[HN Gopher] The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
___________________________________________________________________
The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
Author : passing
Score : 676 points
Date : 2024-06-08 15:17 UTC (1 days 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| outdated phone image numbering schema.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
| zerocrates wrote:
| The Cybershot is a point-and-shoot digital camera, not a
| phone. Though Android does still use the DCIM folder, that
| whole basic structure, for compatibility with things that are
| looking for photos on drives, SD cards, etc. I think Sony
| phones even still use the DSC filename prefix for their
| photos.
| asmor wrote:
| Maybe you want to re-confirm that. In the late 2000s Sony
| Ericsson had a line of phones that had a focus on (then)
| high end integrated cameras called the C-Series, the C
| standing for Cybershot.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| The photo was taken in the early 2000s though!
| IndrekR wrote:
| It seems there is actual standard behind it: https://en.wik
| ipedia.org/wiki/Design_rule_for_Camera_File_sy...
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| If we're going there, we may as well mention Portal which
| predates Stanley Parable by 6 years, and features liminal
| spaces with the same eerie feel - in the game, you wake
| up trapped in an abandoned laboratory that seems to go on
| forever, which on its own hits the liminal notes a bit,
| and then you suddenly find yourself breaking out into
| service corridors and navigating the backrooms of the
| facility. Portal 2 (two years before TSP) continues that
| theme, though I feel it overdid the scale a bit, to the
| point of breaking suspension of disbelief.
| 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).
| all2 wrote:
| > I have asked around but haven't had anyone confirm having
| similar dreams.
|
| Well.
|
| I dream of several specific places that I have never been.
| One is a group of buildings featuring 3 or 4 bay garages in
| the desert, think New Mexico flatlands. The buildings are
| typical corrugated steel siding and roofing, painted in a
| light grey and surrounded by 10 foot barbed wire chain-link
| fences. It is always sunny and the heat is near unbearable.
| Sometimes there are men with large trucks outfitted in a
| post-apocalyptic manner. Sometimes there is no one at all.
| I always have the sense that the undead are nearby and that
| I need to be very, very careful.
|
| This is one place that I come back to regularly. There are
| others that I don't recall as clearly.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| I frequently have dreams where buildings from my past have
| rooms which have doors opening to corridors opening to
| rooms endlessly like a labyrinth. Also often populated,
| mostly some sort of school or shelter building. They spark
| fascination and a sense of infinite exploration rather than
| terror. I vaguely remember I knew the source of them (some
| sort of escape fantasy?) in my childhood.
| 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.
| houseplant wrote:
| I've been fascinated by the genre of creepy "liminal space"
| pictures for ages because the universal nature of how
| offputting they are seems to transcend a lot of cultural
| barriers
|
| I think that it actually boils down to a very deep seeded
| similar animalistic fear all of us have: the agoraphobic open
| spaces with no place to hide, lack of furniture or shelving
| to hide behind either, unreliable lighting with stark shadows
| that could hide danger, no windows or inability to judge the
| passage of time or ostensibly escape through. They're always
| desolate with no people around, and what's more, evidence
| that nobody's been through in ages so you can't even hope to
| stumble upon anyone. Abandoned places, dangerous decrepit old
| buildings, places too large to count on passing by another
| person, places abandoned at night because people have left.
|
| In the end, you feel trapped like a rat in a shoebox with
| nowhere to go. If something trying to get you appeared, you'd
| have no options to run or fight back, and nobody to call out
| to for help.
|
| one of my favourite series of images were of an american
| suburb, rows of identical houses with fences, far apart from
| each other so interaction with neighbours was minimal, short
| little trees, so everything is exposed. Because the
| construction was so new, nobody had moved in yet, so there
| were no cars, no lit up windows, absolutely no life. In lieu
| of walls keeping you trapped, the sheer size was the
| isolating factor: you could run away for 10 minutes and get
| nowhere.
| Jordan-117 wrote:
| You might enjoy Vivarium if you haven't seen it already.
| 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.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Or a fourth. The world is filled with a myriad of people,
| and we all have weird hobbies and drives. I can see an
| 'artistic type' of person, seeing an image and thinking
| "Oh, that's grungy" or some other label to the room/etc.
|
| And "collecting" it. EG, saving it.
