Okay so this isn’t internet related but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately so I’m sharing.

I vividally remember going to a daycare as a young kid. I don’t remember much of the activities and playing, but I remember the nap room like it was yesterday. There was a mean old lady who was in charge of watching the kids nap, everyone had to nap at the same time and the other daycare staff would go out to lunch or something. Most of the kids had sleeping bags and stuffed animals, some had foam houses where they would sleep in. It was just a room with those gym mats on the floor, I remember just having a thin throw blanket so one of the kids who had a foam house would share his stuff with me.

I remember it so well because the old lady was cruel, she wouldn’t let kids go to the bathroom, I guess because she had to stay there and we couldn’t wander to the bathroom alone. Everyday there would be kids who peed themselves and it just got chalked up to kids wetting the bed.

Looking back on it was so weird. The issue, I asked my mom about it a few years back and she said I never went to daycare, we were always dirt poor and no way could she afford it, but she was also heavy on drugs at the time and there’s a lot of stuff she doesn’t remember. But I don’t see how I would’ve been in daycare, or why, she hasn’t worked since I was born, in that time period we were in and out of shelters or staying with her friends… I don’t know but I remember it and stand by it with my whole heart.

I’d love to find my old geo cities page but I’ve gone through the way back machine a few times and haven’t even gotten close to it. I can’t remember anything about it except that I think it was black and green (matrix style) design.

I used the same user name for ~ 20+ years and should have been able to track it down based off of that but I guess it got missed by the web crawlers.

An Evangelion AMV set to I’m Not Okay (I Promise) by My Chemical Romance. It was on YouTube and uploaded by a channel Ahhh123the8ball. But taken down for music reasons. Many years ago.

A short film known as Spin, made in 2004.

It’s about a physicist who is bicycling down a hill and a car is in his path. The driver turns to see him and hits his brakes in the last moment. He skids over the hood, mostly unharmed and begins to ponder this.

If the driver hadn’t had the single neuron in his brain fire and trigger him to look again, he wouldn’t have hit his brakes and he would have collided with the flat side of the car, likely killing him.

He applies this idea to quantum physics and realizes that this is happening with every decision made by any living creature at every waking moment, creating countless split possibilities for all moments in time.

The final scene is very striking, showing a car approach an intersection. The view splits to show the car turning both left and right. The camera splits multiple more times to show the concept that you can always choose any path at any moment. Some are just more likely than others.

It showed on IFC back in 2005 or so, and I’ve tracked down some limited information on it, but it was shot on 35mm and I’ve found no real leads on watching it anywhere.

This is the very limited IMDB page for it.

There are a few things but I don’t think I can really talk about them here. So, I’ll just mention that there was this old browser game on Cartoon Network’s website that I remember playing when I was younger. It was based on Xiaolin Showdown and, while I don’t remember exactly what the gameplay was like, it was a fully 3D game and I think I remember it being a platformer. I have never been able to find this game or even any information about it existing, anywhere. I’ve even checked Bluemaxima’s Flashpoint and it’s not archived there either.

All the music uploaded to cnet when you could upload your own music, circa 2005.

The Romantic. Really cool animated fantasy feature film from ~2009. For a while, the creator had it on Vimeo and even uploaded it to archive.org. Then he seemed to wipe every trace of it off the web. I can only find a shitty 320p version that someone must have had cached. It’s better than nothing, but I want to see it again in the full resolution that was once available.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110103034132/http://theromanticmovie.com/

There’s this one Flash game that was basically only ever featured in one Flash game website (AFAIK), it played almost exactly like Swords and Sandals (it’s a clone that’s got nothing to do with the original series), but with this one, you could also choose to be an anthropomorphic animal and you start off with a fish for a weapon. It seemingly vanished from the face of earth, it’s probably not even in the Flashpoint Archive…

That said, I’ve found most Flash games I played back in the Flash heydey by complete accident (e.g. via YouTube recommendations), games like Chasm, Haunted House, The Farmer, Nightmares, The Adventures Series, except for this one for whatever reason.

I never really began a wild goose chase over this one, but it still lives in the back of my mind sometimes… But I did make it my mission to document flash games I used to play in case I want to ever revisit them lol.

A movie I saw as a kid about the lives of a few people living on huge metal cities that were mobile, roaming the dried, decayed Earth on treads, occasionally sparring other cities that got too close like rival ships. There was an overhead scene of two kids running down a path near the edge, before chasing each other back into the buildings.

Think Mortal Engines. Except where Mortal Engines was released in 2018, I watched this movie when I was in my early teens at the latest. Before 2010.

Now here’s the interesting thing: there was a Mortal Engines book released in 2001. But I absolutely do not believe I have or had the capacity for such a vivid mental recreation of the novel.

a BGP highjack of one of the root DNS servers (I have the letter L in my head for some reason).
The story was that whoever took it kept responding the same as the real one and noone noticed for days. How anyone could get away with this is beyond me & it stinks of conspiracy theory but there was a very convincing looking article about it somewhere.

