The Eggbug Memorial Rotator

Eggbug Memorial Rotator 1: Websites We Have Known and Loved

Welcome to the first issue of our zine, the Eggbug Memorial Rotator!

This was open to submissions from everyone, but the general idea is that one person in the managing group sets a theme and everyone else in the group writes something about it.

The theme this time was set by Calliope: "websites we have known and loved." They were hoping to start things off with a reminder than the Internet is more than just social media sites. Everyone turned in great pieces, and in many cases you can still experience those sites! Callie, who didn't write a piece for this issue, recommends Zombo.com.

Reminiscing on Turntable FM

by moose

Let's Set the Scene

You're in early high school. It's 2010. Smart phones exist, and are becoming popular. They're still pretty new at this point. You're hanging out with some friends, and they suggest you check out this website that allows you and friends to take turns playing music. This is great as you can all listen to the same thing at the same time, and it mixes through all of your songs! You give it a try.

Turntable.fm

Turntable.fm quickly became one of my favorite websites. Not only could I listen to a variety of music, but there was also a chat feature where I could chat to people from across the US! It was a really simple premise - create an account, and either make playlists on the website itself, or import them directly from YouTube. You could then join a queue to DJ. There was a stage and on it there would be 5 DJs, which were basically the next few people in line plus the person whose song was playing currently. If people liked your songs they could give it a thumbs up, and have their avatars dance along. If enough people didn't like your song, it would be skipped. There were different rooms which were typically sorted by music genre.

I used Turntable religiously. Almost every night I'd be home, in bed, supposedly sleeping, but in reality listening to music and chatting with people. I'd stay up extremely late most nights just chatting with strangers. And it was a blast! Listening to music, chatting with people, what a good time. Back then I had to use an iPod touch to join in on the fun, as my parents were slow to get us smartphones. It was funny too, one night I saw my brother in one of the rooms when both of us were supposed to have gone to bed a long time prior. Was one of those things that felt like "oo, neither of us can tell mom but we both know we're doing something we shouldn't".

Social Stories

I made a surprising amount of friends on Turntable, and even more surprising some of them were my age! I'm going to mention some of the more interesting stories below:

Jessi

The first notable person is Jessi. Jessi was someone else who was often on Turntable. We began talking and it turned out we were the exact same age! She lived more in the center of the country, while I lived more on the East Coast, but we were still able to become really good friends. For a while she was one of my closest friends, especially all through high school. Jessi loves traveling, and even flew out to the East Coast to go to prom with me! We still keep in touch here and there, but largely don't talk much anymore.

Danielle

Danielle (or, I think that was her name) was a few grades below me. We started chatting though and it turned out she used to live near me! But had moved away a few years prior. After talking with her a bit though, it turned out she knew someone I went to High School with! They had been really close friends, but had lost contact with each other after the move. I was able to get them reconnected! It made me feel really good about myself that I was able to help them out. This situation was also a great moment of the world feeling small.

The End of Turntable

Turntable eventually shut down, and that was the end of it for me. There were other sites that popped up, and did something similar, but I really didn't transfer much over to them. As I write this, I actually found out Turntable came back under another name. It's now called Deepcut. Might have to check it out again.

Reflection

When I first saw this prompt, I was a bit stumped. No website immediately came to mind, as there aren't many websites that I truly loved (outside of Cohost). I'm on all the standard social media sites - Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Discord, YouTube, etc. But I don't love any of them really. I use them because I want to stay up to date with my friends but... that's it. And I think that's a little... Sad? I spend a lot of time online but there's no place I love to be. What has the internet come to? Do other people have places they love online? As I'm writing this, I'm thinking of some other websites from my childhood. Club Penguin, Runescape. And those sites were fantastic. But does that exist for kids anymore?

