malymin

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Over the past few months, the Bing search engine has completely blocked the domain neocities.org, including the front site and all user subdomains (example.neocities.org), from its search index.

This is not a partial demotion, a ranking issue, or a temporary crawl problem. The entire domain is completely excluded.

In addition to excluding neocities.org from search results, when we discovered the block, Bing was also placing what appeared to be a phishing attack against Neocities on the first page of search results. This is not only bad for search results, it’s very possible that it is actively dangerous. After complaints (it required several) they deranked the suspected phishing site, but neocities.org results remain blocked, and it is possibly only a matter of time before another concerning site appears on Bing searches for Neocities (it’s easy to get higher pagerank than a blocked site).

In addition to the safety concerns, this also unfairly affects over 1.5 million independent websites hosted on Neocities, the vast majority of which are personal, artistic, educational, or experimental projects with no commercial or malicious intent. These are brilliant and wonderful sites with billions of human visitors per month and they don’t deserve to be blocked from an entire search engine for no reason.

We have repeatedly attempted to resolve this through Bing’s official webmaster and support channels, and a few internal channels. Despite these efforts, Bing has declined to reverse the block or provide a clear, actionable explanation for it. At this point, we have exhausted all reasonable avenues for remediation except public disclosure.

Because of this, we are recommending that Neocities users, and the broader internet in general, not use Bing or search engines that source their results from Bing until this issue is resolved.

In addition to Bing, there are other search engines that currently rely on Bing’s search results, including but not limited to DuckDuckGo.

If you use Bing or Bing-powered search engines, Neocities sites will not appear in your search results, regardless of content quality, originality, or compliance with webmaster guidelines. If any Neocities-like sites appear on these results, they may be active phishing attacks against Neocities and should be treated with caution.

I've suspected that the modern "adoptable" is a several-generations removed descendant of 90's and early 2000's "cyberpets," but as a kid I mostly only ever interacted with free-to-adopt pets that could be adopted by an infinite number of people; I was aware limited-quantity pets via application submissions and "breeding" were available, but I have fewer memories of them because I didn't really have a website to participate in them with. (I just saved the free pets on my hard drive, lmao.) It's very similar to how limited adoptions have existed in the Petz Community since at least 1998, but I mostly just downloaded free petfiles or breedfiles that didn't require talking to people.

(kalium has talked about similar levels of rarity and scarcity existing with roleplay characters in fantasy animal forum RP of the era, which is 100% a related phenomenon... just one I've been exposed to less on my own end.)

The problem with researching cyberpets? It's hard to find evidence via search engine that they ever existed. I keep getting results for some very recent take on the "robot toy dog" concept being sold under that name, as well as unrelated garbage articles and images that happen to have good SEO. Robot dogs (and other robot pets like Furbies, and virtual pets like Tamagotchi, etc) were part of a general Y2K fascination with virtual animals, but they are not even a little bit the same thing as a cyberpet. A cyberpet is a funny little image file that lives on the internet, got it? Some are just static pngs, some have "mechanics" that are roleplayed by the creator and adopter, some of the later forms of cyberpet whole website backends like Dragon Cave or Neopets. Bunnyhero Labs even had interactive Flash-based cyberpets. But a cyberpet is, at its core, an picture of an animal on a website, with some kind of certificate or verification showing that you've "adopted" it and that it's yours. (Even if it's one of the ones can be adopted by infinite people, you often get a little adoption certificate to put on your page next to it.)

But... I think I just found some evidence that backs up my theory of adoptables being an evolution of cyberpets?

There was a cyberpet marketplace. They used fake currency, not real money, but still. You have the concept of character designs as a good that can be bought, sold, and traded! Right here at the dawn of the 21st century!

The Market

Welcome to the Market, a unique place where one may buy, sell, and trade various creatures.

How it works
If you wish to participate in the market you must send in a form requesting registration. After becomming a member, you will recieve a certain number of credits. Credits can be used to purchase goods and livestock of many varities. As a member, you will recieve 100 credits(c.) on the first of each month. That means everyone gets 100 credits every month just for being a member! Yes, I did change it back from three to prevent inflation. Credits can be obtained in many ways:

Wyvern Breeding- Breeding wyverns is an interesting and profitable buisness. You start by purchasing a pair(or more) of the creatures from the market. Females may lay eggs once every month, after paying a small fee. They may lay up to 10 eggs and the owners have the option of selling the eggs or hatchlings to other members of the Market. Wyverns, if they are available, can be found in the Roost.
Selling Livestock- Selling a creature that YOU MADE. Adds for creatures may be placed on the board below. The livestock auction is now open! If you wish to sell an item, please do so on the Livestockboard.Also, auctions are to be posted ONLY on the auction board.
Doing a Favor for Yours Truly- If you wish to do a trade with me dirrectly or if I ask you for help with something, you can earn some credits. Just dont bombard me with a hundred trade requests please ~.~

I, DragonSpyrit, must be notified of ALL transactions via the form that will soon be posted below or Email. You must tell me how many credits a person spent, who they were, and who you are. The 5c. selling fee has been deactivated. I will also be keeping running lists of your credit totals.

