Isn't it amazing that you can still get a copy of Heavy Metal Parking Lot - a per-internet viral video - but not a an article from just a few years ago. Makes you think.
I realized Gawker was dead yesterday, too! I read the big story about Uvalde in the Texas Tribune, and was looking for an Alex Pareene post about how actually showing images from those massacres could help. (There's even just audio in the Tribune piece that destroyed me, the one video near the end is maybe the toughest thing I've ever seen.)
Legitimately only found the post because Tom Scocca linked to it using the Wayback Machine in one of his recent newsletters.
Some Substacks are now replacing the above 'reads' but with obvious differences in the format/editorial structure that I really liked about Old Websites. And I still wanna *read* a lot, I don't want that media consumption itch to have to be entirely scratched by videos/YouTube. I just don't always want to *watch*, and everyone knows the labour involved in a video vs a written article would mean some articles/opinions/takes just wouldn't get published if the mandate was Everything Must Be Video.
Vince this post made me Google and find (took a while to fumble my way to it) your FilmDrunk piece 'The Title Is Concept Is The Trailer Is The Poster: Are Comedy Films Losing Dynamic Range?' thankfully it was still up. I work in film/TV in Australia and for my money that's one of the best modern examples of writing on film trends and have sent it on to other peeps in our industry over the years. (The high concept trend itself doesn't hugely apply to our Aussie industry - we just don't make comedy films. But working in the US is like a default aspiration for most of us.) It would be SO annoying for it not to be available online in the future to re-read/forward. So as of ten minutes ago it now it sits on the laptop in horribly formatted 'print as PDF' file.
I also did the same thing to Meaghan Garvey (Substack: SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE) and her post about Hipster Runoff, Indie Sleaze and change in internet/media culture. There's a line in it that I think is so insightful and needs to remain available so I can share with other people from now til thee end of times:
"The culture we consume no longer tells us where we fall on the spectrum of ‘mainstream’ to 'alt'; it tells us whether or not we're a good person, whether we deserve good things to come our way."
Pretty much my entire Internet presence pre-2014 is gone (RIP Xanga and the Rotten Tomatoes forums). All my college newspaper writing is in their physical archives, which I'll never access, and all the stuff from my failed post-college writing career is on websites that haven't existed for years. Like you said, a lot of this wasn't necessarily worth saving, but it was a document of my past self. Ah well.
Though the video is no longer embedded, I'm happy this post of yours is still there - "he fairly did an echidna" pops into my mind now and then.
Vince definitively stating now that his hilarious photoshop art is lost in the aether, like tears in the rain, or something i don’t know im not a good writer cause all this great stuff is being deleted
We're having a mayoral election here in Houston. One local writer (of a now-defuct site, RIP Swamplot) was circulating two articles about the candidates copied into Google Docs from the also-now-defunct Houston Post. They were comprehensive overviews of the problems with both candidates, including an angle on the favorite that hasn't been covered by the Chronicle. I can't find those articles at all through Google search (presumably why he put them in Google Docs, of course).
I say hasn't, but they dropped an article* covering all of these issues (and more, since the Post article was published in 1995) on Friday -- 5 days into early voting for the runoff election.
*I'll say that the reporters at the Chronicle mostly do excellent work. But the Opinion page has been humiliatingly bad on our two massively important elections in the last 2 years.
Within the last few years I have noticed my use of the internet has often felt like flipping through TV channels on a cable subscriber. 'There ain't shit to watch'. Every time a mainstay site that I used for a decade takes a dive its one less area where I might have spent time on the internet and I have noticed that its harder to find replacements for those sites. With that and places like Twitter and Reddit becoming even further shit shows it can kind of seem boring opening a browser nowadays. Something that wouldn't have seemed possible a decade ago.
What the hell am I supposed to do when I get tired of staring at Autocad? Find busy work? Vince please curate me some down time clicks.
I've thought a lot about how the cable TV decline is similar to what's happening to the internet and streamers. Seems like cable TV completely ditched the idea of niche, quality programs in favor of "never stop playing whatever gets the highest ratings". Which is why BBC America, where I found a lot of my favorite sitcoms ever, now plays nonstop Star Trek TNG reruns. Websites don't want to just pay talented writers to write a selection of news interspersed with longer opinion/deep dives, they just want a nonstop string of whatever gets the most clicks.
