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This year marks many great movie anniversaries, and this week everyone celebrates The Blair Witch project. Vice collected a complete oral history of how the multi-year experimental film project has become one of the greatest horror films of all time. You can read Roger Ebert's 1999 eulogistic reviews, The New York Times, and The Washington Post online plus one CNN article confirming that the three stars were not really dead. You can also check a start AV Club interview with co-directors Dan Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, who agree that "the best way to see this film is to know as little as possible" – so if you still have not seen it in 2019, you should probably give everything. these links a pbad.
Whatever the case may be, read on to find news from 1999 that is mostly Internet-based, including a timely reminder of Prince.
"Use the computer, do not let it use you"
Prince had a legendarily complicated relationship with the Internet, declaring it "completely finished" in 2010. Many of his comments concerned the ownership and distribution of music. But the speech at the 1999 awards ceremony is both stranger and more widely prophetic. As wired note, Prince presented the "Online Pioneer" award to Public Enemy at the Yahoo! Online Music Awards, which seems to last three years. His advice to the public?
One thing I wanted to say is, do not be fooled by the internet. It's cool to have the computer, but do not let it take you. It's cool to use the computer, do not let it use you. You did see The matrix. There is a war going on. The battlefield is in the mind. And the price, it is the soul. So be careful. Be very careful. Thank you.
wired I did not really know how to take literally Matrix reference here, and frankly, me neither.
Rise and fall of the free PC
Throughout 1999, companies tried to create free computers – and sometimes Internet access -. The campaign began in February, when a California-based company called Free-PC proposed Compaq computers fully funded by advertising and an Internet service. It looked like a lot, but the trade-offs should be known to everyone in 2019:
Free-PC.com indicates that Presario computers will address the first 10,000 people to hand in their consumer records, including their age, income, family status, hobbies, and shopping habits.
Once their computers are turned on and on, recipients will have to endure ads that will appear, whether or not they are online. The ads will be stored on the hard drive provided with the PC and displayed on the side of the screen.
The price of this "free" PC does not stop there. The company will monitor how the computer is used, by controlling which ads the user clicks on, as well as where users go – and what they buy – on the web.
A few months later, AOL and Prodigy announced a more conservative deal with low-end PC maker eMachines, subsidizing a $ 400 cheap PC for long-term subscribers. None of these initiatives lasted. eMachines acquired Free-PC and abandoned the gift model in November – but, Living room The reporter Mark Gimein said, not until the entire project has resulted in PC sales at home at unsustainable prices. (eMachines was acquired by Gateway, then Acer, and the name was kept until 2013.)
So what happened specifically this week? Well, the future of eMachines was promising and The Wall Street Journal wrote a brilliant profile of their Korean-based provider, Trigem. Trigem would unfortunately be bankrupt a decade later.
"Get rid of Jar Jar Binks, it's terrible"
George Lucas revealed earlier this year that his favorite Star wars the character is Jar Jar Binks – the comic character in relief and his possible secret Sith Lord. So why do so many people hate it? In one BBC interview a few months later Star Wars: The Ghost Threat release, Lucas blamed Internet:
"The American press uses the Internet as the source of everything. So when websites were created, they said, "Let's get rid of Jar Jar Binks, it's terrible." Some critics described him as a comic sidekick, they came in and they started calling the movie racist. "
Stories about Jar Jar mentioned both racism – claiming he was a clownster stereotype of a Jamaican – and his hatred on the Internet. Lucas said that there was simply a group of fans who "want the movies to be tough like Terminator, and they are very angry and have opinions on everything related to childhood" . This is not necessarily wrong … but the story still has not judged Jar Jar kindly.
VoyeurDorm.com vs Tampa
Would you pay $ 34 a month to watch half a dozen female students live together in a Florida home with webcams absolutely everywhere? If so, I'm sorry because the Softcore adult entertainment website, Voyeur Dorm, has been down for several years. But in July 1999, the city of Tampa was struggling to stay online.
Essentially, Tampa officials argued that the house was equivalent to a strip club, which allowed them to close under zoning regulations. The company behind Voyeur Dorm then argued that this comparison made no sense and accused city council of "totally ignorant of the Internet". It eventually won in the courts, setting a precedent for regulating online activities – The New York Times wrote that it "suggested that the Internet was a place that, in some cases, could be out of the reach of local government regulators".
Jurbadic Park, New Zealand Bird Edition
The "extinction" – or resurrection of animals lost through biotechnology – has worked in rare and limited cases. Today, it is a potentially viable means of preserving species that are disappearing at an alarming rate. Unfortunately, this was not an option for the New Zealand bird huia in 1999.
The last huia were seen in the early 1900s. Then a group of New Zealand students took inspiration from Jurbadic Park explore the cloning of the animal, and CNN wrote that they had obtained approval from ethicists and Maori representatives who decided that "efforts to revive the cloned bird should begin immediately." A group called Cyberuni.org was supposed to provide funds, but the project never seems to have gone anywhere. – A 2006 story concluded that museum specimens could not provide a sample of DNA good enough to start.
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