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| 9:36 P.M. May 7, 2009 Rest In Peace Internet Wow, it has been some time. So, the last time I updated this was February of 2006. When I think of the amount of shit that has happened since then...coming to terms with my old school life, growing to love the people I used to hate because they made me smoke bees, coming to hate them again, my first job, my first long-term full time job, the booze, the strippers, winning, losing kinda regaining and then losing again the love of my life, or so it seems, the mad spending, the mad saving, intramural floor hockey, losing the football championship, euphoria, depression, two great summers, that dark shitty lonely period where everybody dissapeared, friends lost and found, the Mets, the Jays, Seinfeld ("Hello...Jerry""Georgey boy!""Laney!""K-man!""Hello...Newman."), Final Fantasy VI, "Slide", GN'R, 54 40, Chinese Democracy, finishing fucking grade 12 by some shot, trumpets, organs, Tiki Mugs, bartending, porn porn porn, Christmas in the service industry, Motown, coming to love my family, a great deal of Japanese (chotto taihen dane!), nostalgia like nobody's business, entering university and the death of the old me. But here it still is, the internet.....perhaps. I look back on all that (shit) but as I go through my files, I look back on much more. I started this site when I was in the 6th grade. (During that weird period after you've looked at porn out of utter fascination, but before you're capable of actually doing something about it.) It all just came about from looking around at everybody else on the internet (all those, "friends" so to speak, such as the Domain of Games), and figuring, "why can't I do this?", before actually doing it, arguably my first real motivated behaviour based on the notion of "Just Do It"...I remember that clean night, and my bright blue background with a crappy slot machine game and that picture of baby trunks ("Feed me damnit!"). I remember getting five hits, and being stoked, before realizing that they were probably jus?t me refreshing. In any case, that was it, I was in. Now, back then, 2000, the internet was largely still an oddly exclusive affair..at least, in my pre-pubescent circles. I remember getting my name on FLAP lists (I am now so ashamed of that Anti-Pokemon crap...yeah, some of its funny, but why focus that much energy into such hatred? I think everyone else eventually thought the same, and we all moved on) and bragging about this to my friends. So, for me to take their suggestions (I think Trunks' afforementioned "Feed me damnit!" was from my good friend Andrew- if you're out there man, give us a shout, I heard you got Matt's number, be good to hear from you) and post them online, was a pretty big deal. But telling them the url was something else entirely -"why are there so many slashes?""why isn't it just mark.com?". The same thing happened a year later when we formed an EZ-board (remember that crap? or when Kazaa was good?...was it ever?), and I posted the massive url on my locker, only to get weird looks and have some asshole tear it down. In any case, those were the good ol' days it seems. Building this site, through DBZ to Megaman to the Ninjas...ah, the ninjas. That was the section that really made this place. It seemed to be my own little info monopoly, and my passion. Hell, I still love those things. A couple months back I bought a few down in Beaver, Utah- oddly, they were all in my favourite colours, blue green black- good stuff. I know that that was why most people came here (...except maybe for the downloads- you people must love Megaman X3...I reccomend theoldcomputer.com for that now, and head to Zophar's domain if you want the hack..), and I'd like to thank all the great folks who've talked to me about it over the years..all the dudes wanting to know there to find them, Ninjaburger.com for the link, everybody who wanted to buy em (sorry! not for sale!), those two dudes at Tiny Rubber Ninja Madness (sorry we lost touch!), Tiny Ninja Theatre (I specifically ask them to come to Calgary....4 years later when they do, its sold out before I can go. Lame!), Kalan Vazquez (damn, we talked like 2 years ago..I hope the Ninja megamix worked out for you..and thanks specifically for this pic ), my good friend Ramin Pauls(for the poopa-troopas....you'll get em back one day) and everybody else who supported the site. To Entertheninja.com...I no longer have beef with you, because you're no longer stealing my pictures. But I think back to that page, and those notions, and the way it was back then- it seemed on the internet, it was all out there..when it wasn't, you'd go and make your contribution...ah yes, the old internet. I remember the days when geocities pages were cool. I had friends memorizing the whole "SunsetStrip" et al. urls, to ZeroXGold and everything..heh, the old Megaman sites. It was like they were these older, brilliant super-cool sprite designers, with their clandestine organizations which seemed to pop-up, proliferate and then dissapear overnight. I miss those sites, the notion of affiliates and actual links. The saturday mornings that turned into saturday nights with little food and no regrets. When search engines like goto were actually good...and the geocities directory wasn't full of ads. And the emotion. The strange sense of melancholic nostalgia that came with a song like Ordinary Girl on Cardcaptors, or hearing the password theme from Megaman X on some randome fansite. And I still remember some Digimon fansite called Sora's Flower Garden, and the owner didn't update again for some time, and came back saying "Sorry, I'm a procrastinator" with such a sense of sadness...it was a thing of beauty...but it seems weird to think how I understood that when I was only 12.. Yes, the internet was very different back then. Everything seemed so mysterious and fascinating,..exotic even, or so I thought. A site like actionace (what? Megaman figures? Dragonball!) or planetnamek, both long gone, that meant so much to myself...even the lower key sites like Vegitto's domain...everything was homegrown and personal, and finding these treasures was a thrill- and a pain like no other when you didn't bookmark 'em!) But the, somewhere along the line, things changed. The internet became more and more legitimately marketable...people learned following the dot-com bust, and then everybody got a website. We went from straight html to frames, to flash, back to html and what now, xml?