This year, ROFLcon will host panels on a few historical memes, including one on "All Your Base Are Belong to Us."
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THE RETRONETIf you weren't around for the dawn of the Internet Age, you probably were never exposed to the incongruous fonts and frenetic background colors of early Web-site design, or thrilled to the rough pleasures of a Geocities home page. (Do you realize that all the fan-fiction links on the Internet used to fit on one page?) It seemed as if this crude early era of the Web was destined to be forgotten.
Enter Space Jam. The 1996 Michael Jordan/Looney Toons vehicle had mostly faded from public consciousness until early last year, when someone discovered the film's promotional Web site, still live, floating in the dark waves of the Internet like a ghost ship. The hilarity of what passed for state-of-the-art HTML 15 years ago proved irresistible; the site went viral.
"In the same way that the '80s came back, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw the same pendulum swing for Internet culture," Hwang says. "It's funny to consider that the culture from 10 years ago is ancient history on the Internet . . . eight-bit stuff and retro-computing stuff have been around for a while, and to see [Web 1.0] burst into a revival would be really interesting."
This year, ROFLcon will host panels on a few historical memes, including one on "All Your Base Are Belong to Us."
"There are memes from 1995 or earlier that are completely forgotten now," Hwang says.
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