Internets Lost

[Peter Paltridge]

So.....how about you? Is there anything you remember enjoying off the Internet from many years ago, yet you just can't find anymore? Usually www.archive.org is your last hope for finding an offline site, but you must remember the exact address and even then, there's a chance it was never found by a search bot.

After Ocarina of Time came out I remember a great comic called "Queen Gohma." It was a graphic novelization of Link's first boss fight in the game, and it was done very well, with some cool and funny twists. To save Link from the Gohma, Navi quickly puts together the slingshot you get in the area, then flies it over to Link, trapped in Gohma's clutches.
"You put rocks in it and shoot them!"
"But....I don't have any rocks!"
Navi looks around and sees none. "Well...um...."
Before she can finish, Link suddenly grabs her, puts HER in the slingshot and fires into Gohma's eye.
Gohma drops 50 feet and dies. Link swings back down on a vine cheering for his victory. A grumpy and goopy Navi crawls out of the Gohma carcass and says, "That was a joint victory, kid."

The site that hosted this comic was www.dekutree.com/zcomic. But remembering the address helped me none--the comic itself doesn't seem to have been preserved.

When this site began some holes in "Everything Else" were filled by links and one of the links was to a site called "Oh No! Not Another Final Fantasy VII Web Page!" It was created by some guy named Frank and full of humorous FFVII-related fanfiction, and it dropped off the Net sometime in 2003. It's taken me quite a while to get the address working in the archive, but tonight I finally broke through. When I was playing through FFVII I enjoyed this story very much:
The Great Mousse Hunt

Now that I've told some old tales, you tell me yours. What would you like to visit again that doesn't exist anymore?

[J. B. Warner]

On a personal level, I'd like to revisit the archives of the old UExpress "Calvin and Hobbes" message boards. They gave me my first experiences in the wide world of Internet forums, and it'd be nice to go back and reread all those old posts from people who were about ten years older than me to see if I'd know what they were talking about now. At the tender age of 12, I failed to understand most of the topics of conversation in the off-topic section.

In fact, the C&HMB would be worth revisiting purely for entertainment value, as my own posts were certainly among the most alarmingly n00bish rants ever rendered in cyberspace. As I recall, my first post was typed all in caps, I derailed fanfiction threads on a regular basis, and I spent one glorious evening spamming up just about every thread in the General Discussion area with non-sequitur talk about Nickelodeon. When I got reprimanded for this, I typed a long angry response that culminated with me taking out a machine gun and "killing" all the other members. If the board had the ability to ban people, I can guarantee that I would have been out of there within my first week.