— p. 118, Super Flat Times by Matthew Derby

Link: https://thewoodcutter.archive.kickscondor.com/

Looks like I first started working on this backup of thewoodcutter.com back in May of 2019. At the time, a lot of the Flash preservation projects out there were just starting out - like Flashpoint and Ruffle. I decided to take an hour this week and see if anything had improved and… was able to get Ruffle working pretty well right off.

I have no idea if The Woodcutter will appeal to anyone out there - I personally really found it fascinating. It made me feel like the Web wasn’t just going to be a recreation of mainstream art - but was an avenue for its own sensibilities. And it felt like so much of the Web would be doomed to be underground - which was a good thing in my mind. Hidden corners, cult classics, experimental shit.

In hindsight, I think The Woodcutter hints at the future - art games like Samorost (which was also at first an early Web Flash game), messy handmade meme faces, and cryptic websites like Superbad or Terminal 00.

+++

I had also planned to revive the Bob Dylan ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ - which was down for a year or so - but it is back in business. Another possible target for my archive is Pharrell’s 24 Hours of Happy, which just isn’t quite functional any longer.

It’s interesting that The Woodcutter has disappeared from the Internet - while other contemporaries like Fly Guy have managed to find their way to Flash preservation sites across the Web.

Maybe it’s just not as well known. Hope you enjoy it!

Link: https://the-life-and-death-of-an-internet-onion.com

This project only appears to have about two weeks left - but it’s a good time to check it out because there’s a lot there now. A lot of onion!

This is a webzine - concept by Laurel Schwultz, but made possible by a team - where new writing is added from contributors every day for five weeks. (Back for its second season, it appears: here’s a snapshot from last August.^[1])

The onion works like so:

Just so you know, onions grow new layers from the inside-out. The oldest layers are on the outside, and the newest on the inside.

In true onion skin style, you can slightly make out the next entry in the background of the current entry you’re reading. You can also browse by contributor.

This new site includes the 2020 onion as well - the new season starts at layer twenty-three.

+++

Part of what really pushed me to posting about this, though, is this amazing spreadsheet:

From a blog post where the stylesheets are laid out.

The internet onion is decaying by phases because it has to be, given the basic hand-coding HTML and CSS we are using. We could write a script, but we are lazy, and there won’t be that many more phases of decay than this, Laurel thinks to herself. (Although down the line, Laurel would like to also degrade the content itself and source code, but that will be in Late Decay.)

So this is like the full 90’s web reenactment here.

I hope this continues to be a staple of the Web. The bots can’t keep up with the handmade Web. It’s too small - they can’t even BE that small!

Link: https://barnsworthburning.net

Directories aren’t surging. There isn’t this nascent directory movement fomenting - ready to take on the world. Directories aren’t trending.^[1]

But there is a certainly really sweet little directory community now. From the Marijn-inspired stuff listed in Directory Uprising to the link-sharing ‘yesterweb’ collected around sadgrl.online - or the originals at Indieseek and i.webthings.

Barnsworthburning (by Nick Trombley) is a very formidable addition to this commuity - a clean, multilayered design and an innovative bidirectional index.

+++

I know it bills itself as a ‘commonplace book’ or ‘Zettelkasten’ - I like to view it through the lens of a personal web directory - simply a collection of links and knowledge that acts as a portal to other things.

To the author, it’s a box to store things. But to us it’s a way of finding the vital pieces of this beautiful disastrous Web - which becomes more beautiful and more disastrous by the day!

Some of the entries are links with summaries; other entries are quotes and excerpts from larger articles.^[2]

Oh but what sets BWB apart is this triptych view.

The left is an index of tags and creators. The center contains the entries beneath the selected tag or creator. And the right-hand side shows details for related articles and entries that link back.

+++

To use the detail pane, you click on any of the attached excerpts or bidirectional links at the bottom of an entry.

Sometimes these excerpts are fragments inside of a larger entry. For example, here ‘Its place in the web of nature’ is linked to ‘crafting repair’ - even though its just attached to ‘A Pattern Language’, the book the thought comes from.

This also gets used to group together metapages - such as the (basically) ‘about’ page.

I’ll leave it to you to explore now. I feel like we could see some really interesting riffs on this setup in the future. It’s great.

Link: http://bullofheaven.com/

Not so much a musical recommendation here; illuminating another web corner. Seems like I’ve encountered this before, but it bears revisiting.

Currently there are 333 releases from this band right there on the home page. Some are a few minutes long, others are seven years long. A few (like 211 - With Muffled Sound Obliterating Everything) are negative in length.^[1] Still others have unknown length.

