The KAISERNET Message Board

I've been out of the loop on pretty much everything lately, but while updating my More Links page I noticed that the great Hobbes archive at https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/ is shutting down this April.

OS/2 has been one of my great loves in software for quite a long time, and Hobbes never failed to amaze me with how extensive and still-updated it is. They offer a TAR of the entire thing you can download, and people are talking about taking it over, but still nothing can compare to an archive dating back to around 1990 that you could STILL add software to. Getting a port of ONScripter-EN added to Hobbes always was one of my goals that I never managed to achieve in time.

I clicked a few more links on my links page and noticed several totally gone now. The decline of all things good on the internet is stifling.

On Ars Technica's article about the shutdown, this comment was posted by "JnyJny":

> For some historical perspective, calvin.nmsu.edu and hobbes.nmsu.edu were originally a pair of NeXT machines hosted in the NMSU Small Systems Graduate Computer Lab in Jacobs Hall. The machines had 8Mb of memory, a small amount of storage and the 256Mb magneto-optical drives. The earliest they would have been available was likely spring of 1990 but probably that summer or fall. The NeXT machines were in counter-point to an early IBM POWER 320, some SPARC shoe boxes, and an IBM RT we referred to as "boatanchor". I worked in the Small Systems lab for most of my time at NMSU which started in the fall of 1998 1989 while studying computer science. I named them Calvin & Hobbes since they were a pair and I was a casual fan of the comic. Other names in the running were names of various igneous rock which were generally shouted down as being too hard to spell or remember. Sorry Dave.

> We noodled around a lot with those machines, mostly playing with Mathematica and Interface Builder. On Calvin we ran various MUDs that were sort of popular but in general caused a lot of drama. I wasn't much involved with the OS/2 Warp archive other than setting up anonymous FTP and keeping an eye on it to make sure it didn't consume too much storage. I goofed up permissions for the chroot jail once which resulted in a large amount of porn magically appearing on the machine. I had some explaining to do when that came to light. At some point we put some bigger hard drives in both of them, upgraded the main board and added more memory but to be honest I'm foggy on those details. I lost track of those machines when I left NMSU and suspect the hardware retiring in April isn't the hardware it started on. But it'd be nice to think those machines lived this long.

"_fluffy" replied:

> I ran the Hobbes archive for several years in the late 90s, as a student working for ICT (then called CANTO) when stewardship of Hobbes had been taken over by Dave Rocks.

> By that time it had been moved over to a repurposed/otherwise-decommissioned AIX server (an RS/6000, as I recall). I was the person behind completely reorganizing the file structure, which was controversial at the time, and I also redesigned the site and wrote the original search engine. As far as I can tell the code I wrote is no longer powering the site but the design is still pretty much the same as how I'd designed it (although with the HTML cleaned up somewhat and converted to CSS for layout).

> I think that the original NeXT that Hobbes ran on was in a pile in the hallway. I remember booting it up once and the monitor was very dim and the hardware just limped along. It felt sad.
> January 30, 2024 at 4:20 am

> I clicked a few more links on my links page and noticed several totally gone now

Get archive copies of the rest while you still can! I use HTTRACK.

Before we started working on onsen again, before Insani started up again, I had taken archives of every onsen-related website (including your own, lol) just in case they went offline (because I don't want to deal with the wayback machine).

hey,hybrid american.
i don't your future and killing soon!
http://darkelf.dip.jp/images/sadam2.jpg
go back america from ryukyu
we hate hybrid monsters. give back racial island!
will be growing up terrorism!
http://darkelf.dip.jp/doubt/index_en.html

https://varishangout.com/index.php?threads/studying-the-origin-of-hentai-in-the-west-usenet.2668/

Thought this was interesting. The author goes through some old usenet posts, trying to find out how erotic manga and anime came to be categorized as hentai' by westerners, and the evolution of the use of the term, as well as how terms like lolicon' were understood at the time--observably different from how it is now, including and more avidly referring to a demographic interested in high school age girls with lolita' and bishoujo' being considered interchangeable.

When I was watching SDF Macross recently, there was a scene where they had decided to translate lolicon into ``likes high school girls'', which I thought was an odd word choice, perhaps a bit censored?- but upon reading this it suddenly made sense considering the time it was made. I wonder if anyone else has picked up on this from shows around that decade.

Also look at that flamewar that's linked in the middle, lol. As an aside, if you want some time-burning amusement I can highly recommend combing through anime-centered newsgroups from the era, a lot of it feels indistinguishable from modern shitposting save for the specific series they discuss. Mind you, this was all Usenet in the 90s--long before 4chan.

>As an aside, if you want some time-burning amusement I can highly recommend combing through anime-centered newsgroups from the era, a lot of it feels indistinguishable from modern shitposting save for the specific series they discuss. Mind you, this was all Usenet in the 90s--long before 4chan.

