Virtual Odds & Ends

So it occurred to me that one thing that could be done with this blog to perk it up would be to bring the Lawndale experience to you. No, the blog will not suddenly fill your life with idiots. You probably have enough problems with that as is.

With the flood of Daria Internet stuff off the WayBack Machine, which is so great that it would take a week to properly sort through, enough unusual items were recovered to make a sort of mini-Virtual Lawndale possible. This would not be that marvelous interactive map from the MTV website. This is something else. The idea came to me when I figured out how to recreate "Radio by Daria" from the old websites, which was really just streaming music (alternate rock) you could play which surfing.

It might not be anything big. It might be sort of fun. Rather than say more, we will let time decide if the experiment works. Party on!


SIDE NOTE: Anyone else delving into the Vortex of Mysteries of Daria stuff through the WayBack Machine? Cool, isn't it? You could build a dozen mega-websites out of it all.

Oh, and I recovered the text contents of all the missing flipbooks, if not the pictures. It turns out the text was the important part after all. Some surprises to come. (They surprised me, anyway.)

DariaWiki's latest addition: Arrivals and Returns (thank you, Richard).

Lawndale Online is still offline. Is it pining for the fjords?

Virtual Lawndale 2000

And there it is, the MTV Virtual Lawndale webpage from October 19, 2000. Notice that a couple of spots haven't let been finished by MTV and are noted as such. I have a few niggles, such as the shade of gray around the block at far right, but that's what came out of the WayBack Machine. A piece of the current VL map was substituted for the missing one. Using 24-bit color BMP on Paint for the background and adding parts in GIF from Irfanview seemed to do the trick. The text under the title "Virtual Lawndale" had to be reconstructed in Word, matched for type and background color, then cut-and-pasted to the whole, as the original text looked bad no matter what I did to it.

A piece of history for you to enjoy. Now you know what everyone was looking at seven and a half years ago.

I still have Jane's LaneBay pages to work on, but those are worse than this one. If anyone else wants to try reconstructing old Daria webpages, be my guest. Make sure you have a lot of free time first. Just don't get sick in order to do it, it's not worth it.

A Work in Progress

Above is a rough idea of how the 2000-2001 Virtual Lawndale page looked. (Click on it for the full-size version.) Color is off in spots (what's with the green faces?), one piece is missing, but I think all can be repaired. More later.

LATE ADD: I figured it out. The background has to be saved as a 24-bit BMP file and the images slapped over it have to be GIFs for best color. More soon.

This is what people do when they are home sick and very bored

So, here I am at home without nothing to do except use up boxes of tissues on my runny nose and drink fluids and take medicine and complain about my head cold (only a little), so what else is there to do to occupy myself?

Play Internet archaeologist, that's what.

I'm in the process of recreating an entire webpage from the old MTV Daria site, the Virtual Lawndale page that operated between October 19, 2000 and June 21, 2001, when the WayBack Machine took snapshots of it. Why do this? 'Cause I can. It's kind of fun, like putting a puzzle together. The webpage redirects very quickly to a 404 error message on the current MTV site, so you have to catch it just before anything loads on it and stop everything, then slowly pick out each missing piece, use the WayBack Machine to retrieve it, and put the big puzzle together. Being a latecomer to this bunch, I want to see what everyone else saw all those years ago when the fandom was young and in flower.

So far things are going well, though some color information is being lost in putting the page together with copy and paste. I plan to take some time to straighten that out if possible before showing the final result, within a week. Then everyone will see a static copy of the Virtual Lawndale page from seven years ago, just for the heck of it. Plus, I get to make up some new logos and icons, like the title bar with this posting. Everyone needs a hobby, and I suppose there are worse things. Peace out.