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Future Blues – Emily's Cowboy Bebop Page (1999)
- 1MachineElf 3y agoWhen MySpace was popular, you could sometimes stumble upon profiles that looked like this. MySpace's HTML/CSS customization was a great feature.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoIt was the gateway to a career in software for several people that I know. It's a pity we don't trust users with freedom like that anymore.
- simulo 3y agoIndeed! Great article on that: https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2019/01/30/html-css-and-our-vanishing-industry-entry-points/ https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2019/01/30/html-css-and-... "many of us without a computer science background are here because of the ease of starting to write HTML and CSS."
- 1MachineElf 3y agoYes! Back in high school, one of the most impressive MySpace profiles I ever encountered was by a peer who went on to build Lil Wayne's website.
- hulahoof 3y agoI've always thought if myspace had .js support we would have an army of quite diverse programmers. Some of the girls from my school were absolute guns at myspace profiles! Put me to shame :) I myself got started from neopets and then myspace to foster my interest in a career (with a healthy bit of WoW botting).
- menzoic 3y agoThis reminds me of the flash sites
- dagorenouf 3y agoCongrats on the site creator for continuing to update it after all these years.
- kleiba 3y agoWhy is this on here? Sorry, I'm missing the context.
- tm2t 3y agoJust thought it was interesting—from a design and content perspective—as the site hasn't changed much since 1999 and it still feels like “ye ol' web”.
- aikinai 3y agoI appreciated the intent right away. Thanks for sharing.
- Brian_K_White 3y agoYes, a fine specimen.
- kerkeslager 3y agoBut how will we ever monetize this!? /s
- kleiba 3y agoAh, okay thanks for clarifying! I thought perhaps there's some special significance to this site that I wasn't aware of.
- Kamq 3y ago1. This is a site for weird internet nerds, which has a healthy overlap with people who like cowboy bebop. 2. The site is an excellent example of a small web 1.0 site run by a single person. This is a (possibly a painful) reminder for some that the web doesn't have to be SEO optimized corporate BS, and of a time when the internet was full of wonder and the possibilities seemed endless.
- pmarin 3y agoFan made websites were very popular in the nineties. This one is really well made and recently updated which is really cool. This particular anime has also a cult follwing in the west.
- jasoneckert 3y agoAside from the Cowboy Bebop nostalgia hit, this site is a great example of how clear, creative, and fun sites were in the late 1990s. While I struggle to identify the many reasons why I think sites looked better back then, I think being simple and content focused are two of them.
- esrauch 3y agoSites mostly didn't look this good though, they were even more garish colors and 'under construction' banners
- Bluecobra 3y agoGuilty as charged. Also don’t forget about frames, marquee text, and that smoking skeleton wearing sunglasses gif. :)
- kitsunesoba 3y agoFrames were quite useful at times, though, particularly for sites that acted as a directory of other sites. With how slow dialup could be it was sometimes nice to have the list of sites you might want to visit in a compact list frame to the left so you didn’t have to hit back 5 times to get back to the directory or juggle multiple windows (because tabs didn’t yet exist).
- frob 3y agoFrames were a great way to keep around nav before the sticky css attribute. However, they were horrible for linking.
- berkle4455 3y agoFrames were the OG SPA
- JasserInicide 3y agoThis is a great example of classic graphics design (at least I'm guessing she probably had some training in it) being directly translated to the web. It's just an image made entirely in Photoshop and the space for the links are carved there. Photoshop-designed websites definitely peaked in the early 2000s. Nowadays you'd be wild to start with PS for designing a website.
- omneity 3y agoA beautiful site. It looks itself like a comic/anime.
- barroomhero 3y agoWith updates dating back to 1999! https://futureblues.com/what.shtml https://futureblues.com/what.shtml
- bhaney 3y agoI'm more impressed that the updates continue to 2021
- aaronharnly 3y agoAnd the guestbook is still live and astonishingly empty of spam!
- mhd 3y agoAnd it's actually a service that still operates, does GDPR, anti-spam etc.
- kurthr 3y agoThe first is March of 1999, but the most recent are about the live action release at the end of 2021, and there's some developments for most of the 20 years in between!
- ta8903 3y agoIt's funny how the site kept getting regular updates but stopped right in the middle of the owner watching the Netflix adaptation.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoI’m into a casual fan and it was rough to try and watch the first episode. They could’ve made that contrast of high and low budget simultaneously work, if it wasn’t for the extreme miscasting and needless changes. I can only imagine what a super fan would’ve thought.
- 3y ago
- swayvil 3y agoCB delivered a truly potent and high-quality vibe-in-the-round. A fully featured artifact. Best modern equivalent: Chainsaw Man.
- kokonoko 3y agoChainsaw Man is wasted potential. Feels very wrong directly comparing these two.
