A PHP-built Simpsons fan web page first created by a 14-year-old in 2004 is again on-line after greater than a decade of inactivity — Krustofski.com by no means ought to have trusted these Krusty-brand servers.
It might shock some Simpsons followers and the terminally on-line alike that, regardless of the present’s historic longevity, The Simpsons will not be, the truth is, older than the web. By the point The Simpsons premiered in December 1989, computer-wielding college college students had already established worldwide connections on the rudimentary early networks, and quite a few on-line chatrooms already existed the place the technologically superior may argue about popular culture like youngsters in a cyber schoolyard. However as soon as The Simpsons erupted into the zeitgeist, it turned clear that the web can be without end modified and outlined by Simpsons superfans spreading lore and endlessly quoting their favourite episodes by web sites just like the all-important Simpsons Archive, which nonetheless stands to this present day.
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One other such web site got here from an upstart coder, artistic and Simpsons fan named Billy Gardner McIntyre, who, this previous January fifth, republished Krustofski.com to function a residing reminiscence of these early web communities. Props to McIntyre for by no means promoting out to Bill Gates.
McIntyre defined the origin of Krustofski.com, also called Simpsons Zip, in a reflective blog post that begins, “There’s a rule I’ve discovered about group: you might be an old-timer otherwise you might be an upstart, however besides on the extremes and with out the good thing about retrospect, you don’t get to know which one you’re.” An excellent-older-timer would have simply written, “I was ‘with it.’”
In his journey, McIntyre discovered concerning the worth of being a “noob” on an web present process a cultural and technological adolescence, considering again fondly of the early site owners who made The Simpsons a web based sensation. The extra McIntyre interacted with the net Simpsons group, and the extra he studied the coding language PHP from a e book gifted to him by his programming father, McIntyre discovered these classes: “1) All of those web sites have been lacking issues that I wished. 2) I may construct a web site of my very own. 3) It may very well be nice. 4) If I did that, then I may turn out to be an old-timer too.”
However in his urgency to turn out to be an “old-timer,” McIntyre noticed the darker aspect of the web’s fast, exponential development, finally coming to the conclusion that he had extra enjoyable being a artistic, coding Simpsons fan earlier than the emergence of “The Consideration Economic system.” By the point McIntyre left faculty, Simpsons Zip was indefinitely offline, a state through which it remained till this previous weekend when he revived the venture and recorded the teachings he discovered from it.
Now, anybody with nostalgia or curiosity for the previous web can click on by the pages of Simpsons Zip and skim McIntyre’s historical past of Simpsons fast-food toys, browse his analysis on the GM World’s Honest exhibit that impressed the creation of Futurama or educate themselves on the bibliography of just about all of the literature references from the primary 4 Simpsons seasons.
Krustofski.com might by no means have been the pre-eminent fan web site for The Simpsons, however because of McIntyre’s preservation efforts and contemplative prose, it’s a historic testomony to the creativity of the present’s fandom and the enduring classes that on-line communities just like the consistently squabbling Simpsons following can train to aspiring upstarts.
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