while i was goofing around with #globalTalk, I ended up searching for some old Simpsons icons for my classic Macintosh (an LC 475), and stumbled upon an entry on the garden called Banned Simpsons Icons. (Who could resist downloading something with a title like that?)
They were called the "Banned Simpsons Icons" because Fox once sent the artist - Jeanette Foshee - a cease & desist letter for her uncannily perfect renderings of the copyrighted characters. they planned on suing her for every penny she made ($0.00) on them. this was back in 1995.
i thought - hell, what a wild story. why don't I get a hold of the artist - jeanette - and find out more about her banned icon set?
what i stumbled upon broke my heart, and i ended up spending a week digitally preserving what i could find.
@vga256 good share and thank you for what you do. Preserving that old school Internet is important. Very sad that she passed away so young and before her mother. I wonder what it could have been from?
@Flamekebab sometimes i see people who just - disappear - after a certain point in their lives. they turn inwards and never quite re-emerge, and their best/only memories are all of times 20-30 years earlier. even jeanette's own home page doesn't cover her life after university.
@vga256 that's a sad story, but thank you for taking the time to write it up! It frustrates me that companies like Google are all too happy to destroy internet history. I've tried recently to go back and find old sites I had in the 90s and 2000s, and there's a lot that's missing on The Internet Archive, unfortunately. I wish I kept better backups.
@vga256 that’s sad and sweet and horrible at the same time.
And it’s pages like this one I miss — though that it still said „tired of being alone“ when she died may show that our pages of old often did not work as people needed. Which may be why social media captures so many more people.
@ArneBab that's a good point. at the same time i have never seen any social media post quite as intimate as her homepage. i really get the feeling that i'm seeing her for who she is, rather than who she wants to be seen as. that's what i miss about homepages.
Though bilingual parts are less structured than before. On old websites I had actual parts split by language. Now I mostly have some articles in German, some in English, and I collect the most important ones in sections by language. That means that it is necessary for readers to ignore the parts in languages they don’t understand.
Also I have to start creating link-lists of other pages again. Currently all I have is “important articles elsewhere” and lists of links per topic.
@ArneBab sounds perfect to me. any amount of translation is very much appreciated - autotranslate in Safari produces some rather ah “poetic” english from german
@ArneBab you’re right. it’s interesting that they didn’t. i’ve had plenty of e-mails about my homepages over the years, but none of them resulted in long lasting friendships. there is ONE exception to that - for me at least - blogs. I ended up having a few 15+ year friendships out of the mid 2000s blogging era. i guess those would be considered social media now - but at the time they felt more like homepages :)
@vga256 Actually social media also did not lead to long-lasting friendships for me (also not today), but I know it’s different for others. They rather led to me finding interesting people, and friendships started on other platforms I found that way.
@vga256 Lurleen Lumpkin had an episode all her own where Homer was her manager. She appeared as a washed up former star in a later episode where she delivered what was likely her best line; "I spent last night in a ditch."
@vga256 Reading her interests on her "are you my dude" page, I'm like, damn girl, I woulda had lively conversations long into the night with you! 53 is so young to have passed. I never knew her but this webpage offers a glimpse of her sense of humor and joie de vivre and I think the world is poorer without her in it. I even went and read her blog. There's something sad about these digital remmants of people that pass. So many are on cloud services that you know will wipe them eventually. They, like all of us, are on borrowed time, so intentional preservation like yours feels like a small but significant middle finger to entropy, loss, and grief. She was here, she was real, and as long as your server and my memories persist, she'll stay that way a bit longer.
@90sScriptKiddiw she sure seemed like a very special person, just judging by what and how she wrote. i really regret that i only learned of her this week - she seems like the kind of person that would have made a great friend 🙏
@vga256 A sad story. It's a shame how ephemeral people's website's are, but then I suppose that's the nature of life. Great work giving this one some more time online.
@Charles@vga256 we had them on the hard drive icons for the Macs at the student newspaper. I remember the computers were named things like "Mr Burns" and "Lurleen Lumpkin".
This is the first I'd heard that Fox actually tried to get them wiped from the Internet. That is so stupid. I'm glad they failed.
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