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The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

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Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#61

Post by Mr_Minderbinder »

radicality wrote: post #40
Chinjut wrote: 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.

I have often thought that it would be nice if the Wayback Machine had a reverse image search feature.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#62

Post by lobochrome »

beastoftheweast wrote: post #29
Chinjut wrote: 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?

Up until last month, the earliest known post/repost of the Backrooms image was an archived 4chan post from 2018, but it was believed to have been taken in 2012 or earlier based on the filename. So people have been looking for earlier posts/reposts of the image for years in an effort to uncover its origin. During the recent successful search, the searchers trawled 4chan archives for early-2010s posts with similar imag…

[flagged]

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#63

Post by jpsouth »

lobochrome wrote: post #62
beastoftheweast wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until last month, the earliest known post/repost of the Backrooms image was an archived 4chan post from 2018, but it was believed to have been taken in 2012 or earlier based on the filename. So people have been looking for earlier posts/reposts of the image for years in an effort to uncover its origin. During the recent successful search, the searchers trawled 4chan archives for early-2010s posts with similar imag…

[flagged]

There is no grass to touch in the back rooms.

Jokes aside, what’s wrong with having an interest in a (seemingly very) niche subject that doesn’t harm anyone and is a pretty cool investigation task?

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#64

Post by throwaway2046 »

houseplant wrote: post #60
WantonQuantum wrote: post #57

“ However the original, anonymous user stumbled onto this photograph, it appears it was taken from either the Wayback directly, or the Wayback Machine crawled the same site the user had found, and kept that webpage’s preservation for over 20 years.” Something people used to do is to use search engines to find images with file names that indicate they were from a digital camera. You could find all sorts of interesting…

I recall a thread years and years ago about a guy who found an abandoned digital camera in the woods, only to take it home and extract the photos from its SD card, and as everyone poured over them, they began noticing odd figures in the trees and so on. That's the kind of fun group activity I love about these mysterious things

Got a link to those photos? Sounds like an interesting story, whether true or not.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#65

Post by Jordan-117 »

houseplant wrote: post #58
Use wrote: post #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?

everyone says the Kanepixels stuff is the best, but in my opinion, establishing a lore and a story with this big corporate overlord and science fiction stuff was a mistake and only erodes the mysterious and malevolent nature of the entire thing. There's a youtube account called "mattstudios" who does his own take, and generally spearheaded the "poolrooms" variant of this genre, that is far more grounded and tries to…

Kane's spiritual sequel "The Oldest View" is kind of like this.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#66

Post by Jordan-117 »

houseplant wrote: post #59
xg15 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've been fascinated by the genre of creepy "liminal space" pictures for ages because the universal nature of how offputting they are seems to transcend a lot of cultural barriers I think that it actually boils down to a very deep seeded similar animalistic fear all of us have: the agoraphobic open spaces with no place to hide, lack of furniture or shelving to hide behind either, unreliable lighting with stark shadow…

You might enjoy Vivarium if you haven't seen it already.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#67

Post by msephton »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #49
dooglius wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They have an index of all images. Maybe someone picked a random image (I don't see a Random button, but one could exist?) or happened to look at this index the day it was added, or just clicked through to 2002 looking for something nostalgic https://archive.org/details/image

The discussion is about Wayback Machine rather than the link you suggest.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#68

Post by zerocrates »

frob wrote: post #15
jsjohnst wrote: post #4

I remember seeing this before. Curious how / who found the original in the Wayback archives? Didn’t see that mentioned in the article.

Here's a YouTube video covering the discovery process. Ultimately, one person found it, but they were part of a wider team piecing together many parts of a puzzle, including outdated phone image numbering schema. I found it to be a worthwhile summary that doesn't really assume the viewer has much previous knowledge. https://youtu.be/-1EKIIM3ShI

The Cybershot is a point-and-shoot digital camera, not a phone. Though Android does still use the DCIM folder, that whole basic structure, for compatibility with things that are looking for photos on drives, SD cards, etc. I think Sony phones even still use the DSC filename prefix for their photos.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#69

Post by Loughla »

houseplant wrote: post #60
WantonQuantum wrote: post #57

“ However the original, anonymous user stumbled onto this photograph, it appears it was taken from either the Wayback directly, or the Wayback Machine crawled the same site the user had found, and kept that webpage’s preservation for over 20 years.” Something people used to do is to use search engines to find images with file names that indicate they were from a digital camera. You could find all sorts of interesting…

I recall a thread years and years ago about a guy who found an abandoned digital camera in the woods, only to take it home and extract the photos from its SD card, and as everyone poured over them, they began noticing odd figures in the trees and so on. That's the kind of fun group activity I love about these mysterious things

Yeah where's that link? That sounds fun.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#70

Post by marzetti »

throwaway2046 wrote: post #64
houseplant wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall a thread years and years ago about a guy who found an abandoned digital camera in the woods, only to take it home and extract the photos from its SD card, and as everyone poured over them, they began noticing odd figures in the trees and so on. That's the kind of fun group activity I love about these mysterious things

Got a link to those photos? Sounds like an interesting story, whether true or not.

https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/I_Found_a_Digital_Camera...
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