One of the more popular tracks is called n and is 87,708,958,333,333 hours and 20 minutes long. There is a ‘simulated’(?) excerpt on YouTube which runs closer to 10 hours. (In accordance with 2010s tradition.)

+++

A very interesting track, though, is ‘A Lovely Pear’. Knowing that this kind of stuff is in there makes this whole project a lot more than just audio file math.

+++

I discovered this group while plowing through the recordcollector1972 wiki - which is another story, conveniently linking some recent interests on this blog.

Recordcollector1972 is a YouTube channel adjacent to SiIvaGunner. However, instead of high-quality video game rips, the channel posts high-quality music tracks. These are mostly all mashups, but there are some very straightforward rips, such as Depeche Mode’s ‘Enjoy the Silence’.

The channel departs into strange terrain sometimes with very obscure tracks, like this Nero’s Day at Disneyland mashup - never thought I’d run across such a thing! Or this New Deluxe Life parody.^[2]

And, okay - what’s this?

(Also want to mention here, while we’re off on abandoned trails, that SiIvaGunner’s recent foray into Aphex Twin / Space Jam / GTA V territory is pretty frightening. This will obliterate many college educations.)

Link: https://maya.land/updates/2021/08/16/update-year-blogroll.html

Maya gets it. I mean I don’t even know if I get it as much as Maya does. Glad to sit back and learn at this point.

After a year, there’s no need to get high-minded. Maya.land is just fun.

But let’s get high-minded anyway. Is maya.land a blog? Is it a wiki? Whatever - it’s hypertext through and through. There’re regular updates, pages devoted to topics (like the goblin manifesto - which also can be blogged to), and responses to things.^[1]

I think Maya has a rare formula where aesthetics and wordsmithing get balanced.

In the same way that one might ask “how would the Book of Kells have looked if Columban monks had had access to neon pigments”, I like to use contemporary CSS options as my means toward ends that are a little anachronistic.

I think the pigments do work to say other things that we can’t. Or to be us in this hypertext world that we can’t easily pierce.

+++

To celebrate the inaugural year of maya.land, there is a very precious gift - in the form of this carefully annotated blogroll - a very good map of nearby ‘altweb’/‘outerweb’/‘yesterweb’ people!

I harp on about personal directories THEY ARE SAVING US and this lovely little catalog gives me a serious, uhh, shall we say… well it gives me the pringles all over. It’s really amusing to me that the 88x31 tiles are making such a come back. I mean we’re really getting quite specific with those dimensions.

+++

Maya.land is also a kind of touchstone for the current pragmatic Indieweb stuff. Webmentions bring in mentions from Twitter and other websites like mine. RSS feeds are still around.^[2] Bit of whostyles in there. And a lot of posts get crossposted (manually?) to Lemmy.

I think this shows a kind of middle ground of easy-to-reach protocols that should be more achievable to people. It gets you connected to our world of chatter enough that you’re not alone out here - but also gives you your own iceberg to carve.

— p. 38, That Time of Year by Marie NDiaye

Link: https://hobune.stream/videos/bPVohspy054

I recently covered Taia777 (and its ‘checkpoints’) here - now many of those videos have now been taken down - along with all of the comments. This appears to have happened on June 15th. Checkpointers have moved to other Stickerbrush Symphonies here and here. It appears that home for checkpointers is any place that this song calls home.

Fortunately the video is now also archived here along with all of the comments.^[1] Jonny RaZeR has also made a very good summary of the history and events up to the disappearance of these videos - with a bunch of screenshots taken the week previous.^[2]

+++

Rebane - who runs the ‘hobune stream’ YouTube archive says on Reddit:

Hey, I’m an internet archivist and I archived the taia777 channel and also the comments on it. Now that Nintendo has struck down many of the videos, I’m going to share my archives.

This reminds me of a tweet I recently saw from Robin Sloan:

I have developed a pretty strong habit of using youtube-dl to grab “tenuous-feeling” videos, especially those that qualify as some kind of research, and stashing the files away.

I have a stash too - I’m sure many of you have your own! If anyone out there is working on archival tools or has some pointers, please pass them on. It’s a good time for that.

+++

Oh also: this playlist is an incredibly solid directory in this world - and also happens to be SiIvaGunner/Soundclown adjacent. Go get a good education!

Link: https://sadgrl.online/

Ah so - this is a good rabbithole - go click on it, that’s all there is to it.