It makes me happy that things like this rotator are happening. Cohost opened my eyes to a whole side of the internet I didn't know existed - a side full of people who are passionate about things like making your own website, and connecting those sites, and using the internet without algorithms. And it's honestly awesome. I hope this trend continues outside of just my circle of the internet. I'm doubtful but... maybe. As more and more people get sick of algorithms.

One thought I have as well is how important it is for kids to have a "third place" away from their parents. Where they can be around other people and kids. Now that I'm getting old enough to have kids on my own this... scares me honestly. The idea of my child just on the wide open web, talking with God knows who. But also... I learned so much and formed so many great relationships from being able to talk and interact with people online. I'm not sure how I'll approach this issue when I do become a parent someday.

The best place to find me is on my website. You can see other posts I've made, some tech tutorials, and a bunch of other stuff!

Thanks for reading,
- Moose

Remembering a Softer World

by A Vaudeville Ghost

In the mid-2000s, in the days before the internet consisted of three websites, there was a massive explosion of webcomics. A whole ecosystem developed, with the most successful comics' creators making a living largely by selling merchandise, largely in the form of t-shirts. There were all manner of webcomics, from two-guys-on-a-couch gaming comics, to long-form fantasy stories, to absurd adventures, to nerdy stick figures and the same six panels on endless repeat. It was an exciting time to be online, to see so much cool art from so many different people, all trying to find their niche.

A Softer World always stood out among these, even at first glance. The collaboration between photographer Emily Horne and writer Joey Comeau, the vibe was less online comic and more physical artifact, with Joey's text looking like someone cut out typewriter text and printed it on Emily's photos. There were no characters, as you'd recognize them; the text was not generally meant to be read as dialogue, nor was it necessarily a caption to describe the scene. The photos, too, were not trying to stage a scene. Both were fragments, capturing a moment in time: a feeling, a thought.

I don't remember my first exposure to ASW. I couldn't tell you if I fell in love immediately or bounced off and did something else. Someone else I follow must have linked to it--I thrive on following the connections between creators I love, to find new, interesting things down the line. (This is also how I find most of my music.) And then I clicked through, maybe the first time, maybe several times later, and at some point, I realized that what I had found was something beautiful.

Joey's writing always resonated with me: sometimes poignant, sometimes transgressive, sometimes silly, sometimes macabre, sometimes all of these at once. He has mastered the art of delivering a cutting insight or a clever twist in a handful of words--in many ways, exactly like a haiku master--but he also perfectly captures the spirit of the outsider. All of these comics, all of his short stories and other writing projects, are about someone who doesn't fit in, someone for whom the world we are told we live in doesn't quite make sense. The world is stranger than that. The edges are softer.

I'm no photographer, so I don't really have the language to describe Emily's photography in a way which does it justice, but there is often some unusual framing, some film grain, some level of abstraction: these, too, carry the outsider's spirit. They are brief, and unexpected, and fleeting, the perfect complement to Joey's words.

ASW continued for twelve years before it finally came to a close, after well over a thousand comics--a successful run by any metric. It went out with a big celebration, all beautiful things should: it is important to celebrate what we once had, and to remember. I still go back and read through the archives every now and then, and even now there's always a new treasure to unearth. And I am certain, if you decide to explore those archives after reading this, there will be a treasure waiting there for you, too.

If you liked this essay, you can find more like it at the writer's website, the vaudeville ghost house. If you didn't like it, you can also find things unlike it there, so you really can't lose.

And while I'm not aware of any way to support Emily Horne or of any public projects she has, you can read Joey Comeau's stories on his Patreon for free.

Drop a Bomb On It

by Iro

It might be gauche to talk of Giant Bomb as if it no longer exists. The fact of the matter is that it no longer exists as I once knew and loved it, all those years ago.

What is Giant Bomb? It's a website about video games. The backstory: in the late 00s, noted game journalist and podcaster Jeff Gerstmann was fired from noted game website Gamespot for giving a poor review to Kane & Lynch: Dead Men whilst the site was plastered up and down with advertisements for it. Several other staff members quit in solidarity over the next few months, and eventually they congregated at a new website about video games. The crew already had a strong rapport from the Gamespot days, and this let them experiment with wild and wacky skits and ideas for videos.

