Live data from Hacker News

The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

blog.archive.org

31–40 of 117 posts

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#31
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stanley Parable outdates Backrooms by like 8 years. But they’re all basically about liminal spaces.

TSP isn't really about liminal space, it's about narrative decision making and the consequences of trying to account and develop for that in video games. I suppose you could say that it uses the liminal space of a barren office to achieve an awkward atmosphere that is meant to make you question everything about it, but that's a really small aspect of the game as a whole.

Sure. But it can be about a lot of things. And almost the entirety of the game takes place in liminal spaces.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#32
post #21

How did people hunting for the origin of this image discover the random niche website preserved by the Internet Archive that this image happened to come from?

The original URL of the photo was actually found on Twitter, where it had been posted in 2011. Wayback Machine was used only for the final confirmation. It's curious that this is not mentioned in the article, but I suppose it ruins the narrative. I read about the whole thing last week at 404media, via waxy blog, which is a much more comprehensive article: https://archive.is/sj846

That is actually kinda fascinating given that it's directly in opposition to this blog post. I wonder who's telling the truth?

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#33
post #27
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean there is survivorship bias? That the only image used is the one that survived? Or it survived because it was used? Something I noticed was that all other jpgs in this site have a lager number in the filename, for example: www.hobbytownoshkosh.com/Dsc00348.jpg So maybe the crawler that saved this webpage had a limit on how many suburls it would capture and it sorted by name and then stopped at around…

That might have been the 161st image taken by an old Sony camera. Cyber-shot model names use a DSC prefix, which is an initialism for "Digital Still Camera". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber-shot

The filename for sure comes from the camera. My point was that the crawler stopped there and did not pick up the other images on the page because all of them have a higher number in the name and it stopped at an artificial number of sub urls

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#34
post #12

I love and appreciate the Wayback Machine, but using it is such a bittersweet experience. So many of the crawls are incomplete. I’ve managed to find pages that hosted content of interest to me, only to find that particular resource unavailable. And if it’s not on the Wayback Machine, it’s just gone forever. Feels like tracking an old friend down to their tombstone.

Definitely feels incomplete. It should at least make an attempt to capture videos from the crawl. It feels like it does less than what yt-dlp would do if given that URL.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is because the image didn’t exist in other archives and it’s a very obscure site so why would someone have seen that? More probable they stumbled on something random like this in the wild or on Internet Archive?

Why would someone have been looking at an very obscure site on the Internet Archive? Why is that more likely than looking at it on the web?

Because the obscure site had not existed for years when the copypasta first appeared. So someone would have had to have found that obscure site and then saved the image for years before using it.

Honestly, both options (website or archive) sound pretty unlikely to me. I'm wondering if instead it was a third option: maybe the originator of the copypasta was the person who originally took the photo. It would make sense for them to remember the event and go pull a good image out of their photo folder.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#36
Gotta love the found footage videos' photorealism and camera effects too. One of the reasons why a "retro" motif is commonly seen in these videos is to make it more convincing.

What found footage video do you assume to be most convincing? And how do you think photorealistic found footage videos will be made in the future?

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#37
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every future historian is hissing at you right now. So much of the past is completely opaque to us because of decay, intentional destruction and lack of interest. I think there's a moral imperative to preserve.

Things that are important to society will naturally be preserved. I believe in the moral right to be forgotten. We cannot, and should not, preserve all of knowledge forever. Don't get me wrong, I love the internet archive, and the team behind it are incredible. As a resource it's very important to maintain and preserve. However, I'm sure that at some point, either due to the economics of it or through hardware failur…

If someone requests for their content to be deleted, IIRC the IA does it. In other cases however I don't see the need to remove old(er) content. Particularly also because older content/webpages were far lighter than modern equivalents - you may need to delete 10 or even 100 old website archives to store one new one.

Decay is natural, but so is the human/animal urge to stop it.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#38
post #5

I didn't know about the old meme, but the image made me immediately think of The Stanley Parable. Not surprising since TSP is probably a descendant of the meme.

I'm surprised that despite all the talk about liminal spaces, no one mentions the lack of windows in those spaces and how much they add to the creepyness.

I found this especially noticeable in Stanley Parable. Or rather, the offices there have windows, but they are all opaque, showing just a featureless white (and a few are mounted on interior walls, making you doubt whether they really are windows or just LED panels).

At least for me this had an enormous effect to the drearyness and general feeling of disorientation in the game.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#39
post #5

I didn't know about the old meme, but the image made me immediately think of The Stanley Parable. Not surprising since TSP is probably a descendant of the meme.

Stanley Parable outdates Backrooms by like 8 years. But they’re all basically about liminal spaces.

Most of my dreams take place in similar places. Often though they are falling apart — like leaking ceilings, etc. Always they are labyrinthian, almost always it is night time (although the frequent windowlessness of the places would not make that obvious). They are often populated though — maybe college-age students, sometimes more like a mall.

I've always been fascinated by the place of my dreams. I have asked around but haven't had anyone confirm having similar dreams.

When I was a teen (and a bit younger) I had night terrors. I did not know the name of them at the time (no internet yet). But sometimes they featured a room that extended so far in every direction that you could not see the walls. Something like an all-white parking garage, I suppose. I feel like a family friend a little older than me tried once to hypnotize me when I was young — they might have used a similar description: a room white that extends to far that you cannot see the walls. Perhaps that was the source of the imagery in the night terror dreams.

I wrote a game decades ago where you (well, a paper airplane) wander a seemingly endless house trying to escape. I am not sure which came first though — the dreams of an endless space or the game.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#40
post #21

How did people hunting for the origin of this image discover the random niche website preserved by the Internet Archive that this image happened to come from?

I didn’t read the details of how they did it, but it would be cool if the Internet Archive exposed some kind of image hash / perceptual hash / similarity metric database, so that this task could have been a quick lookup in such a database.
Post reply on HN