Oh, hello. This is my website. I'm Emily.
I saw the influx of (nice, thank you!) comments on the guestbook, so I checked to see what was up. Yes, I keep the site running and haven't changed very much about it (mostly out of laziness) but I do periodically update it when something new (music, tv. merch, game, etc)happens. So I guess it is only still being updated because the franchise keeps popping up with random new things over the years. I do still have a lot of unfinished areas of the site that I tell myself I need to get done, but it has been 20+ years now, so you can see how well that's going (I see you, episode summary sections). I designed this for 800x600, lol. I am, frankly, terrified to actually look at the site on my phone. Back then I was really into making anime fan sites, and Bebop had such a nice aesthetic. Anyway, thanks for visiting my site and signing the guestbook. I am equally amazed that my old guestbook service is still operating.
So much of the "good ol' web" has disappeared into oblivion because people couldn't bother keeping their personal home page online after moving onto other interests, and they can't be blame for that.
Your website has that "handmade touch" that we took for granted back then and that has completely disappeared from the "modern" web. Stumbling upon your page, one can't help but feel nostalgic about what the web was back then, compared to what it has become. "Back in the days", the web was human. Now it's just a stream of unending, same-looking, ad-infested, seo-optimized noise.
Thanks for keeping this site online : it reminds us that another web was possible.
P.S : I looked at your other websites, and they all have that nostalgic-retro-looking warm-and-fuzzy-inducing design. I love it !
Nice header text designs and effects, you're good at Photoshop! We should start a webring on Xoom or Tripod.
But seriously, it's nice to see old-school fans still maintain websites independent of the big platforms and social media (Neocities being a recent bright spot). Webrings were a nice community-organic way to navigate to related sites/homepages, and we've lost that to the Social Algorithms feeding us what they think we should see.
Bring back Web 1.0 New and Improved, please. The Wild Web.
The website looks fine on my Palm Phone (720 x 1280 pixels in portrait mode, so slightly less wide than your original 800 px width). Need to pinch to zoom in some parts, but that's standard for any website really.
Thank you for creating this little treasure and maintaining it. It's a time capsule from that era!
>>I do still have a lot of unfinished areas of the site that I tell myself I need to get done, but it has been 20+ years now, so you can see how well that's going (I see you, episode summary sections).
Maybe ChatGPT could help create episode summaries for the Cowboy Bebop live action series? At least as a placeholder until you have time to write it yourself?
Even if it stops being updated? The internet is replete with old sites that are still up but have long stopped getting updates. What made this unique is that it was continuously updated for over 20 years. If the price of continuing that is AI generated content, at least as a placeholder until which time the site owner can handcraft the episode summaries, isn't that a price worth paying?
All else being equal, the later the point in time when the author chooses to stop updating the site is, the more special the site will be.
The question is, is the site more special if it stops being updated now, when it's made up of exclusively handcrafted content, or if it transitions to less labor-intensive/AI-based content generation for new updates, and continues being updated for many more years.
The second domain I ever registered was for my ex-wife’s cartoon fan site for a particular Disney cartoon series back in ‘98. Her drive to digitize stills from the show and write character bios and episode summaries was something I never understood, but she was certainly dedicated.
I’d imagine all of that kind of compulsion ends up on Wikia sites and such today, but back then it was do-it-yourself. She was writing HTML in Notepad, making graphics in Paint Shop Pro, and uploading to the shared hosting site w/ FTP.
(Had she kept it going into the 2000’s I’d imagine she would have gotten a cease-and-desist from Disney.)
I remember in the early wikipedia days, Jimmy Wales complaining (in a good natured way) how a bunch of anime series had more pages devoted to them on wikipedia then World War II.
I'm not sure how good natured it was. Eventually Jimmy founded Wikia/Fandom.com and later a lot of well-sourced fiction-work pages was expelled from Wikipedia, with Wikipedia admins (or whatever they are) bullying people into moving content to Fandom, in deletion discussions. Some remain due to some people putting up long fights. The difference in quality from the content we had in the 2000s in Wikipedia to the content we have today in Wikia/Fandom is abysmal. No sources, bad categorized, terrible interface. This was terrible for the internet.
