I’m going to start 1998 it with something that really started in 1997. A large portion of this was written in my original word document so that it would tie in with the end of the 97 section. So, bear with some possible rehash or time travel.

As is my fashion let’s start in 98 and work backwards for a bit. Since Dawson’s Creek debuted in January of 1998, 1998 gets the section on the beginning on web site development. Why? Well I will get to that, but for better or for worse that show’s premiere is the water shed of this whole section. I had already honestly been making web pages since early 1997 I think, and with a small bit of successes. But not to the point where it became profitable.

So now the starting point that leads to January. The initial motivation back in 1997 was to look at new ideas to fill the hole left from the loss of a BBS in my life. As stated they were still lingering in 1997, Marty was still active on them, but once Goldfish went down I started to not log in to the other remain BBSs as much. Mom had also setup an account with a local internet service provider (ISP), the Davis Community Network (DCN), to have internet access in the house that wasn’t through an old UCD account.

Up until mom got her Music Lady account for home internet access we did just survive of found UCD accounts. I think Marty was even using J.F.’s for a time. That was how we accessed Usenet and ftp stuff, but having a home account was going to make internet use different. This would give her a proper email address and access to the internet beyond kids just downloading pirated files and looking up dirty USENET groups like I said.

Now where the dabbling begins I don’t know for sure. I know for a fact though we got Netscape Navigator setup with the dial up connection and the new resources for gaming alone made a new pattern on the computer of use. This was getup, turn on computer, dial up to DCN and have a Netscape page open. Since I had two phone lines, I could just sit mom’s account online, so if we needed something we could go look it up.

A side effect then was that it gave me some proper server space that was paid for and in theory could be messed with without fear. I think that was the real point we didn’t try anything beyond file downloading with the UCD accounts. They weren’t ours so any use of email, Netscape and the like could be gone the next day. So, I started making pages at a ridiculous uniform resource locator (URL), http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~mscldy/ryan , yup nice and simple to remember. I made a main index, listed some likes, and then expanded on those in subfolders. Not that fancy to start.

I was simply to start just armed with a blue HTML reference book and I think a want to make my custom RPG have a function character generator on the internet. So followed the directions and learned form submission, and for a while just spun my wheels doing hardly anything at all. I don’t know what my goal beyond wanting a way to submit randomly generated numbers and the like to me, but it was what it was.

There wasn’t a lot to it though. So I started photoshoping and making images of penguins with guns to add to the page. I was coming of my last BBS handle, Conbustable Penguin, which itself was sort of a nonsense amount of odd word play. I really just thought penguins were neat, have for years, remember Little America? And misspelling words was sometimes cool. I don’t know I pictured a mafioso penguin, which is what one of my images was of.

This got me understanding how to format pages into weird little animated tables with penguins and character submission forms. I was enjoying it though and no one cared about a character generation sheet for a game only a couple people have ever played. What was the next step.

So we have to pause the computer for a second and open up the world of the late 90s. Then make fun of myself and others. Nineteen-year-olds are lazy. I keep talking about this extended free time windows that lax college schedules, waiting for military appointments and the like served for us during this time. What did we do with the time, a lot of games, eating, making fun of things, oh and then I still had cable television.

Then we had syndicated television. I don’t know how it all started. But I guess riding the legacy of the syndicated success that was Star Trek the Next Generation, a lot of better budget Saturday afternoon syndicated programming started showing up. There was the juggernaut that was Baywatch and others, but it was a spinoff that Chirs M. and I got into heavily.

Xena: Warrior Princess, was a spin-off of Hercules: the Legendary Journeys. These were mid-budget campy takes on Ancient Greece and it’s myths. Produced by a team that had made films that were pretty much cult classics at the time, most notably Army of Darkness with Bruce Campbell which both Marty and Chris M. loved. They somehow skirted a line between serious and comedy, which is right about what a late teenager is. They think they are mature enough for real subject matter, but still are motivated by fun.

Thus, I did the obvious thing. I made a web page about it. The Xena page,  ”Xena at CP”.

Xena at CP

The Xena site.

The CP, well Conbustable Penguin. Yeah the name really only made sense to me, and I had to know my background. Dumb name, though to be honestly I really kind of doubted anyone would care about my take on the warrior princess. There was, what seemed like at the time, a lot of media on the internet about it already. Which is why I chose to focus on the side characters of each episode, and made a really simple form (!), that let people submit there names, emails and maybe something else to be added to a Fan list that I would update on the site.

To my surprise the site had some moderate popularity in the online Xena fan circles. One major thing it did was start getting me a lot of daily email. It was along these lines though that I had branched off of mom’s account and had my own dcn account. Horus, after the Egyptian god. The website url was insane. http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~horus/syco/xena.htm ,It made no sense for this to become the url that drew people in.

But it worked and throughout a lot of 1997 it became the focus of my time and efforts away from hanging out with friends. I started learning how to submit my sites to places like altavista.com, which was one of the earlier popular search engines. I would join banner exchanges and the like so that people would link to my site and vice versa.

The Xena page took off. It may have helped that by this time, between figuring out stuff with ANSI for design purposes and years of Photoshop, my page just looked nicer than most other offerings out there. It may have also helped that I was migrating away from being at school and would go through and answer all my emails at the time, which expanded into email groups and so on. So, people coming to my site had a lot more instant communication. It was like being the SysOp of a BBS, if you talked to everyone they kept coming back.

Then something interesting happened. I was getting my social outlet from the BBSs from the site, but I got an email offering me goods. Some company I don’t remember now and the archived site doesn’t mention. Offered me free posters they were making for the show in exchange for getting a link or being mentioned on my site. There was an avenue of trade goods that was starting to open up if I could get the site popular enough.

But lets not get to far ahead in the story. Once I got the pattern down I felt the need to try and get everyone online. This lead to me wanting to get the family online in 1997 along with friends, like Chris and Marty, and then Karl with his band Silvara. These all had different amounts of success. The family would get setup with a hosted site at http://house.simplenet.com/ . I went with house over ewing just because as I told everyone house is easier to remember, and back then long urls were pretty normal, so easier was better.

Chris M. and Marty then did stuff off the family site. Marty had various things he would do over the next couple years. Chris who was only going to be around for the year started on my personal site doing movie and television reviews, but somehow ended up with a GeoCities page about Knight Rider. Karl and Nik would do some work on a Silvara site, that later in 1999 would get a upgrade. But their big story was that someone asked for a demo tape to use in some independent film. Did the film ever get made? I don’t know, I wouldn’t know where to look to find out all that information anymore.

Chris at one point during the height of my Xena stuff, wanted or did do some stuff with Bruce Campbell’s character on the show, and the character of Joxer. But since we don’t seem to have any backups from that year it is hard to remember exactly which. But it was the Xena site that got big. So big that it started pissing off DCN. Remember the angry calendar date in 1997. Well reading through the Xena site you can see I had to move things due to “hosting” issues. The issue was DCN offered webhosting for websites as part of their ISP plan, except they had a ceiling on how much bandwidth you could use, and that ceiling was on the floor.

Alright, quick break, here we have an early 1997 blueprint for my personal website. This is post-Xena creation, since I can see it on the list of links, so this is most likely a battle plan I made to upgrade my personal site that never happened.

As I can see with my plans, I was basically trying to transplant the idea’s I already had with some of the stuff we had going on with Goldfish back in the BBS days. What is funny is that some of this stuck. Obviously, Karl and Mike got their band webpages running with me during this time, Chris M. did do television ratings, Marty of course followed along to the websites.

My guess is this plan fell apart with the Graham, Joe, JF and Jake plans. As I would come to find out after High School, getting everyone around to work on one solid thing was never really going to happen again. I think a lot of this got scrapped for what was working, the Xena page and then those who stuck around got included into the family web page project that I got into probably fairly soon after this plan failed.

It is interesting to see my old thought process, including the Star Wars references, still planning out the websites like I did the BBS stuff. I even got the rough draft of the penguin image for the middle done I just don’t think I ever scanned it in and made it into a web loadable image. Which back then was a lot of work of coloring the thing in photoshop then getting the image small enough it would load quickly for internet users on 14.4k modems.

This plan might be fun to recreate someday, which means after this short description and images I might have a spoof of what this might have looked like if I ever got it done below.