Giant Bomb was a comforting constant in my late teens and early 20s. With the main Giant Bombcast on Tuesdays, regular Quick Looks of releases both new and not-so-new, weekly livestreams like Thursday Night Throwdown and the Whiskey Media Happy Hour, and smattering of other one-off videos and reviews, there was a constant stream of - as the kids say - content.

I didn't actually listen to the Giant Bombcast for quite a while; it wasn't what drew me to the site. I've spoken in the past about I played Persona 4, Planescape: Torment, and Fate/Stay Night effectively at the same time, and I'd consider them all formative works (for better or worse). If someone notable had something to say about any of them, I was at least curious what they thought. What Giant Bomb thought was that they would never find the time to play a 100-hour JRPG like Persona 4 normally. The only recourse was to make it part of the job, filming fresh gameplay of it every workday.

Thus began the ever-infamous Endurance Run. In modern parlance, a Blind Video Let's Play.

I was never an actual user of Something Awful or its infamous forums (I did not want to pay the $10 entry fee, and I'd heard plenty of horror stories about the simultaneous arbitrary severity and lack of moderation therein), but what I did and sometimes still do use is the Let's Play archive that pulled almost entirely from SA. I'm absolutely a Let's Play elitist as a result.

I largely want my video LPs to be informative, curated, and produced; that usually means post-commentary, not live commentary. For me to tune into a blind playthrough or a live commentary series, the hosts need to have enough personality to compensate, and even back then I could only listen to so many 20-something white guys quip on mic. 30-something white guys, though? Novel!

At the time, Youtube still had a 10-15 minute upload limit, so most video LPs on the Archive had links that pointed to various now-dead video platforms like Blip.tv or Viddler. The P4 Endurance Run (and really, all of Giant Bomb's content) had the advantage of being hosted on the website itself, allowing the videos to range wildly in length.

In the depths of my own depression and inability to focus, years before I had any idea I had ADHD, Giant Bomb and the Endurance Run were there for me. I would just lay down on the couch with my laptop and binge watch, often falling asleep. The voices of Jeff Gerstmann, Vinny Caravella, Brad Shoemaker, and Ryan Davis became relaxing.

Even to this day, I don't really watch "streamers". I still don't know who Jerma even is. I want something I can pace out (or binge) at my leisure. That's why I like screenshot LPs, because I can blast through them as I will. Sometimes you just need something you can read at a computer screen for three hours by simply mashing spacebar. That's why I'm doing my own silly screenshot LP.

Some people point to the Endurance Run as popularizing the format of the video Let's Play. While I'm not sure I'd quite make that claim myself, Giant Bomb as a whole undeniably has a long shadow. Others can and have spoken on more detail about the site's historical importance to the evolution of the internet, their rise and fall as the original crew splintered off towards their own ventures. But that broad overview wasn't how I knew and loved it.

I did not post on the forums, I barely ever typed anything into stream chats. I was part of the Giant Bomb audience, not its actual community. But most of my other friends were also watching and listening to Giant Bomb at the time. It was a common point of contact that served as proverbial water cooler talk. I think stuff like this is much harder to come by these days without some kind of dedicated effort towards cultivating it. How many Discord friend servers started up a movie night or a party game night during lockdown, if only to maintain contact?

After a friendship breakup, I was once advised that people become friends based on mutual interests but stay friends based on mutual values. For years, Giant Bomb served an important role as a mutual interest. While their videos and podcasts thrived on the parasociality of Hanging With The Boys, they also facilitated some actual Hanging With The Boys. It's not like we did watch parties for any random Quick Look, but tuning in to Unprofessional Fridays, a Mario Party Party, or (my favorite by far) the E3 night-time interviews was a communal experience. I don't even mean in the stream chat, but just on Skype or Discord with my friends.