Also, please keep in mind that the Livestock board is the main part of The Market, not the Roost.The roost is down again due to the fact that DS is overwhelmed with stuff to do. Id appreciate it if no one complained, concidering that I get no money fro wyvern sales and it takes 20 minutes to draw, scan, color, upload, and put each wyuvern up on the page.

(I've left all of the misspellings on the original page as is...)

Here's an example of a "market stall" for boutique cyberpets. You can definately see how the concepts at play here have evolved into new forms later down the line, right? And here's another market stall, and yet another.

BTW: That last site, Clearwater? Also has a bunch of free-to-take cyberpets, which is the main thing I remember it for. If you have a website, consider adopting one! I always liked the Glerit on the "canyon" page of the site. There's also two secret pages with secret pets...

If you're into smallweb/oldweb stuff, consider adopting and making free cyberpets! They're such an iconic part of early web culture for me, as irremovable from my nostalgic conception of my childhood as dubbed anime and Nintendo games are to a lot of my age-peers. And you know what? I never see them acknowledged on the intentionally nostalgic throwback sites people make at all. Never! They're literally collectible gifs, don't people love those? Cmonnnn you wanna make a web page for magic animals so baaaaad

I've seen a lot of people complain about Pillowfort not allowing image uploads of larger sizes.

I'm not on Pillowfort, but I did help a friend reduce some image file sizes to upload to a different website. And you know, the funny thing is... a color-indexed PNG is much smaller than its full-color version, even when they have the exact same number of colors. And there's images where there will be colors missing, but it's surprisingly difficult to notice. Reducing the file size of scanned images of traditional artwork works better with color indexing than I ever thought it would.

And pixel art? I'm now realizing that saving them in full color is absolutely nothing but a waste of file size. They don't gain much of anything from being saved in RGB.

Like... the Stardew Valley screenshot I shared in this old post? It's color-indexed. It's a little under 20 KB. Neat, right?

Here's a piece of digital artwork I found online. The original artist, judging from the watermark, is ArcadianPhoenix. When I tried to hunt down the source upload, I found that ArcadianPhoenix long ago deleted their entire Deviantart presence - unsourced re-uploads are the only way this image survives.

The image is 900 pixels long and 696 pixels tall. It is a png, and examining it in GIMP finds it to be color-indexed.

Its file size is 132 KB, or more specifically 136,038 bytes.

I can tell this image isn't true pixel art, but rather a digital painting with airbrushed shading that got converted into a dithered, color-indexed image in post. Yet I don't think it hurts the image that much here? The color banding is most obtrusive on the ground the dragon is standing on, and the dithering elsewhere in the image lends it an interesting texture.

I've been thinking a lot about how people have gotten habitually sloppy about avoiding bloat, in both designing offline applications and designing websites. Modern websites run like garbage if you have weak or slow internet, while a website last updated in 2010.. well, it won't necessarily look great on a phone, but at least it'll finish loading in a timely manner. I'm thinking a lot about how cleaner, lower-byte web design is an art that needs to be understood and appreciated by the "slow web" movement, as well as embraced by the mainstream. And the high "weight" of images, video, and audio (and the devaluing of ways to reduce their "weight") is just one part of that issue.

Suggested Further Reading:

• I’m more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I’ve built since, by Mike Hall
• How web bloat impacts users with slow devices, by Dan Luu

If you want to develop an art style that is hard for AI to imitate...

You might want to consider pixel art?

It's possible that this weakness will get fixed as the models develop, but for now - image generation seems to be consistently dogshit at pixel art. People ask it to make pixel art and it makes, like... pseudo-pixel art. There's mixels, there's jpeg-like artifacting, it looks bad. Mimicking photography, digital painting, and vector-like flat shaded art all seem to be easier for the models than pixel art - probably because the training data contains more of those things than it does pixel art, but I also wonder if there's something intrinsic to how image synthesis works that makes understanding "pixel art" as something more specific than "theres a bunch of squares and rectangles" difficult.

This also reminds me of the issue of how hosting images is one of social media's sources of bandwidth issues. So much of current fanart culture is focused on posting high-fidelity images with large filesizes, but ultimately every website with unlimited image hosting is going to run into the server and bandwidth costs involved. Was talking about how this bodes badly for the future of conventional social media that doesn't plan on using predatory practices (selling personal data, etc), and how the internet at large might need to pivot back to a text-centric culture if we want more socmed options that are both non-exploitative in their monetization models and financially sustainable (but most people i've mentioned this are afraid this would mean the death of fanart in fandom), they mentioned:

my first thought is getting back into the art of making small-scale pixel art and such, that kind of thing used to be all over the internet and generally the filesizes for them are a lot smaller than large-scale renders and digital paintings and such