- dclowd9901 3y agoHuh I hadn’t thought of comparing the two, but I think you’re onto something. I’d always equated chainsaw man with FLCL, due to the similar themes of chaos, beauty and youth nihilism
- HopenHeyHi 3y agoWhenever Bebop comes up it hits right in the feels. The future sure panned out different than how I imagined it would be when I was a kid staying up late watching this timeless classic. At the time I just thought it was cool and conceptual, never realizing how much the vibes were on point. I get it now. See You Space Cowboy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03qBqP2I4p8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03qBqP2I4p8
- ajmurmann 3y agoI feel we are getting closer and closer to a cyberpunk future, but without all the stuff that made it cool.
- pastacacioepepe 3y agoDystopias aren't that fun to actually live in.
- ajmurmann 3y agoI'd prefer many aspects of cyberpunk fiction that we didn't get. Our "cyberdecks" turned out smaller and more omnipresent than in fiction. They are also much more locked down and nobody is hacking anything with them. They ended up mostly attention control machines for the corpos. We didn't get impressive cities with mega buildings/arcologies but instead more sprawl of cookie-cutter town houses. No steamy backalleys in which to eat ramen under neon lights.
- pastacacioepepe 3y ago> We didn't get impressive cities with mega buildings/arcologies but instead more sprawl of cookie-cutter town houses. No steamy backalleys in which to eat ramen under neon lights. Haven't visited myself but Asian metropolises should be much closer to the cyberpunk vibe you're looking for. I also really like the vibe but wonder how happy would I be actually living in it.
- Avicebron 3y agoI'm personally offended this isn't a hugo site with firaCode font and hash marks denoting blog items about rust, this is 2023, have some class.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- EvanAnderson 3y agoThe second domain I ever registered was for my ex-wife’s cartoon fan site for a particular Disney cartoon series back in ‘98. Her drive to digitize stills from the show and write character bios and episode summaries was something I never understood, but she was certainly dedicated. I’d imagine all of that kind of compulsion ends up on Wikia sites and such today, but back then it was do-it-yourself. She was writing HTML in Notepad, making graphics in Paint Shop Pro, and uploading to the shared hosting site w/ FTP. (Had she kept it going into the 2000’s I’d imagine she would have gotten a cease-and-desist from Disney.)
- simplicio 3y agoI remember in the early wikipedia days, Jimmy Wales complaining (in a good natured way) how a bunch of anime series had more pages devoted to them on wikipedia then World War II.
- whstl 3y agoI'm not sure how good natured it was. Eventually Jimmy founded Wikia/Fandom.com and later a lot of well-sourced fiction-work pages was expelled from Wikipedia, with Wikipedia admins (or whatever they are) bullying people into moving content to Fandom, in deletion discussions. Some remain due to some people putting up long fights. The difference in quality from the content we had in the 2000s in Wikipedia to the content we have today in Wikia/Fandom is abysmal. No sources, bad categorized, terrible interface. This was terrible for the internet. I never particularly cared about those articles, but Fandom.com is such a terrible website that this whole move made me vow to never donate to Wikipedia or to anything involving Jimmy Wales ever again.
- voz_ 3y agoThis is a huge issue with Wikipedia. The “importance” bar is silly when a page is basically free to host. Yet, despite this, they often remove or delete articles because they do not deem it worthy of an encyclopedia. I never understood this - it’s not a physical tome. If the knowledge is well sourced who cares what it’s about?
- arepublicadoceu 3y agoHa, this remind me of a time when I did google(?) searches to find specialized sites of RPGs, Anime, etc. Every site was different and had a sense of wonder and discovery associated to it. Back then, I used to go to page 10 of my search engine and still find interesting gems. Nowadays days I just append “site:reddit.com” to try to dodge the SEO fulled blogspam hell, gobble the information and move on with my day.
- mhd 3y ago> Ha, this remind me of a time when I did google(?) searches to find specialized sites of RPGs, Anime, etc. I still think fondly of browsing lspace.org (Discworld) and the Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5.
- Steuard 3y agoOh, man, the Lurker's Guide was just such a fantastically good site. Organized, comprehensive, solidly good look: great stuff! I feel like it's often harder to find high-quality focuses resources like this at this point. I'm not sure whether that's because people have stopped making them, or whether they're just competing for clicks with exponentially more common (and more SEOified) junky fan-wiki sites, or what. (I still get a steady trickle of traffic to my Tolkien Meta-FAQ (http://tolkien.slimy.com/ http://tolkien.slimy.com/), but I gather that Google tends to de-prioritize sites that aren't being constantly updated.)
- oyashirochama 3y agoA gaming example would be fandom of touhou versus its fan-owned and operated touhouwiki which controls entry of details and has a community that actually cares for checks.
