When i was younger i used to watch little machinimas, movies made through game engines, one that specifically squats in my mind (and has done for nigh on a decade) used Naruto opening music, now, most of these really amateur works were probably made with kids about my age using camcorder footage and windows movie maker, stuff like this:

Which to nine year old me, was some of the coolest, most interesting shit out there, it was like somebody had animated the fun stories i made up in my head about crash bandicoot being in the internet as depicted on futurama, just crazy mishmashs of everything, i fell in love with them, i started watching other machinima, most of which was absolutely terrible but captivated me anyway, that year, the guy making these got better at his craft, and by the end of it, he'd make this:

Wherein he actually hacked the game, so Mario was a pokemon, and Rotom, a pokemon from the newest games was transplanted back in time 5 years, and it blew me away, i wanted to know more, for the first time i saw games not as some incredible thing that came fully formed, but these equally incredible, lurching machines, built by teams, like a crane, straining under weight, swaying in the breeze, they were digital, physical things, and the ambient desire to become a game developer calcified, i'm studying computer science because of the long trail watching these videos as a 9 year old led me on, hell, this:

Probably led to my interest in history, so why am i wasting your time on this? Well for one thing you're reading some rando's post on some obscure personal website so fuck off and stop pretending either of us have anything better to do, I'm writing this because so much of this is gone, the wrath of the ice god video? Original uploader's gone, apparently hacked, it's only available in reuploads, all your history? Ditto, reupload only, the network that uploaded hundreds of these videos, Machinima on YouTube has been completely surpassed by changing monetization and a changing internet, the machinima series with the Naruto music? gone, completely, i haven't been able to find it, something that wasapretty big part of my life for what felt like years is gone forever, and only my fallible memory of it remains.

There's a quote i really like about this by Felix Biederman, in reference to the mainstreaming and perceived decline of MMA fighting, "This will be the fate of everything you love", and man, i loved this little flicker ofcreativity, and as my politics have changed over the years, this is what i want, i don't want flickering lights and big expensive productions, i don't wantbig marvel movies, capital has invaded the internet, and these are the burned homes left behind, for a brief moment, the dream was here, a world that transcended the physical, that linked people, and now it's all gone, and kids these days will never even know it was there.

And that's a big sad, isn't it, time keeps flowing, things keep changing, the frontiers are closed upon, everything obscure and niche and personal and bad either gets washed away into the void or becomes mainstream and just tolerated, it's something that exists, i generally don't like fandom in it's modern form because it feels removed from actually enjoying things and becomes an excuse for community in an increasingly atomized world (which, for the record, i don't blame people for doing that), but at least 'fandom' hsa some passion, has some blood, prior to youtube's large scale monetization, people made interesting, funny, informative, and strange videos, kids made small romhacks with simple, silly stories to tell about Mario fighting gods, there was a sense of equality, that anyone could do this.

Writing this post i looked up Youtube's old slogan: 'Broadcast yourself' and didn't find a lot of raging against the dying of the light as they slowly removed it (see also: 'don't be evil'), and that's a damn shame, i wonder how much of the new web3 stuff is an attempt to reacapture this time, of small flickers of creativity, of small sites, the time before the internet became a structure that for most people facilitated access to 4 megasites, endlessly regurgitating content between themselves, all a lie of course, increasing monetization of the internet got us to this point, it'd be idiotic to assume that what was missing, and caused the decline of this shangri-la was the fact that it didn't have even more finance lizards running the damn thing.

yet again, maybe this is just nostalgia, i was either 9 or younger (i believe the show may have come out in 2008, but due to the original uploads being gone, i can't confirm this), and to a 9 year old, everything is new and fascinating.

Goodbye 2009, i hardly knew ye.