|
| Some people will stare at live ants for hours, others
| collect rocks. I can imagine a person out of billions,
| liking "weird, musty rooms" or some such.
|
| But who knows, heh.
| 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
| msephton wrote:
| The discussion is about Wayback Machine rather than the
| link you suggest.
| 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.
| bbarnett wrote:
| This seems very unfair. There's absolutely no point,
| anywhere in that IA blog post, that says "We found it".
| Anywhere! They're just _providing information_ on the
| history of the file, from _their archives_ , and detail
| into why it's an amusing story.
|
| They even say
|
| _Naturally, as news of the Backrooms being "found" travels
| throughout the world, responses have wildly ranged. For
| some, this is a proof that "with enough eyeballs, all
| problems are shallow"._
|
| How is that taking credit?
| joenot443 wrote:
| I think it's usually pretty customary to attribute the
| original source if you're going to write an exposition.
| They go through enough work explaining exactly the
| location of the furniture store, you'd think they'd have
| the courtesy to link to the tweet which actually made the
| discovery.
|
| As has been pointed out though, IA has a pretty tenuous
| relationship with the Musk/chan adjacent parts of the
| internet, so it doesn't surprise me they deliberately
| left those facts out.
| 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.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Any evidence for this or just mentioning it because you
| can?
| chuckadams wrote:
| I try to not mention Xitter because I just want it to go
| away. It was terrible as a conversation format before,
| and it's completely unusable now. Oh yeah, the owner is a
| raging douchecanoe too. But mostly it's just broken.
| bbarnett wrote:
| They most certainly did not take credit, where did you see
| that?! I think this accusation is unfair.
|
| In fact they say _For some, this is a proof that "with
| enough eyeballs, all problems are shallow"._ That doesn 't
| sound like "we solved it!".
|
| Instead, they're using this to highlight how vital archives
| are. It's a valid point, and there's nothing I see wrong
| with it.
| 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.
| Mr_Minderbinder wrote:
| I have often thought that it would be nice if the Wayback
| Machine had a reverse image search feature.
| 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.
| cal85 wrote:
| I found the article very interesting and didn't for one
| second feel the author was 'taking credit' in any way. A few
| unreasonable critics are a good signal that you wrote
| something that was widely read and enjoyed. They're not
| representative, they just comment a lot.
| 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?
| houseplant wrote:
| everyone says the Kanepixels stuff is the best, but in my
| opinion, establishing a lore and a story with this big
| corporate overlord and science fiction stuff was a mistake and
| only erodes the mysterious and malevolent nature of the entire
| thing.
|
| There's a youtube account called "mattstudios" who does his own
| take, and generally spearheaded the "poolrooms" variant of this
| genre, that is far more grounded and tries to present the
| concept from the point of view of an everyday guy who "noclips"
| into it purely by mistake.
|
| for me, this is the best backrooms take, not just for how
| realistic the video artifacts are, but because of how it
| captures just a guy recording something on his handicam in 1997
| and how he'd realistically act:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KenTOGFwLpU
| Jordan-117 wrote:
| Kane's spiritual sequel "The Oldest View" is kind of like
| this.
| WantonQuantum wrote:
| " However the original, anonymous user stumbled onto this
| photograph, it appears it was taken from either the Wayback
| directly, or the Wayback Machine crawled the same site the user
| had found, and kept that webpage's preservation for over 20
| years."
|
| Something people used to do is to use search engines to find
| images with file names that indicate they were from a digital
| camera. You could find all sorts of interesting photos that
| people had uploaded to share with their friends not realising
| that search engines would index them.
| houseplant wrote:
| I recall a thread years and years ago about a guy who found an
| abandoned digital camera in the woods, only to take it home and
| extract the photos from its SD card, and as everyone poured
| over them, they began noticing odd figures in the trees and so
| on.
|
| That's the kind of fun group activity I love about these
| mysterious things
| throwaway2046 wrote:
| Got a link to those photos? Sounds like an interesting story,
| whether true or not.
| marzetti wrote:
| https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/I_Found_a_Digital_Camer
| a...
| de_nied wrote:
| The photos feel like a story being told. Meant to be in
| an almost serial way.
| Loughla wrote:
| Yeah where's that link? That sounds fun.