Plan Recreation in 2023

The plan realized

This is what got the family site setup on simplenet. This caused me to have to learn how to start hosting my pictures on the family site while maintaining the url at the address people knew. It was becoming harder and harder work to keep up with. But I just kept going, then we get to the new year. On January 20th, 1998, after watching a new show called Dawson’s Creek, I decided I should start up a page for the character Katie Holmes played on the show while there were none. I don’t know I just had a spark that people wanted more from that show and character. This also seemed like a good idea to take what I was doing and not have another 8,000 sites on the same subject. I had the site up a few hours after the series premiered, I had the good spot in line.

And thus for a few years an entertainment empire was born. Overnight the amount of traffic coming into my URL, into a subfolder, called http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~horus/dawson/ ), was more traffic than was allowed on DCN at all. It was more than simplenet wanted too. This was when I learned how much of a new frontier web hosting was and that almost no one providing web space in that era ever allotted for the sites having actual web traffic. ISP’s would offer the space, but if you generated any traffic they’d lose their minds and shut down whatever they could since most ISPs where cheap, dial up based, and couldn’t handle hosting sites that required actual bandwidth.

Luckily as this happened with DCN, I got an email from another web site prospector that had just registered a website for the actress of the character and had his own web server. He offered a 50/50 split on the site if I moved it over. I took him up on it. When moving the site over I noticed some part of his information was attached to a UCD email address, and so not only did I get lucky with finding a new hosting site, but this random guy wanting to get in on what I had just tapped into, happened to live about a mile or so down the main Boulevard from the L street house. The random chance of that is crazy. Now if I didn’t meet him and see he was actually into the show, I could have justified it all as he saw the DCN address and just took an opportunity since he had a web server, but he did seem to genuinely be into the actress and the show.

Katie-Holmes.com 1998

Then things became obvious, it wasn’t picking the shows you liked and being a fan that generated big traffic, it was picking the celebrities then glorifying the characters they played that were becoming popular that generated real traffic. I haven’t mentioned it but I had a small Star Wars site. It would meld into a Natalie Portman site. These traffic increases would get big enough to get, what at the time, were ad banner contracts. Nowhere near today’s advertising dollars though. So, I sold my fan sites souls to celebrity sites for money, and I was fine with it. Now with more resources at our disposal we added Message Forums, much akin to what the old BBSs had and now the websites felt like lucrative BBSs with, better graphics. The websites were now becoming a job.

The next big addition was being able to do video capturing. I went out and got a capture device which were rare at the time. Video Capturing became a staple and huge draw of the site. Every week people could get still images and short video clips from the newest episodes of Dawson’s Creek and other shows now associated with other “starlets” that the site had started to work with. This in an era where a lot of the shows coming up were getting featured with an “official” website that was mainly just a one-page advertisement of when the show was on and that season’s five or so official still images.

The Capture card also allowed us to save talk show appearances, which would have entirely come and gone without rerun through the late show circuits, if not saving them forever to the internet. Real Audio, JPEGs, and small AVI movie clips helped the sites generate even more traffic to match with the Message Boards. And then even more complaints up the chain of command from the people supplying the bandwidth. The world was starting to shift to the internet, but the providers weren’t equipped for the demand that was coming. This made managing the web domains a lot of daily work.

To work around the limitations of “unlimited” internet in the late 90s a lot of our sites were hosted on one server while the images and other large bandwidth items were scattered over an intricate web of free servers. While those sites had their limitations, one popular image gallery using the free space of say a GeoCities folder wasn’t going to make anyone mad. As long as there was some fake index file for the free accounts you could stash any manner of files in the folder and not get kicked out of the server. If I recall, I even used some of the free sites to host the main index pages of the real sites further blurring the line of what was going on.

Of course, in today’s internet the numbers we were hitting should have never caused so much of a ruckus, but the expectation back then was pretty low from the ISP and web providers, so matters had to be taken.

But the main fun of doing this, beyond money, was the message forums. The Katie Holmes forums initially were the most active by a country mile and they ran with a community feeling much like the old local BBS forums, except no one was local. This caused moderation of the boards to become a bigger issue because people had personal anonymity from trolling. In the old days you pissed the wrong person off you got locked out of all the BBSs and had to look the people in the eye that forced you to sit at home with nothing. Now you could get banned and just make a new account.

So, we had to institute a way to block IP numbers from registering accounts. The fights then would be different when people got mad because the punishments now, in the new day and age, were less severe and harder to maintain. With that, lets re-introduce Marty who is doing his weekdays at the Police Academy and his weekends at the L street house, posting on the new forums.

Now I mentioned Duncan, and when Marty got ousted by that group of local computer kids, then later he was still engaging in chat and forum drama with the kids, but now I have given him access to the world. Look I am going to speculate here, so Marty may deny this, but having a Message board with access to anyone that had internet back then, which meant kids our age, and having the site’s operator in the room with him, gave him a sense of power. And he liked power when entering in a “debate” or as some would call it a flame war.

Enter our first major event with Marty I can remember. Marty was actually a fan of the show Dawson’s Creek, he wasn’t just posting to starch that itch he missed from his BBS days, but he definitely wasn’t into the show like some of the cats in the early days when the site was still called Trouz’s Site of Joey. Oh yeah, at this point I have gone back to Trouz as my nickname. I don’t remember everyone he butted heads with over this, but there was an antagonist to his protagonist, if you want to look at things that way. A guy whose nickname on the boards was Gog. Gog was a resident of Wilmington, North Carolina, which happened to be where the show, Dawson’s Creek was filmed.

He was in his early twenties, like most of the avid posters in the forums were, and so had taken to getting up in the morning and getting in line to be an extra on the show itself. This provided the site in its early days a lot of access to information and the like other fan run sites didn’t. This brought him his own little celebrity within the group of diehard fans. For reasons or another that I don’t remember he and Marty didn’t care much for the others opinion on things.

Now I have to give mainly what I remember from Marty’s side because, he was in my bedroom posting and I knew a lot of mindsets he was ranting about. Anyway, Marty decided at some point he was sick of the mindless devotion some of the geeks on the forums had for Katie Holmes. In particular those one could tell couldn’t distinguish the actress from the on-screen character Joey. He wasn’t wrong, in these early days a lot of the creepier fans were bolder with their undying love for something, figuring now one could know who they were.

Gog became sort of the catalyst for the pro creeper group. Marty would start to attack Gog as using his geographical location to garner false idolism and that it blinded him from seeing that the show and actress weren’t all that important. This, as things do, quickly degenerated into personal attacks, some of which were obnoxious because we had to deal with it on the server side of things. So, Marty decided he was going to mess with the whole lot of mindless fans and came up with the James Vander Beek arrest report.

Marty took all his current policing knowledge and carefully one night constructed a fake police report inditing that someone on the set who was a minor had possibly been involved with Vander Beek and that the police were investigating if a crime had been committed. He then took the time to sharpie over any reference to address or the minors name in the reports to add to its fake authenticity. Then made a new account and posted the information as though he were some anonymous informant letting the internet know the storm that was about to come out.

How that would change anything who knows, but it was a prank pulled on the legions of those not capable of having a laugh even when it came out that the information wasn’t real. Marty would grow sick enough of the Katie Holmes groups that he moved to one of the other forums as time went on. There less maliciously he continued to engage in little troll wars. Mainly I remember his complaints about a post named Mulder the Poulter Cow.

The prank itself I remember being a bit of a dud. This is still early internet and people are oddly more skeptical than they are now, and even though the site had a lot of traffic, the message boards required interaction, which made them more niche and the story never got out of that location. If we scaled everything up to todays levels, Marty well could have got in trouble for starting a scandal though, instead he just intensified his fight with Gog and the others.

The Splitting of groups to different forums was an issue as time went on, even though it expanded the amount of sites and forums that were getting used, it slowed the feverish style of discussion that kept threads going, which mean ad revenue. This is why after a while of adding sites, eventually a group of us working on the content for these multiple sites tried to centralize the websites into one main hub. Thanks to the WayBack Machine it looks like that happened on December 18th, 1999, with the launch of a site called http://www.hotrage.com/ .  In some respects, this was the sign of a downturn for my income. While Hotrage would expand what we were doing there were more people involved now and less revenue to share.

HotRage.com

THis is a version of Hotrage.com

It was around this time other endeavors, through people met doing the websites, became dependent on the websites they were “brainstorming”, becoming huge, so that people could be “paid” later. You know pay people with imaginary later money. Couple this with my need to move to San Diego in 2000, I would step back heavily from what was going on. Now decades later we know what was coming, the signs were there, the avenues that were paying where getting cornered and gobbled up. Those places that were trying not to pay people, well guess how those were about to go, wonder how everything burst.

