deathnet.net

(I originally posted this to the Internet Mysteries group but I feel like it fits in better here)

So here's a bare yet strange website I found: https://deathnet.net/

I
first found it when I was looking up information for DeathNet Studios,
the label that the Nightcore album Dreamworld was released under, but
the two seem to be unrelated.

At first I thought it was just a
bitter message, death is inevitable, but then when I came back to it
today I unearthed a whole history.

The gif at the centre of
the website only has the one frame. Translating the binary to English
gives us "everything that has a jeginning, has an e�d" which is either my fault or the creator's. TinEye says that it was first
detected in December of 2019, but eventually I found it goes back to
2011, and the domain goes back further than that. I've conveniently
organized the information for you, reader.

Origins and 2nd era - the forums

Putting
it into the Wayback Machine gave me a snapshot as early as 2002 and I
found that it used to be a gaming forum. In order to keep this post
short I'll just give you some fast facts here;

• The forum had
  four admins, Astro-Boy and Gopher (since at least 2002), and Hetzer, and
  LordWarsprite (since at least August 2003)
• The about page said
  that they were a monthly LAN gaming group associated with the Sylvanian
  Heights Youth Club in NSW, Australia.
• The earliest snapshot from
  June 30th, 2002, has a single post from Astro-Boy about how this is
  their new website with a fancy new domain name, and that hopefully this
  is the last time their address will change (hence why I'm calling this
  the 2nd era)
  
• In addition to their event calendar, the site hosted opinion polls for different gaming related things and the latest patches.
  
• There's
  a page in the top navbar about an annual event called the Mother Of All
  Battlegames (MOAB), which says that deathNET has been in attendance
  since 1996. This is the oldest record I've found of their existence so
  far.

According
to a comment by Gopher, the Sylvanian Heights Youth Club called
Astro-Boy to let him know that the club hall had been double booked and
that they could only have it until midday (I have no reference for what
time their events ran to except for "through lunch")

3rd era - the news site homepage

The
next snapshot is from the 12th of December, 2005, and deathnet.net
looks completely different. The forum is gone, replaced with four boxes
with links to articles from different news sites. The boxes come
together to form the Windows logo, with red being game news, blue being
real world, green being Australian broadband, and yellow being
technology. Apart from some fine text, there's nothing else on the black
background.

The "help" link in the fine text leads to similar
coloured boxes with a list of the news feeds, a new about, and a get
help section. The about says "The site was put together out of the
desire for a new start page, customisable by any one at any time." and
it appears you could add news feeds that would only be shown to you.

Get
help includes an email link to an email that doesn't match that of any
of the 2nd transformation admins except that it's an @deathnet.net
address (making it the third of its kind I found). Another similarity is
that the email address is offered "if you feel you absolutely must talk
to a real person" just like how the deathNET forum admins had theirs
listed even though "it's more efficient to contact us on the forums".

This is how deathnet.net looked until at least December of 2010.

4th era - "inevitability" and thoughts

The
next snapshot on the Web Archive, October 18th, 2011, shows us the
deathnet.net linked above, with the single framed gif that has
"inevitability" at the centre of binary code.

So, what's the deal?

So
I put deathnet.net into whois.com which lead me to tucowsdomains.com,
which gave me some information. Now I'm no IT geek, but if a domain
thats sold doesn't keep its original creation date, then deathnet.net is
indeed still owned by the person who bought it in late June of 2002 in
NSW, Australia.

Now the mystery here is why keep the domain up with a bitter message?

My
strongest argument is that it's Astro-Boy. Hear me out, because I'm not
just saying it's him because he made a post that it was inevitable
their meetup would be cancelled. He made 4 of the 5 posts shown on the
homepage shown in the April 1st, 2005. These were the call for November
2004 registrations, announcing the November date was cancelled, December
2004 announcement (which in the comments he declares it cancelled for
lack of interest), and finally the announcement of separating from their
local youth club and hoping for larger, more infrequent events. I think
he was really trying to keep deathnet alive with what little
encouragement he had.

With all that said I think Astro-Boy did
this because he was bitter that their LAN gaming club of at least 8-9
years fell apart. It's hard to say whether he did the deathnet news
homepage.

Um anyways this is my first forum post, idk if I made
this too long. Final opinion I swear, the news site era looked really
cool and I totally would've set that to my homepage :,]