This IA article is by the same Jason Scott of http://textfiles.com/jason/
The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
101–110 of 117 posts
Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good luck “searching” for anything on YouTube in 2024..
It's 2024 and need a search engine that doesn't suck
Also:
(Quite the story, that ...)
Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If we're going there, we may as well mention Portal which predates Stanley Parable by 6 years, and features liminal spaces with the same eerie feel - in the game, you wake up trapped in an abandoned laboratory that seems to go on forever, which on its own hits the liminal notes a bit, and then you suddenly find yourself breaking out into service corridors and navigating the backrooms of the facility. Portal 2 (two years before TSP) continues that theme, though I feel it overdid the scale a bit, to the point of breaking suspension of disbelief.
Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 aroun…
> I have asked around but haven't had anyone confirm having similar dreams.
Well.
I dream of several specific places that I have never been. One is a group of buildings featuring 3 or 4 bay garages in the desert, think New Mexico flatlands. The buildings are typical corrugated steel siding and roofing, painted in a light grey and surrounded by 10 foot barbed wire chain-link fences. It is always sunny and the heat is near unbearable. Sometimes there are men with large trucks outfitted in a post-apocalyptic manner. Sometimes there is no one at all. I always have the sense that the undead are nearby and that I need to be very, very careful.
This is one place that I come back to regularly. There are others that I don't recall as clearly.
Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also the excellent http://astronaut.io , which I found via Hacker News. It automatically plays short segments from YouTube videos with those default filenames, inevitably surfacing a kind of gallery of the mundane: The unproduced, untargeted, mostly unwatched, everyday moments of real life.
The amount of (AI generated?) crypto spam is mind boggling. Most of the other videos seem to be amateur sport events, but the rest contains a few gems of random stranger's life :)
I let it scroll through about 30 and didn't see either of these. I saw a couple small church services, some random snippets of people walking throughout various areas, what seemed to be an interview for someone's school project and some videos of pets.
Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 aroun…
I frequently have dreams where buildings from my past have rooms which have doors opening to corridors opening to rooms endlessly like a labyrinth. Also often populated, mostly some sort of school or shelter building. They spark fascination and a sense of infinite exploration rather than terror. I vaguely remember I knew the source of them (some sort of escape fantasy?) in my childhood.
Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can actually do this with YouTube. By search for MOV001 etc. Mental Outlaw did a video demonstrating this a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_Ho_KDPi_U
http://astronaut.io/ - YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13413225
I expected dumb gameplays and influencers. Somehow zero of those. Almost all the random samples have been immensely interesting.
Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
#108I love this stuff. Some other greats: Doot doot: https://youtu.be/ZYcHOEjGzPA?si=_TP90YX-p5PkKdim Michaelsoft Binbows: https://youtu.be/yDzAAjzbV5g?si=A2HTyCM8IU2MJHVQ
> Michaelsoft Binbows
Freaky, I had never seen the image before. It got posted on a Discord server I was on yesterday, and than you go and post a YT video. Heh
Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
#109Earlier 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…
this poor guy keeps getting ignored. here is the tweet https://x.com/rkfg_me/status/1130028610700664832
Should have posted that info in a sane location where people discuss these things instead of tweeting it into the void hoping that someone was looking.
Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
#110How 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?
It wasn't needed for this but it would be great to have a fulltext (and binary!) and reverse image search of the internet archive. Often you know something about what you are searchng fore but have no clue about the location.
Of course this is not going to happen with the current resources of the IA and if it did it would probably just result in them getting hammered with DMCA requests and other legal demands for content that the "owners" didn't even know was on the archive.