A very strong work of original fiction that I enjoyed. "Archeologists find things they aught not" is a well-trod concept, but the implied future setting adds a sense of deep time. Our moment is not the present, but the past as well.

cohost! - "Aquazone - Expensive Digital Fish"
archived 21 Sep 2024 03:24:31 UTC
An essay on a virtual pet product, Aquazone, that was contemporaneous with my own favorite virtual pets, but which seems to have far less survival in its online presence than Petz has. Ahead of its time in the worst ways (paid DLC microtransactions), and yet so thorough as a fishtank simulator, in a quintessentially of-its-era way, that no modern equivalent scatches the itch.

no subject
Date: 2024-09-21 05:48 pm (UTC)I have very distinct memories of an Aquazone fansite (part of a network of virtual life game fansites run by one guy, along with a forum) describing the robot alien fish in detail! Unfortunately, the fansite network went down before 2006, so long ago it's not captured on Wayback...
You can try to visit the captures from 2004 here, but they'll redirect you to "suspended" pages from 2006 before you even get a chance to read them. The captures from 2016 are useless, the site was already down for a decade at that point. Not sure why they exist.