I never particularly cared about those articles, but Fandom.com is such a terrible website that this whole move made me vow to never donate to Wikipedia or to anything involving Jimmy Wales ever again.
This is a huge issue with Wikipedia. The “importance” bar is silly when a page is basically free to host. Yet, despite this, they often remove or delete articles because they do not deem it worthy of an encyclopedia. I never understood this - it’s not a physical tome. If the knowledge is well sourced who cares what it’s about?
Notability is one piece of the puzzle, but the other is ensuring that Wikipedia content is not written "in-universe". Fandom has no such restriction, and in fact skews the other way, with content being assumed to be referring to fictional people, places, and events as if real, unless otherwise noted.
I think this is a valid barrier for Wikipedia, and the desire to describe fictional worlds this way is a good signal that that content is a better fit for a more fan-oriented forum.
The bar for notability also somehow ended up a lot lower for the kinds of things that appeal mostly to the Wikipedia editor demographic, although there has been some improvement on that front in recent years.
It used to be a popular (and true) joke that word count of the article on Jedi Knights was significantly higher than the article on historical knights.
> Error The administrators or owner of this guestbook are not allowed to link the guestbook via HTTPS (SSL) unless they have a premium account. [...] NOTE: If you are still seeing this message after clicking the link above, then you are using a non-default setting or plugin that is causing HTTP links to be upgraded to HTTPS. This is not a standard way of surfing the web. Please change your settings or try with another browser. You will otherwise have problem accessing 20% of all websites.
Even the third-party dependency has a nostalgic feel, of some random person with a Perl CGI script running on a beige PC under their desk, who could just do their thing on the Internet, their own way.
I hate it when my browser ignores the protocol part of a link. Then again, gopher and ftp have already become broken in firefox, I guess it's only a matter of time before it's entirely unusable.
Oh, man, the Lurker's Guide was just such a fantastically good site. Organized, comprehensive, solidly good look: great stuff!
I feel like it's often harder to find high-quality focuses resources like this at this point. I'm not sure whether that's because people have stopped making them, or whether they're just competing for clicks with exponentially more common (and more SEOified) junky fan-wiki sites, or what. (I still get a steady trickle of traffic to my Tolkien Meta-FAQ (http://tolkien.slimy.com/), but I gather that Google tends to de-prioritize sites that aren't being constantly updated.)
A gaming example would be fandom of touhou versus its fan-owned and operated touhouwiki which controls entry of details and has a community that actually cares for checks.
Aside from the Cowboy Bebop nostalgia hit, this site is a great example of how clear, creative, and fun sites were in the late 1990s. While I struggle to identify the many reasons why I think sites looked better back then, I think being simple and content focused are two of them.
>I think being simple and content focused are two of them.
You mean you don't like newsletter subscription pop-ups? Or a virtual assistant chat window on the corner? Or auto-playing videos that follow you when you scroll down? Or a choice between "Accept all cookies" and "Learn more?"
Reddit mobile site does this when you tap a post. It drives me nuts. Then you have to hit back, which refreshes Reddit and brings you back to the top. I think it’s intentionally designed to get people to switch to the app.
I doubt they'll care. By that time, they'll be confident that whatever loss they incur by killing old. will be worth it for them. If there was an actually significant user base using old., I imagine "regular" Reddit would look a bit different than it does.
Except for when you go to try and click that tiny x, only to find that there was an intentionally coded delay for another ad just above it that pushed the x lower on the page, so you end up clicking that other ad.
It looks like you have an ad blocker! Click here to disable it for this site.
Log in to continue reading this article.
And, oh, you don't want advertising cookies? Here's a list of a dozen categories you have to manually deselect one-at-a-time. To help with this there's a bright-colored button that says, "accept all" and a drab text link that says, "use my selection."
Consent-O-Matic lets you to select which cookies you want in a site, and then automatically clicks the selections to popups if they appear. Has been working pretty well for me.
