A Mystery of the Wired: Gazouup.com

[Maypews]

One of the things that brings me much joy about SciADV is how it integrates the Wired with it's stories in a tasteful manner. Perhaps no entry embodies this more than Chaos;Head, which features a number of distinct websites that are shown throughout it's runtime. MAGES employees creating sites as shown in the game is nothing new, as quite a few of the sites shown in the games at one point or another existed on the real net. The most enduring of these is no doubt the Future Gadget Laboratory's homepage, which you can still find at the URL http://futuregadget-lab.com/

Yet not all of these website recreations are created equally. Many know of the FGL page, but fewer know of the official MAGES-hosted We-Key Pedophilia page (C;H's Wikipedia equivalent), fewer still know of the now-defunct Phantasm official band website, and even fewer of a Japanese fan's recreation of Deluoode.

Yet today one of our forum's banners ended up being the source of my curiousity. This piece of fanart showcases the URLs that Shogun spams Takumi with in the early going of Chaos;Head, that of a site named "Gazouup.com"

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These links are said to contain predictions of the staking case that he is to witness the very next day, but the game only actually shows one or two of these pictures instead of all of them. Curious, I decided to plug the URLs into the Wayback machine and.. sure enough, the domain did indeed exist at one point and host these images. Check for yourself if you dare. Interestingly enough, a closeup of the Pregnant Man case is also included among the pictures.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100104231 ... 168491.jpg
https://web.archive.org/web/20100625041 ... 168492.jpg
https://web.archive.org/web/20100625041 ... 168493.jpg
https://web.archive.org/web/20100625041 ... 168494.jpg
https://web.archive.org/web/20100625041 ... 168495.jpg
https://web.archive.org/web/20100625041 ... 168496.jpg
https://web.archive.org/web/20100625041 ... 168497.jpg

A blog post from around the time by a Western elderweeb who was reviewing the anime reaffirms that these images existed as early as 2008. The Internet Archive seems to go cold in around 2010, so it's likely that's about the timeframe in which these were online. God bless whoever the one person was who backed these things up properly.

A little bit of snooping from the Wayback Machine's URLs page (good way to get around that stupid redirect issue) for Gazouup leads me to believe that this is all that was ever hosted on the site. Going to the main page just returns a broken image, which upon inspecting element seems to be a 404 page. Unfortunately it doesn't seem there was ever a proper "BBS" as the URL implies.

I'd wager that a MAGES employee likely purchased this domain for the sole purpose of hosting these pictures so that they could use the links in the page and have players go "A-ha!" if they searched it up. The BBS is likely window dressing to try to make the site appear legitimate otherwise in spite of it's lack of content. I will say that it's perhaps possible that the stuff outside of the images simply wasn't archived, but I can find no evidence of anything else existing on this domain.

Following 2010 it seems at some point it was turned into a Japanese porn site circa 2013-2014, and since then has spent most of it's time passing hands between owners never really establishing itself. Today the domain is for sale, and I totally would've bought it and reuploaded the images if not for..

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this.

[capstasher]

"fuckyou.PNG"
I wonder if we could get this somehow. What would we host there, beyond the images? Also, is that monthly payment? If so it's really not a possibility.

[Maypews]

"fuckyou.PNG"
I wonder if we could get this somehow. What would we host there, beyond the images? Also, is that monthly payment? If so it's really not a possibility.

Probably not worth it. That's not a monthly cost though, it's just the total sum. Gazooup.org and .net are available at much more reasonable prices. It did occur to me that it might be cool to set up a forum script or something on it, but I'd wager it likely wouldn't be used much similar to the BBS textboard I have on the FGL Deluoode site.

Edit: Maybe if we did get it by some miracle we could set up that SciADV fansite I've been wanting to make on it. That could be cool.

[capstasher]

Edit: Maybe if we did get it by some miracle we could set up that SciADV fansite I've been wanting to make on it. That could be cool.

That would be really neat. Imagine a proper fansite that documents as much as there is out there about the series. Very few resources on SciADV outside of S;G, so a place that puts together where you can get the games, game guides, complete official artwork library, compiles the lore together, and all other things we could think of, it would be very neat.

Either way, thank you for posting about your hunt, May! This was great to read. Love when people find lost content.

[Maypews]

Edit: Maybe if we did get it by some miracle we could set up that SciADV fansite I've been wanting to make on it. That could be cool.

That would be really neat. Imagine a proper fansite that documents as much as there is out there about the series. Very few resources on SciADV outside of S;G, so a place that puts together where you can get the games, game guides, complete official artwork library, compiles the lore together, and all other things we could think of, it would be very neat.

Either way, thank you for posting about your hunt, May! This was great to read. Love when people find lost content.

Yeah, there's KKB but that's pretty much it as far as public-facing stuff goes and it's not exactly what comes to mind when you say "fansite". You know, something I find really sad about visual novels is that they only came over to the West after our net had gone to shit already. Like, that blog post I linked is a grim reminder of when the only way a Westerner could experience Chaos;Head was through the Chaos;Head Anime

There aren't really any fansites you'll find for this stuff as a result, it was just entirely too niche when the peak of fansite culture and what not was in it's heyday. That's a big motivator for me making this "network" of sorts, I feel like VNs in general deserve that sort of treatment. I hope we're able to add more to the Deluoode fan projects section in the future, part of me wants to open it up to projects for other VN series too I.E. Muv Luv and whatnot. There's an embarassment of riches for like Shounen anime and stuff if you go looking for fansites but that culture just never reached the more "otaku" shit over here.

I did find that one of the CMS scripts that people used back then to make fansites still runs on the PHP version that we're on but a lot of the extensions don't play nice with it anymore because they're from literally 2004 in a lot of cases. That's something I want to mess with in the future though, and i was thinking it could be like a community fansite where anyone can submit to it.

[Parzival]

Oh, hey, you actually reminded me: there used to be a fansite of sorts, gazou.com
It was just a Japanese image hosting site, but since that was all that was known about gazouup in-game, that's all it really needed to be.

I forget who first found it and how I heard of it myself but I think it's still on internet archive.

Yep.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170710074 ... gazou.com/

I remember uploading the staking CGs on there, but it was mainly used for shitposting among SciADV fans on Discord because the images wouldn't embed in posts when the links were sent

"The world changes if you click it" followed by gero froggy staring at the world trade center towers being struck.