satellite cult 9.9
wiregore666, neocities features, 2000s email
welcome to this week’s satellite cult dispatch. i’m so glad you’re here. i hope the artifacts i present you with will propel you into a state of uneasy longing that can only be satiated by the icy embrace of a 3D-rendered Playstation NPC. let the cult be that NPC. let the cult embrace you.
please be aware that the void dive section below contains flashing gifs.
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wiregore666
last week in my premonitions dispatch, i included limeluv ep by MALWAREX64—published online by wiregore666—in my sextrance feature. this week, i came across another release published by wiregore666, which got me curious enough to explore the account’s varied and complex discography.
wiregore666 doesn’t describe themself as a musician or a label (their bio just says hi!) and they don’t link any socials on their Bandcamp page. i reached out via the contact feature on Bandcamp to ask if they were one person releasing music under different monikers or someone running an online label; i haven’t received a response yet, but i suspect it’s the former. for now, i’ll discuss each project as if it’s independent from the others.
this self-titled EP released on the wiregore666 account by Computer▲ngel is a floating, ambient eccojam fog that builds and ebbs. it’s some of the slushiest slushwave i’ve heard recently, dreamy and meditative, a not so distant past calling to you from the room next door. it harkens back to vapor tracks i loved ten years ago, and while the spin isn’t particularly fresh, i think it demonstrates that something doesn’t need to be fresh to be good. there’s a reason i listen to albums from the 80s decades after the sounds became recognized as emblematic of their era. this sound was more common perhaps even five years ago, but now i sometimes have difficulty finding new releases that capture such a particular mood. in that sense, it actually is rather fresh to find producers and musicians keeping the style alive.
another wiregore666 release, Welcome To The Neighborhood​!​™ by North West Housing Development, is a hexd homage to early-aughts lower middle class suburbia, featuring plundered and edited game scores. for me it evokes walking to the park with the neighborhood kids, watching your friend from the school bus play PlayStation 2, trading Pokémon cards with the boy down the street. it makes me feel like i’m the paper boy from the N64 release of Paper Boy.
and the final wiregore666 release i’ll bring to your attention is a harsh noise ep by GodlessWiredGemini.
only three tracks, entanglement is unexpectedly gentle in places, and some sampling seems present under the static if you listen hard enough, resulting in a complex and layered audio experience.
something something capitalism
i’ve had a rough couple of weeks and chances are, some of you have, too. it’s left me craving moments of irreverence to empty and cleans my mind. nights out are cult rituals. here’s some future funk released last week by Hot Singles to vibe to:
neocities features
if you’re into Neocities, some of these sites may look familiar, but maybe you’ll find something new. i’m even a fairly recent transplant to Neocities, having followed sites hosted there for a few years, but only finally building my own within the last few months. here are some sites i like to look at:
https://blissnet.neocities.org
soft pastels, hearts and angel wings, magical girl anime, and cozy games await at Bliss-net by Cinderpeach. click through layers of sweetness to find the core of this lovingly crafted site.
https://virtual-lounge.neocities.org
if you’ve been here for a while, you know i love vaporwave. while the website itself hasn’t been updated in five years, the design of virtua-lounge perfectly marries vapor and the old web, and I find myself thinking about it often.
https://ceph-a-lopod.neocities.org
the title of this site, Ceph’s gay little website, clicked for me. the design is ambitious for Neocities, and while it’s not perfectly executed, it is a sweet experience of the depths.
2000s custom email
if you wanted a custom email address circa 2000, you could have used a free service called ZapZone, accessible now through the Wayback Machine.
the address was not 100% custom—your domain would still be [insert here].zzn.com—but some online communities used the service to provide member email addresses.
here’s a forum post about the service on EmailDiscussions.com from 2001:
Tumblr user oldwebmlp’s post about an early 2000s My Little Pony fan community1 using the service landed on my dash recently.
now, the ZapZone url directs here, so while the service appears to be active, it seems that you can only log into existing accounts and that you can’t create new ones.
void dive
thank you for joining me. until next time.
this was a time long before bronies