Well it's impossible to have anything better than that. I mean, it's not like the worst solutions would win out and the entire planet would tacitly go along with it to prevent having to do something harder but better.
I think someone should put up a counter of how many lives the EU parliament has taken by summing the collective time every cookie banner has taken from human cognition / lives. Maybe it'll be enough to charge them with crimes against humanity.
Part of it might be because everyone did their own thing back then. There weren't many frameworks or templates, and your content weren't delivered on top of massive social networks that enforced consistency, so individual websites looked unique and refreshing.
You might say that old websites were more artisanal while modern websites are more mass produced.
Responsive websites pretty much killed this type of aesthetic. It would be an absolute nightmare to get this sort of design to work well while supporting mobile.
It's a real pity, because the hybrid designs we get now all looks like a bunch of uninspired rectangles.
People should just stop making web pages for mobile. So many times I have had to force the desktop version of a page to actually get what I'm there for.
I think the real dead end is making websites for both mobile and desktop. They are simply too different to ever have any real hope of producing something that translates well to both without hopelessly crippling one of them.
Mobile-only sites, sure. Desktop-only sites, why not. If you want both, do both instead of making a hideous web design Cronenberg pleading for the relief of death.
Back when mobile exploded I got a bee in my bonnet that I had to have an app for my website. I spent a couple thousand dollars to have a highly recommended mobile website designer do this for me. The result was HORRIBLE and I decided to just live with what I had. Turns out my native website on mobile looks GREAT, far better than on a computer screen. Go figure.
I find that responsive design works well for simpler webpages. But for more complex pages or apps, yeah: it totally falls apart.
However... whenever I see an app or site that has two separate websites, I know I'm in for trouble: sometimes one version will miss some features, and I'll invariably have to request the desktop website. The worst of them was my previous health insurance provider, that only had one very important feature in the mobile version.
I think this is already happening. People are realizing that not every site needs to work (or more often, become a horrible vertically-scrolling soup) on mobile. The only laggard is Google which is still stuck in 2009 and downranks mobile-unfriendly pages (even on desktop searches)
The handset is a dead concept and yet here we are carrying them around it’s sad. I can’t remember the last time I put a phone to my face yet that is exactly what the form factor was made for. It’s all but guaranteed Apple cannibalizes the phone handset market for a new mobile platform.
It works way better for me on mobile than most new sites do.
Developers assume everyone has the latest iPhone or Pixel. So they take like a minute to load, heat my phone up, drop the battery by 10%, and have a 20% chance of OOM-ing my browser.
The Guardian is the absolute worst at this. I don't know why, it brings mobile Firefox to its knees.
Basically, fancy "mobile friendly" JS is no good if it makes my phone stutter and go catatonic.
Whereas if people just wrote old school "CSS Zen Garden" sites, or even this old table stuff, any ancient phone could handle them easily.
But no, I need to go pay a kid to dig up more coltan.
I can scroll. It's ok. What I can't do is will my phone faster, without shelling out more stupid cash.
Mobile design was something created for old phones that didn't have quite the resolution of computer monitors. Modern phones don't really need mobile designed sites.
You need text to scale and reflow to device width if you want text to be readable. This is one of the main reasons for mobile web design. Else you're stuck panning around the screen to read the text zoomed in.
Once you decide to scale text to device size so that it's readable, you are stuck doing the rest of mobile web design (fluid layout).
You need to allow users to scale text as desired, as the original web intended. You shouldn't make a site targeted to mobile; you should make a site that allows the user to display in their client as they wish.
To solve that, you have to move from the easier static made-for-one-width design (what we think of as desktop-first design) and move to fluid, reflowable design which we tend to call mobile-friendly design.
Unfortunately, it tends to take more thought because we usually want widescreen components, like sidebars, that are easier to build when you can hard-code a device width, and hard-coding width is what breaks zooming and text size changes.
This is a great example of classic graphics design (at least I'm guessing she probably had some training in it) being directly translated to the web. It's just an image made entirely in Photoshop and the space for the links are carved there. Photoshop-designed websites definitely peaked in the early 2000s. Nowadays you'd be wild to start with PS for designing a website.