We still make references and call backs to some of those now ancient bits. Giant Bomb informed my sense of humor, the cadence of my speech, the way I riff on movies or handle being on a podcast myself. When should or shouldn't I speak up with a quip? There are entire genres of dumb bits I make that are inspired by banter on Giant Bomb's Quick Looks.

Giant Bomb has been fully Ship-of-Theseus'd at this point, and while it doesn't invalidate anything the site once did or anything its current incarnation is doing, it does mean the things I went there for aren't there anymore. The decline was slow, inevitable. We all mourned when Ryan Davis passed away. Not to be overly dramatic, but I mourned when Austin Walker left the site to form Waypoint, I mourned when Drew "Blinking White Guy" Scanlon left the site to pursue Cloth Map, I mourned when Red Ventures bought the site and signaled the true beginning of the end.

I knew it and loved it, and now I do neither. I suppose like anybody, I yearn for the simpler days of my youth. At least I'd say I learned a few lessons from those nightmare people and their silly videos across the years:

  1. Companies do not make the things you like; people make the things you like. If you must express some kind of brand loyalty, save it for them.
  2. Unless it's mutually recognized, people you follow on the internet can be friendly with you, but they are not your friends. They do not have your best interests at heart.
  3. Don't announce you're doing something big until you're ready to actually follow through on it in some form.
  4. If putting out consistent regular updates is french fries, then having a back catalog is a sack of potatoes in the pantry. People won't cheer for it, but they'll appreciate it in the lean times.
  5. Let the bit evolve ("yes, and"), but be willing to drop it instantly. Sometimes it's just not funny. Sometimes it will be way funnier when left to cook for a few weeks.
  6. Be a hater, but make the hate a whetstone for your mind rather than a bludgeon wielded against others. It's a wastrel's maneuver to simply declare that something sucks. Learn to articulate how and why you're disappointed with something and acknowledge that not everything is for you.
  7. Nothing lasts forever and nothing is perfect. It's not fair to remember the good times or the bad selectively.

Find Iro here

The Combination Radio and Internet

by pontifus

Shortwave radio, the high-frequency band between the AM stations and the broadcast media people actually care about, is loaded with Christian fascist, survivalist, and other far-right nonsense.

This is a little misleading, or relative, I guess. The Christian stations are restricted to the international broadcast bands, which they have to share with Spanish-language music and news from BBC and NHK. The survivalists are mostly ham operators, hobbyists you aren't that likely to encounter during their limited free time. Otherwise shortwave is used by absolutely everyone, from government personnel to bored truck drivers. The niche fascist garbage bears mentioning for the sake of content warning, though--I won't reproduce it here, but it's floating around at all times. You could reach out and touch it. Shortwave is undeniably a last resort of people too horrible for even the usual outlets.

That said, it's not just a pool everyone's free to piss in. There are various blips and boops. Bear with me.

I'm not a licensed radio operator or otherwise especially interested in radios as synchronous communication devices. I wasn't born with internet, but I discovered chatrooms at about age 9 and knew immediately that I had no time for anything less convenient. Like a lot of radio enthusiasts, I just like listening, but I'm also not a particularly good radio enthusiast in that I don't have a decent radio. The last one I had was cheap, I never tried setting up an antenna for it, and it's broken now anyway.

But this all kind of works out, since maybe the most convenient way to DX in the 2020s is with software-defined radios. They range from $30 USB dongles to chunkier and more expensive boxes, but regardless of form factor and as the name suggests, you plug them into a PC and control them with a desktop app. When I feel like replacing my old busted Radio Shack radio, I can set up something like this, with a device that'd look much more like a portable hard drive than military surplus equipment.

One option is the KiwiSDR, which pairs a radio with a standalone Linux computer that runs the necessary software. It's fairly pricey as far as hobby stuff goes, but you don't need your own; the Kiwi, once set up, is meant to be accessible and operable via the internet, and quite a lot of people will let you use theirs.