- mgaunard 3y agoNot really 1999, the website references other shows that were released much later.
- LobsterJohnson 3y agoAs soon as I saw the page, I started wondering how Emily designed this effect of the menu merging with the image back then. Turns out it's just cropped images carefully placed together - check the source code yourself. Only then was I able to start noticing the imperfections of this implementation, but it really puts in perspective how our web design has changed over the years.
- jeanlucas 3y agoKeep in mind there weren't many screen resolutions, it was all 4:3
- zwaps 3y agoYeah this is how we used to do it :-)
- matthuggins 3y agoWe also used to use image maps for this kind of thing, at least once that tag became available. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/map https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ma...
- whstl 3y agoI remember some webdesigners specializing in cutting those layouts before there were good tools available. Sure, before that there were image maps, but with cut-up layouts you could do on-hover effects and add small animations here and there. It wasn't exactly useful per se but then again it was done mostly for marketing purposes, to stand out, so it did the job.
- pimlottc 3y agoAnother classic Cowboy Bebop fanpage that's still up is The Jazz Messengers [0], which primarily focuses on all the fantastic music used throughout the series. 0: http://www.jazzmess.com/ http://www.jazzmess.com/
- Bluecobra 3y agoI love fast these old websites load on smartphones and stay in desktop mode.
- cyrialize 3y agoIf you like this site design you should check out neocities! There are many websites on there that have this style: https://neocities.org/browse https://neocities.org/browse.
- pmarin 3y agoWinamp skins! https://futureblues.com/skins.shtml https://futureblues.com/skins.shtml
- stubybubs 3y agoWow, those skins really whip the llama's ass.
- vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago[dead]
- ajmurmann 3y agoWe've had this mentioned here many times before, but if you love these types of pages, make sure to check out https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/. A search engine made for this type of stuff.
- creamyhorror 3y agoI browsed a few random sites[1][2][3] from https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random - it's a nice way to preview many random things. Bookmarked. Seeing these interesting sites makes me wish I could RSS-subscribe to them (or add them on social media, ironically). [1] https://2bit.neocities.org/ https://2bit.neocities.org/ - Zoomer makes impressive faux-'90s webpage. [2] https://annotations.lindylearn.io/ https://annotations.lindylearn.io/ - A collaborative social layer for annotating all webpages. Something I've thought about over the years, and finally run across. [3] https://fed.brid.gy/ https://fed.brid.gy/ - Connects a website to Mastodon/the fediverse, with two-way post flow.
- Giorgi 3y agoTrack 06: Yo pumpkin head - is amazing.
- rubyn00bie 3y agoDamn, this is hitting the feels, makes me want to bring back my cowboy bebop website. I did have the largest multimedia section until a phpBB came through and owned the site and forums. I didn’t have backups at the time and that was all she wrote. Glad to see some of the others are still around.
- mxmbrb 3y agoThe modern internet is deprived of ornamentation in the same way modern architecture is. Tiktok allready upped the speed and made a lot of the established web seem terribly boring. I truly hope that AI generated content is putting the final nail in the coffin and we start to see more creative and individualistic media landscapes thrive again. Hope dies last.
- ryandrake 3y agoThere was an HN article[1] a few weeks ago lamenting how everything looks uniformly boring, beige and average, including houses, cars, fashion, movies, books, and so on. Nobody is doing anything bold or creative anymore. Everything looks like it’s been homogenized down to target some global ISO standard average consumer. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355703
- jstarfish 3y agoOnly in the west. We do not value art or aesthetics; we defund it at every opportunity and now have computers generating approximations of art for consumption from our digital troughs. We're androgynous blobs driving gray cars, eating reconstituted gray McMuck and scrolling through gray websites while living in our gray apartments and planned communities. Kids can't play outside; we paved the green spaces to put in more parking lots. Kids belong in their beige bedrooms anyway. Japan might be to your liking. If you appreciate art, I highly recommend a visit if you need a reminder that creativity and artistic beauty are still alive (in spite of their own homogeneous culture!).
- binjooou 3y agoI think this is why I'm so bored with modern video games - they all look the same - Unreal Engine, lots of same type of foliage and rubble and "background art" everywhere - take a random screenshot from a random aaa game and I couldn't tell one from the other.
- neilv 3y agoI couldn't wait to see a guestbook again... > Error The administrators or owner of this guestbook are not allowed to link the guestbook via HTTPS (SSL) unless they have a premium account. [...] NOTE: If you are still seeing this message after clicking the link above, then you are using a non-default setting or plugin that is causing HTTP links to be upgraded to HTTPS. This is not a standard way of surfing the web. Please change your settings or try with another browser. You will otherwise have problem accessing 20% of all websites. Even the third-party dependency has a nostalgic feel, of some random person with a Perl CGI script running on a beige PC under their desk, who could just do their thing on the Internet, their own way.