This wasn’t the end of things though. Some of the sites maintained popularity after I moved away. And while in San Diego later on during a time of fiscal crisis, I recalled that the young man in Davis whom I started the first positive website with still owed me a clutch of money. Obviously with the payment being so delayed I couldn’t get through on the telephone, which cost money back then just to make the call anyway. So, I got to volunteers, Jim and Karl to go collect for me and put it out of my mind.

Later that day I got a call from the young man, it wasn’t an apology for being so far behind on payments. Nope, it was, “Please don’t send your goons after me.” Anyone that knows Karl, might find him as a goon somewhat hilarious. Anyway, he said I could have just asked for it, I told him I had tried and that I couldn’t physically collect it since I was 500 miles away and it’s not like wire transfers or anything were a thing at this time. Finally, to appease him I sent, I think my mother to go collect the back owed money. Which I am pretty sure he undercut, should have sent Jim and Karl again to break his legs I guess.

During this time though from 98 – 00, I still kept up with my personal website. Small as it was, it became this weird list of items we didn’t have a spot for on the big ad revenue sites, and then a series of random images and links that were almost 100 percent just Marty and Ryan inside jokes. From a picture of GWAR to the Undertaker from WWF and a Levi’s ad featuring an Asian man driving his denim car through ha car wash that Marty though looked like our friend Hien. I would never just kill my own weird corner of the internet, even in the face of a ton of work that paid elsewhere. Because of this, Marty and I probably got to many random visits on our weird inside jokes.

Personal Page 1998

My Personal Website restored somewhat from a backup on the WayBack Machine. I am just writting this write now to fill out space on the top as a test.

For now though that is the introduction to the internet exploding at the L street house.

There was more to 1998 though than just the transition into an all you can eat internet buffet. Admittedly with Chris gone and Marty just on the weekends, while the webpages started making money. My weekdays became a lot of wake up, work on the internet, go to bed.

This wasn’t a terrible pattern, but I did become sedentary for a while. There were some non-celebrity website related things though this year. I had my room setup so the TV was right next to the computer monitor. So I could upload large video capture events and play games or watch a TV show. This was a good setup since we are still on modems. 56k, which was the high end, but still sometimes things took a while to transfer and having a non-internet hobby to play when waiting around was nice.

The PSX era also seemed to bring cheaper games, which meant more stuff to do with it. Early in 98 though I would have still been goofing around with FF7. Tomb Raider II would have been fun for Christmas in 97, but FF7 was just a fun game to explore and with the internet now so much to try out that was listed on gamesfaq.com.

The split screen of Twisted Metal was great for multiplayer, so along with the PC I felt like I had more than enough to play with Marty on the weekends and during down time on the web sites.

This was an interesting change since mid-96. The NES and SNES during their heyday pretty much dominated what titles got played in the house, until the SNES had to start giving some time to the PC. But by 1996 as the SNES was retiring into the night, and the new Nintendo, the Nintendo 64 (N64), was not impressing us. Once FFVII had released on the PSX, I had sort of made up my mind I didn’t care about the N64.

This continued until late 97 or in 98, but then Goldeneye sort of happened. Oddly though as much as that game was a catalyst to investigate getting the system, it was wanting to try the Shadows of the Empire game for the whole Star Wars marketing thing that got me to buy the system initially at the Warehouse in Davis. But it was Goldeneye that was primarily the only game ever played on the system. As I said, Doom and Quake multiplayer had been attempted on the PCs by now, but the games speed along with having to play, in Quake’s case, with random people online had left the FPS multiplayer scene in a need of something cleaner. (I think I’ve mentioned that, lol)

That’s where Goldeneye stepped in. self-contained, well designed deathmatches that everyone was in the same room for. It amazes me to think we were happier playing a four-player game on split screen on a 19-inch CRT TV, then playing full screen on the PC. But I guess our eyes were younger and better back then. With few exceptions I had one system for one game. Then the PSX for one player games mainly and PC for the exciting new stuff coming out of the minds of game developers. In the end without Goldeneye though, I just wouldn’t have had the N64.

Sure, I bought it with the intention of playing the Star Wars game, but if I had just stuck to the single player titles on that system I would have considered the thing a waste of money in comparison to the PSX. I know I have mentioned some of this, but even though revisionism has painted the N64 as a landmark system, it was kind of boring when it came out. It was, and I know things got marketed this way, but it was a baby system for babies. It had Mario, Zelda and, a Mario like games, and a new f-zero and, well Goldeneye. It had Goldeneye and then a lot of games that would have been made had that system not existed and a better version made in its place.

As much as people love the Nintendo licensed games on the n64, its still hard to say they were better sequels to the SNES versions of the game. Which will infuriate those that have bought into the Nintendo Kool-Aid that the n64 was anything but a disappointment. On the flip side, as amazing as the FF games, and FF6 was, FF7 did up the bar. Castlevania, a long with new entries, the PSX dominated this time console wise, it was never even close.

So, while the PSX dominated the era, and the birth of the internet and my little web empire would drain hours into the PCs, we had a “healthy” multiplayer scene at the L street house with Goldeneye. I say healthy, but dang did having four people in a deathmatch get a lot of colorful language out of the participants. There are some derogatory remarks made over the couple years of Goldeneye play that I still find my brain going to use when engaging in other competitive hobbies. That’s excessive shit talk, but we are also now twenty.

To say Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64 was an important game is to understate its importance. A quarter century later Nintendo and its loyalists have tried to downplay the fact it kept the Nintendo 64 from being a machine no one cared about. You hear about how much people “loved” the in-house titles, but no, everyone I knew in my demographic played Goldeneye and wouldn’t have cared enough about any of the other titles to buy the system and sales were bad for the system anyway. No Goldeneye, who knows where Nintendo is. And in our demographic, we played a lot of that game. Now as I already stated Marty was on a weekends at the house schedule, I would spend my week doing web design and advertising, then Fridays, he would show up and we’d get people over and plant proximity mines.

See more of the same sentiment. I guess every time this generation comes up, I got on the same rant. To be honest though I am not even dunking on the n64. I just really feel like its lost how important Goldeneye was for Nintendo during this time. People talk about it being a amazing FPS game, sort of, what it was though was the landmark title for that console. Which it needed. I know people believe Mario carries the company, but people thought that about Sega with Sonic at the time too, and since YouTube wouldn’t be around for nostalgia stories for a while there was a difference in living during the time and looking back at it. Proximity mining your friends, fun, Backwards long jumps, no one even knew what those were or cared.

image 105 Goldeneye being played on the N64

The funny thing is through this space, Final Fantasy 7, Goldeneye, Age of Empires and Command and Conquer are the only games I can say for sure were games in 1998. I’ve even mentioned others I played, but they were forgettable. Since I bought the n64, I did Shadows of the Empire, played through Mario 64 and for Christmas got Zelda 64, I mean Ocarina of time. Zelda proved fun for a play through, but I never went back to it. I’ve tried. I also cycled through Tomb Raider II obviously, but it didn’t hit as hard as the first. I think those titles suffered a little over time due to proximity of release, because the second one wasn’t unfun, I just couldn’t tell you what happened in that versus the first one.

I don’t know for some reason 1998 and video games and the internet make for a weird time. Even though both are sort of in the same space, not to many engineers have smashed the two together yet. Except for battle.net.

Blizzard, your once loved now maligned game developer. In the late 90s they were known for fun games that were complete rip-offs of other things. Look I know people also love this era of Blizzard but the company and original ideas weren’t a pair. I am pretty sure ill get into Starcarft, but before that there was Warcraft and I think Warcraft too. Age of Empires. And that is the story of Warcraft at the L street house.

Diablo though was fun and maybe have been the first game ever to get played online with strangers. The simple dungeon crawler was fun and had a couple times it got a lot of play over battle.net. Justin and I, during one of his kicked out of the house phases with Steve, did some multiplayer dungeon crawling on our own little private server.

But it was Chris coming home for a visit that forever cements Diablo’s legacy. See battle.net was young, and unlike modern servers that host and matchmake, it didn’t have anyway to stop people from, well, cheating. Chris one night while staying over during his visit, well cheated heavily.

There was an external program you could run to manipulate all sorts of things in game. He of course made himself all powerful, joined people’s open games, summoned them back to town and the slaughtered them. Diablo not having a lot of foresight at this point that this was how people were going to look at multiplayer if not policed. Allowed the murdered to then take the dead players gear, and well, as a trophy of their kill, the dead player’s ear.