I kinda miss the dead simple near-pixel-perfection and freedom of font choice that could be achieved with tables-and-images web design. If you were smart with choice of color, image format, etc you could even make them load fast on slow connections despite the large number of images involved. Their source code was awful to look at but it’s not like modern web design doesn’t come with its own dump truck full of trade-offs.
Frames were quite useful at times, though, particularly for sites that acted as a directory of other sites. With how slow dialup could be it was sometimes nice to have the list of sites you might want to visit in a compact list frame to the left so you didn’t have to hit back 5 times to get back to the directory or juggle multiple windows (because tabs didn’t yet exist).
I was strongly opinionated that upper case html tags were better and more readable, and I still believe that it should have won. Building sites in '96 nearly everyone upper cased.
Now that there is syntax highlighting though the readability benefit is minimal so not a big deal. I still think SQL keywords should be capitalized though...
Sites from the late 90s had ads and SEO. Some pretty terrible ads like flashing banners, popups, and later Flash. In fact Flash bad reputation wasn't because the tech was bad, far from it, but because of how it was used, particularly in ads. Popup blockers were the ad blockers of the time, and the situation with popups was so bad that popup blocking became a standard feature of most browsers. As for SEO, it was crude, like the search engines of the time, but it was there, keyword stuffing, link farms, etc...
Some sites from the 90s, like the one linked here were ad-free, SEO-free and usable on a browser that is not Internet Explorer, but far from all of them were. I still like their simplicity, especially now that we have modern hardware and broadband connectivity, I don't miss the 56k modems that were part of late 90s experience.
For me, what was great back then were splash pages. The more creative your splash page, the better. It was l33t if someone centered their site, like one would center their splash page. This site does that.
It’s because so many websites have become generalized to become a platform to gain as large an audience as possible but that audience is splintering and decentralizing and there is nothing they will be able to do to draw them back to the gray zone
I've been thinking about this too. Why is it about these sites that they transmit that changes how we approach and experience them. The internet of the 90's had a sort magical feeling to it. It was new and different and felt very personal. In essence it wasn't yet devoured by capitalism. It felt honest and real.
Convention had yet to be established in the 90s; anything was fair game.
I suspect we are going to run into the same burnout with AI, and much quicker. Today, "holy shit anything is possible with this magic." Tomorrow, it's going to be as exciting as your average HR drone.
I don't feel like this site is simple, it's noisy and crowded. It doesn't aid me in finding what's provided to me. Although it looks very cool I'm quite glad we simplified designs and put UX on top of the priority list vs showing off what we can do.
I agree with the sibling saying that no website owes you anything, but what you say is not even true in the first place. In general we didn't really "simplify designs", and the "good UX on top" is often negated by modern website cruft.
As an example: the modern replacement for this kind of fan-site would be a Fandom.com site, which has an interface full of cruft, focused mostly on ads and "engagement" stuff. Only a small portion reserved for actual content. Unless there is a lot of customization, list pages are often alphabetical and have a terrible design that make it very difficult to find stuff. So you need to use their terrible search that is hidden in a tiny 30x30 button on the top among other buttons.
Plenty of other examples there. For every website like Hacker News, there's dozens of forums whose design is more focused on useless ornamentation, monetization and increasing engagement through stupid tactics.
Sorry but I totally disagree, not only with you but all the other commenters and down-voters. We got rid of flash, gifs, auto play videos with hideous sound, and blinking shit. We got reader mode, focusing on good UI/UX (given you're using ad blockers). In the times of myspace every website tried to pull fancy shit on us and I'm glad it's over. Just because there's still enough shit around doesn't mean that the internet got more readable in the mean time. Maybe I'm not using these shitty sites like you do, by MY experience is better than it was in these days.
/edit: and browsers and plugins are our saviours, hail reader mode and not auto-playing videos! I consider that part of the UI/UX development as well.