Things like this are why I hoard stuff (movies, music, podcasts, PDFs, etc.) that I like, and part of the reason I went back to grad school. The Wayback Machine is great, but part of my searching there now involves having to find websites that reference what I’m actually looking for then putting that into the Wayback Machine. Then having to figure out if the URL scheme has changed over x number of years because that impacts the results. (“Filmdrunk.com” vs “filmdrunk.uproxx.com” vs “uproxx.com/filmdrunk” not that I’ve had to use it to find an old old post or anything).
As a regular user of The Internet Archive (and Wayback Machine in particular), it would be awesome if you interviewed Graham or someone else from there for the Substack (or Frotcast).
It has gotten to the point that I start my search for old stuff on the way back machine because search engines are so degraded. The part that worries me is when the big guys finally manage to kill the internet archive.
This is my nightmare, and not just for websites, but all digital content. Somewhere along the way, movies will disappear, too. My entire digital collection will go poof. All the physical media, the DVDs and Blu-Rays I was convinced I didn't need, will be gone forever, and I will be highly annoyed with myself for not trusting my own gut. And when that day comes, and I cannot find any possible way to watch some stupid little movie like The Death of Dick Long at 3 am on a Tuesday, I will finally know hell.
I hate feeling like the digital version of Crazy Prepper Guy, with a warehouse full of rare VHS tapes in my underground bunker, but this is what they've done to me. I have so little faith in The Man that it all just feels inevitable.
I started as a guy who just liked bonus features and higher quality like a normal film guy, not even a prepper! Then Netflix started purging stuff in the early days (probably when they lost Starz or Criterion) and that was the catalyst for my distrust.
I'm glad I never really stopped buying movies, although my spending has gone way down. There are at least a dozen movies on my shelf that aren't streaming anywhere. And not even obscurities - fucking SPICE WORLD doesn't exist online outside torrents.
I moved about three years ago and took a long hard look at my movie collection and nearly pulled the exit cord but decided to just put the boxes out in my shed. I am pretty glad I did that. I definitely still have all the CDs I bought throughout the years but I wasn't as beholden to the cases for those for some reason so they are all just neat in a giant CD binder case so they have never felt like burden storage wise to keep.
I have thought about doing that with the Bluray/DVDs and just getting rid of the cases and keeping all the media in a big storage case binder like I did with CDs but there is something in my brain that just likes to have those beautiful cases (if I turn Independence Day DVD this way in the light white house go boom...hell yeah). Must be the visual medium.
I remember my first taste of this BS when a group of shady Lithuanians bought a poker message board forum that was full of interesting degenerates, that dished underground stories and gossip during the initial poker boom in the aughts. They sent the whole thing to the phantom realm after an attempt to use the name for an online gambling site.
Your point about failsons and private equity funds not understanding "good traffic" from "bad", is excellent. Whether it was UPROXX, the AV Club, Gawker, or Deadspin, it is infuriating that these people bought these sites without any understanding of how talented the writing staff's were, or how special and dedicated their readership was. There was a period where the AV Club was covering and pumping out AAA reviews of dozens of television shows daily, and it was not uncommon for comment threads to have thousands of responses. The last time I morbidly clicked on an old bookmark, the place looked completely like an A.I. operation.
I can't imagine how devastating it's been to live through this. Every one of these people should be launched into the sun.
Yeah, man, absolutely. I think a big part of it is the interplay between sales and advertising. Deciding which metrics are valuable, which ones you have, all that stuff. The hard thing for ad sales people is that you're probably always selling to dipshits, and the types of ad metrics they crave don't always reflect reality or something that's going to make the internet better (see: pivot to video). Same thing with creatives and coders and probably lower level employees everywhere -- we can send gold up the chain, but if someone higher decides they prefer shit, there isn't always something you can do about it.