Chris just collected hate and ears all night long. It’s amazing how much causing people anguish in a video game can keep people playing. King of like Chris K. dunking on us during his MTG tutorials, Chris M. just beat people down who had no chance unless they too were cheating. Good game.

With Age of Empires though dominating the RTS landscape, it was I guess interesting to have JF bring over Starcraft. This like Warcraft was another games workshop rip-off, just of the 40k variety instead of just straight Warhammer. But it was at the time the closest one had a good space conquest game. It was also battle.net supported so we could play JF from home and beat him at literally his own game.

It was harder to get in house games though going through battle.net than it was AoE, so the game did suffer a bit from that. But later Jim would pick it up and by 2001 when he got his own computer, battle.net seemed a bit more competent and the game had a short revival. The important part is that Battle.net showed up and the first idea of playing with randoms on the internet was sort of birthed during this time. I know command and conquered had some service too, but we just never needed to find people to play that game when it was big.

Christmas 1998. I have titled this section “Holidays III”. And while I could argue that is not the most accurate title, since between Thanksgivings and Christmases in the 1990s, we have managed our way through a lot of holiday seasons I think I few this in the grand scheme of things, that being my Star Wars destroyed narrative mind, as the final chapter in the trilogy that is the 90s Holidays. The middle of course being what I think of as the norm for the season.

It's hard for me to argue this with myself, which I do. But I think the over encompassing reason, and the shadow cast for years on the holidays was how triumphant the 1997 season was. Last year was probably what the ideal for family holidays and that cozy feeling one gets when thinking about what a perfect Christmas is. There were too many things that just fell into place to make it seem like something unattainable ever since.

Marty, Chris, and I were just out of High School, each one of us was also in the middle of some interesting transition. Chris was waiting for his enlistment date in the Air Force, Marty was working on getting into a local Police Academy and I was just starting to make the transition from college to web design. Somehow culminating in being still technically teenagers, except Marty who was now 21, and nothing but free time and parents that weren’t giving us a hard time about not working etc. because everyone was on the cusp of what looked to me our adult lives.

Those months then, we got to plan and do all of the holiday events the way we wanted. It’s one of the main reasons we got an updated Trivial Pursuit game, and then of course practiced it a lot. Then with just everything that was going on we had free time to just add our spin on things, which included the Mr. Hanky ornament we made for the tree thanks to South Park, and just so on and so on, which I hopefully covered well the year before. There is no negative look back of those holidays, running back and forth setting up Command and Conquer, sitting around my bedroom quizzing each other for the Trivial Pursuit games, looking up stuff on the internet around our weird new shows on Comedy Central. 

So, there was a lot of pressure on 1998 to keep the happiness going. Of course, then this year had one glaring issue to deal with. No Chris. It would mark the first time since 1993 that Chris would miss the holidays at the house. Half a decade is time enough to make it seem normal. This was something on everyone’s mind. Gone to an extent was the high school era when Chris and Marty couldn’t co-exist, Chris had become such a fixture to at home that Mom felt off not having him around and so during Christmas shopping Mom and I, borrowing from Marty’s nickname of Chris being a baby Gorilla bought a stand in for him during the holidays:

Weird in a way. But yeah, it gave Chris a proxy for the holidays, but since it was based on a family nickname/joke it somehow worked.

Thanksgiving itself because of these events is a lot less memorable. I looked up the NFL games from that day and they don’t ring much of a bell. I do remember the Niners game from that Sunday to me when we lost Garrison Hearst to injury that game, that was the slow death knell on the season and so I do always remember that game happening and the lump from it. But we did pass through the holiday with no fanfare like 97’s with its Trivial Pursuit championship parade. I will echo a statement I’ll probably make or have made already though. With Marty doing the police academy up in Oroville he would come and stay with us every weekend. Thus, with the holidays this year he followed that pattern, he just had more time off. And even though I don’t remember the specifics it is entirely believable that he probably came down Wednesday evening and stayed at the house all Thanksgiving.

It is here that my mind wanders to wondering about another long-standing Thanksgiving tradition from the 90s. The Thanksgiving Day newspaper. While figuring out when Dad stopped doing the paper route is now probably impossible, I can make an educated guess. And that is that Dad slowed or stopped them completely by 1999, because by then he started in on his eBay arc. But I think the paper routes weren’t a, we had them one day and then the next they were gone, So, I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t still have the last lingering of Black Friday ads to fold up during this holiday week, not realizing that a near decade long tradition/torture was about to disappear from tradition, and slowly out of culture in general.

This is where a theme will start to grow with this holiday season of endings, which is why I go back to my original statement of this being the last chapter in the trilogy of the 90’s and its holiday heyday.

This of course is not going to be known at the time, and so after Thanksgiving the norms would happen. We would on Black Friday drive out to the Christmas Tree farm and pick up a tree for the front room. In turn as Mom’s students came in for the final lessons before Christmas break, we would decorate the house and I would convert the Dining Room into the computer lab.

The dining room conversion is something that luckily this year I have pictures of, because for the back half of the 1990s this was one of my personal favorite parts of the season. This year in particular because I had a newer/newish computer, but my old one was still running, and Mom’s was still chugging along we had a solid setup. Of course, for me the best part was being able to hook up the best computer into the stereo system and blast whatever was going on at full blast.

The temporary allocation of the Dining Room into the computer room also marked that everyone, save Dad, was on vacation. It gave Christmas a unique feeling because memories from these times have distinct arrangements of where one was in the house. Even when lounging around Mom and I would be generally in the same areas, the house would be lit up with decorations and no one was really hiding in their offices or rooms which is something that becomes more of a norm as kids get older in households. For a couple of weeks during the year, Mom tolerated the backhouse hijinks in the front of the house and somehow it made everyone much cozier.

With that in place, Mom and I can get down to doing the Christmas shopping. Without Chris and Marty around nonstop like last year Mom and I had a lot more time to kill during the lead up to Christmas. Thus, a lot more plotting was given to getting presents. Well just a lot of plotting in general, this was also when Mom and I came up with the Chris proxy idea as well.

I am going to start with my presents for this year, just because it is part of the long gaming narrative of my life, and I might as well get this sidetrack to the main plot out of the way.

As had become the norm at some point during this era I was allotted three wishes. This year, for the first time in a while I wanted some Nintendo games. If I recall one of the main feelings was that I didn’t have enough N64 games in general. For the most part we just played GoldenEye and I felt like there needed to be some variance in gaming on the platform.

Added to this was the next Zelda game. Which from my perspective of only having normal consoles was the first one since 1992, so for as long as Chris had known our house for the holidays, we hadn’t had a new Adventure in Hyrule. Thus, that was the main wish. Ocarina of Time. From there it was F-Zero-X, a sequel to a much beloved game from the early 90s again, and then the final wish was to keep going with the Tomb Raider games, which once again had a holiday release this year with Tomb Raider III.

These guys don’t hit on much of a lasting impact like the original Tomb Raider did, or like Twisted Metal 2 had. I played all of them, Ocarina I was excited about, being it now over a year since FF7 and a new RPG adventure felt needed. And while I completed the game, the lack of grandiose story compared to FF7 did end up making me feel a little meh about the title. I didn’t hate it or anything, but it was clear at this point that CD’s, having access to FMV’s and more data made for longer experiences, which help make the games more immersive and, in the end, more fun.

F-Zero-X, while a fun game, was also just not the same as the original and now in an era where everyone was making games that felt fast if they wanted that feeling it also in the long run feel flat and could never get much in the way of 4 player games going.

Tomb Raider III also wasn’t quite what the other titles had been the years before. Making this Christmas, as far as my presents maybe not be on par with say Optimus Prime and Megatron from 1984, but I was older and this years presents were not about me.

Mom and I, as per our norm, would do some shopping out at Arden Fair in Sacramento. This was the closest big mall in the area and allowed one to shop around to find the right items. Woodland Mall which had been a fixture for some time through the late 1980s and early 1990s was starting to suffer from it’s small size and was kind of just Target at the this point to us. Arden on the other hand feature a large mall, with shopping centers surrounding each side. There were just more options. And we would need these this year.

First though we have to go back in time. This is going to be extremely hard to date accurately, but sometime between I think Christmas 94 and 97 Dad made Mom happy/upset. Because I don’t know which Christmas this is, I don’t think I have told the story yet, so here it goes.

