I gave myself until March to have a break from the Ruins series, but as mentioned several times before, I had a bit of a busy streak. Minor issue, since I updated my personal site a few times throughout that period 30 years ago until settling around June when I broke out the sections into their own pages. A main page and internal links? I'd gone crazy.

V4.1 - March-June, 1996

My cat became the mascot for a time, replacing the Earth wallpaper that was in my room, which in turn had replaced a spaceship from Descent (I think). Somewhere in there, I also had a digitized picture of a mole rat from the zoo, but I only have evidence of that via a screenshot in a word document sent to the extended family in Sweden.

V4.2 - June, 1996

And while that copy did exist in June, the final move to a distributed layout happened that same month with a swap to a childhood stuffed animal named Marty Kitty.

A quick online difftool saved me a ton of time trying to figure out what I already talked about, and thankfully there weren't too many. The research is rewarding, but it still takes some time, and I have a few more things I want to do before July 4th, assuming I don't fall as flat as the rest of the country in celebrating. We're mainly dealing with the last traces of X-Men and my enduring Barney-hate phase. Oddly enough, my link page garnered some interest, due in no small part to only a few people being on the internet. And yes, a link page could do numbers in 1996. Makes me wonder why I try at all these days.

Sara's X-Men Home Page

We're in the final stretch of the X-Men craze, and it's with a bit of sadness that I witness this. Quake and forthcoming 3D games (we didn't have a genre title yet, and Doom clones didn't feel apt) were taking priority. It was also pushing a year since the site's debut, so my tastes were shifting, and fewer traces of my pre-online world were making the transition.

Sara's page, by all accounts, was ordinary. Kudos to the WayBack machine for scraping all the images on the pics page, because hollow, front-facing sites are always a bummer. There is an extensive links page as well, and I wish I had the energy to worm through them all and see what else I can find. It's interesting to see that the majority are on GeoCities, so a great cultural shift had already begun as many either moved from the local ISPs and University pages or simply found their way online for the first time as the free hosts persuaded people to make a presence.

This page was on AOL, which I guess had its foot in both worlds, offering a hosting platform like the more famous ones but also serving as the platform many a person cut their teeth on in the mid-90s. In the archives below, I've dug down a few levels, since the Sara page appears to be hosted alongside a Homer Simpson fan page. And like many fan sites at the time, the legal team whipped out the ban hammer with gusto.  

Lavender Darts: A Blink Homepage

The Blink page is one I feel like is an old faithful, but it was apparently a later addition. Granted, 30 years ago vs. 31, but still—it snuck in during the final stretch. Blink was a minor character during the Phalanx Covenant storyline but quickly became a fan favorite after dying during the run. She was only meant to be a throwaway that wouldn't upset the status quo by killing off a memorable character, thus making future stories a bit messier. It backfired when people took a liking to her, so when the Age of Apocalypse rewrote history from the ground up, she had her chance to shine again.

It mattered little once everything snapped back to the baseline, but this website detailed every appearance and hosted theories about her return. She never did, so the site only functioned for a few years before being put on indefinite hiatus.

That said, it's one of the rare cases where the site still exists…! And on the same URL…! Such a rarity needs to be exalted.

The Emma Frost Home Page

This feels like many of the other fan pages, acting more as a character bio akin to the back of the trading cards—the ones we all referenced so we could pretend we read the comics. Sadly, the images are lost, so you don't get to ogle the drawings that had little place being marketed to pre-teens.

I recall that Emma/The White Queen was one of many ex-villains who became part of the X-Men, and she was running the Generation-X lineup—the semi-regular attempt to have an all-new, all-youth group of superheroes. That always lasts.

Official Web Site of The X-Files

When I was a Freshman, I wanted an X-Men/X-Files collab. This was due for no other reason than that fact that I liked both, and each started with X-. Now in my marginally wiser years, I see what a stupid idea that was.

Nevertheless, the next entry focuses on the X-Files, and since litigation was squashing the fan sites right and left, leaving only a trail of messages stating as much, I linked to the main site. It had the basics like Episode Guides and Character Bios. There was a fan forum section, but it seems like they set up templates for about a hundred different characters and topics, and then nothing was added. There was an IRC room too, but we'll never know how popular that was.

