A short film known as Spin, made in 2004.

It’s about a physicist who is bicycling down a hill and a car is in his path. The driver turns to see him and hits his brakes in the last moment. He skids over the hood, mostly unharmed and begins to ponder this.

If the driver hadn’t had the single neuron in his brain fire and trigger him to look again, he wouldn’t have hit his brakes and he would have collided with the flat side of the car, likely killing him.

He applies this idea to quantum physics and realizes that this is happening with every decision made by any living creature at every waking moment, creating countless split possibilities for all moments in time.

The final scene is very striking, showing a car approach an intersection. The view splits to show the car turning both left and right. The camera splits multiple more times to show the concept that you can always choose any path at any moment. Some are just more likely than others.

It showed on IFC back in 2005 or so, and I’ve tracked down some limited information on it, but it was shot on 35mm and I’ve found no real leads on watching it anywhere.

This is the very limited IMDB page for it.

A weird flash video cartoon about a news report of a disease called crapola - a play on Ebola if I remember correctly. It was stupid but made me chuckle. In my head at this point it is way funnier than it likely actually was so I’ll likely be disappointed if I ever do find it again.

A movie I saw as a kid about the lives of a few people living on huge metal cities that were mobile, roaming the dried, decayed Earth on treads, occasionally sparring other cities that got too close like rival ships. There was an overhead scene of two kids running down a path near the edge, before chasing each other back into the buildings.

Think Mortal Engines. Except where Mortal Engines was released in 2018, I watched this movie when I was in my early teens at the latest. Before 2010.

Now here’s the interesting thing: there was a Mortal Engines book released in 2001. But I absolutely do not believe I have or had the capacity for such a vivid mental recreation of the novel.

Back in the mid 2000s I made a fan website dedicated to my favorite game character, kirby, on one of those “build your own website” type sites. I remember I was like 8 and working on it quite a lot. The site was aimed at like kids / teenagers I think. Can’t remember what it was called to save my life. It definitely does not still exist, but the idea is that I could somehow find the site I made in a backup somewhere. Ive done some pretty deliberate searching over the years but still cant remember what the site builder/hoster was called. Something that started with a P, or had a P in the name, maybe?

Very wholesome thread so far so I’ll keep it that way but if anyone can find the Mr. Coffee video that was on NewsFilter.org circa 2006 please PM me a link. Its haunted me for years.

I’d love to find my old geo cities page but I’ve gone through the way back machine a few times and haven’t even gotten close to it. I can’t remember anything about it except that I think it was black and green (matrix style) design.

I used the same user name for ~ 20+ years and should have been able to track it down based off of that but I guess it got missed by the web crawlers.

All the music uploaded to cnet when you could upload your own music, circa 2005.

The Romantic. Really cool animated fantasy feature film from ~2009. For a while, the creator had it on Vimeo and even uploaded it to archive.org. Then he seemed to wipe every trace of it off the web. I can only find a shitty 320p version that someone must have had cached. It’s better than nothing, but I want to see it again in the full resolution that was once available.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110103034132/http://theromanticmovie.com/

There’s this one Flash game that was basically only ever featured in one Flash game website (AFAIK), it played almost exactly like Swords and Sandals (it’s a clone that’s got nothing to do with the original series), but with this one, you could also choose to be an anthropomorphic animal and you start off with a fish for a weapon. It seemingly vanished from the face of earth, it’s probably not even in the Flashpoint Archive…

That said, I’ve found most Flash games I played back in the Flash heydey by complete accident (e.g. via YouTube recommendations), games like Chasm, Haunted House, The Farmer, Nightmares, The Adventures Series, except for this one for whatever reason.

I never really began a wild goose chase over this one, but it still lives in the back of my mind sometimes… But I did make it my mission to document flash games I used to play in case I want to ever revisit them lol.

a BGP highjack of one of the root DNS servers (I have the letter L in my head for some reason).
The story was that whoever took it kept responding the same as the real one and noone noticed for days. How anyone could get away with this is beyond me & it stinks of conspiracy theory but there was a very convincing looking article about it somewhere.

An old ASMR video - not a particularly good one, but one I enjoyed anyway. It was about a futuristic themed space travel agency. The woman in it described various planets as viable options, and at one point offered a tour guide whose name was something like “Loop Hole”. I remember that because it was such an odd name. At some point in the video she receives a Facebook message (not part of the video, likely a mistake, but the notification sound is there anyway). The background was wood paneling, kinda looked like it was filmed in a trailer.

It was made private on YouTube years and years ago.

A decade ago I watched a YouTube series about a space Opera musical. It was great, I can’t find it anymore. But because of your post I put all of the things I can remember about it into chatGpt and it found it

I give you: Stingray Sam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxfggiZLn60

This has lived in my head forever. And it totally disappeared off the internet for a long time

Every few months I look for this video: https://lemmy.ml/post/36868744

2004 or 2005, there was some “low bandwidth gamer radio” that I used while gaming on dial up. I’ve looked everywhere for it, would probably never use it again since I’m on fiber instead of dial up now, but it just bugs me not being able to remember what it was called. I’ve found other services like that that would have been active at the time, but looking at their UI in screenshots or wayback machine snapshots, none of them look familiar.

Back in the flash game days, big games had their own mini loading screen games since they could take a few minutes to load the main game. One of them on Miniclip or Newgrounds was just driving a school bus at noght down a road that turned with very limited visibility. The bus got faster until you crashed. No real objective, just a keep-your-mind-occupied thing like the Chrome t-rex. I always really enjoyed that game, no idea why.

I tried looking for it after a few years had gone past just because i thought it would be fun, no dice. A year or two later, that era in internet gaming came up in conversation and j checked again, but nothing. I checked for it every time I thought about flash games and had a few minutes, but never found it over the years. Then they shut down Flash.

Never found one screenshot on Google, one blog post, one game comment or anything that reaffirmed my knowledge in its existence. But I know it was there.