This site is truly a throwback to the Original World-Wide Web. A personal home page. Pages of links. Tutorials on making your own web page. Lots of little 88x31 link buttons. You can go here and pretty much experience the Web as it was.

One of my favorite areas is the shrines - a collection of mini-sites dedicated to Sadness’ obsessions. These sites are their thing: their own designs, their own feel - I assumed they were external links at first. Yeah, no.

+++

Since the site is on Neocities, there is a page cataloguing the recent updates. I’ve been using Neocities’ RSS feeds - but they are very limited - no indication of what has changed, just a timestamp.

So when I visited Unimaginable Heights’ recent updates page, I was happy to see that it shows thumbnails that are linked to the pages that have changed.

I’ve added support for this to Fraidycat, so that you can keep up with updates to these sites - just follow the url (https://unimaginable-heights.neocities.org/, for example) and it’ll show you a feed of that ‘recent updates’ page.

I like this a lot - no need for a blog - just build your home page on Neocities and people can have a window into what you’re working on day-by-day. Would love to see this on mmm.page!

+++

Oh also - you can find sadness on Spacehey.

Link: https://help.vivaldi.com/mail/mail-feeds/feeds/

I’ve been using Vivaldi for quite awhile - it’s a Chromium-based browser with quite a lot of interesting features, such as tab groups, tiling windows, and customizable sidebars. Their new RSS reader is rather elegant - as it’s just part of an inbox page that’s integrated into the browser - and can act as both an e-mail client and a feed reader!

I’ll personally continue to use Fraidycat with Vivaldi - because the ‘inbox’ metaphor doesn’t work for the volume of feeds I like to follow - but it’s great to see a resurgence of support for RSS in recent weeks. (I’m thinking particularly of Chrome for Android’s new ‘follow’ button.)

You can access the e-mail/reader pane by visiting vivaldi://mail/.

+++

Kind of wish you could hook into the RSS ‘subscribe’ button in extensions - but hey at least it’s there! The icon shows up in the address bar when feeds are detected - and you can click there to subscribe.

There’s also a preview window to show you the contents of a feed. Nice touch to see if the feed shows the full text of a post.

I think this is one of the better RSS integrations among browsers over the years. Firefox used to have a way of monitoring RSS as a ‘live bookmark’ - which was REALLY WEIRD. This was removed in 2018.

— Wikipedia article for Lozenge, “Heraldry”

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPVohspy054

Ran across this link in the mmm.page discord last week. I’m not linking to the video part of the page here - to be honest, I haven’t watched it yet. The video is not irrelevant here - but there is just a lot going on in the comments.

In fact, these aren’t just comments - but checkpoints! A new kind of comment where you check in and say how life is going. That’s all there is to it!^[1]

+++

The Taia777 Sanctuary Discord describes checkpoints as ‘spiritual comments’:

When people listen to the song and see the background of the vines/sky, it invokes a sense of nostalgia and curiosity. It’s hard to explain. It brings you back to a simpler time, when everything was controlled and bliss. But it can also amplify the current state you’re in, causing a complete reevaluation of yourself, and perhaps an epiphany of your existence as well. Many people have found solace in the comment section, as they pour their hearts and souls out to anonymous people on the internet.

It’s unknown what the first spiritual comment was, but when the video was first recommended to me around 2017, I recall seeing people question their identity and reality; I had also translated several of the Japanese comments, many of them sending their love to the unknown and those who are lost. Ever since I can remember, the taia777 comment section has been filled with love and, for many people, has been a safe space where people can vent with no repercussions. Everyone’s experience with these videos is different, but what’s universal is the utilization of the pathos. Emotions will be involved one way or another.

An even more popular video is taia777’s “Corridors of Time” video - while there are some checkpoints attached to this video, most of it is color commentary on this peculiar subculture.

+++

Along similar lines (and also brought up in the original discussion on Discord,) this video of Porter Robinson & Madeon’s “Shelter”. Except that the comments section in this video is dominated by a single user (name of JustJeff) posting checkpoints daily!

From a few hours ago:

Day 824: Finished “That time I got reincarnated as a slime” season 2 today. Man I love that anime

Sorry, it’s not strictly JustJeff. There are a lot of comments that are fake checkpoints, parodies or copycats.

I can’t help but feel that the stigma around YouTube comments - once seen as the premiere cesspool of the Internet - has perhaps made them the perfect spot for this kind of natural flowering of humanity. A great balancing has transpired.

Link: https://mmm.page/

Weiwei spotted this one some months ago - a tweet showing a responsive website builder:

XH:
I’ve been working on a dead simple way to make websites.

