Digital Snark-eology: Something Awful preserving the Weird Web

SentFromMyMinitel

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Anyone else used to peruse SA's old weekend web feature? I used to enjoy it as a contemporaneous exploration of weird internet subcultures but now I find myself going back to it and getting a little wistful about the furry fart-fetishists, the spandex clad "Real Life Superheroes" and my favourite: the folks that use string theory to insist that Digimon are real.
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Today the walled garden enclosure of the internet has funneled the weird cheek-and-jowl beside the mainstream which I feel has caused it to lose some of its authentic strangeness and beauty. I read many forums like some of the above when they were the primary mode of communication on the web and there's such a rich sense of in-group identification and learned culture in these environments. People speak with a sense of almost naivety as they figure out this new and ever changing mode of communication and intermingle these revealing little peaks at their personal lives without fear of some psycho doxing them for liking the wrong Tv show.

Within these little snippets there is so much of the good of that era. Its conspiracy theorists are "digimon truthers" are beautifully untainted by the mainstream culture war talking points that gum up any "Black Helicopters and healing crystals" today. Something about the tempo of their conversations reveals them for what they are, hobbyists are weirdos who take a distinct amount of "computer time" out of their day the way you might take an hour to head back into the wood shed, and in that time that craft and lathe the truly weird with care and attention. Otherwise they're tending to the mundanity of life completely unwired while their strangeness grows more gorgeous for their absence from the machine. The constantly connected mode of modern online interaction, without discrete time or space or identity for taking on online personas, has kind of ruined all that
 

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