You started your message complaining about this specific website. Now, the things you complain of in this reply don't really apply to it. It's still better to use than the kind of website that replaced it. My browsing habits have nothing to do with it, I just picked an appropriate apples-to-apples example for comparison. I think it's unfair to compare this to Apple's website or something.
Also, you mention auto play videos. Those are pretty much a staple of the current website era, with browsers themselves having to fight back [1]. Now, even Reddit's new version has it. Annoying animated gifs and annoying flash were mostly novelties in personal webpages.
If anything, needing ad blockers, reader mode and and anti-autoplay in browsers, is an indication of how things aren't exactly great in the web anymore. And that website from 1999 doesn't need any of those.
My point was that in the early days I couldn't really shape my browsing experience. Now I can because a necessity arose due to websites delivering shit (and imho this started in the early days). So now they are nice. That was my point, not really sure the delivery was on point haha. And with the demise of flash it really got a lot better. But maybe I don't visit shitty websites a lot.
Why does it have to aid you in finding anything? We’re so obsessed with efficiency and “productivity” these days.
Let’s be honest, when you came to this site you weren’t looking for anything in particular. Instead the site invites you to simply look around, embrace the excitement of clicking randomly and not really knowing what you’re going to get, and not really caring either. Just be a thoughtless child, wandering a garden yanking leaves along the way. Now isn’t that rejuvenating?
As much as I want to agree with you, we're not kids anymore.
When I need to find a store's operating hours so I can try to dash over after work and before dinner, I don't have time for the Scavenger Hunt in the Garden of Narnia Experience.
> We’re so obsessed with efficiency and “productivity” these days.
I consider the internet something like a library. I want to find relevant stuff, not sift through shit to get to something interesting.
I didn't even know what it had because I was overwhelmed with colors and unusual styles that I clicked around and left. Sure, it's a nice reminder of the old days and some people find it pretty, but it's bad at conveying information imho.
Another classic Cowboy Bebop fanpage that's still up is The Jazz Messengers [0], which primarily focuses on all the fantastic music used throughout the series.
We've had this mentioned here many times before, but if you love these types of pages, make sure to check out https://search.marginalia.nu/. A search engine made for this type of stuff.
I browsed a few random sites[1][2][3] from https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random - it's a nice way to preview many random things. Bookmarked. Seeing these interesting sites makes me wish I could RSS-subscribe to them (or add them on social media, ironically).
[2] https://annotations.lindylearn.io/ - A collaborative social layer for annotating all webpages. Something I've thought about over the years, and finally run across.
[3] https://fed.brid.gy/ - Connects a website to Mastodon/the fediverse, with two-way post flow.
The modern internet is deprived of ornamentation in the same way modern architecture is. Tiktok allready upped the speed and made a lot of the established web seem terribly boring. I truly hope that AI generated content is putting the final nail in the coffin and we start to see more creative and individualistic media landscapes thrive again. Hope dies last.
There was an HN article[1] a few weeks ago lamenting how everything looks uniformly boring, beige and average, including houses, cars, fashion, movies, books, and so on. Nobody is doing anything bold or creative anymore. Everything looks like it’s been homogenized down to target some global ISO standard average consumer.
Only in the west. We do not value art or aesthetics; we defund it at every opportunity and now have computers generating approximations of art for consumption from our digital troughs.
We're androgynous blobs driving gray cars, eating reconstituted gray McMuck and scrolling through gray websites while living in our gray apartments and planned communities. Kids can't play outside; we paved the green spaces to put in more parking lots. Kids belong in their beige bedrooms anyway.
Japan might be to your liking. If you appreciate art, I highly recommend a visit if you need a reminder that creativity and artistic beauty are still alive (in spite of their own homogeneous culture!).
I think this is why I'm so bored with modern video games - they all look the same - Unreal Engine, lots of same type of foliage and rubble and "background art" everywhere - take a random screenshot from a random aaa game and I couldn't tell one from the other.
As soon as I saw the page, I started wondering how Emily designed this effect of the menu merging with the image back then. Turns out it's just cropped images carefully placed together - check the source code yourself. Only then was I able to start noticing the imperfections of this implementation, but it really puts in perspective how our web design has changed over the years.
