pya!

» see pya.cc as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

pya! opened on 15 April 2003 with a Flash cartoon named after Happy Tree Friends, and the post is still dated in the archive. One person ran it. There was never a company behind it and never a round of funding. People uploaded images and video, other people voted and argued underneath, and Japanese writing about the site settled on calling it a 老舗ネタサイト, the long-established joke site, which from that particular internet is close to an honor.

It sat in the middle of a loop rather than at the end of one. Material posted to pya! turned up on 2channel and later on Niconico, and material from those places came back the other way, with the derivative versions going out again to YouTube afterward. This was the standard shape of Japanese web humor before video platforms had real infrastructure, and pya! was one of the places holding the files while everyone else passed around the links.

An on-site survey in 2006 found the readership was over 73 percent male. In June 2009 a text series that had run there, about a man in Shikoku and his cats, became the first pya! content to be published as a book. An iPhone app followed in October 2012. That is the whole commercial history of eighteen years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ where maiyahi came from ~

O-Zone reached Turkey the ordinary way. Dragostea Din Tei was on the radio and on everybody's phone in 2004, the same as it was everywhere else, and that is the version of the song I have.

Japan got a second life out of it. Somebody misheard the Romanian lyrics as Japanese, built a soramimi Flash around the mishearing, and posted it, and the accounts of how it spread point at pya! as the place it went from. It ran far enough to produce a mascot cat, and then a trademark argument about that cat in 2005 that got genuinely ugly. Same song, and only one of its two afterlives ever arrived at the Ankara end of the cable.

~ out of the living room ~

For nine years the site ran on a machine in the administrator's house. In February 2012 he announced it was ending on the 29th and restarting on rented hosting, because the costs had stopped being survivable. ITmedia quoted him saying it had been in the red for quite a while. The replacement site came up on 14 March.

The second problem was the adult material. An over-18 sister site had been spun off to pyu.me in December 2008 and closed around 2012, which put everything back in one pile. In January 2018 he announced he was leaving the pya.cc domain, and the reasons he gave were that the domain had ended up on blacklists and that mixed-audience posting was unmanageable. He added a third: the codebase had grown too tangled to maintain. The renovated site opened on 31 January 2018 at pya.tokyo under the name ぴゃ！どっと東京, and pya.cc was turned over to adult submissions that March.

~ under preparation ~

In August 2021 the notice said both sites would close on the 18th, the renewal date of the server contract, and that the domains would be kept even though the hosting would not. By late September each address was serving a one-line joke about being under preparation, 準備中どえす on one and 準備中どえむ on the other, with pya.tokyo still carrying pya.cc in its page title. Five years on, both domains have stopped resolving entirely.

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