Dad had a history of trying to outshine everyone at home on Christmas buy getting the right gifts. In the 80s this got me some transformers and so on I really wanted, but Dad also tried to get Mom the right things. Over the years there was the Christmas with the bike for Mom’s triathlon years, then there was the ring with all seven kid’s birthstones that Dad took me with him to go get custom made at the jewelers in the Woodland Mall.

But it was during this 92-96ish time that Dad pulled the fast one on Mom. This particular holiday season Mom had Dad under some scrutiny for overspending his budget getting Mom something that was too expensive. She cited it as “not being a competition” and so watched Dad pretty tightly.  So, it got to Christmas Eve and a teenage boy with his own phone line got a call from his father. Dad was not going to stand for being told he couldn’t get his wife something over budget! Thus, he wanted me to brainstorm ideas.

Eventually the broken dishwasher becomes a focal point of the discussion. While sounding somewhat lame to a teenager, as an adult I can understand an appliance that stops discussions over who has to do the dishes every night as just a priceless stress reliever if nothing else. When that was decided upon though there were some other details to iron out. One, the L street house was old enough it didn’t have a built in dishwasher, which were the norm by the 1990s, so phone calls and adds had to be looked up to see what was available in “portable” dishwashers, which you could get full sized, and weren’t very portable but could be hooked up to a sink and had wheels to roll around the kitchen. Secondly Mom’s former dishwasher had a wooden top, which sounds like an odd detail, but its space in the kitchen and its wooden top made it a giant cutting board, which is honestly a convenience I didn’t understand until living in more modern homes that don’t have the convenience of a giant cutting board available at all times.

These two details we tried to match caused a day-long search, mainly through phone calls, on Christmas Eve. It wasn’t until Dad got home that we had tracked one that match both criteria in stock at the Florin Mall Sears in Sacramento. Under some ruse, Dad and I made our way back out on the road in the evening before the store closed for the holiday and Dad paid some crazy fee to get it delivered in some manner that he could get it to the house the next morning. Perhaps he delivered it to Steve’s and got Steve in on the plan, but I don’t think Steve had a big enough car at the time, so it might have been some other family acquaintance that Dad called in to win this round of gift giving.

And while pleasantly surprised at being able to find a proper model and so on, Mom was upset that Dad had broken their pact and once again gone above and beyond what they agreed upon.

Here we are a few years later and Mom and I have had a lot of time to brainstorm. One of the things Mom keeps mentioning is that she is tired of Dad being the one that swoops in with the amazing expensive gift every year. She realizes he can’t be stopped, but for just once, she would like to come out at least on top of the dazzle category of gifts. This led us down the road to camcorder.

For years, considered highly expensive it was an item Dad seemed envious of when Steve used to use one. Now as technology was getting ever more affordable, we decided it was a feasible gift he wouldn’t see coming. After some hoping around an looking at models we got to Circuit City and decided we liked the gimmicky Sharp “Viewcams”, which where small, for the time, Hi-8 cameras with a very large, for the time, LCD screen and a swivel lens, which allowed the user to not have to stand with a viewfinder up to their face to see what was being recorded. It was at the time, amazing. So much so that remember the make and model was hard, since all camcorder manufacturers where going to start making smaller LCD-centric cameras, and having worked in electronics a bit later on, I got used to everything being called a handycam, which I guess was Sony’s term, but I attributed to this camera as well.

It was advertised as digital at the time, which was a big buzzword in the late 90s. But it did just record to Hi-8, but the resolution, back then seemed amazing, unfortunately as we see in the pictures coming from Christmas, over the years the images wouldn’t seem to so amazing with their small pixel count.

Once we decided to make the purchase Mom got sold on buying the extended warranty coverage from the store on the device. This is something I would become well aware of in my adult life, but at the time I was 20 and I think the only other time I heard a speech about extended coverage was when I helped Dad get that dishwasher. So, with no real input on the scheme, Mom asked her questions of him, the main one being that with such a large screen would the cover someone say dropping the camera on the screen and it cracking etc... to which she was told yes. And so, she decided it was a good idea to add that onto Dad’s already kind of pricey gift. The important note there is that she specifically accidentally foreshadowed an important question and got a direct answer.

After that though Christmas was setup and ready to go. We had a pattern for it now and it was straight forward to setup and Mom and I had the time to do it. Most of the income from the websites at that time was coming from the k-h.com message boards, which for the most part meant work for me was posting messages and reading other peoples posts and being generally involved with the online community built up around the website. Something that back then was almost completely unintelligible as a source of income and job but is a direct precursor to modern times “social” media.

Marty, who wasn’t getting paid through the site, still was heavily into the boards by Christmas. With the complete death of the BBS after 1997, this was the new online way to communicate. Marty now, who was always a bit of a blow hard online if I were to be honest, now had the same interaction we had been used to for years but online with people who didn’t know him offline. Beyond that the k-h.com forums with me being the webmaster gave him some measure of stature among the community. So it was that we would sit out in the Dinning Room this year and spend hours having a dumb old time online with the internet nerds. Considering the year before and its BBS drama that drove Marty so crazy, this years teasing of rabid Katie Holmes fans was great fun.

Christmas Eve Marty and I sat down and did this, along with other things on the internet. One of which was work on his personal website. How do I remember this, the Wayback Machine is how. I remember the website he was making at the time mind out, but thanks to the internet somewhat backing itself up at the time, there is a backup of Marty’s December 24^th, 1998 update saved online:

Code4 December 24th 1998

As it would happen that night I was testing out Dad’s new toy with my computer and I snapped a picture of this event. There me and Marty are in the Dining Room on my two computers, Christmas tree in the background working away, probably at sometime near midnight I am guessing, fire going most likely next to me, working on the internet. Those computers would then be setup for running Age of Empires, which was much like the year befores Command and Conquer games, except with Age of Empires I was able to setup with one disk on three computers.

This would be a Christmas day activity. Essentially getting to play army men, in this case ancient armies, over the network with that many of us was not only seemingly cutting edge at the time, but just juvenile fun that allowed everyone to revert to the age you want to be Christmas morning.

This feeling of childhood joy would permeate through the air. During present openings Steve would have me throw crumpled wrapping paper at him to hit with the wiffle ball bat we had present in the living room, almost hitting our Aunt Dorothy in the process. Straight little kid behavior out of what now is technically old men. While slightly dangerous, the fun factor outweighs the dumbness of it all. Like always games would be played, puzzles worked on and the night would bring one of the more fascinating ends when Dad, Marty, Justin and Steve all sat down for some deathmatch in Goldeneye:

Dad, still in his nightshirt he had worn all day. A fitting end to the what was really the last Christmas of its kind in the L street house, the last great Christmas of everyone’s childhood, before things became less immature and fun. Eventually Steve and Justin would go home and Dad would go to bed that night, Marty though kept going on and as Christmas night turned into the day after’s morning there was still on GoldenEye, playing the Aztec level on one of the difficulty levels that we needed to unlock something with, giving me the greatest gaming picture I have:

That’s how those holidays ended. I didn’t know it was the closing of a chapter at the time, but as I dirdled away time on the computers that night and Marty probably talked about how much he hated James Bond these holidays were coming to an end. Christmas 1999 wouldn’t be completely different, some of the same traditions would remain for one more year, but this is interestingly enough the cut off to when it felt completely carefree.

One important note as of now is that I cannot find where we put the video from this Christmas for “safe keeping” meaning the images I captured from that tape are all that remains.

Christmas Caps 1998

Notes, plans, math. From the work I started doing in 1997 on websites into the end of the 1998 year I had found a way to make money off the sites. It ended up through the Xena site through T.V. show themed and then celebrity sites based on traffic and advertising, but that was not the only route attempted.

Initially when working on the personal web pages, there was a strong parental push to just turn web development for others into a functional business model. So, I gave that a go for a small amount of in 1997. Under the moniker Pachyderm I started setting up a website and pricing plans for the idea. It’s hard to follow my notes, but I can make out the homepage, which was going to be tagged onto my DCN account.

I cannot find a backup of the URL though on the Wayback Machine, although I might have seen a html backup of some draft of the site on an old backup CD. I did have the site up to some extent for a small period of time, but as I can make out in my pricing math the real problem, or issue I had with it, was that what people expected to pay and get was wildly different from the amount of work I was going to have to do. The biggest issue around expectations was finding a way to express maintenance of the site after creation. Back then I could find a fair amount of people that would see the time it took to make the page and be okay with a flat rate dependent on hours, but it was that “MAINT” section I remember being the biggest headache.

