I started this site a long time ago, as a way to promote a radio show I was doing on KFI in Los Angeles. I took it offline for a few years while I ran Regretsy, and just put it back up again a few weeks ago.
In the process of getting this bastard up on its feet again, I’ve spent a lot of time combing through 13 year old posts, looking for things that might be fun to revisit.
Last night, I came across links to some particularly horrible Geocities vanity sites. If you were online in 2000, you remember the midi music and the bad gifs, and how generally horrible the internet looked. If you weren’t, there’s no way to show it to you, since these sites went offline years ago.
Or so I thought.
Last night, I decided to try The Wayback Machine to see if any of this stuff is cached, and believe it or not, some of this shit is still out there.
I’m only going to post two today as a sort of appetizer for the main event. I hope you take the time to explore them before someone realizes they’re still hosting this shit.
Sassy – her real name, by the way – has written over 500 poems.
Like this one:
“The greatest treasour on earth can’t been seen or touched. It has to be felt with the heart. Because the treasour is love.”
Yes, Sassy is a national treasour.
Sadly, there are only a few pages of poetry archived. I guess we’ll have to wait for the book on tape, which I like to imagine will be read by Shirley MacLaine.
“We first met on Yahoo Chat on November 17, 1998. Barry had been going from room to room, just looking for someone to talk to. Barry and Trish chatted for awhile, and exchanged email addresses. They added each other to their friends list on Pager. They then went their separate ways, neither knowing what fate had in store for them.”
I don’t want to spoil the ending for you in case you never added someone to your friends list on Pager, but on January 5th, 1999, at 6:15AM Eastern Standard Time, Trish received an email advising her of a virtual flower delivery. Those virtual flowers would virtually change their lives for virtually ever.
But this isn’t just a love story. This site is a treasour trove of midi files and backgrounds, created by Barry himself. Probably while he was flying 34 hours to meet Trish for the first time.
AND NOW, THE MAIN EVENT
In February of 2000, Halle Berry ran a red light in a rented Chevy Blazer and crashed into another car on Sunset Boulevard. She suffered a gash to her head that required 20 stitches to close.
Which might explain this:
HALLEWOOD, THE OFFICIAL HALLE BERRY WEBSITE OF 2000
I’m going to go out on a limb and say this is the most fantastic thing I’ve seen in my adult life. There are beauty tips, workout videos, and a cringeworthy faux hip hop soundtrack that will make you cry. Not to mention the giggling voice overs provided by a pre-Oscar Berry (hover over the animated dog and Berry says “I’m Polly! Tee Hee!”).
And check out Halle’s closet:
I must insist you go to Hallewood right now. Click on everything you can, and lose the entire day digging through the most embarrassing chapter in Halle Berry’s life since Cloud Atlas.
I cannot put my love for The Wayback Machine into words. I’m adding it to my friends list on Pager, and with any luck, you’ll find the kind of happiness we have in the last 48 hours.
I miss the internet of 2000…
There’s a reason it’s now referred to as “Geosh*tties”, and it’s close friend, “Angelfarts”.
No good came out of those two hosts. None.
The days of seeing how much crap you could cram into a page with 20mb of storage.
In my mind, I read that as “Geotitties”, followed by the distinct sound Halle’s giggle. And found it hilarious.
April, Thanks SO much for that trip to the ancient internet – I am simply ill with emotion. Thanks goodness that most of the links are inactive or I would be lost in Hallewood forever : )
They’re mostly still active if you get there through the flash video. Click on the images around her, like the bullseye and the stacked W’s.
I spent half an hour trying to find Barry and Trish online to see if they are still together. Came up empty. So empty.
That’s disappointing. Well, let’s just speculate instead! “Barry & Trish: Where Might They Be Now?”
My guess is that they did indeed get married and are still together living in the converted missile silo they bought shortly after the wedding. There they spend their time enjoying fine wine, cross-stitching and dubstep music.
I think they have been engaged for the last fourteen years but have never married because they can’t find a municipality that will issue a wedding license in Elvish. Wanting to be together, but missing the urgency that came from living apart, they built a house across the Nevada-Utah state line and have a fantasy life that is best left unimagined. Having quit their respective jobs, they support themselves with their mail-order business selling vegan hams.
Barry and Trish clearly share a sexual kink so rare and unusual (some kind of cross-stitch related BDSM thing, perhaps?) that now they have found each other they are far too busy acting out their wildest sexual fantasies to bother with the internet.
Ah, the seizure inducing sites to flush out latent epileptics of yesteryear. Well, they’d be seizure inducing if you waited the 15 minutes it took to load on dial-up.
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I go to the bathroom to study hallewood
Hallewood is just marvelous. I can’t think of a better person to get my beauty tips from then early 2000′s Halle Berry.
I too want to know the fate of Barry and Trish. They seem to disappear from the face of the godawful ’90s internet. Maybe they couldn’t handle the new millennium.
I thought Barry and Trish were the main event – I felt quite dirty spying on their memories from 14 years ago.
Well, not enough to stop looking, but, you know – dirty.
O dear napping Cthulhu, hallewood.com is the shnizzit & then some. No doubt many a millennial skidlet got their fap on while monotonously mousing back & forth over all the chirpy/breathy audio that lurks on that homepage.
Hooray for Hallewood!
Can anybody explain what’s going on with Barry’s stripes? He’s got a single upper chevron like a private but two lower ones which you should never have…
Barry was in the air force not the army. Their rank stripes work differently than what you are thinking.
Well, I blew the entire evening checking Hallewood. I was getting so much accomplished until now. Thanks for rescuing me from the Horrors of Achievement.
How cool is that! I can’t wait for my daughter to see this. Thanks for turning us on the Wayback.
I love the wayback machine. It reinforces the adage “the Internet is forever”
I made the gross tactical error of clicking on Hallewood while I also had the Stallone mp3 loading up in another window. Now my ears won’t stop bleeding.
Wow, thank you so much for reminding me just how much the internet used to suck.
The Wayback Machine ain’t worth my time if it can’t find me some Chrissy LaCreme, ’cause that’s what I remember best from what Ms. Winchell found and fed to us.
Anybody else remember that one?
Okay, this reminds me of something that has been…well…haunting me lately. After people die, what will happen to all the shit that they post online? Is Match.com going to start overflowing with ghost profiles that don’t get deleted? Websites and blogs will linger in limbo to mystify the people of the future? All of this detritus will actually cause the internet to seize up and crash in some dystopian sci-fi future? WILL WE DROWN IN DEAD PEOPLES’ CLEVER COMMENTS?? Am I the only one wondering this?
So much wow in one post. I particularly like A) that Barry requests we link back to give him proper credit for the Winnie the Pooh backgrounds and B) that the Animaniacs Theme Song is inexplicably wonderful as a midi.