An account on a personal website or maybe a kayaking forum from around 2000: a sea kayaker described paddling with friends off the coast of Nanaimo, BC (I think). He wanted to paddle a bit more when the friends headed for shore. When he decided to join them, huge swells had started to come from the north, making it dangerous/impossible to ferry (paddle crosswise to the current) without getting broached and dumped. So he surfed down the swells, trying to angle toward shore as much as felt safe. He described riding a single swell for a long time, maybe multiple hours, before the sea calmed down enough for him to get to shore, now many miles south of where he started. I remember his description of combined terror and thrill: he could get flipped and–in the big sea–maybe never get rolled back up, just hanging onto his boat hoping for rescue, but here he was, surfing down the face of what seemed like an eternal wave, constantly at the edge of his ability to keep a line.

I’ve looked for that thing over a dozen times, spent maybe 20-30 hours searching over the past decade. No luck, yet.

2004 or 2005, there was some “low bandwidth gamer radio” that I used while gaming on dial up. I’ve looked everywhere for it, would probably never use it again since I’m on fiber instead of dial up now, but it just bugs me not being able to remember what it was called. I’ve found other services like that that would have been active at the time, but looking at their UI in screenshots or wayback machine snapshots, none of them look familiar.

I watched this video of Jack Antonoff showing how he created one of his songs - I think it was “I want to get better” - and it was fascinating. I copied the link so I could show my wife when I got home, but when I went to use it I got a 404. Searched like crazy and was never able to find it.

Don’t have one anymore.

For the longest time, it was an Amiga game that my brother played more than me. The bitch of it was, I wasn’t even good at the game. But I remembered it and I wanted to recall the name, but couldn’t. The other bitch of it was — I later learned, after finding it — that another game came out in the same setting (not the same kind of game at all) that had a VERY similar name. I’d heard this name, and it didn’t set off any alarm bells in my head.

TL;DR the game is called Stellaryx, and of course the more popular other game is Stellaris. I’ve still never played the latter one. But, the name of that game should have clued me in, but didn’t.

So anyway, I remembered an Asteroids clone with aliens, and these black panels called monoliths you could shoot. You’d enter a single screen stage where, like in Asteroids, touching one side of the screen meant you’d warp to the other side. You also only had thrust and shoot for controls, and, like Asteroids, controls were a bit wonky since you didn’t have brakes. There were asteroids, and ice chunks, but there were also other things to shoot. And gorgeous backgrounds. Oh, and there were powerups. After so many of these stages — clearing one sucked you up to the top/center to enter the next area — you’d do like a Lunar Lander thing and land on a platform to complete the level.

The only other thing I remembered was that at the beginning, you chose difficulty by flying into it on a special stage for selecting the difficulty, and if you flew into one of the side ones at great enough speed, you’d go through the middle choice as well. (I was not sure if that did anything special, or even which difficulty option it chose of the two, but it absolutely showed both being selected, the first was not unselected when you flew through the middle one, and the middle one was not ignored by flying through the one on the side.

For years and years I asked on forums. Also tried Googling various terms. Nobody had heard of this game. Until one day I found a YouTube video where someone played a bit of like 100 Amiga games. The game wasn’t shown, but I went ahead and asked the YouTuber. They gave me a list of 5-6 games it could be, and one of them was the right one. So, mystery solved. Just had to find someone who was as old as I am and who had similar memories/experience. Because I’ve found most people on the Internet are pretty young. You will find a few old timers out there who don’t get memes and who don’t know what “skibidi” means and at this point are afraid to ask… but they’re few, far between, and they don’t always know more than their younger peers. (And yet, I’ve often found I’m not the oldest guy in the comments most of the time. But often the most verbose.)

Oh, there are a couple movies I remember details of but I don’t recall the name of the movie, but they’re not movies I ever want to watch again. Like I saw something horrific once upon a time and later forgot what the movie was. I found what the movie was, but a better example was a show… I thought it may have been an episode of Supernatural because there was a big car (like Dean’s) but I wasn’t sure. I remembered a teenage girl running from someone through some pot plants, and someone getting put in a trunk, and someone being poisoned. Everyone told me I imagined it. Then by a pure stroke of luck, my wife and I decided to watch a show called Justified — what I saw was the first episode of the second season. But now everyone wants to say Justified is cool and they love it, but when I pretty accurately described the second season pilot they couldn’t tell me the name of the show? Make it make sense. Anyway, it’s an awesome show, and the teenage girl? Katelyn Dever, one of my favorite young actresses. She’s awesome in Justified (sort of like a little sister/niece type companion role for the main guy) and I’ve seen her in a few other things. Hearing she’s in something is usually enough to get me to watch it.

An old ASMR video - not a particularly good one, but one I enjoyed anyway. It was about a futuristic themed space travel agency. The woman in it described various planets as viable options, and at one point offered a tour guide whose name was something like “Loop Hole”. I remember that because it was such an odd name. At some point in the video she receives a Facebook message (not part of the video, likely a mistake, but the notification sound is there anyway). The background was wood paneling, kinda looked like it was filmed in a trailer.

It was made private on YouTube years and years ago.