[HN Gopher] The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
___________________________________________________________________
The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
Author : passing
Score : 362 points
Date : 2024-06-08 15:17 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.archive.org)
| Jun8 wrote:
| If you think that this would be right up SCP's alley, you'd be
| wrong, it's not included (yet). Here's a Reddit discussion on the
| topic:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/TheBackrooms/comments/bs2zog/why_th....
| The SCP 682 referred to here is, of course, the undestroyable
| creature: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-682.
| fourteenfour wrote:
| Now someone should make a game where you design indoor rc car
| tracks in the backrooms.
| imglorp wrote:
| Someone should convert an unused warehouse or shopping mall
| into a real-world backroom maze escape game.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| There should be more things in the world like Meow Wolf -
| this is an aspect of that in person exploration experience.
|
| I wonder if anyone has a list of that kind of space.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Relevant: <https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3008>
| TrianguloY wrote:
| Not sure about design, but for driving them you have re*volt
|
| And, as expected, there is a backroom level:
| http://revoltzone.net/m/tracks/70429/Backrooms (There are
| probably others, this was the first result after a search)
| jsjohnst wrote:
| I remember seeing this before. Curious how / who found the
| original in the Wayback archives? Didn't see that mentioned in
| the article.
| frob wrote:
| Here's a YouTube video covering the discovery process.
| Ultimately, one person found it, but they were part of a wider
| team piecing together many parts of a puzzle, including
| outdated phone image numbering schema. I found it to be a
| worthwhile summary that doesn't really assume the viewer has
| much previous knowledge.
|
| https://youtu.be/-1EKIIM3ShI
| jprete wrote:
| I didn't know about the old meme, but the image made me
| immediately think of The Stanley Parable. Not surprising since
| TSP is probably a descendant of the meme.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Stanley Parable outdates Backrooms by like 8 years. But they're
| all basically about liminal spaces.
| worble wrote:
| TSP isn't really about liminal space, it's about narrative
| decision making and the consequences of trying to account and
| develop for that in video games. I suppose you could say that
| it uses the liminal space of a barren office to achieve an
| awkward atmosphere that is meant to make you question
| everything about it, but that's a really small aspect of the
| game as a whole.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Sure. But it can be about a lot of things. And almost the
| entirety of the game takes place in liminal spaces.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Most of my dreams take place in similar places. Often though
| they are falling apart -- like leaking ceilings, etc. Always
| they are labyrinthian, almost always it is night time
| (although the frequent windowlessness of the places would not
| make that obvious). They are often populated though -- maybe
| college-age students, sometimes more like a mall.
|
| I've always been fascinated by the _place_ of my dreams. I
| have asked around but haven 't had anyone confirm having
| similar dreams.
|
| When I was a teen (and a bit younger) I had night terrors. I
| did not know the name of them at the time (no internet yet).
| But sometimes they featured a room that extended so far in
| every direction that you could not see the walls. Something
| like an all-white parking garage, I suppose. I feel like a
| family friend a little older than me tried once to hypnotize
| me when I was young -- they might have used a similar
| description: a room white that extends to far that you cannot
| see the walls. Perhaps that was the source of the imagery in
| the night terror dreams.
|
| I wrote a game decades ago where you (well, a paper airplane)
| wander a seemingly endless house trying to escape. I am not
| sure which came first though -- the dreams of an endless
| space or the game.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Wonky spaces seem to be a fairly common thing in dreams.
| One that I used to have every so often was walking around
| inside what at first seemed like a normal room, then
| looking up to see that the ceiling was several tens of
| stories high, as if the building were a skyscraper with
| only a single tall and narrow room inside. The unexpected
| height of the ceiling always caused an intense sensation of
| vertigo, causing me to fall backwards in my dream (and
| sometimes wake up IRL).
| xg15 wrote:
| I'm surprised that despite all the talk about liminal spaces,
| no one mentions the lack of windows in those spaces and how
| much they add to the creepyness.
|
| I found this especially noticeable in Stanley Parable. Or
| rather, the offices there have windows, but they are all
| opaque, showing just a featureless white (and a few are mounted
| on interior walls, making you doubt whether they really are
| windows or just LED panels).
|
| At least for me this had an enormous effect to the drearyness
| and general feeling of disorientation in the game.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The notion of vast abandoned underground "backrooms", maybe
| with a couple people in hazmat suits on their way through also
| perfectly fits into the Westworld TV series. Though of course
| they didn't go with an 70's office vibe.
|
| But the copy-pasta for the image builds on those influences,
| not the other way around.
| Thorrez wrote:
| >This agnostic, wide-ranging crawl likely represented both the
| original source of the image
|
| Why do they say it's likely that the person who first posted the
| image on the message board got the image from the Internet
| Archive?
| TZubiri wrote:
| I thought the same thing. If you look at the crawled page, it's
| only one of like 20 images that survived.
