# Retro dreams

## Concept

People do what they want.

So there is, especially here on neocities, many sites that feel retro.
Pixellated fonts, limited color palette, animated GIFs.

Well, I would say it is retro in spirit, but nostalgia of something that never was.
It is a retro dream, a ghost.

## What it is

Well, you find a quantity of website that have a "retro" vibe. And to me it looks fake.

So it is often in pastels tones, orange, kawaii, with cats. Well, that's extremely modern.
The website are slow, with heavy javascript, animation everywhere.
Some site have a palette of 8 brutal colors, like red, blue and black.

I feel like a lot of people spend weeks on making the site, then leave it "in construction". And perhaps writing and sharing should be the goal.

You know that Ozamu Tezuka saw one poster of the German expressionist movie Metropolis and decided to make a Metropolis manga? Well, that's how it feels, like if someone had found an artifact of the past, perhaps a selected screenshot of a funny website of that time, and went for it. Maybe it is creativity. Maybe it is recreating a civilization from a picture. In this sense, it is real. But it is not getting internet back, making our new network of ideas and friendships.

## What is real

A good website at the time was trying to be fast. It rarely did, because internet was just too damn slow. Until it wasn't, in a blink of an eye. Within 5 years we had extremely fast ADSL, cable internet. It is not fast like nowaday fast, it was immensely faster than was existing websites were targeting for. All of sudden sluggish pages were facing a 30+ times faster internet. And everything was instant. There never was loading screen. Loading what? We waited for the modem, not for an application to start. Javascript was a novelty, netscape, people were not coders, mostly. With Javascript, you'd made one menu. No, werer loading the page, ok, because it was slow, but we felt a step away from faster loading. Loading was not a culture, waiting for the page to display was annoying. We were not hoping for better, we were confident we'd get it.

Bad design was mostly not intentional. First, black background sites with rotating skulls and unreadable blue fonts were already thought to be poor taste. Sometimes purposeful poor taste. There was this idea that we were l33t, elite. That conventional design did not apply. That being provocative, bold, personal was the way to assert dominance. And these website even at the time did not look great. I have never been impressed by seeing the same low quality skull rotate again. But they provided something, a fix : mp3, ROM, porn, insane pamphlet. We'd go despite the site design, sometimes.

And we'd respect that the guy's home, the guy's rules. Same for current retro. I like it or not, that does not mean it is bad. It means that I feel entitled to call it crap, and you should feel entitled to ignore me.

Animated GIFs were a scarcity. Yeah, people able to make a 3D model and put it on the somehow light animated picture were rare. And that was almost the only way to have something animated on the website. Yeah, you want something to move on your page, you got to put dancing baby.

We did not have pixels, mostly. The retro fonts are not entirely but almost an invention. We had very small monitors, 14 inches, with super low resolution, 640x480. And the CRT with phosphore bleed and such was perceptually anti-aliasing. So... to see pixels, you would have to really push it. No, pixellated fonts are mostly from before, when we had 320x200 resolutions or even less. There, really you could see the pixels almost as squares. And it is not even true for everything. Because when you look at 8-bits games, you look at them on a modern computer with a large screen. We were looking at a TV from the couch, with scanlines, phosphore, our brains feeling gaps, the imagination of the time. We did not really see pixels as such. At work, people would have relatively high resolution, in 2 colors, it was quite good. So I would say that a pixel font, you'd have to use a computer at home, and instead of smashing things in a game, read text, in the 80s.

Kawaii was not a thing. Yeah things like Mario and such in retrospect may be kawaii. But you can see it is not the same color palettes, not the same intention. Mario was meant to be readable. He has a moustache because it is expressive with one color and a few pixel. Red is visible. But the pastel tones of cat moving all over the place... nah.

As for a terminal. Nobody knew what it was, almost! I mean even say you are working on AIX, it is not what we have with transparency, fun, themes. It is work.

But more than anything, everyone tried to provide something, a text, a community, we were connecting.

## What was a good site?

To me, a good example is that :
[Reading Project](https://readingproject.au/)

That's it, really, when someone was paying attention to design, it looked like that, mostly white, with measured colors.
A theme already. In 1999, my favorite forum looked like that. Most famous website started with this kind of design.

It was new, not faking anything, but not limited by printing. We did not spend nearly enough time on internet to complain about the white background. Picture were legit good pictures on a screen.

## What is true

I am not defining what good taste is. Well my website is a bit crap also.
But I am trying to decode what is going on : not a past revival, but the revival of an image of the past.
So what!?

## What I am doing

I feel I am continuing the web as it could have been.

- Extremely fast : click, instant
- Super easy to edit for me, no HTML
- Personal : my views, my interests, my style
- And yeah not letting the past die
- Thinking of the future