Beyond the Simulacrum / Blog

For the first proper post of the year, we have me getting into a rabbit hole because of a somewhat niche adaptation of a media franchise, the usual.
I was rewatching the ONA adaptation of BLAME! (not the more recent anime CG adaptation, I haven't watched that one yet on the basis that it excludes the more interesting parts of the manga imo (you, the reader should watch the BLAME! ONA it's incomprehensible and I love it) and for the first time really noticed the watermark of what I now assume to be the group that did the translated subtitles which, frankly, don't make the anime all that more comprehensible. It just so happened to have a web address so I couldn't let that go.

Surprisingly! this address is still in use! but it's far from what you'd expect, I suppose the webmaster reused it for their projects later down in life, I like the art a lot tho. Interesting, but now we, obviously, need to do an archive dive.

Wayback Machine does yield us some results! All timestamps are about the same (i havent checked them all yet tbh) and they bring us all the way back to the magical land of 2004.

Sure enough, that's the Wizzu Crew. But this site is pretty sparce, at least the aprts that work are but! we get a list of members and that's always fun. A couple of contact emails probably not working but also some links to other projects. Currently I've been looking at one of the members old Geocities site cause there is some genuinely very nice art there.

I'm not too sure where this dive is headed tbh, but what strikes me is how far apart this group is, we've got artists in Singapore, eco-art collectives in Indonesia, a software dev in France and all that. I'm not of the generation that experienced the start of the Internet or even some of it's most interesting phases int he early-mid 2000s so it's kinda shocking to remember that there still was that level of connectedness thanks to stuff like IRC (and while I did check, the Wizzu IRC is dead and gone). This sort of stuff is what fuels my passion for Internet archeology.

Anyways, this post is running on a bit long, but if you have any neat old corners of the Internet to share, send it my way at junosgone on Discord, I'd love to find more dive material.

Happy new year to all :3! I've got a lot on my list of resolutions for this year I'm hoping to retake the stride I got in the last half of 2024.

I've finally taken the time to convert the old dynamic PHP from my school project into static HTML to put up this version of the website on Neocities. It's not very pretty but it's a good start.

As you can see, the Hall of Experiments is still WIP. It'll be available once I can figure out Godot web integration.