|
| So either the crawl got lucky and saved the only relevant
| image, or there is survivor bias.
|
| Then again, the actual crawl might be triggered precisely
| because the image was linked.
| kwstas wrote:
| What do you mean there is survivorship bias? That the only
| image used is the one that survived? Or it survived because
| it was used?
|
| Something I noticed was that all other jpgs in this site have
| a lager number in the filename, for example:
| www.hobbytownoshkosh.com/Dsc00348.jpg
|
| So maybe the crawler that saved this webpage had a limit on
| how many suburls it would capture and it sorted by name and
| then stopped at around Dsc00161.jpg, which is the name of the
| image in question. Though there is a Dsc00164 that is lost so
| it seems kind of unlikely...
| adolph wrote:
| That might have been the 161st image taken by an old Sony
| camera.
|
| _Cyber-shot model names use a DSC prefix, which is an
| initialism for "Digital Still Camera"._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber-shot
| kwstas wrote:
| The filename for sure comes from the camera. My point was
| that the crawler stopped there and did not pick up the
| other images on the page because all of them have a
| higher number in the name and it stopped at an artificial
| number of sub urls
| jsjohnst wrote:
| My guess is because the image didn't exist in other archives
| and it's a very obscure site so why would someone have seen
| that? More probable they stumbled on something random like this
| in the wild or on Internet Archive?
| dooglius wrote:
| Why would someone have been looking at an very obscure site
| on the Internet Archive? Why is that more likely than looking
| at it on the web?
| sparky_z wrote:
| Because the obscure site had not existed for years when the
| copypasta first appeared. So someone would have had to have
| found that obscure site and then saved the image for years
| before using it.
|
| Honestly, both options (website or archive) sound pretty
| unlikely to me. I'm wondering if instead it was a third
| option: maybe the originator of the copypasta was the
| person who originally took the photo. It would make sense
| for them to remember the event and go pull a good image out
| of their photo folder.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| They have an index of all images. Maybe someone picked a
| random image (I don't see a Random button, but one could
| exist?) or happened to look at this index the day it was
| added, or just clicked through to 2002 looking for
| something nostalgic https://archive.org/details/image
| exitb wrote:
| I love and appreciate the Wayback Machine, but using it is such a
| bittersweet experience. So many of the crawls are incomplete.
| I've managed to find pages that hosted content of interest to me,
| only to find that particular resource unavailable. And if it's
| not on the Wayback Machine, it's just gone forever. Feels like
| tracking an old friend down to their tombstone.
| samwillis wrote:
| I quite like the fragility of it, it makes it more apparent
| that everything is transient. In a way I wish the IA had a half
| life on content, that it would decay over time, pages and
| images would be randomly deleted. Little by little it would rot
| and become nothing, a reflection of humanity.
|
| I suppose that's the internet itself...
| 627467 wrote:
| > everything is transient
|
| I agree. Permanence should be tied to individual wills, not
| collective inertia. If you want a permanent thing, work for
| it, host it and publicize it
| PKop wrote:
| Sort of describing entropy yes? All things will decay
| unless external energy is continually applied to the system
| to maintain an ordered state.
| andybak wrote:
| Every future historian is hissing at you right now.
|
| So much of the past is completely opaque to us because of
| decay, intentional destruction and lack of interest. I
| think there's a moral imperative to preserve.
| samwillis wrote:
| Things that are important to society will naturally be
| preserved. I believe in the moral right to be forgotten.
|
| We cannot, and should not, preserve all of knowledge
| forever.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I love the internet archive, and the
| team behind it are incredible. As a resource it's very
| important to maintain and preserve. However, I'm sure
| that at some point, either due to the economics of it or
| through hardware failure, the content saved by the AI
| will begin to be lost. I don't see that as a bad thing.
| user_7832 wrote:
| If someone requests for their content to be deleted, IIRC
| the IA does it. In other cases however I don't see the
| need to remove old(er) content. Particularly also because
| older content/webpages were far lighter than modern
| equivalents - you may need to delete 10 or even 100 old
| website archives to store one new one.
|
| Decay is natural, but so is the human/animal urge to stop
| it.
| drsopp wrote:
| Yes. Both content but also the technology to display this
| content. I put this on my personal web page 21 years ago:
|
| http://trondal.com/magisk/magic.html
|
| At the time (or maybe a few years before), clicking this
| button would show a dropdown menu linking to a bunch of web
| pages. Now, the button doesn't work anymore and I think
| most of the links go to missing content.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Feels like tracking an old friend down to their tombstone.
|
| I did this yesterday. He went in 2016.
| therein wrote:
| Definitely feels incomplete. It should at least make an attempt
| to capture videos from the crawl. It feels like it does less
| than what yt-dlp would do if given that URL.