After some time, it moved to the official FOX site, and as recently as 2018, it was listing the two latest seasons. But everything is gone now. Maybe they mistook themselves for a fan site and brought the smack down.

If anything is gleaned, however, it's the The Official X-Files Fan Forum Primer. Not only do we get a crash course in netiquette, but they outline handy acronyms, some of which I've never heard before nor since. I'll defer to the link below so you can get schooled on all that's cool, but they do pose the eternal question:

for example, a thread might ask-"Is DD the hottest man alive?"

Umm…yeah…

The Church of Barney

On to the Barney Hate… or B'harni as they seem to call the demon. I suppose that's his ethereal name. This page holds a special place, not because I remember visiting it in any fashion but because a ton of images over on CoolPix were sourced from there.

There's something unreal about having some saved image on your harddrive for decades and then stumbling upon the source all this time later. I know it's happened with the X-Men pictures, but I really can't believe that I'm retracing yet more steps from my browsing trajectory going back that far. I guess it's because dialup just took so long that each site visit was a laborious and deliberate process, so it was worth documenting.

Oh yeah, he hosted some of the ASCII art too.

Barney-Basher's Coalition

No trace of the site, so I have no idea what was here. We're not going to stress about that though, since I've found yet another university site that had absolutely no governance over their student pages. Did I uncover anything scandalous? No, but seeing 'chris.html' on the root of a formal educational webserver brings me no end of joy.

Since there were, unfortunately, many proper files in the box, searching the entire listing was fruitless. Instead, I just went through the alphabet and found anything that appeared to be in the late 90s before they realized all the skateboard pics and HOT BABES. Well, one babe.

The links are below. You can hunt for the lucky lady on your own time.

The TRUTH About the Purple Thing!

While the Church of Barney provided many of the saved images, I see that the bloody monster pic came from this one. Good to know.

This site does appear to add some original content, which is always nice. Unlike some sites that are just links out of there (mine). There's also the mention of alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die newsgroup. Before the cancer that is phpBB arrived, these allowed people to converse in a similar manner. I recall that the (dot) delimiter was used to denote sub forums, so drilling down several levels just to add a few extra 'die's was commendable.

Lastly, the site title musthave changed at some point before the WayBack caught up, since my initial link text was much different. I've used the recent one here, since as much as I am against censorship, there's just certain words I don't want indexed by the AI loverlords. You can view the original link list here

Hate Barney!

There's not much more than a link page here. I'm certainly guilty of the same offense, but what is interesting is the background. I'm sure it was lifted from somewhere else, but a muted version can be seen on the Backgrnd page here. We're finding all the sources in this round. Epic.

Let's Drop Kick Barney

Final link. It took a bit of searching, since the page appeared to have moved about 3-4 times, and each only had a portion of the archive. Luckily the wildcard search let me see what's been archived on a folder level, so I was able to source out what I needed.

It's a joke song about drop-kicking Barney into outer space. It hails back to the pre-net days of 1994 (for most people) but made every effort to get it archived. The internet never forgets, until it does, and then again until I dig it up 30 years later at great personal expense of my time for an article no one will read.

I don't even know if Roy ran the site, as it appears to be a subhosted site. I've linked the main one below, so perhaps there are a few gems. That's yet more homework for you to do.

I'm figuring that these entries are more for me than the public audience. There's some interest in the old web and some sort of history, but I get a drip of nostalgia retracing my steps during those early days.

Statistically, we're at a point where half the population was born into the internet era. Many more don't remember a time without it, but for me, I can see a sharp delineation between the time before and what came after. As evident by what I linked to, I was very much carrying with me the fandom that I enjoyed offline and with personal friends. As we will see in the next installment, my friends became virtual, and almost all of them I would never meet face to face.

My world went from walls in and perhaps something via 4-6 week mail order to an instant-access domain where downloads could get you anything you needed right then and there. Perhaps it was spotty at first, but I wasn't waiting until Sunday when my friend's brother was handing me the latest shareware on a 3.5" floppy.

Soon the web would begin to take on its own characteristic and not act as a landing bed for everything else that was offline and just happened to be digitized and served off of acomputer somewhere in the world. I gained many more connections but lost just as many outside its influence. It is what it is, but the 1995-1996 timeframe of the net was far different than anything that came later, and lumping all web 1.0 together can miss some of the finer details.