I remember some webdesigners specializing in cutting those layouts before there were good tools available. Sure, before that there were image maps, but with cut-up layouts you could do on-hover effects and add small animations here and there.
It wasn't exactly useful per se but then again it was done mostly for marketing purposes, to stand out, so it did the job.
I'm an occasional casual anime fan who had never experienced the original but watched the Netflix show and mostly loved it. I was sad there won't be another season.
The first is March of 1999, but the most recent are about the live action release at the end of 2021, and there's some developments for most of the 20 years in between!
Wow, the amazon links for the mangas still work and some sections have been updated to include reference to the live action netflix monstrosity (which I sincerely enjoyed). Way to go Emily!
One thing I love about Cowboy Bebop is how each episode's name matches the genre of the episode's music. It only occurred to me the second time I watched the anime, and it was a whole new experience. A great work of art in more ways than one.
Does anyone know what the author is up to now? I'm curious whether the people who made things like this back then for fun generally ended up in tech or went on to pursue other things and other careers.
Damn, this is hitting the feels, makes me want to bring back my cowboy bebop website. I did have the largest multimedia section until a phpBB came through and owned the site and forums. I didn’t have backups at the time and that was all she wrote. Glad to see some of the others are still around.
I'd prefer many aspects of cyberpunk fiction that we didn't get. Our "cyberdecks" turned out smaller and more omnipresent than in fiction. They are also much more locked down and nobody is hacking anything with them. They ended up mostly attention control machines for the corpos. We didn't get impressive cities with mega buildings/arcologies but instead more sprawl of cookie-cutter town houses. No steamy backalleys in which to eat ramen under neon lights.
> We didn't get impressive cities with mega buildings/arcologies but instead more sprawl of cookie-cutter town houses. No steamy backalleys in which to eat ramen under neon lights.
Haven't visited myself but Asian metropolises should be much closer to the cyberpunk vibe you're looking for. I also really like the vibe but wonder how happy would I be actually living in it.
That's definitely true. And to be fair, even in the seminal Neuromancer the mega buildings are in and around Tokyo while the US has sprawl and my native Bonn apparently got nuked or something.
I've visited Shanghai, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Osaka and they are definitely more what I want. I visited Chongqing in 2009 and now it looks incredibly cyberpunk: https://youtu.be/cD-t3W1zLzg
I would theoretically be very interested to live in Tokyo, Shanghai or Hong Kong. I greatly enjoyed my visits. The density and public transit makes for fantastic exploration and walking without getting into a car. Tokyo has great parks and many neighborhoods feel quite cosy if that's what you are looking for. I'm worried about Japan's work culture though and it doesn't seem particularly welcoming to foreigners. I absolutely loved China in the 00s and would have loved to live their for a bit. I did stay for a month with a girlfriend who did an internship in Shanghai and it was one of the greatest times of my life. Everything was booming and exciting. China had issues but seemed on a good trajectory. Now I feel that trajectory has reversed and I'd be uncomfortable to even visit.
I still love the idea of living in a huge Asian city at some point. Right now nothing seems attractive enough. Maybe Taipei or Seoul, but I haven't visited either and have obvious concerns about Taiwan.
1. This is a site for weird internet nerds, which has a healthy overlap with people who like cowboy bebop.
2. The site is an excellent example of a small web 1.0 site run by a single person. This is a (possibly a painful) reminder for some that the web doesn't have to be SEO optimized corporate BS, and of a time when the internet was full of wonder and the possibilities seemed endless.
Fan made websites were very popular in the nineties. This one is really well made and recently updated which is really cool. This particular anime has also a cult follwing in the west.
> not allowed to link the guestbook via HTTPS (SSL) unless they have a premium account.
Uhh...
> you are using a non-default setting or plugin that is causing HTTP links to be upgraded to HTTPS. This is not a standard way of surfing the web. Please change your settings or try with another browser. You will otherwise have problem accessing 20% of all websites.
the unencrypted conspiracy continues?... the decryptinati?! /s