I feel like art optimized for small filesizes is something that's become... less of a common skill? I miss tiny-handful-of-KB pixel graphics being all over the place, but also typical social media displays cute little animated gif pixel arts... abysmally, because their imageposting format is designed for photosets. My conversation partner added:

yeah true, display sizes on social media aren't geared towards smaller-scale images i wonder if the "add gif" kind of feature that some sites have could be tuned to account for small pixel and reaction kind of gifs to display them more clearly, i feel like it'd be relatively easy to make that a popular feature considering how much people like using emojis

I think about how decorative pixel graphics used to be very popular on Tumblr back when users were encouraged to customize their page's HTML (remember those Homestuck "pixel families" and the edits of them to represent other fandoms?), but I've noticed that Tumblr has been... not outright removing the ability to make custom HTML pages, but making it harder for new users to even know it's an option, and altering the UI to discourage viewing the site via custom pages and encourage viewing blogs the more standardized pseudo-mobile format.

yeah, customization being removed on a lot of bigger sites definitely seems like a factor in stuff like that declining

I think there's multiple good reasons to shift back towards pixel/sprite art in the wake of fandom artist anxieties over being replaced by AI, the decay and collapse of last decade's Standard Online Experience, etc. But that doesn't mean people are actually going to try, or even think to do it. And I'll never be persuasive enough to start any kind of movement, so.

dvillines26:

The original Pokemon games always felt haunted because the programming was held together on chewing gum, string, duct tape, and prayer. The abundance of glitches, eccentricities, odd design decisions, and unexplained lore that would later be sanded out is vaguely unsettling and intriguing on its own. Like, there are multiple references to real world locations and events in the original games, and 'Kanto' is just based on the Kanto region of Japan, suggesting at least that Red/Green take place in an alternate reality Japan. Gold, Silver and Crystal aggressively retcon, essentially making the Pokemon Universe its own thing, while adding some troubling and unsettling implications of its own, like the silence of Red, Mt. Silver being sealed off, the Cinnabar disaster, the revival of Suicune/Entei/Raikou, the rival being a cruel, petty thief of unknown origin, Eggs, Celebi and the lost GS Ball event, etc.

The thing that makes the Gen III games such a radical break is how much less unsettling they are. This is a function of the GBA inherently being less spooky than the GameBoy/GameBoy Color, but also of design decisions opting for more vivid colors and a lot of more straightforwardly 'cool' Pokemon. Ghost, Dragon, and Dark actually became more standard types with a huge expansion in the available number. The Pokemon series is the series established by Ruby and Sapphire, I would argue. In a sense it's true that Pokemon, as we knew it in GSC, did not continue. It mutated into something with fewer edges, something bright and fun and increasingly lacking in the jank that gives the early games their unique appeal. For Pokemon to survive it had to move beyond that. They never became exceptionally well-programmed, but they weren't janky until Sword/Shield and then Scarlet/Violet, and those are different types of jank. though S/V can be unsettling in their own right especially when you fall through the world or go somewhere you shouldn't be able to. The unclimbable landmass always disturbs me a bit, like I know there's nothing, but it feels like there should be something there.

The 'haunted' energy isn't usually captured by romhacks that use the Gen I/II engine because they're trying too hard, and the people writing them are brain poisoned by creepypasta and 'edgy' media. I think if they want to make something genuinely unsettling, they need to play at least Earthbound, if not also Mother 3, to get some idea of how to generate an 'off' vibe. The best horror is left partially to the imagination. Rather than gore or explicitly fucked up stuff, which usually triggers disgust rather than fear, the point of a 'haunted GameBoy game' should be to give you the increasing sense that something is Just Not Right. It'd be funny to just do a Red/Green mod that 'fixes some of the bugs', and not tell anyone that it's a romhack that gets increasingly weird the deeper you get into it. like, you encounter Pokemon or items in the wrong location, some doors or ladders take you to places they shouldn't, some trainer AI will be extremely odd, things will randomly appear in your inventory that you didn't pick up, and sometimes a text box will pop up, unprompted. You're Running Out of Time. There's never any explanation or pay-off for that message, nor does it correspond to playtime or anything. At the end, instead of silence, Mewtwo talks to you, but what they say doesn't make any sense. But it has Implications. you can't help thinking about what Mewtwo said. however, Mewtwo only speaks the first time you play the romhack, and never again. Also, you can't actually catch Mewtwo. The player character refuses to throw the ball. A message pops up. 'I can't do this anymore.'

Youtube comments are ephemeral things. I wanted to save this one.

im coining a new pinterest aesthetic. im calling it. linkrotcore™️

it's based around clearly broken and redacted images from the rotting of the old web. straight up missing images. images that don't show up because "no hotlinking." empty spaces, watermarks, and placeholders where beauty used to be. frustrating lacunae. move over babes THIS is the new hotness:

made with nex3's grid generator

(I know hosting images on Discord is a bad idea - in this case the fact the image will definitely rot is part of the post. Conceptually.)