| dither8 wrote:
| You can actually do this with YouTube. By search for MOV001
| etc.
|
| Mental Outlaw did a video demonstrating this a while ago:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_Ho_KDPi_U
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| Good luck "searching" for anything on YouTube in 2024..
| nextaccountic wrote:
| It's 2024 and need a search engine that doesn't suck
| jhoh wrote:
| https://kagi.com is by far the best out there IMO.
| Bluestein wrote:
| Also:
|
| - http://startpage.com
|
| (Quite the story, that ...)
| password4321 wrote:
| http://astronaut.io/ - YouTube videos that have almost zero
| previous views
|
| 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772
|
| 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13413225
| kubanczyk wrote:
| I expected dumb gameplays and influencers. Somehow zero
| of those. Almost all the random samples have been
| immensely interesting.
| firecall wrote:
| There is a subreddit for Open Directories!
| mikae1 wrote:
| There's an even more fitting (inactive) subreddit for
| filename searches here: https://old.reddit.com/r/IMGXXXX/
|
| Here's a list of prefixes to search for:
| IMG XXXX MVI XXXX MOV XXXX 100 XXXX
| DSC XXXX SAM XXXX HDV XXXX 102APPLE
| IMG XXXX FILEXXXX GOPRXXXX
| Nition wrote:
| There's also the excellent http://astronaut.io, which I
| found via Hacker News. It automatically plays short
| segments from YouTube videos with those default filenames,
| inevitably surfacing a kind of gallery of the mundane: The
| unproduced, untargeted, mostly unwatched, everyday moments
| of real life.
| elaus wrote:
| The amount of (AI generated?) crypto spam is mind
| boggling. Most of the other videos seem to be amateur
| sport events, but the rest contains a few gems of random
| stranger's life :)
| deaddodo wrote:
| I let it scroll through about 30 and didn't see either of
| these. I saw a couple small church services, some random
| snippets of people walking throughout various areas, what
| seemed to be an interview for someone's school project
| and some videos of pets.
| 3abiton wrote:
| This reminds me of opendirectories subreddit. So many random
| stuff.
| deskr wrote:
| Back in the day, searching for "top secret", "highly
| confidential", "for private use only", etc, ... would return
| interesting results.
| codelobe wrote:
| Distinguished seekers also searched: "NOFORN" "EYES ONLY"
| magic_hamster wrote:
| I was sort of expecting an article called "the backrooms of IA"
| to tell me some interesting things about the unseen parts of IA.
| But it's still cool to see where the backrooms image came from.
| Presumably the building is still around and the hobbytown store
| seems to be in business as well.
|
| Some videos I found of the store from 2014 mention it's the
| source of the "backrooms", so maybe this wasn't such a huge
| mystery to some people. Funny how something mundane like a hobby
| store in your town could become a world wide meme phenomenon.
| pfraze wrote:
| You can visit the Internet Archive in SF. It's worth it. They
| use an old church
| PinkMilkshake wrote:
| I _love_ this stuff. Some other greats:
|
| Doot doot: https://youtu.be/ZYcHOEjGzPA?si=_TP90YX-p5PkKdim
|
| Michaelsoft Binbows:
| https://youtu.be/yDzAAjzbV5g?si=A2HTyCM8IU2MJHVQ
| doublerabbit wrote:
| > Michaelsoft Binbows
|
| Freaky, I had never seen the image before. It got posted on a
| Discord server I was on yesterday, and than you go and post a
| YT video. Heh
| m463 wrote:
| These pictures make me think of silicon valley startups,
| especially after the dot-com bubble burst. Offices filled and
| popped, usually leaving trails of rack-mount and cube panel
| screws.
| grishka wrote:
| Why are most of the images missing on that page though?
|
| It's not the first time I notice this -- sometimes some images or
| SWFs or other resources on a page would be just gone, with "hrm,
| the wayback machine hasn't archived this URL" with seemingly no
| rhyme or reason. It's just kinda odd that this article talks
| about finding an image and points you to a page where only 2 out
| of 14 images were preserved without addressing this.
| dmor wrote:
| Immediately made me think of the set for the show Severance
| xanthine wrote:
| This IA article is by the same Jason Scott of
| http://textfiles.com/jason/
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