#lost websites

[eepop-stuffs]

So, because i have a love for media preservation, and recently got a VPN, I figured I could compile some stuff from websites I couldn't visit before, like the Minmie website. The Minmie website is region-locked for the US, so I'm on a Japanese server. I chose Japan because this is a region that I know Minmie products were sold in. Like the Fulla website, it's partially lost. For the same reasons as the Fulla site, too. Ruffle simply can't open a lot of the archived pages. However, because Minmie was smart, we can actually see the home page due to the site not opening on a flash-based loading screen.

Much more after the cut!

This capture is from February of 2006, two years after the site was launched and six before it would be taken down. The 2004 capture's flash elements are inaccessible (but still there!), and for some odd reason the animation of Minmie and her man(?)* on the Vespa is inaccessible on every later capture.

*Edit: It's her brother. I was writing this as I was going along, I had no clue who he was at first😭

That blue part of the background is animated, and the text scrolls. I forgot to capture it in the video I think, but the red mailbox hops up and down when you hover on it.

The top animation seems to restart after a certain amount of time.

The 10 squares at the bottom bring you these images, and they're the same in every capture.

Slightly problematic "Attack Gangster" caption aside...

It's kind of weird how low quality these are, right?? This is the official website. These images literally come directly from the page those squares lead to. Also that last one of the boy character terrifies me. Also....does the seventh image imply that the boy's name is Min and the girl's name is Mie?? It would be hella weird if it did, considering that after the DJ Min image, the name Minmie was exclusively used to describe the girl in merchandising. Because they never used the boy again. I didn't even know he existed until now.

I love Minmie's art style so I'm kind of disturbed by the way male characters look in it-

I find it really interesting the way they draw her jawline sometimes, it's very round. They only seemed to do this in the 2000s, after 2011 she had an exclusively sharp jaw.

It's surprisingly low effort on everything but those little animations and transitions, there. The pages listed on the buttons are inaccessible no matter what capture you're on, although in the October 2008 capture, the "Character" button leads to a different page with content that Ruffle can't run. This is different from the others in which the buttons don't do anything at all when you click on them on the front page's archive. The "mail" option leads to an error page in the 2006 capture, although similar to the Character page, in every other capture it doesn't do anything at all. The "Shop" option leads to a site to purchase the Minmie domain instead of an archive for some reason. The "board" button seems to have lead to either a chat room or image board, but it's not accessible from the main menu and the URL is a swf, which I can't access. There's an "about me" page in the URL tab on the archive, but nothing loads.

HOWEVER!

We still have the site map, and the site map actually gives us the pages the buttons led to.

The shop page looked like this. I don't find it necessary to screenshot all of the options on the menu because all of them are pretty much the same, just with a different title, sometimes a longer page, and different inventory (the photos of which were not archived). Although I think it's very amusing how one of the shop pages is just named "bunch of keys". The "New Product" gif's background would rapidly flash black and white.

Here's the New Product pages (there's two for some reason).

New Product 1

New product 2

Like I said earlier, the pages look mostly the same. Because of this I only screenshotted the pages that had a different layout. Sadly the shop page is the only part archived through the site map.

Now we look to the URL tab. There's several gifs that are unavailable, and while it was also unavailable there's two gifs with the word "avatar" in their titles. This might also be nothing, though. The domain squatting sites were and continue to be archived even after the original site went down, so a majority of the URLs are from those. A lot of the old Minmie files lead to a blank or unavailable screen, however.

But back to what I did find:

There's this strange part of the site I found, and it's a menu with some futuristic graphics. It has a lot of moving parts, and buttons.

I have no clue what any of these lead to, the URLs that have names relating to some of these buttons just lead to the menu, again. The image to the side is blocked, and there's only one date of capture for the three URLS, so for now that's a mystery. I assume the background was a repeating pattern based on the order of the missing images in the back. Green binary over a black background, perhaps?

I found parts of the index page from 2012/11. Any other captures of this iteration of the site are fully unavailable, with many of the assets meeting the same fate as the right image in the futuristic menu page. These are super cute.

The red text is an error message. The catalog has the same layout. I think the most interesting thing about this version of the site is that one of the catalog pages has an option that says "Minmie doll". I would love it if anyone could give me any insight about that.

There's two images here that show the site when it was active during the early 2010s.

Both are from @tmgc's blog.

The 2011/12 site also has Wallpapers listed. They are all unavailable. there's multiple game pages (for both versions of the site, actually) but they both have nothing at all archived.

There's some more from this version of the site, I'll reblog with those images though. There's this huge image gallery of images from several events that I won't be able to fit in here

And now, we have some comic pages! They confirm the boy and girl are named Min and Mie respectively. I refuse to ever give that idea any credibility. I put them in a webtoon-adjacent order for more convenient reading :)

[page 3-6 are missing]

[Pages 9-14 are missing]

I have a feeling I know why these pages in specific were archived...

I'm kind of pissed about this comic??? Like why put Mie all over the marketing and merch and then....do this??? I was wondering why the brand failed so bad and the site died so quick, but now I think I may have my answer? I seriously think the 2010s cutting Min out of the picture was a good thing, if he acted like this.

As stated earlier I'll be reblogging this with more images, specifically from the 2011/2012 version of the website's event image galleries.

