T-t-t-twenty Minutes into the F-f-future

This day is of course known for the JFK assassination in 1963, which I remember as a third grader, but it is also known for a peculiar event called the Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion incident. That was 22 years ago, when someone wearing a Max Headroom mask (at left) used powerful transmission equipment to interrupt normal TV transmissions in Chicago, Illinois. Max Headroom (a "real" photo of which is at right) appeared in a Daria fanfic by Ruthless Bunny, the title of which is borrowed from the original movie in which Max appeared.

Interesting: Here is a webpage detailing efforts to get various TV shows on DVD, and both Daria and the Max Headroom TV show from the late 1980s are on it!

More Interesting: The BBC's Channel 4 created a series of ads two years ago using Max Headroom to promote the switch to digital TV. The result was one of the most hysterically funny ads ever shown on TV. You have to see this. Also, Max Headroom's music video and Max Headroom's advice for macho guys.

NEWZ

• Richard Lobinske has updated the 2009 Daria Visual Fanworks list! Hooray!
• NEW! The earliest Daria story on FanFiction.net was posted 11 years ago today: Paperpusher's "Her, Uh, Cane." It was also 11 years ago at this time that one of the earliest and most extensive Daria supersites, Planet Daria, was taken offline.
• NEW! Tommy Sherman, by some esoteric mathematical figuring, won the state championship in football for Lawndale High about 15 years ago.
  
• NEW! The last story in Kara Wild's Driven Wild Universe was completed about this time four years ago: "Tomorrow Never Knows."
  

PPMB

• Finn Morgendorffer 16: Ambrosia Vinaigrette, by HolyGrail2007 (Part 1): "Daria, did anything interesting happen at school today?” “I wasn’t invited to anything, no one asked me on a date, I’m getting a cold sore, and I think someone threw a Life Saver at me.” “Oh, that’s horrible! Finn, what about you?” “I blew off my date with Ashley Beaker tonight to do this work, I’ve got two parties and four dates come the weekend, and I need to master these...tactics before my birthday next week. And today, someone actually gave me Life Savers.”

Stay tooned.

They're not coming. They're already here!

The Fashion Club announces that Lovestruck Alien Teenage Invaders from Mars (parts 1 and 2) is now available on Lorenzo Sauchelli's Dariaverse.com website. Thank you!

Sorry for the text-heavy previous post, but there was a lot of technical stuff.

Moar suun.

Oh, and Dariaverse.com updated with lots of new stories, too. forgot to mention that. Too many to mention here. Okay, I'm lying. Here they are, all complete.

• A Little Vacation by Doggieboy (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5)
• Let Vengeance Ring, by Richard Lobinske
• Blood, Sweat, and Cheers, by Kristen Bealer
• Over the River and Through the Mood Swings, by Kristen Bealer

Go, thou, and readeth.

The latest DariaWiki page: Planet Daria. Yes, that Planet Daria. Milo fills us in on the one great website of yore that I have never been able to retrieve by WayBack Machine. THANK YOU, MAN!


FF.net

• Snow Problem, by Smileyfax (COMPLETE!): A slice of horror for the winter season.

Not As "Lost" As You'd Think

It is supposed to be an axiom of the Internet that (almost) nothing is every truly lost. The vanished supersite Lawndale Commons was mentioned in an earlier post. Let's see what we can dig up about that site and what was on it.

The site, operated by the justly famous Michelle Klein-Häss (who appeared as a camper on "Camp Fear"), was a real supersite. It had its own IRC chat and message boards and everything. Tonight I discovered that it is possible to get a complete list of everything that the WayBack Machine stored about the site (not everything, but a lot anyway). Among other things, I discovered:

• ...something borrowed from the legendary, long-gone website Planet Daria.
• ...the origin of that idea that two seasons of Daria equal one year of "real time" in Lawndale.
• ...a map of Daria's Bomb Shelter.
• ...and Daria and Jane spinning around in 3-D CGI, rendered by John Markus. (LINKS ARE FIXED!) Now, is that totally cool or what?

Anybody remember all this? Wish I'd known about it when I got into the fandom in 2002. Missed it. Dang!

Oh, and you can get all of the fanfics ever stored in Lawndale Commons in the WayBack Machine, too, using the above method. Click through about 46 pages of stored images, web pages, fanfics, etc. No more missing fanfics. Nice.

Anything missing that I wish I could get now? The large image of the Lawndale crest, shown small-size in the logo above. Rats. Anyone remember this? Anyone remember to SAVE this?

Richard Lobinske has again updated the list of 2008 Visual Fanworks for PPMB and SFMB. I, on the other hand, have not updated the fanfic list yet. Sue me.

