Well huh. Would you look at that. A little time investment can indeed buy you some prime-grade nostalgia. What you’re looking at right here is a “back from the dead” attempt to piece together a site we once thought was long gone – www.newsaskew.com.

Following a recent visit to SModcastle Cinemas and a chat with the man himself, the nostalgia hit hard causing the inspiration to fire up the keyboards and see if this was even possible. Some late nights and weeks later, here we are.

From 1997 until 2011, News Askew was essentially a living scrapbook of all events and news related to Kevin Smith, View Askew, SMod, and every tangential thing around them. From what you can see here, it was a lot. After those 14 years, during a time where the Askewniverse had seemingly closed its doors for good, the site transitioned into The SIRmon, a similar concept that tracked Kevin’s world that had then spun into the world of podcasting and internet radio. Our schedules forced us to step down only months later, and the site did not survive into 2012.

We’ve since lost www.newsaskew.com to squatters, but thanks to the miracles of modern technology, you’re browsing a freshly stood up instance of the site, built with as much old data as we could scrape together to mimic that exact experience you had back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.

We’re super proud of the work we did over those 14 years and are happy to have it (mostly) back and on the books. We hope some of you may enjoy looking back on these days as well.

What you’re looking at right now represents 7,859 published posts, tons of special edition pages like physical media reviews, set visits, and of course, the classic drinking games that were the original inspiration of this site. Thanks to some dusty old backups and some creative scripting of the internet archives, the site (along with its final look prior to transition to www.thesirmon.com) is here. It’s alive!

There’s a lot of great content here, but what was also learned was just how much disappears when you allow it to. We’ve got a lot of it back, and are continuing to use all the tools we have to piece together what’s left. Here’s some notes on what you will and won’t see as you explore the vast archives:

• The basic text of all of our locally crafted news stories are back, hopefully in a format you can read.
• The search box is also working very well, along with monthly archives pages, if you’re looking to revisit a particular month.
• Hyperlinks inside those stories, especially those that go to offsite locations, are mostly not going to work, just due to the fact that websites that were around from 1997-2011 don’t seem to be anymore, or if they are, they changed their link structure and didn’t maintain forwarding links forever. We get it.
• Similarly, images we linked to from offsite are also gone, in addition to a lot of our local images (especially in the years 2009, 2010 and 2011).
• Our on location, retro askew, drinking games, and other special features should mostly be viewable, though maybe not quite as clean to browse as they were back in the day.
• Comments made by real users as well as your scoop credits are actually still there. We are working to get comments restored for the 2009-2010-2011 era (same timeframe as the lost images).

So now then, where were we…?