But I found I had to price out the maintenance for the sites because if not, you got a lump for the initial design and uploading, then people just expected you to make any all changes to the site for free, forever, which became the biggest hassle to deal with.

Now there are some parts in the early plan there I don’t get, mostly doing with why Graham was so heavily mentioned. There must have been some idea to have him host the sites is my guess. I do notice that there is a listing for the King High website, which I would almost wonder about until recently when I found that website zipped up on an old archive. I am pretty sure that site was being made for free but was up there just to be a referable site. It’s also funny to see that we must have had a site for Dad’s stamps, that would be pretty neat to find.

Chicken scratches for revenue management though, and well plans as we have seen, give me a bit of a memory backup for what life was like at this time. The next scan comes from way later, in 1999, but is adding up bills due, with website ad revenue for the specific goal of getting Final Fantasy 8 and a new PlayStation at game launch. It’s amazing I have these particular notes still since that was an event that happened, that I will go over extensively in 1999.

I don’t know any profound reason for showing off these details of how I got things done during this period, but I find it amusing. Mainly because while I am pushing into the PC realm and working on internet, for whatever reasons I insisted at this time to chicken scratch everything down with pen and paper first.

There is this interesting span of time, sort of from late 1997 through Christmas 1998 that is somewhat lost. Kind of. I have just spent those two years talking about web development, the power of the holidays at the house, the release of Final Fantasy 7 for the PSX, it wasn’t hum-drum. But, as I am noticing, while working on this project there is a disappearance of a photo record of things for the first time since the late 1980s.

This means some of the more routine and mundane things from this era have sort of vanished. The big stuff, paradox changing things, yeah, but day to day, remembering when I changed my room around, stuff that helps keep a lot of the mid 90s fresh doesn’t have the pictorial support. Which is odd because this had to have been some pretty good times. This was Chris and Marty and almost no school to go to because I was trying to churn out the internet into a business.

Marty working at the car dealerships, had to have been here. So that means this is the point he lived over in the apartments with a girl he called Dirto. I can remember that being a thing, and the name, and the delivery of saying the name, and drinking a Zima over at the apartment all with no reference. Why was he living there? I don’t know. How did we end up getting Zima for some random reason? I don’t know. I remember something about driving a car down to contra costa county for the dealership which I think was the catalyst for that event but the memories of why are so hazy.

Oddly it’s having no clue what was up with the Dirto. I cannot even recall what her name was or anything. This had to have been post the brothers living in West Sacramento, but before Marty and the police academy, which honestly is a narrow window that can only be this time in my life. But for as much as a story as this all seemed at the time, I guess it got broken down by what was to come and what had come before.

Instead, we have months of just living and doing in between the first big chapter of life, public schooling, and the second which is ones 20s. A lot of things I have talked about in other sections would have been big here. The websites, Hockey fandom, the 49er’s games, Japanese class, the PSX. All daily things at some point or another.

In 2019 I had a dream that I woke up at the L street house one morning in the 1990s. Out of sorts, with waking up and seeming out of time I made my way to the dining room table and checked the newspaper for the date in a groggy haze. June 7, 1997. That dream continued in a weird way when I realized my father shouldn’t be alive anymore. But it was the date that really stuck with me. Why that date? After talking to my mother, we couldn’t really see any significance to remembering the date.

Oddly though it was a day I could look up and know a little bit about. It was the last day of the Hockey season, and the first Stanley Cup victory for the Detroit Red Wings in decades. I know for a fact I watched that game in the front room and the television on ESPN. So, I know I was home that day. I wondered for a time if that was also the Day Chris’s graduation was, but it had to have been a few days later.

So, I am having dreams decades later about days during a time I can scarcely remember with good clarity. It makes me think the memories are there, just out of place. Chris’s graduation I can remember going to with Marty and sitting in the back of and peanut gallery-ing his fellow classmates that we knew of. I even remember Chris’s mothers’ speech about King High fixing Chris. Like I keep saying its not a blank space in my mind, just something I can’t sort out and I think it is because of the lack of physical evidence from the era.

Karl living with Nate at the Baywood house. Check that was this time. I have pictures to prove that, or I have scans of Karl’s pictures to prove it, from well, June, or well, 1997. When Jim also graduated, like Chris a year behind us. I sat in the bleachers, Jim had an inflatable man doll he brought, we had an after party at the Baywood house, in complete contrast to the DHS sponsored grad night the year before. Karl made eggs for breakfast that morning.

But even though I can’t think of the time and space that happened in, its not without following this logic path, whereas a lot of the stuff I have talked about from say 1994, I know was 1994. And still, I feel a fondness for 1997 and 1998 as sort of a couple of the best years of my life. Strange.

Which then gets me to the fact that when I think about these times generally, I just get a feeling of longing contentment. But not any real specific visuals. There is something special about these two years that is somehow different than when one remembers doing things. Like there was so little stress that there weren’t enough traumatic things to strike those neurons that remember when terrible things happen. Instead, you just get a stress-free euphoria when thinking about it. I think it is also why after all those up and down years with Marty in high school fighting over the BBS and such that I don’t view him negatively like say Karl does, because he was around for this period. Perhaps if Chris K. could have shown back up then he would still be on the Christmas list.

Oddly I think that last part is even more profound because I think he was still going through his villain arc that had started back when Jake and I were sent to try and retrieve the radio stations stolen items from him. There is a good chance that 6/7/97 was just in the heart of where my mind wants to go back to, because there isn’t a lot of cares at the time. Maybe that day was just the healthiest my mind has even been, which could attribute to why I could make out the date on the paper in the dream.

The Mundane Life of a Twenty-Year-Old (Work in Progress)

Throughout both junior high and high school there was a sense of needing to do something with one’s free time. Perhaps it is because school at that point in one’s life is a mandatory, inescapable institution that during those teen years seems to be stymying one’s ability to hang out with one’s friends and have a good time. This helps develop a culture that we saw a lot during those years, especially from 1993 through 1995. If we could find a way to go out and do something, we probably did.

In Davis, California that meant, for the most part, going downtown and nearby at night, and for the most part loitering. Surprisingly to some degree, I guess, this wasn’t met with as much substance abuse as this behavior would be presumed. Sure, there was the occasional story like the time we went to the arboretum with Jake, Alyssa and Mike and Jake decided it would be fun to drop acid while we all babysat him that night. There was the night Jake and I shoulder tapped to prove to my parents we could do more wrong than we were. But for the most part these nights out were the exception. Most of the time it was just hanging out on foot, some bad ideas, and some Taco Bell. While maybe too broad of a generalization most of what we did was in the “harmless” classification.

But what it did take was a lot of time, especially on Friday and or Saturday nights. Then like teenagers we would sleep all day and before you knew it, that weekend was over, and it was back to the grind. This paradigm was so greatly changed after high school that, even though somewhat covered I don’t think I have explained it properly.

To this extent I think my first example of what I am trying to explain about life, is The Price is Right.

To start this, for me we have to go back to the 1980s and I have to be sick. We also have to give an honorable mention to Regis Philbin, because his show did come on right before The Price is Right. It started sometime during the morning when one’s mother would decide it was okay to stay home from school because you either threw up, or were too congested, or the myriad of reasons elementary school kids can find to miss out on a day of class. After that morning show, I wasn’t to saw around 9 or 10 in the morning was The Price is Right, at the time, with Bob Barker. Kids my age are old enough to remember him having a disclaimer about no longer dying his hair.

Anyway, it was this gameshow that came on in the early morning that somehow signified staying home from school. Although I think they did run episodes other places on other channels at different times, especially later on when the Game Show channel became a thing, it’s morning time slot on ABC I think it was, was Monday through Friday and was the airing that was the measuring stick for a getting a weekday off.

The show itself seems rather simple. Maybe this is due to every child in America at some point being sick and learning the rules. But in all honesty the show itself isn’t all that enthralling either, even though it is a beloved institution. I would postulate that it gains so much good will from the happiness of missing a math test in say the fourth grade, that some of the dullness of the show is fogged over with the knowledge that once we see one of Barker’s beauties showing off a boat someone could win, that the downside of a runny nose was going to be covered with being in bed and getting chicken soup.

Then you graduate from public school. If you have morning classes, you can just sign up for a schedule you like. You get to choose to miss class if you so desire. No longer does one have to get up in the morning and put together a camping to lobby the mothers of America to call into school and let you stay home. Thusly you aren’t up at 8 in the morning begging to go back to bed. If you skip class, you skip class and just sleep through whenever.