| Chinjut wrote:
| How did people hunting for the origin of this image discover the
| random niche website preserved by the Internet Archive that this
| image happened to come from?
| msephton wrote:
| The original URL of the photo was actually found on Twitter,
| where it had been posted in 2011. Wayback Machine was used only
| for the final confirmation. It's curious that this is not
| mentioned in the article, but I suppose it ruins the narrative.
|
| I read about the whole thing last week at 404media, via waxy
| blog, which is a much more comprehensive article:
| https://archive.is/sj846
| oooyay wrote:
| That is actually kinda fascinating given that it's directly
| in opposition to this blog post. I wonder who's telling the
| truth?
| Zambyte wrote:
| The legend lives on :)
| msephton wrote:
| The people who found it are telling the truth. The trail of
| discovery was 4chan then Twitter then Wayback Machine.
| beastoftheweast wrote:
| Up until last month, the earliest known post/repost of the
| Backrooms image was an archived 4chan post from 2018, but it
| was believed to have been taken in 2012 or earlier based on the
| filename. So people have been looking for earlier posts/reposts
| of the image for years in an effort to uncover its origin.
|
| During the recent successful search, the searchers trawled
| 4chan archives for early-2010s posts with similar image
| metadata to the 2018 Backrooms image copy. These archives were
| missing the original image files and thumbnails, but still
| retained some image metadata that could be filtered on
| (dimensions, image file md5s etc.) One of the searchers came up
| with a list of posts which might have originally included the
| image file, based on image metadata and context. Another
| searcher plugged the image md5 of one of these candidate posts
| (an April 2011 post recently added to an archive) into other
| archives, and hit on a post with a thumbnail matching the
| original Backrooms image from March 2011. At this point they'd
| finally found an earlier copy of the image, after years of
| searching.
|
| Soon after, one of the searchers plugged the filename of the
| March 2011 post into Twitter's search, and came up with a post
| from 2019 which included the physical address and a link to the
| image source (this Twitter user had already found the source
| before the search had really begun, but it had gone unremarked
| upon at the time). The website had been replaced with blogspam
| in the interim. A searcher plugged this domain into
| waybackmachine and found a page with the image and a full
| explanation (it was taken during the renovation of a commercial
| property in Wisconsin).
|
| Post from one of the searchers here:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/backrooms/comments/1d3pkif/how_the_...
| temporarely wrote:
| this poor guy keeps getting ignored. here is the tweet
| https://x.com/rkfg_me/status/1130028610700664832
| Thorentis wrote:
| Wait so, the Internet Archive was not involved at all in
| finding the original, but since the image exists in the
| archive, IA have written a blog post claiming to be crucial
| to its discovery? Seems like taking credit for something they
| didn't do to be honest. They didn't even mention the Tweet in
| the blog post which was essential to finding the image, which
| makes me think they want that part overlooked.
| msephton wrote:
| I think it's part of the recent trend to not mention
| Twitter/X because of its owner.
| radicality wrote:
| I didn't read the details of how they did it, but it would be
| cool if the Internet Archive exposed some kind of image hash /
| perceptual hash / similarity metric database, so that this task
| could have been a quick lookup in such a database.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| There's actually a wonderful little mini-doc on YouTube that
| just came out the other day, produced by one of the people
| involved in the sleuthing:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1EKIIM3ShI
| cdchn wrote:
| Almost all good memes seem to be extracted from some random
| niche website.
| textfiles wrote:
| See you all in the backrooms
| textfiles wrote:
| Anyway, I'm sorry if some people are reading this hastily
| written blog entry to seem like the archive is taking credit
| for the process of discovery being done by people. The phrase
| likely does not mean definitely and perhaps I should have used
| a different word when I wrote the entry. But the fact remains
| that the wayback machine is the only place you can see the
| image in the context of its original website, and that is only
| happening because the archive is doing such a general crawl.
| That's all I wanted to get across, all hail the wayback
| machine, have a great day.
| boustrophedon wrote:
| Thanks for writing the blogpost! I think it's perfectly valid
| as a fun demonstration of the utility of the wayback machine.
| Use wrote:
| Gotta love the found footage videos' photorealism and camera
| effects too. One of the reasons why a "retro" motif is commonly
| seen in these videos is to make it more convincing.
|
| What found footage video do you assume to be most convincing? And
| how do you think photorealistic found footage videos will be made
| in the future?
| maximus_prime wrote:
| Adding those imperfections to the video in post allows your
| brain to fill in the blanks and make it look more realistic. If
| it were a 4K video the CGI would be a lot more noticeable.
|
| I think the retro look will probably stay as I feel it's part
| of the aesthetic. But maybe in the future we'll have backrooms-
| style videos of the current times, and then I imagine the
| retro/vintage aesthetic will go away.
| Use wrote:
| How do you think CGI for photorealistic found footage would
| be optimized? What new methods might be used?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-06-08 23:00 UTC)