- dusted 3y agoI hate it when my browser ignores the protocol part of a link. Then again, gopher and ftp have already become broken in firefox, I guess it's only a matter of time before it's entirely unusable.
- Retr0id 3y agoThe earliest archive.org snapshot, from 2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20020605151248/https://futureblues.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020605151248/https://futureblu... (it appears mostly unchanged!)
- Youden 3y agoDoes anyone know what the author is up to now? I'm curious whether the people who made things like this back then for fun generally ended up in tech or went on to pursue other things and other careers.
- pkdpic 3y agoWow, the amazon links for the mangas still work and some sections have been updated to include reference to the live action netflix monstrosity (which I sincerely enjoyed). Way to go Emily!
- sublinear 3y ago> not allowed to link the guestbook via HTTPS (SSL) unless they have a premium account. Uhh... > you are using a non-default setting or plugin that is causing HTTP links to be upgraded to HTTPS. This is not a standard way of surfing the web. Please change your settings or try with another browser. You will otherwise have problem accessing 20% of all websites. the unencrypted conspiracy continues?... the decryptinati?! /s
- scotty79 3y agoI wonder if someone who just have seen google ad sense back then accurately predicted where it's gonna lead.
- MagicalEmi 3y agoOh, hello. This is my website. I'm Emily. I saw the influx of (nice, thank you!) comments on the guestbook, so I checked to see what was up. Yes, I keep the site running and haven't changed very much about it (mostly out of laziness) but I do periodically update it when something new (music, tv. merch, game, etc)happens. So I guess it is only still being updated because the franchise keeps popping up with random new things over the years. I do still have a lot of unfinished areas of the site that I tell myself I need to get done, but it has been 20+ years now, so you can see how well that's going (I see you, episode summary sections). I designed this for 800x600, lol. I am, frankly, terrified to actually look at the site on my phone. Back then I was really into making anime fan sites, and Bebop had such a nice aesthetic. Anyway, thanks for visiting my site and signing the guestbook. I am equally amazed that my old guestbook service is still operating.
- creamyhorror 3y agoNice header text designs and effects, you're good at Photoshop! We should start a webring on Xoom or Tripod. But seriously, it's nice to see old-school fans still maintain websites independent of the big platforms and social media (Neocities being a recent bright spot). Webrings were a nice community-organic way to navigate to related sites/homepages, and we've lost that to the Social Algorithms feeding us what they think we should see. Bring back Web 1.0 New and Improved, please. The Wild Web.
- pleasejustdont 3y agoSo much of the "good ol' web" has disappeared into oblivion because people couldn't bother keeping their personal home page online after moving onto other interests, and they can't be blame for that. Your website has that "handmade touch" that we took for granted back then and that has completely disappeared from the "modern" web. Stumbling upon your page, one can't help but feel nostalgic about what the web was back then, compared to what it has become. "Back in the days", the web was human. Now it's just a stream of unending, same-looking, ad-infested, seo-optimized noise. Thanks for keeping this site online : it reminds us that another web was possible. P.S : I looked at your other websites, and they all have that nostalgic-retro-looking warm-and-fuzzy-inducing design. I love it !
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- block_dagger 3y agoIt’s time to get everybody and the stuff together! Ready? 3, 2, 1, let’s jam!
- grungydan 3y agoThe evolution of the internet has been straight down since the 90s.
- kingstoned 3y agoFor people who like these kinds of websites, there is a classic search engine: https://wiby.org/ https://wiby.org/
- herodoturtle 3y agoOne thing I love about Cowboy Bebop is how each episode's name matches the genre of the episode's music. It only occurred to me the second time I watched the anime, and it was a whole new experience. A great work of art in more ways than one.
- zzzbra 3y agoholy smoke, she keeps updating it!? did not expect to see content for the live action series
- einpoklum 3y agoA thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
- a01bd76cbe4d9ba 3y agoI suspect this site is even older https://www.spiderfan.org/ https://www.spiderfan.org/ It's a little more up to date but has a similar feel.
- antod 3y agoIt almost feels like I'm reading Wired Magazine back in the mid 90s. Or at least how they imagined the web to be 5yrs later. I mean that in the best possible way.
- chunk_waffle 3y agoI had some of those Winamp skins back in the day! https://futureblues.com/skins.shtml https://futureblues.com/skins.shtml
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- rchaud 3y agoA website like this brings me back to my teen years of exploring fansites for X-files and other shows. It's like visiting a homestead property. Platforms like Wikia and Fandom turned that culture into an industrialized, ad-ridden hellscape.