[sacrow]

Exploring Forgotten Websites

[nightmarereverie]

Circa 1900, Bat in Flight with the Man in the Moon brooch. Made by Unger Brothers, USA. ❤︎₊ ⊹

[lethal-spaceship]

please more dipcifica i am on my hands and knees 🙏

SIR YES SIR also feel free to give me any dipcifica requests (twirling my hair giggling)

when I got this ask I was like:

[deaddriv]

Translated with permission! Artist on Twitter (@achu_0u0) and original posts.

[dansemacabre]

(tw unreality!)

ayo new theory just dropped and bad news! the implications are cosmically horrifying

in the bulletin from time baby in book of bill, he says bill is a “danger to narrativity”, and that he risks the fourth wall. this kept bothering me. why reference the fourth wall here? why have time baby reference it? yeah the heaven page and shit is a bit meta, but thats just how bill talks, right? Well i was a fool

when you put “seven eyes” into the lost files site, this warning pops up from the oracle question mark? from journal three:

the therapese at the bottom translates to “set coords for dimension: r34lity”.

and putting r34lity into the website gives us this image:

the text below it reads they found a new home. those are “real” fucking images. the henchmaniacs are in our “reality”. the cryptids page might not have been a goof goof bit- they were “real”. (“real” meaning our reality in the book of bill sense of it but still our reality. is that tracking.)

none of the rest of the cast actually references us as a specific audience, or the fandom, or acts like we know them at all. the cast addresses everything they write to a mystery “reader” who needs to be saved from the book’s influence.

meanwhile, in the book of bill:

because bill’s not talking to a mystery “reader” who’s reading this book.

bill fucking sees us.

bill sees reality. REALITY reality. like this earth the one with alex hirsch and gravity falls the show and tiktok and shit. book of bill is a book in our reality for us the reader. (ie. there’s a reference to “they both reached for the gun” if you put gun in the website, which would only make sense if bill was sentient in this “reality” right now.) and someone is trying to get here to hide from him. maybe they’re already here.

[bobauthorman]

Schmeb You Unlocked pages

Scans of images from the Schmeb You Unlocked pages. Sorry about the black line intersecting them, as on the website itself the image were fractured, and I had to reconnect them.

[hyuckonia]

very first 10 seconds of the tsum event and Kalim getting beaned by his tsum and lilia was like "oh guess i wasnt fast enough to stop it myb bro" SHUT UPPPDNAHAAJHA KALIMS SCREAM HAD ME LAUGHING SO HARD I WAS GUNNA CRY whatever i love them so badLMAOOOOO

[jackyjackdraws]

"No way! I like sweaters and writing in my diary too!"

[cozylittleartblog]

also in the face of people deleting their blogs, that's another reason why you guys are supposed to reblog stuff. if somebody deletes a post, your liked version will disappear, but the reblogs remain. i'm insane about preservation and archival, every single piece of art i have ever enjoyed is reblogged on my 450k+ posts main account so if the artists leave I still have their work. i even tag things (though just with the main fandom tag) so I have years and years worth of fanworks saved that the terrible general site search will never show you.

please reblog art. not just to support the artists who make it and share their efforts, but also so you have your own copy of their works saved for yourself, and the future users of this site.

[espighty]

World's Okayest Lobotomite Tshirt Shamura REDRAW. Because it's been bothering me for a while.

[areyoudoingthis]

more than one person asked so i'm making a post about it. i use this program to download torrents (it's safe, no viruses or ads, i've been torrenting for years). and this is the website where i found the ridiculously hd version of ofmd. just type "our flag means death s01" in the searchbar at the top. for s2 you might have to search episode by episode, so "our flag means death s02e01" and so on (i don't know if the season has been uploaded in a single torrent yet, it hadn't been when i downloaded it). then just click the little red magnet symbol that looks like a big U, and it'll ask you if you want to open the link with qbitorrent. click yes, pick a folder to save the episodes in your computer, and have fun (the higher the green number next to the episodes is on the website, the faster the link will download, so if a link doesn't work just pick another one). you can always ask if you get stuck somewhere, i don't mind!

oh btw 2160p is the highest definition available right now so aim for those links, I'll leave them seeding forever

[unhappy-sometimes]

retirement au is up on ao3

one based off this post

i have birthed this creature

she is 11 chapters long

she weighs 22,000 words

i was in labor for three days

please. please im begging you. never let me do this again. gaze upon her beauty.

also i WILL be reblogging/reposting this with art sometime soon because my art posts usually perform better but it is almost 4 am and i wanna sleep

[cdr2002]

Character bios and lore pages from the official Midway website for Mortal Kombat Mythologies Sub-Zero, accessed through the wayback machine. I think this is really important and fascinating information that deserves to be preserved. The detailed character and more info here is great to have

[rotisseries]

planet of love

[iamhereinthebg]

I will never be over the fact that tbhk really takes place in 2015

We know that AidaIro published the first chapter in December 2014

The Yugi Twins were in the 66th Festival in 1968 and the curent present have the 113th Festival.

On this panel, it's written that the 1st of September was a Tuesday. The closest years to the manga airing having this date being either 2009 or 2015.

Bonus:

Which means: the 1st year (Aoi, Akane, Nene) were born in 1999, Teru in 1998 and Kou and Mitsuba in 2000.