(Just kidding.)

Oldest Known Daria Site Discovered!

In the process of hunting for Planet Daria, I happened to discover by complete accident the oldest known archived copy of the MTV Daria website, dating from April 13, 1997 (the day just before "The Lab Rat" aired). If you want to have a look at it and click the links, here it is. You have to wait a little for the pictures to load, but they will (sometimes). Anyone remember this from 11.5 years ago?

Before now, the oldest site I could find was from October 1997. Here's a link to a saved copy of the central picture at left, just for fun.

Party on!

Hunting for Planet Daria

Last night, sitting at home with yet another head cold, I decided to try one more time to find an ancient copy of the legendary Planet Daria website. I used the WayBack Machine at archive.org and Google's 2001 archive searcher. And I found it (see pic at right). In other words, there was nothing there except an apology from the former webmistress, Rowena Stubbs. How could a site that was so popular disappear so completely, even from the archives?

Now, as I understand it, Planet Daria existed for only two years (1997-1998), but in that time it was outrageously famous. Every single link to it that I can find on other people's ancient websites praises it to the skies as the best possible Daria fansite. (This was before Outpost Daria, of course.) About 1998 or so, a 14-year-old girl named Starr reviewed Planet Daria for a website called SmartGirl.com and described it in some detail (click here or here). Another source says it had episodes, song lists, sounds, pictures, postcards, "etc., etc." A rating system was also available for stories.

The curious thing is, of all the links I've found to the old Planet Daria (not the Australian blog of the same name), it's rare to find any two that are alike. Here are some of the web addresses I've uncovered that supposedly went to Planet Daria:

• http://freemall.com/daria/
• http://home.earthlink.net/~arowena/daria/
• http://welcome.to/daria
• http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Academy/4517/
• http://www.geocities.com/~planetdaria/
• http://www.opni.com/~rowena/daria/
• http://www.opni.com/~rowena/daria.html
• http://www.the-wall.net/~daria/
• http://www.the-wall.net/~daria/main1.html
• http://www.the-wall.net/~daria/main2.html
• http://www.the-wall.net/~daria/guide/guide.html
• http://www.the-wall.net/~daria/l1.html

All this from 1997-1998? Many of these pages (retrieved using the WayBack Machine) have the same apology for not keeping up the site, so I guess it's the same place.

One of those addresses (http://welcome.to/daria) was also used by a site called The Daria Craze (ex-Low Self Esteem) in April 1999. (Click here and remember to enter your name!) At the top of the screen, however, are the words "Planet Daria." What's up with that?

Did anyone save anything from Planet Daria, like the logo or comments or anything? I know Outpost Daria has much of Planet Daria's content (thank God), but what about stuff showing what the site actually looked like. Anyone save a page from there? Anyone know why there are so many addresses for Planet Daria? Was there more than one?

Chat about this if you would. Wish I'd gotten into watching Daria a lot earlier.

(P.S. I've added a LOT more ancient websites to the "Blast from the Past" section at the bottom of the left column. Enjoy your stroll down Memory Lane, old-timers.)

Daria Returns . . . to the BBC!

A new live-action Daria show will soon appear on the BBC!

For details, click HERE!













Okay, okay, it was just a joke. Don't get your shorts in a wad. It was an old joke, in fact, one that I found using Archive.org's WayBack Machine. I saw it on PPMB ages ago, too. Here are some other good spots on Is this really Daria Morgendorffer? (an old website no longer in operation).

• Daria's Dream
• Oh my God it's Christmas
• Saint Daria — The Miracle of the Halo
• Church of Daria

It took a mighty sick sense of humor to come up with these. Someone after my own heart.

All seriousness aside, I've been looking through the "Blasts from the past" section at left (way down near the bottom) and am exploring some extinct websites. Amazing stuff there. I've always regretted that I missed almost the entire run of the show and all of the fandom until April 2002, when I finally joined in. Feel kinda stupid about it now, but what can you do.

So, exploring old fandom sites is my thing now. I've found Katherine Goodman's Daria portfolio, four different versions of Lawndale Commons, and some intriguing artwork. The holy grail would be to get the original "Planet Daria" site, but there's some kind of screw-up preventing it from showing up on the WayBack Machine. If you want to try it, the old link was:

http://www.geocities.com/~planetdaria

Using the WayBack Machine, you can get only one hit from 1999: here. But clicking on the link says the site redirects to itself, which the Archive.org people say they can fix, but I've e-mailed them and they haven't gotten around to it. Oh, well.

More news on my time-traveling later. Enjoy your day, and don't get fooled. Too much.