Sadly it is intentional on Google's part, and to top it all off they say search results are better than ever; they think we're just too dumb to use it. They've changed the rules so that "expert" sites are preferred, so they don't want you to find the specific page you're looking for because it might not be "high quality." The verge had a good article about this where Google's SEO liaison basically said we should all go pound sand if we don't like results.
Also: “There are probably hundreds, if not thousands of blog posts written in 2007-2010-ish house blog style that I wouldn’t be especially proud to share today, and certainly wouldn’t write the same way now. Not that I’m especially ashamed of them, it just is what it is. Posting styles change, as do the business mechanics that produce them. “
I haven’t finished yet but I felt this intimately when I was applying to the USC MFA screenwriting program. Not to be a kissass, Vince, but I wanted to quote part of your Benjamin Button review (this part: "Lived forward, life seems and possibly is temporary and completely arbitrary. But in looking at it backwards, retelling it as a story, it becomes such that it only could’ve happened in just this way. Those isolated, arbitrary moments suddenly become meaningful and permanent, necessary to making us what we are. Write it down and it lasts forever."). There was just one problem: I couldn’t find it. Wasn’t on UPROXX. Eventually, because I was very serious about that essay, I went through the way back machine and found it.
But as someone who is a packrat about my own writing I would have blown a gasket if I was you.
Isn't it amazing that you can still get a copy of Heavy Metal Parking Lot - a per-internet viral video - but not a an article from just a few years ago. Makes you think.
First they came for Rotten.com...
Shout out to the other Mark Graham.
I realized Gawker was dead yesterday, too! I read the big story about Uvalde in the Texas Tribune, and was looking for an Alex Pareene post about how actually showing images from those massacres could help. (There's even just audio in the Tribune piece that destroyed me, the one video near the end is maybe the toughest thing I've ever seen.)
Legitimately only found the post because Tom Scocca linked to it using the Wayback Machine in one of his recent newsletters.
RIP to my regular reads the past few years.
BirthMoviesDeath folded.
FilmDrunk obvs.
Gawker died, but then I found out about...
Mel, just in time for it too to die.
SomethingAwful articles are toast.
Jezebel went down, (but is coming back?)
Some Substacks are now replacing the above 'reads' but with obvious differences in the format/editorial structure that I really liked about Old Websites. And I still wanna *read* a lot, I don't want that media consumption itch to have to be entirely scratched by videos/YouTube. I just don't always want to *watch*, and everyone knows the labour involved in a video vs a written article would mean some articles/opinions/takes just wouldn't get published if the mandate was Everything Must Be Video.
Vince this post made me Google and find (took a while to fumble my way to it) your FilmDrunk piece 'The Title Is Concept Is The Trailer Is The Poster: Are Comedy Films Losing Dynamic Range?' thankfully it was still up. I work in film/TV in Australia and for my money that's one of the best modern examples of writing on film trends and have sent it on to other peeps in our industry over the years. (The high concept trend itself doesn't hugely apply to our Aussie industry - we just don't make comedy films. But working in the US is like a default aspiration for most of us.) It would be SO annoying for it not to be available online in the future to re-read/forward. So as of ten minutes ago it now it sits on the laptop in horribly formatted 'print as PDF' file.
I also did the same thing to Meaghan Garvey (Substack: SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE) and her post about Hipster Runoff, Indie Sleaze and change in internet/media culture. There's a line in it that I think is so insightful and needs to remain available so I can share with other people from now til thee end of times:
"The culture we consume no longer tells us where we fall on the spectrum of ‘mainstream’ to 'alt'; it tells us whether or not we're a good person, whether we deserve good things to come our way."
Pretty much my entire Internet presence pre-2014 is gone (RIP Xanga and the Rotten Tomatoes forums). All my college newspaper writing is in their physical archives, which I'll never access, and all the stuff from my failed post-college writing career is on websites that haven't existed for years. Like you said, a lot of this wasn't necessarily worth saving, but it was a document of my past self. Ah well.
