Obscure History
What did the site look like 25 years ago? Do you really wanna know?
The SporkCam Archive: 1998-2000
Back when webcasts were just stoopid fun.
Most of these little “featurettes” disappeared from my site in the early 2000’s, so I’m happy to resurrect them here in all their crappy old-school HTML glory. It’s a little snapshot of my old web-life, back when I had hours to work on a single page of dumb stuff just for the hell of it. Some of them (like Bridget’s Wurld) are self-contained webpages hosted on Google Drive via the fantastic service DriveToWeb. Serverless web hosting, baby!
🔸 Bridget’s Wurld (1995-1999) – Ah, Bridget. We enjoyed you to no end, waving you at people from car windows and sometimes even throwing you at people. Your fame was brief but your fans still linger!
🔸 The Ford Phallus (2002) – One of my favorite pages ever — it’s so bitchy. To this day I still think of giant trucks as huge penises on wheels.
🔸 Blurry Visions (2004) – A look at how you can see just about anything you want if you just squint hard enough. See a fence post transform into the Virgin Mary right before your eyes!
🔸 Weekly Absurd Polls (1998-2000) – Just for a little “interactive” fun I started making weekly polls for visitors to the site. Usually the questions were of a ridiculous nature or had ridiculous or loaded answers, and they were a lot of fun to write. But after a while it was a lot of work to come up with 8-10 new answers for a new stupid question every week, so I started doing it bi-weekly, then monthly…soon I wasn’t doing ‘em at all unless I was bored. So I stopped altogether almost exactly two years and 60+ polls later. They remained open for a couple of years after that, though, and people had kept voting on them. Anyway here they are, all in one spot, complete with results. Most of the material is hilariously outdated as well.
🔸 Meth and Your Veins (2003) – Mocking a pamphlet that “helps” addicts with the help of a creepy little mascot.
🔸 Annoying Busfolk of Seattle (2003-2007) – Just what it says!
🔸 The Goo Cafe (1998-2000) – This was a pretty popular page. It’s basically a gallery of celebrity and politician photos that I altered with Kai’s Power Goo into funny/disturbing caricatures. At some point I added a JavaScript thingy which allowed people to make their own goo images, though only pre-selected ones ’cause the script wasn’t fancy.
🔸 T.V. Highlights of Weeks Past (1999) – One of my favorite little pages ever! I’d like to start doing these again.
🔸 Mocking the Mesa Sculptures (1999) – Shortly before I moved to Seattle we spent an evening taking pictures with some silly sculptures in Mesa. It was a blast!
🔸 The Ugliest Doll in the World (1999) – Troy found this hideous little doll and brought it by for a photo session.
🔸 Daily Haiku (1999-2000) – For some reason I began writing a silly daily haiku for my homepage. It didn’t last long but it was kinda fun. Even got a few reader submissions by email…
🔸 Homosexual Conspiracy Official Headquarters (2000) – After the term “homosexual conspiracy” began to be used by actual people with alleged brains, I thought it was time to devote a little page of mockery to the right wing’s idiotic homo-fear. It’s gleefully supergay…all it’s missing is photos of half-nekkid raver boys flailing around to techno music with glowsticks clenched between their teeth.
🔸 E-Leash (2001) – This one seems quaint today, since back then not everyone had a cellphone but they were becoming overused enough to be mocked. I was especially sensitive to this, because in the late 90’s I dated someone who never turned his phone off and always, always, always, ALWAYS answered it, no matter what time of day or how inconvenient it was to everyone around him. His work ruled his life, so I think that probably had a tiny bit of influence here…
🔸 Cereal Boxes from Hell (2001) – This short-lived page was supposed to feature lots of amazingly stupid cereal box art, but sadly I only did two before I moved on. I think it was just too overwhelming to photograph/scan as many as I wanted — it would be much easier with today’s cellphone cams.
🔸 Airheads: Fun with the SkyMall Catalog (2001) – This was fun to do. I actually got a nastygram from some guy at the company which sells the bizarro fire hood. He basically said “You’re stupid and wrong, it’s actually very effective and doesn’t melt. Thanks for helping advertise our product!” Wow…I didn’t know my site had any consumer sway whatsoever. (It doesn’t — he was just being touchy.)
🔸 The Michael Jackson Gallery of Horrors (2003) – Yeah, he was an easy target and this is totally a juvenile cheap shot. I just couldn’t help myself. 😀
🔸 Testimonials (2003) – What website is complete without some celebrity testimonials? And here’s something I never mentioned before: the guy in the Spider-Man suit was my boyfriend at the time. He was dressed up for Halloween and I told him to pose before heading off to work. It still cracks me up!
🔸 Kraftwerk Concert Review (2004) – This show was an explosion of nerdicious geekromancy. I never thought I’d ever get to see them, so this was my gushing review. Turns out I got to see them again in 2014, too…in 3-D!
Total Obscurity 