Twelve Years On The Web

I've personally been here longer. This is an observation about other things I've noticed around the web.

Last Friday night was the last Zipperfish Live show that was officially titled as such. Starting in the next week or so, it's going to be called something else. I'll give specifics later, when I actually see for myself what's actually to come.

But that got me to thinking. It seems like a lot of the sites I've followed in my little more than fifteen years on the Web seem to top out at only a dozen years or so. There was this site based around Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan fiction, that went dark in 2004. My understanding is that it started sometime in the mid 1990s when MST3k was still on the air and the Web was young. This WSN9, as we called it, may have only lasted ten years, tops, but it was a fun site with lots of interesting fan fiction, albeit from one show.

There was another MST fan fiction site called Everything What Is Crap, or EWIC for short, that was active for a dozen years before the owners decided to finally stop updating it a couple years back. It seems to be down for something of a move at present, but that's to be expected, I guess.

And then there's a site dedicated to a cartoon character called Minerva Mink. It went down about a week ago after a dozen years of hosting a message board and a ton and a fucking half of fan art based around the character. It was a fun site while it lasted, but it's gone now.

Those are the ones that are gone now, seemingly for good. There's one near and dear to me that's still around after a decade. It's called ZipperFish. From what I understand, sometime in the next week or so, it'll be undergoing a slight rebranding, where it's going to be all stuff created by the site owner over the last ten years or so. That's a cool thing, I think. He does some cool stuff, and it'll be good to see it showcased again, like it has been in the past.

The same guy's also starting another site where he's going to do new video stuff. Based on what he said in his show, it sounds like he's going to come up with with a good variety of stuff. The range will be from news and current events to personal opinion and rants.

What I like the most about the announcement is that in a way, I guess I'm part of the inspiration for this coming change. Recently, I tweeted a YouTube vid from a guy named John Basedow, Turns out, Mr. Basedow's recent video about Jessica Simpson inspired this buddy of mine to shake things up in his online life again. I'm quite pleased with myself for having been a small part of this change.

All in all, I think this is going to be a good change for a lot of people. I can only hope I'm one of them.