The Price is Right is no longer a part of one’s life. One’s school schedule is not dictating television habits. If you sign up for Tuesday/Thursday classes only, you can go out Tuesday and Thursday night and be dammed to dealing with the masses going out on a Friday night. Television schedules, which were a thing back in the day of a hundred channels that all had programing that was only savable with a VCR, were something one could be pickier about. Sure, you could get up on a Wednesday in that example, watch Bob and reminisce about the old days of public schooling.

But why, you now have a schedule around your own habits, you can stay up every night and catch Letterman and Conan and just sleep in the morning and go to class a couple days a week. Somehow, somewhere this independence, while so heavily sighted as growing up, also let people get more degenerate in what they spent their time watching on television.

That is an odd statement to make. I guess the first thing to say is that I think degenerate in this case doesn’t have to mean a negative. Part of what it means is instead of life dictating what you’re watching due to having the same free time as other kids or other adults on the 8ish to 5ish schedule that parents and kids can fall subject too, one can manipulate things around what they need to get done and what they want to enjoy about life.

Because of this I think it is no mere coincidence that this time after high school saw a giant explosion in television ingested at the L street house by us waning teenagers, along with an increase into geekier exploits. The need to do things at a set time to get a set reward were sort of out the door, weekends were not as important, and while shows like The Price as Right are well beloved for their time and what they represent, unless you really like game shows, who cares anymore?

Another thing that then sort of disappears is judgement. To be honest I never did dorm life. As I have stated I had a college plan, and it started with the local community college and staying at home to save on expenses.  I had some friends that were completely against that idea, but it is what it is. But yeah without a daily dose of the old pressures a lot of the walls we build to prove we aren’t social messed up disappear. I keep bringing up the going downtown thing, which is something that maybe didn’t completely stop happening, I even have a video from 1999 showing it didn’t, but it wasn’t the same thing.

And now, at least for me there were things like Wednesdays. For some frame of reference, we will call it a Wednesday in somewhere between Nov 96 to Feb 97. The year prior Wednesday was the same thing it had been since 1983, a school day. While Wednesday itself is an interesting school day for district reasons, for kids it’s just another day at the office, only interrupted by some divine hand that made one’s mother let them stay home and catch back up with Bob Barker. But Now, 18, out of high school, Wednesdays are something different.

I can roll out of bed, knowing me at that age, let’s say around noon. Do I have to get up and shower and get ready for class, nope, is it a Saturday and Mom and Dad have some schedule that they want us kids to work around, nope, Dad’s at work, and during this particular window so is Mom, dealing with her new business front downtown most of the time. Chris is at school, he might come by afterwards, but for now I just have to go to the pantry, grab a Pop-Tart, walk over to whichever table the Sacramento Bee is strewn about and mainly catch up on the 49er’s news of the day and see what prices Fry’s is throwing our way this week.

After that strenuous morning routine, there is no set plan. Do I want to go somewhere outside on a Wednesday? No, why? I don’t think it’s mere coincidence that things like the internet grew so heavily during this window. Why go out and do whatever when I can sit around and look for ways to do something I might actually find interesting and not just what some local jack-ass decided should be available to the public.

As I have said, one of the things this led to was finding HTML and building websites. Those websites originally came from a want to keep the BBS culture going, but as we see with the story, it made a turn into covering popular entertainment. Because, well, the BBS stuff involved local kids all struggling to find things to do on the same schedules, that was a lot of work and the pool for that audience had changed. Online was a different place back then than it is now, than BBS were. So, I started looking at other things I had been interested in.

Star Wars was an obvious catalyst, I had always loved it and now I could sit around and look up things about it. No longer would I be pleasantly surprised going to the drug store with Dad to see the action figure line come back, I could go online and lookup what action figures they were planning on releasing in the next year to coincide with the re-release of the movies. It was then a lot of fun to talk about what “facts” I had learned about the comings and goings with say friends like Karl, when I went over to his place to have a couple drinks.

We are still kids, but we aren’t kids anymore, so some of this stuff is somehow oddly interesting, or we are just dumb and sometimes drunk so learning what amounts to useless information seems, I don’t know fun? As it happened then during this time, there were hundreds of channels on the cable box, and so there were these sometimes-different syndicated television shows that came on at different times, sometimes on more than one channel that, well, Chris and I got into.

Star Trek: The Next Generation was one of these shows that had been on since the 1980s and ended in 1994, but it did help carve a niche as a decent production, that could run on whatever channel paid for it, and not just on a network at a set time once a week. By the late 90s, maybe to fill the void left by Star Trek and or to fill the void of all this television that had to be delivered 24 hours a day more shows had popped up. That’s where shows, that spawned websites like Xena, Warrior Princess game from. And on a random Wednesday afternoon I could dial up DCN, go online, download some pictures and slowly craft a page about items from the show I found interesting and then share them with other bums like myself.

A year before, I don’t think I would have thought sitting around on a Wednesday afternoon downloading images of Lucy Lawless in leather armor to share with faceless weirdos on the internet would have been a thing I figure to be fun. In fact, I probably would have thought it stupid or supremely nerdy. For one, if you were looking for sexy pictures there is much easier to access goods even in the BBS days and two, weird. And not that weird that was looked upon as good and unique in junior high, but weird as in the homeless lady that would talk to teenagers in the park.

Now it was just a funny show that Chris and I would watch and could go on the internet and download audio files of Joxer signing his own personal theme song stripped straight from a recording of the show. Of course, I cover a lot of what this transformed into, but it’s hard to explain what the change was in the day to day. But as I keep trying to point out its that we went from entertainment that was given to us that we liked when molding it to our situation, to finding entertainment that was suited to us. Or then I guess later for me, that was suited to making money for me.

This, while not defined by one year, does lead into 1997 being this watershed moment of a more mundane existence of internet browsing and getting into weekly serials and learning about beloved franchises. Xena on the television and internet, a revitalization of Star Wars, staying up late with Chris to watch cartoons that I guess were considered too weird to coming on at a reasonable hour. Giving us Beastwars and Dragonball Z. Television is becoming this great new experience, less sitcoms, much more product that drives enough interest to invest loads of time into this other new entertainment medium of the internet. And to be honest we’re in January. It’s not surprise that life started shifting focus to this, this was fun, cheap, in fact would make a profit down the road, it didn’t require finding money or to go somewhere to mooch drinks, you could do it from the privacy of your bedroom if you felt anti-social.

One could have done this with music too. But I guess to an extent that was something that had to be such a defining characteristic during high school that it seemed un-interesting now that my guard was down and I was just letting whatever dumb idea I wanted to grab a hold. Why make sure everyone approves of our music choices that match your “personality”? I want to watch a cartoon fight slowly take place over two months at 5:30 in the morning while I talk to Chris about rating his favorite TV shows with either stars or steaming piles of poop.

While I can see this is mundane, it doesn’t give the feels like it was. And now that we’ve transitioned into 1997 there is sort of an explosion in media that works so well with this. Was it crafted by the big wigs? Was this a small golden age of television? or were some of these shows and movies just lucky enough to prop up at this exact time when enough people were also finding a use for the internet beyond racist jokes and pornography?

I find this window interesting because we have some of my established franchises really coming up big this year, we have Star Wars, re releasing the original films, which there was only the three of at the time, as special editions. Sounds normal enough now, but this was why this sounds normal now. This was when that term became a term. Re-issues weren’t a thing, calling something a special edition didn’t happen. But here they came, one a month and not just re-released, but restored and with new footage. Deleted scenes that in some cases people had never heard of, restored and edited to fit into the films using CGI, a new technology that at the time people were aware of but not sick of.

After the success of those films, almost everything released on DVD in the future, re-released for no reason, put on VHS, well studios just started slapping the special edition moniker on things, to where there was a point I felt in the late 00s and beyond that special edition didn’t meant a thing other than a marketer somewhere thinking they were making extra money. This culture, which became out of control here it is, starting and I’m 18 going on 19 and have enough time to sit around the house and enjoy it. Let’s see Jabba the Hutt get his tail stepped on.

Then of course later in the year we know Final Fantasy broke out of its SNES shell with FF7 a major video game release, well of all time, and another very important one in the story of my life. Early CG gets a lot of bad mouthing, but in one year we got two franchise titles that set the idea for, not just there genre but for what companies do.

