groups the band members have worked in, and i implore you to google around for more. i can't tell you everything, david.
this concludes my first entry in the rabbit hole, i hope you enjoyed this as much as i did!!