Overview forblog

An ode to Y2K

Sorry if my posts have been looking a bit tumblr-ish lately, but sometimes there is much cooler stuff on the Internet than what’s going on here. Take this for example:

I remember this esthetic; it gave off a vibe of futurism right before and during the dawn of the new millennium. And what would you know, some wonderful soul out there created a imgur account, collecting a butt ton of images using this style. They marked it as an esthetic between 1996 and 2003, which to me with that timeframe seems about right when that look started to take hold and then began to fade away.

It was seen all over the place: magazines, billboards, TVs, movies, album art, music videos, EVERYWHERE! The silky shirts, the spiked hair with frosted tips, goggles on the forehead or hanging on the neck, the slightly out-of-focus photography with a hint of glow, and of course, the heavy dosage of blue, orange, or green.

Back then you didn’t really take notice of it because we were living in it, but in hindsight you can easily tell it was a really unique look. I think technology was a big factor for the inspiration because it was steamrolling into our homes at neck breaking speed. With the introduction of the World Wide Web, people bringing computers into the house, ecommerce, and cybercrimes, it was like we were quickly surrounded by tech and didn’t know what happened until it was too late. The changes were fast and that may explain why everything was out of focus and heavy on the colors.

In relation, Y2K freaked everyone out, believing technology was going to betray us when the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000. Thankfully that didn’t happen.

But while in the 1990s, even though Y2K was a looming threat, most people (mainly young people) saw the potential of what the digital revolution could bring. We were on the verge of starting something new and it was incredibly cool to see it about to evolve into its next stage. We were going to be the leaders of this new revolution, leaving behind the status quo of trivial stuff like typewriters, tons of paperwork, and, for the most part, the postal system.

But then nothing really happened once we crossed into the new millennium. Sure tech was still marching forward, but the utopia we were dreaming of really didn’t pan out the way we expected it to. After the dot com bubble and seeing a new threat to the country, the innocent dream was killed and so the style.

Either that or the style just ran its course.

Homage

Source

Spotted

Nearly did a spit take this morning while I was watching the news on NHK World. During their lighthearted closing story, they reported on a festival in Japan where some celebrates participated by throwing beans into the crowd as a way to invite good luck. One of those celebrities was this guy:

Oh my. It’s Segata Sanshiro!

Didn’t expect to see him on television this morning. Turns out Hiroshi Fujioka, the guy who played the role of Segata Sanshiro, is currently an actor in a historical drama TV show called Sanada Maru that airs on NHK. Based on the website, he plays the character Honda tadakatsu, “the bravest warlord in the Tokugawa family and a supporter of leyasu. His daughter, Komatsuhime, becomes the lawful wife of Nobuyuki in order to build ties between Tadakatsu and his foes, the Sanada family.”

I was wondering what happened to him. Last note I saw of him was around a decade ago when he was promoting a Rambo arcade game from Sega. Glad to see he’s doing well, but we still need to find out what happened to Hidekazu Yukawa, the Senior Managing Director of Sega who was the face for the Dreamcast in Japan. Only when we find his whereabouts will I finally be able to sleep well at night.

All cranky as heck

This needs to stop:

Gives you chills, right?

Don’t get me wrong as I don’t mind seeing advertising on websites. I don’t use any web browser add-ons to remove ads from webpages or any other kinds of similar programs as I know ads are an essential revenue earning generator for many web publications, but some ads go way too far in annoyance and need to be banished from the Internet all together. The biggest offenders of them all are the video ads.

You’ve seen them, the ones that show a brief spinning swirl for a loading icon and then show a nonstop series of 15 and 30 second video commercials; using the Flash program and having your CPU fan turn on at its max, making your laptop screaming at you for mercy to close the browser window because it’s getting torn to shreds from the inside.

Ads are fine until they become obtrusive and get in your way from the content you’re trying to read. For these video ads, not only are they making your PC physically loud, but then they also bring your web experience to a screeching halt as it eats up system memory, causing scrolling up and down on a webpage to be shuddery or sluggish and causing pages to load very slowly.

Many websites have video ads but the one that uses them the most is usgamer (yeah, I'm calling them out). On regular occasion a webpage on their site may have two or even three of these suckers running at the same time. Add in the fact that I like to have multiple tabs open when crawling through their site and my browser ends up locking up to the point where nothing is responsive and I need to force quit the program. Most times I have to retreat from their site before I’m finished reading an article.

These video ads have been around for a while now and it’s been that same amount of time since the web experience, from a performance perspective, starting sucking. If website admins have the ability to select the types of ads that show up on their websites, then they really need to uncheck the box that allows these kinds of ads from appearing. Don’t worry, as I have no plans on placing ads on this site, so use it as a safety zone to retreat to if you ever get bombarded with ads like those.

The one-two punch

My head is still spinning from the double dose of asshattery I saw during the weekend. The first incident should be a federal offence, but the second one is just a misdemeanor.

I realized I must have been near the annual gathering of the douches on Saturday while I was walking through a parking lot. You can tell because of how one of the attendees parked their Mustang by taking up four spaces. Not two, but four! Two I can somewhat understand when it comes to the raised bro-style trucks that are famous in this area for taking two spots. Their trucks are so big that they spill over across the next space. I don’t like it when I see it but at least there's an explanation as for why they take up more than one space. But for something like a Mustang and for it to take up four spots! That turd was flaunting it!

And then a few minutes later down the road I saw this guy:

Not as bad as the Mustang, but riding a bicycle like that out on the streets where the seat and handlebars are raised by a few feet with no practical reason but to show off. Come on! Keep that junk in San Francisco. Well, now that I think about it, he was probably an attendee at the conference too.

I should be fine by tomorrow, but in the meantime I’m just gonna lie down for a while and rest a bit.

Later, 2015

With only a few hours left before we say hello to 2016, I want to take a moment and thank everyone for reading this site. Not sure if there are any regular readers for it, but I hope the content found on it is enjoyable or at least interesting. And after the New Year, the first week of January is when the third year begins for internet-tokens.com. Time sure does move fast! In a few days from now, we will be closer to 2020 than we are to 2010. Zoinks!

But before we say goodbye to 2015 and the holiday season, I’d like to show one last piece from it before it ends. Check it out:

I saw it the other day while at GameStop and it looks so cool! I thought it was going to be way expensive like $15 dollars or more, but nope. It was a nice and easy $4 something. The package is so cool too that I don’t want to take the ornaments out of it. So next year, rather than ornaments on the tree, they will be next to the tree. Crazy? Yep. But that’s how I live life.

Happy New Year, everybody.