Though the video is no longer embedded, I'm happy this post of yours is still there - "he fairly did an echidna" pops into my mind now and then.
https://uproxx.com/filmdrunk/friday-free-for-all-scottish-people-are-really-hard-to-understand/
The video, for the curious:
https://youtu.be/Xan2xU-ZFic?si=McsH5-U-j9nhM5ZH
Whit thu fuck ye tawkin aboot m8, al fuckin doo ye, eh! Ha, The Scheme is a classic - a day in the life of Bubbles, if he was Scottish.
Vince definitively stating now that his hilarious photoshop art is lost in the aether, like tears in the rain, or something i don’t know im not a good writer cause all this great stuff is being deleted
We're having a mayoral election here in Houston. One local writer (of a now-defuct site, RIP Swamplot) was circulating two articles about the candidates copied into Google Docs from the also-now-defunct Houston Post. They were comprehensive overviews of the problems with both candidates, including an angle on the favorite that hasn't been covered by the Chronicle. I can't find those articles at all through Google search (presumably why he put them in Google Docs, of course).
I say hasn't, but they dropped an article* covering all of these issues (and more, since the Post article was published in 1995) on Friday -- 5 days into early voting for the runoff election.
*I'll say that the reporters at the Chronicle mostly do excellent work. But the Opinion page has been humiliatingly bad on our two massively important elections in the last 2 years.
Within the last few years I have noticed my use of the internet has often felt like flipping through TV channels on a cable subscriber. 'There ain't shit to watch'. Every time a mainstay site that I used for a decade takes a dive its one less area where I might have spent time on the internet and I have noticed that its harder to find replacements for those sites. With that and places like Twitter and Reddit becoming even further shit shows it can kind of seem boring opening a browser nowadays. Something that wouldn't have seemed possible a decade ago.
What the hell am I supposed to do when I get tired of staring at Autocad? Find busy work? Vince please curate me some down time clicks.
I've thought a lot about how the cable TV decline is similar to what's happening to the internet and streamers. Seems like cable TV completely ditched the idea of niche, quality programs in favor of "never stop playing whatever gets the highest ratings". Which is why BBC America, where I found a lot of my favorite sitcoms ever, now plays nonstop Star Trek TNG reruns. Websites don't want to just pay talented writers to write a selection of news interspersed with longer opinion/deep dives, they just want a nonstop string of whatever gets the most clicks.
IFC "Two and a Half Men" programming blocks are infuriating.
It’s so weird how linkrot has changed from “we didn’t build the internet to handle all of this” to “someone bought this company and said ‘nahhhhh’”. I don’t know the academic articles that I read off the top of my head, but here's a relevant Verge article https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/21/22447690/link-rot-research-new-york-times-domain-hijacking.
Things like this are why I hoard stuff (movies, music, podcasts, PDFs, etc.) that I like, and part of the reason I went back to grad school. The Wayback Machine is great, but part of my searching there now involves having to find websites that reference what I’m actually looking for then putting that into the Wayback Machine. Then having to figure out if the URL scheme has changed over x number of years because that impacts the results. (“Filmdrunk.com” vs “filmdrunk.uproxx.com” vs “uproxx.com/filmdrunk” not that I’ve had to use it to find an old old post or anything).
As a regular user of The Internet Archive (and Wayback Machine in particular), it would be awesome if you interviewed Graham or someone else from there for the Substack (or Frotcast).
It has gotten to the point that I start my search for old stuff on the way back machine because search engines are so degraded. The part that worries me is when the big guys finally manage to kill the internet archive.
This is my nightmare, and not just for websites, but all digital content. Somewhere along the way, movies will disappear, too. My entire digital collection will go poof. All the physical media, the DVDs and Blu-Rays I was convinced I didn't need, will be gone forever, and I will be highly annoyed with myself for not trusting my own gut. And when that day comes, and I cannot find any possible way to watch some stupid little movie like The Death of Dick Long at 3 am on a Tuesday, I will finally know hell.
It's never too late to start!
(I do own this movie so they can never take it away from me, even if the internet goes down I still have that good good quality Dick Long).
I hate feeling like the digital version of Crazy Prepper Guy, with a warehouse full of rare VHS tapes in my underground bunker, but this is what they've done to me. I have so little faith in The Man that it all just feels inevitable.