Which again raises the question of, what's even worth hearing on the HF band?

Not very much of what I like to listen to on shortwave qualifies as substantive "content." The music's crunchy in an unintentional way and the talk radio is absolutely rancid as described earlier. But maybe, like me, you'll get something out of all the various beacons and things.

You'll find most of the following and many other things labeled above the spectrogram on the Kiwi's OpenWebRX interface, so click around at your leisure.

Numbers stations

Admittedly the thing that got me interested in the broad category of radio oddities. I never claimed to be original. The one you're most likely to run into is probably HM01, broadcast on several frequencies from Cuba, or maybe VC01 from China.

Pirate radio

People do in fact still do this. Usually on weekends, and often in the vicinity of 6900 khz in North America. Just be aware that, while they mostly play music, you could be subjected to basically anything through these. Also note that radio receivers can sometimes guess at a broadcast's point of origin, and in this as in all things it's bad form to be a narc. Dedicated listeners report on pirate broadcasts in real time on forums like HF Underground.

Beacons

Automated HF beacons might be doing any number of things--transmitting weather information, providing data for signal propagation testing, helping fishing boats keep track of their nets, etc. Some are even weird in the way numbers stations are. I just think it's fun to hear some beeps and try to figure out what they might be. And to imagine being a lone buoy in the vast ocean. The HFU forum keeps track of these too.

Weather

VOLMET is a reliable choice if you want to listen to a monotone voice deliver weather information, and while it's most relevant if you're a pilot, I find it kind of relaxing. The US Coast Guard does HF weather broadcasts, and there's also a Bangkok weather station that uses 6765 and 8743 khz, though I've never gotten good reception with that one. If you keep an eye on the amateur bands and are very lucky, you might catch callsign OK1HH from the Czech Republic reporting on space weather in Morse code.

Time stations

I dunno, maybe you want to set your clocks to whatever some government thinks the current time is. Try 7850 khz for CHU or 10000 khz for WWV.

Local AM radio

Not technically shortwave, but often you can still use an SDR to listen to it. 530 to 1700 khz (in the Americas, but it's roughly the same elsewhere), aka the massive red beam obliterating the left side of the spectrogram, is the medium wave band used for AM broadcasting. You may be interested in checking out what's local to whatever radio you're using.

???

You've got low-latency high-frequency trading, which isn't great, but it's interesting and sad that the capitalists will resort even to this. You've got your pips, your geese, and various other sounds military hardware make on purpose or on accident. If you feel like eavesdropping, you've got your choice of air traffic control chatter, maritime communication, and the ISM (industrial, scientific, and medical) bands. Go wild.

I may not be good at radio in the sense of hardware knowledge, but I'm fully into the romance of radio. Not the trappings of professional broadcasting, podcast hosts doing an old-timey radio guy voice and whatever else, and not that kind of disingenuous "free thinking" that can only conceive of an accessible communications network as a bulwark against Biden confiscating our perfect and beautiful guns. What I mean is people talking into or doing work with individual-scale devices made for the specific use case of blasting messages through the air. This is a whole domain of human activity, a lot of it incidental and mundane, that hums around us at every moment and leaks into the perceptible world from poorly-configured speakers and old guitar amps. Cooperation and connection as an aquifer of warm noise.

My hobby trajectory being what it is, maybe this attitude was partly influenced by denpa aesthetics in music, anime, and games. While the name (電波) translates as "electromagnetic wave," it originated in a grim event pretty far removed from an interest in radios--look it up if you want. But denpa media invokes the aggregate mush of signals between us and a hostile world, transmissions so layered and blended that, in the best case, they cease to be effective weapons for IP holders to wield against us.

This is all to say that radio makes me feel something like how I feel about personal websites. But also the odds are pretty good that when you look at a personal website, it reached your device of choice via radio waves. If you're here, you're already receiving.

Find me at ponti.club. I mean, if you want.