(I gave up on programming 6 years ago) And then the hunt ended. I remember, summer of 2004 finding wikipedia, and my jaw dropped (its a treasure trove!). I figured I had just found the holy grail...and..anyone can edit it?"I can't let this fall into the wrong hands!" Three months later I'd started High School and saw my peers using it...two years later it was all anyone used. Not that it matters now- wikipedia sucks right across the board (use it for school?if you're stupid. use it for pop culture?if you don't wanna learn anything of interest), so now I usally find myself on the lower key wiki pages. In any case though, one thing was certain though- it was no longer cool to be on the internet. Yes, along with wikipedia came everything else"Web 2.0"- youtube (which I've already managed to link), social networking (wow), blogs. Suddenly the notion of individuality was either lost or totally accelerated- everything now blended into some massive gelatinous form where everything was one and equal.....okay, I'm losing it here....a lot of it reminds me of a lot of self-trained art- yeah it's impressive that you did that, but why is it all so similiar and generic?/"Theres more people playing jazz, but theres fewer jazz masters", because we don't have the candle under our ass anymore/ the complete dissapearance of copyright-without compensation, won't the system eventually fail? i.e. no one to make the money to buy the instruments, so no-one makes the instruments anymore? I heard once that there will never beanother record to sell 12 millions copies- that real, cultural phenomenon sorta thing..but isn't it possible that as we grow more and more into our own little niches we further exclude the outside world as it becames harder and harder to relate to others? On a similar note, I've watched alot of the internet comedy and television shows...Yacht Rock and Those Aren't Muskets come to mind..but I watched an Obama Girl episode or something, and someone commented that they hoped that such things would eventually replace sitcoms...whoa, back up because what I just watched was really not that good...then I talked to someone who mentioned the final episode of Friends before stating that he didn't watch T.V. "What do you do then?""YouTube"....uh-oh. Perhaps in this excess of information where suddenly everyone's an expert we're going to lose the real experts and end up with just "moderate" people across the board. At that point, there'll be nothing to strive for, because we'll be good enough- it seems we're raising an iPod generation, where everyone gets exactly what they want, when they want it...nothing is strived for because you don't have to work...nothing new is learned because theres no need to learn it...and what do we do with this added efficiency and time? Piss it away making celebrities out of people like Paris Hilton...and Perez Hilton for that matter ^Well that whole thing reads like quite the right wing slant, like someone in the aristocracy who's fearful that the peasants are uprising. Perhaps the most telling thing in all this, and the main reason I'm writing, is that today I read, not in magazines, not in my e-mail and certainly not when I logged into my yahoo account (because I do that just so frequently), but on wikipedia yahoo is shutting down geocities wow I heard this and wished there was more time, and wished I had used the time I was given, but in all truth, this announcement was the "candle under my ass" I needed. First of all, as shitty as this is, kudos to them for actually providing some warning, unlike those poor bastards at AOL hometown who just had the rug pulled out from under them last year, with no forewarning . Second, they are keeping the pay pages I believe...I always wanted a domain, and came oh so close several times between 2001 to 2005, but it never occurred, and then my names were taken...rubberninja.com anyone?..but why would I pay yahoo for a page with just a little bit more space and bandwidth than this, that still has ads? And third, does it matter? Oh, I like to think so, but remember, this is the new internet. The old pages are largely gone, same with the old style- no-ones gonna go track down some Angelfire page about Inhumanoids when they can hook up with the youtube intro, some dude's blog entry, the wikipedia page, and the comments in all three. I guess maybe its just good business. Like when your favourite diner gets demolished to make way for a mall with a 25-vendor food court. Its just good business. But it stings....it stings bad. We lose the soul, and its the culture and therefore the self that suffers for it. (oddly, there is an Angelfire page about the Inhumanoids in the first page of google listings....and no blog entries! but none of the pictures work...) The old internet is gone forever. I know that. And I know how lucky I was to be able to catch a glimpse of it. So, I guess this is goodbye...wow, I think of all the pages that have dissapeared in my time, both with large sendoffs and quiet shutdowns. I know this site never had many fans- why would it? I never updated, and there was little material. But I always wanted to be at the centre of some kindof internet phenomena. Call it an obsession with recognition, or just a calling to really make connections with people. I remember witnessing, and arguably still do witness, the connection online, as people get to know one another through this medium, and are truly sad when their friends are gone and "set their sails out over the water". Its a profound thing, and I'm glad to have experienced it to the extent I did. Maybe I also just wanted to be a mentor to someone online eventually, really mean something to them- maybe its a calling to have children some day. I don't know. In any case, I leave it as it is. Maybe some day I would like to come back, but knowing how way leads on to way, and how I had to stare death in the face to finally put out this update, I doubt that I should ever be back. Though we'll really have to see- there is still a part of me that wants to make a really good rubber ninja site, and maybe a webcomic..why am I always so busy? Why is everyone? Anyways, for those who read this, I still roam around the internet in my moniker Tutsuro (its usually me, as I came up with the name- there is no "tu" character in Japanese; its a misspelling of Tetsuro and is better pronounced as tuht-sir-oh...oddly, Tatsuro is actually a Japanese name as well), often on the X-E message board, when it doesn't piss me off...or e-mail me at tutsuro@hotmail.com or trunks1@shaw.ca . Really, it has been great, for all of my own procrastination. And I'm in the process of saving all my files and pages from here...maybe I'll put 'em up on some other server. Heh. Peace everyone. sayonara! -Mark Andrew Schmidt |
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| <---finished after 5 years!!!!! |
| ^Updated-with poopatroopas^ |