I started as a guy who just liked bonus features and higher quality like a normal film guy, not even a prepper! Then Netflix started purging stuff in the early days (probably when they lost Starz or Criterion) and that was the catalyst for my distrust.
I'm glad I never really stopped buying movies, although my spending has gone way down. There are at least a dozen movies on my shelf that aren't streaming anywhere. And not even obscurities - fucking SPICE WORLD doesn't exist online outside torrents.
I moved about three years ago and took a long hard look at my movie collection and nearly pulled the exit cord but decided to just put the boxes out in my shed. I am pretty glad I did that. I definitely still have all the CDs I bought throughout the years but I wasn't as beholden to the cases for those for some reason so they are all just neat in a giant CD binder case so they have never felt like burden storage wise to keep.
I have thought about doing that with the Bluray/DVDs and just getting rid of the cases and keeping all the media in a big storage case binder like I did with CDs but there is something in my brain that just likes to have those beautiful cases (if I turn Independence Day DVD this way in the light white house go boom...hell yeah). Must be the visual medium.
I remember my first taste of this BS when a group of shady Lithuanians bought a poker message board forum that was full of interesting degenerates, that dished underground stories and gossip during the initial poker boom in the aughts. They sent the whole thing to the phantom realm after an attempt to use the name for an online gambling site.
Your point about failsons and private equity funds not understanding "good traffic" from "bad", is excellent. Whether it was UPROXX, the AV Club, Gawker, or Deadspin, it is infuriating that these people bought these sites without any understanding of how talented the writing staff's were, or how special and dedicated their readership was. There was a period where the AV Club was covering and pumping out AAA reviews of dozens of television shows daily, and it was not uncommon for comment threads to have thousands of responses. The last time I morbidly clicked on an old bookmark, the place looked completely like an A.I. operation.
I can't imagine how devastating it's been to live through this. Every one of these people should be launched into the sun.
I'm gonna be devastated when the AV Club comment sections get nuked. Some of the best writing on that site was below the actual articles.
Have you been to Deadspin lately? Let it burn.
Proud day one Defector subscriber.
Yeah, man, absolutely. I think a big part of it is the interplay between sales and advertising. Deciding which metrics are valuable, which ones you have, all that stuff. The hard thing for ad sales people is that you're probably always selling to dipshits, and the types of ad metrics they crave don't always reflect reality or something that's going to make the internet better (see: pivot to video). Same thing with creatives and coders and probably lower level employees everywhere -- we can send gold up the chain, but if someone higher decides they prefer shit, there isn't always something you can do about it.
Sadly it is intentional on Google's part, and to top it all off they say search results are better than ever; they think we're just too dumb to use it. They've changed the rules so that "expert" sites are preferred, so they don't want you to find the specific page you're looking for because it might not be "high quality." The verge had a good article about this where Google's SEO liaison basically said we should all go pound sand if we don't like results.
https://www.theverge.com/features/23931789/seo-search-engine-optimization-experts-google-results
I searched for something like this to link it, not surprisingly didn't find anything.
Also: “There are probably hundreds, if not thousands of blog posts written in 2007-2010-ish house blog style that I wouldn’t be especially proud to share today, and certainly wouldn’t write the same way now. Not that I’m especially ashamed of them, it just is what it is. Posting styles change, as do the business mechanics that produce them. “
Drew Magary had an excellent column on this topic: https://deadspin.com/the-reckoning-always-comes-1819874125
Yep, I think of that one often.
I haven’t finished yet but I felt this intimately when I was applying to the USC MFA screenwriting program. Not to be a kissass, Vince, but I wanted to quote part of your Benjamin Button review (this part: "Lived forward, life seems and possibly is temporary and completely arbitrary. But in looking at it backwards, retelling it as a story, it becomes such that it only could’ve happened in just this way. Those isolated, arbitrary moments suddenly become meaningful and permanent, necessary to making us what we are. Write it down and it lasts forever."). There was just one problem: I couldn’t find it. Wasn’t on UPROXX. Eventually, because I was very serious about that essay, I went through the way back machine and found it.
But as someone who is a packrat about my own writing I would have blown a gasket if I was you.