Don’t worry more happens. Cable had more than syndicated TV shows. While I could talk about how fun it was to get into Xena, it’s hard to know what goes where. Was it website related, was it because Chris and I found it amusing and its part of the tail end of his existence at the L street house. But the year wasn’t defined just by that show. Ever since lunch break in junior high we had always watched a fair amount of Comedy Central. As this explosion of cable networks and quality of programing grew, their original and other shows became something we would watch. Absolutely Fabulous is one that I remember even my mother sitting down to watch if we had it on the front room television. So it would happen that during 1997 Comedy Central started advertising some new shows due out in the upcoming year.

I don’t remember what all the shows were that were part of this campaign. I swear Viva Variety was one of them, and that was a show we looked forward too and liked. In that fact I have a broken link to a Real Audio file, that I probably made myself with my video capture card, labeled Johnny Blue Jeans. What I remember feels like a run of one new show a month had us pretty excited. As I said VV was a bonified hit, and I feel like there was some other show on the list we were highly anticipating. And as the shows didn’t disappoint, Marty, Chris and I sat down, perhaps even with Karl, by random chance, one evening to watch one of the ones on the list:

Little did we know, another media institution was about to unfolded this year. In a campaign that featured a lot of stuff to want to see, we did hold some interest onto what a cartoon about little kids on the channel would be about, but somehow even with the internet missed the finer points what the show was until we say the premiere. Then of course it was straight to the internet, and eventually a QuickTime file of the original VHS that was pass around that got the show to air in the first place. By the end of 1997 South Park would have us arts and crafting ornaments for the Christmas tree. And this in a year when Star Wars has been cranked back on and we have FF7 and GoldenEye to play. And we have this small window where there might be some lingering ways to watch Star Wars in a theater, play a brand-new copy of FF7, then watch an episode of Xena, South Park and watch Gohan and Krillin hunt for the dragon balls on Namek all in the same week.

I have talked about some of these and their relevance to my life as well, but it is so interesting that there was this huge shift in, what feels like everything specifically during a transition year of life. One could argue that these trends were starting. I didn’t start loving Star Wars and FF this year, Comedy Central hadn’t been getting better shows on it than network sitcoms just overnight, but all this information about new stuff, along with new mediums does seem to match up well. You didn’t look up Seinfeld on the internet, even though it was coming to the end of its coming to an end in, well 1997. But these new things one did, get images of the new digital work from Star Wars, download an mp3, a what? Of the theme you hear when fighting Sephiroth in FF7, see what other TV shows guest stars on Xena have bene in, download a Quicktime of what would have been an unknown VHS copy of the original hand made South Park episode.

Then it was not the computer revolution just when it finally stepped up, by the end of 1996 who was still goofing around with the SNES, we instead were suffering through low polygon counts, with this promise that 3d computer graphics would just keep getting better, and since they originated on computers, where better to download images of them from. Childhood one, the analog one, gone, 1998 will be online and digital, is The Price is Right even still on TV?

Turns out yeah, it’s survived. But that is kids stuff, there’s even new Networks on TV now. One of them, in 1997 interestingly enough, managed to come up with a show that rivaled what these extended cable channels were getting. Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Yup remember my list of things you could be keeping up with during a given week in 1997, there is another show that has managed to transcend it’s own time into being something else and considered a norm of ideas twenty years later.

Christmas ornaments from one show, a web site from another, now a show that caused an infliction so bad Marty needed a membership card. It’s hard to be concise about how much change in media intake can cause, but  it’s also hard to reconcile how different of a person one goes from the end of high school to the start of 1998 when suddenly there is no bad stigma on becoming a total nerd for what seemed like at the time just amazing new stuff. While maybe not single handedly, this is a major part of what made me finally happy with just liking things, I well, liked. Beyond that it felt like everything was new and exciting, DOS was fading away, I got a bigger TV, more channels, new shows, the old shows were ending, new computers, new consoles, different and new schooling.

This, along with the web sites gave me the freedom to just scan and like shows for whatever reason, even if the reason was I figured I can make a website about some aspect of it, garner a following and sell ad space. This took the Hotrage/TAoD.com that branched out of the Katie-Holmes website into just a slew of sites, one of the biggest pet projects being Amber Barretto, who I found to be a cute red head from a TNBC show called Hang Time that aired Saturday mornings.

I wasn’t going to get up on a Saturday either to watch the show, so my VCR which I used to capture recorded shows for the websites became even more important, because since I was going to make captures, I was also just going to program the VCR to tape the shows and then chain watch them all at some point during the week, and then honestly, but out a better amount of online advertising and media than NBC did itself. Who knows where these sites would have taken me if any of the big networks understood how much free work I was doing for the shows, well free to them.

Instead, it would be considered somewhat fringe to that part of the world. Getting legitimate acknowledgement for these sites was nearly impossible. Instead, there was this fight with the idea you were stealing their content, even though they obviously understood nothing about how the whole process worked. In a space, full of rabid fans, they figured no information was making them more money than proliferation of information and media. Luckily for them, the websites all persisted on, despite their ignorance, to become the norm of what they pay tons of money to have done in-house these days.

I regularly talk about how good the back half of 2002 was for me. While not the same, there being the idea of college for a time and not as much money saved up, 1997-99 had a lot of the same stress-free living I go on about for that small time period. Finding a way to earn money from the home I liked instead of working harder for the same sort of income and spending it all on a crappy group rental while juggling it with classes was the right choice for then. It’s one of the few times I can look at a group of years and say good stuff was going on. Who knows, Mom and Dad might have been worried how it looked outwardly, their now 20-year-old son walking up in the afternoon and sitting on, what the their generation at the time, was viewed as some sort of video game. But I had money, everything I was doing I liked, we had food, shelter, a solid dog, and good friends, this coupled with the world that was the end of the 90s is un-re-creatable, and I think is a time period people tend to romanticize. It is what say the streaming revolution on the internet for shows had to look back at, a total shift on how people were taking things in. Interestingly it does mirror it well, changes were made, people enjoyed it a lot at the time, the big wigs thought it was piracy, then they figured out it wasn’t, and the golden age was sucked out of it.

You don’t get original online series like you used to, we can’t get cheesy syndicated shows like we used to, its all kind of gone. What I find interesting though is not that, it’s that either my life is just a reflection of the fads for my age, or I happened to just get real lucky.

1983, there was a point in that window where Toys R’ Us had Star Wars, He-Man, Gi Joe, Transformers, and even if you want to get real technical, Nintendo at the tail end of the action figure heyday. Action figures and kid’s cartoons had maybe their greatest era, even though it was only for a small time, when I was its target audience.

1987, Dad get’s me into baseball cards, this happens to be the era in which baseball cards became so popular that they were printed to demand and their long term value was destroyed because at the time Topps, and Donruss and then the other glut of trading card companies that would sprout up could just print money with their set releases for a few years. Chasers, foiled cards, all this stuff that trading cards take for granted now were introduced to try and bring more money into a saturated market, and card collecting has never gone back to how simple it was in 1987 when this all started getting so big.

Then I was allowed to get a PC in the early 1990s, and I wonder where that all leads? As we read and write this whole thing on the internet on a PC.

Maybe this is why I don’t care about cell phones the same way kids today do. But then phones in this behest aren’t something new in fact I do feel a big stagnate in how much change there is to enjoy, while time feels like it’s going faster, there seems to be less new unique things to latch onto. I now get caught up a lot in things that harken back to years like 1997.

Maybe I am wrong though, maybe it was just the freedoms the time allowed that add the extra shine to it. I mean it’s hard to deny Star Wars of the time, but maybe I could only embrace the mania because I was allotted the freedoms that lower cost living allotted. Maybe Call of Duty is amazing if you are living rent free, and then Call of Duty 2, wait, didn’t call of Duties come out in the 00s? As much as I joke, it just doesn’t seem like there is as much mainstream success with interesting cultural stuff. While there is the internet with tons of niche stuff, you also have to be a member and into those things to then dedicate your time into finding out about it, and a lot of that, once again seems to be grasping at what made years like 83 or 97 so awesome, and using that nostalgia to try and make something similar, seriously look into it, just like new shows are chasing the shock people had at Game of Thrones when it first came out a decade later, people are still chasing and or owning the Star Wars license and chasing what they did without trying decades before.

1998 being a carry on of 1997 is pretty truthful too. Now there was a template of what I liked, what I was doing with my time and so on. The 49ers even lost both seasons on losing their run game and eventually clocked out just shy of a Super Bowl in the playoffs, the Red Wings won the Cup both years. It was mundanely beautiful and there was no reason to think 1999 would be any different. 99 would be a great year, but as we will find out, it does end up being very different and this way of life and times would end.