I have an affinity for web banter and discussion in its most basic form, which is why textboards appeal to me so much. I love the way 2channel was, and the way 4chan was in formula, but find the image component of imageboards to be so extraneous that a board like [this one] is my ideal. It's sad that textboards like 4-ch never got a serious foothold in the west, so that style of pure-text banter is basically a distant memory in the form of Usenet.

>>2
thats the thing 4-ch is the current serious foothold in the west
even 4chan is the 99.9% 0.09% 0.01% style of lurkers posters and consistent posters compared to the average
theres been various of media from western authors partly based on what you can find in the modern tanasinn wiki alone and there is a independent culture for textboards and bbses which yes include banter and always have
infact in the way its nowhere near the activity of r*ddit let alone x is a good barrier from corruption like the hacker known as 4chan that along with how many of such cancer types wont come around from it being text only
banter based on pure natural ragefaging or due to le 4chan being the place for venting or whatever other trashy is philosophy exactly what wont develop into a new normal around here
those last two statements are opinions more than the first none of it is true :^)

>>3
4-ch is great, they've done everything to make it what it should be, but when a platform doesn't pull in enough people to host great minds, it's like having a little sandbox. 2channel was the most visited website in Japan for a time, and 4chan was the closest thing to it in the West. People grew up steeped in its culture, it's made news, and it's had a hand in historical events numerous times; it's easy to see that its banter always carried more weight.
To be clear, I've never been a 4chan poster, but even today as it stands in ruins, it beats out the desolate air of 4-ch.

gopizz

dowhat

yeah dog, game on

        ******

^__^ ********
(~o_o) ******
|| ||
||8====D~~ ||

       ~~~|| 

do piss

chaoskaiser72

yeah

furudeh rikah nipah van reinah returns 404's...
https://kaisernet.org/imageworks/ANT.JPG

Hello, how are you doing? Your website is lovely, full of personality and passion!
What is that attracts you in When They Cry?

Thank you for the kind words. I'm doing better than I have in a long time, getting up before sunrise rather than staying up until sunrise; will give me energy to do more than ever before, hopefully.

I can't say I care for WTC as a whole, but Higurashi is very special to me. I grew up in the forested and mountainous southeast US, so its setting is just like home to me, and the concept of a secluded village resisting modernisation makes for more interesting character dynamics than in, say, Umineko. There's a distinct bygone way of life that the village natives live by, and in the slice of life scenes you get to see the group play together mostly innocently without intrusive modern concepts. It's a snapshot of natural living, curious insular culture, and a great opportunity for articulate character writing (which I believe Ryuukishi07 best excels at).
I also adore the music that was in the Question Arcs, which is why I can't stand that people read it without ever knowing it's been completely replaced.

So there's one weird AIO pack on cdromance that features about 40 VNs ported from PC onto PSP with ONscripter, I'm talking about this one https://cdromance.com/psp/english-patched-visual-novels-ported-to/ (found out about it thanks to Clair looking for games to install on hers, I think Kaiser knows her)... And among those games was, you guessed it, Saya no Uta, right there, in the flesh! https://i.imgur.com/n6iqqZV.png

I hurried myself over, extracted the saya no uta folder from the ISO, and threw the latest ONscripter-EN executable in the same spot. The text and the images aren't really centered, the menus are broken (QUIT button doesn't do anything), not the most promising start but still something. https://i.imgur.com/3WblKBK.png

When you launch a new game it displays the text the way it should. https://i.imgur.com/C3itBru.png

...At least, it's what you'd think if you were to not read any following line, which ends up displaying itself on top of the previous one https://i.imgur.com/zN59WSV.png

Until it ultimately crashes by not finding a certain voicefile https://i.imgur.com/6U95OW7.png

That's crazy, funny place for it to turn up. The ONScripter PSP port was a pretty big thing, I'm sure this VN and others had a convertor run on them.

The English script for this port was always just the regular fan translation; if we were to want to reconstruct Saya for ONScripter we could just insert the English lines into the Russian game. It's a janky port that requires a lot of rewriting to be functional (I've already delved into the script when helping with a French translation that used it). I thought it would be an interesting curiosity to have it on ONS in English, without having to reconstruct it, which is why it was on the Wanted page.

Come to think of it, the English version of the ONS port may have been thrown together just for the sake of porting the game to PSP...

how do you even make a site like this? where users and the guy can easily make posts that all just work? i do not comprendo

Thanks! This board runs on a fork of Kareha, which is a clone of 2channel written in Perl; most boards like this run on PHP. Although it's very easy to make your own website now with services like Neocities, generally for "user-generated" content like our posts, you need the server running scripts on its end, which just about no one allows for free. I've got my whole site running on a cheap VPS, and a friend who's posted here a couple times helped me set it up (I'm not actually good with this stuff)

>>2
kareha!?!?!?!
&a

well im not sure now