Drag-and-drop, free-form, collage-like.

Well, today mmm.page is out! So good! Please share your pages in the comments.

Over the past few months, I have seen this tool become incredibly polished - and have had some great chats with XH, discussing the plans for it. But even today - what a killer tool! Works brilliantly on mobile devices. Easily an heir to the throne of the original Byte page maker.

+++

Don’t want to speak for XH here, but there has been talk about self-hosting pages as well.

a) definitely want to support the use case of self-hosting. i think the ideal world is… “decentralized” hosting

b) at the same time, i want to support ppl who have no technical knowledge. let ppl put up a website within a minute or two – a presence online.

I asked about how the service will be kept alive, given that so many website builders end up capitulating to ad revenue and “engagement stuff” - the reply was “I would rather have no service running than one doused with advertisements.”

There is such a community of zazzy web tools coming together lately! Brilliant work, XH.

Clearly the radio silence on this one means that perhaps I am the only one who is affected here. Many of my personal link-hunting escapades begin on the Pinboard tag and user pages – those pages have been closed to the public for the past week, requiring a login to access.^[1]

Pinboard: User+tag pages will remain limited to logged-in users only because someone is trying to do a distributed crawl of Pinboard at about 40 queries per second. They didn’t even buy me dinner first

I asked if this was a permanent change and got a quick reply:

I don’t like it, but right now it’s my only defense against heavy distributed crawling.

I’m going to take the phrase ‘right now’ as an indicator that this is a brief manuevre.

+++

Logins for Pinboard are $22/year - very reasonable - a small fee to pay for the wealth of information within. But would be sad to see such a gift to the Web forced into a hole. (Especially since we recently saw some activity on twin site Delicious, after nearly ten years in a hole of its own.)

At the same time, I’m surprised there are no Pinboard-like sites in the Fediverse. There are ‘link-sharing’ sites, but they’re all more like Reddit.

Link: https://webcurios.co.uk/

Ayyy!!! Frantic ayyyy!!! CURIOS IS BACK. Previously a regular feature of Imperica zine - which sadly disbanded a year or so ago. But I’m glad to see Curios return on its own website.

Initially this will save us a lot of time because we won’t have to surf the Web ourselves any more. However, we now have to surf each episode of Web Curios - start yer scrolllllling.

Imperica sadly folded, but thanks to the able assistance of Shardcore (website and spaffwrangling), Ant (design) and Kris (email gubbins) all the Web Curios from the past have been retrieved and resurrected, and the whole horrible, overlong, emotionally-traumatic, faintly-exhausting rigmarole can begin anew – I can only imagine the look of excited expectation (that’s what that is, right?) thats spreading across your chops as you read this.

(Oh - incidentally, if you want to follow with RSS, here’s a super seekrit link for you…) Nvm - REAL FEED: webcurios.co.uk/feed/. (thank ya krisu - in comments below.)

Link: https://highquality.rip

It’s possible that you’re reading this thinking, “Okayyyy, uh Kicks? You can dig up rare TiddlyWikis and out-of-the-way neo-cities, but you’re just discovering SiIvaGunner??” Hey, I’m sorry! I don’t know who is reading this or what anyone knows or what’s IMPORTANT OKKKK!!

Let me start by saying that I’ve been asking around in kid circles - and it’s not unlikely that they know SiIvaGunner. HOWEVER. They don’t really know SiIvaGunner - they often have just heard the video game soundtrack “rips” - high quality rips - posted to the YouTube channel. And they uncritically accept them - videos such as “Horse Race (Extended Mix) - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time” - as nothing more than high quality rips.

Of course, if you happen to continue down the SiIvaGunner storyline - which is easy to do, since a dozen new videos might appear each day - you can end up at videos like: “Main Theme (Anniversary Edition) - Wii Shop Channel” or “Title Theme & Ending - 7 GRAND DAD”. A “rip” can be a mashup, a remix, a medley, mixed-up sentences - stuff like that.

Of course, the channel has fought through several takedowns over the past six years - since it purports to be unironically infringing copyright and distributing unedited tracks.^[1] (A cover story which plays into its “fake out” strategy.)

+++

Anyway, SiIvaGunner isn’t a single person. There are about 300 active contributors - more than 900 people having contributed to the catalog.

So this is obviously a deep well to try to dive into with a massive Discord channel and wiki and network of YouTube and Twitter accounts, regular livestreams and ARG events. I think my favorite place to point people is the GilvaSunner Bandcamp page, which regularly releases new compilations assembled by the collective.

There is a wider “high quality rips” scene - like CrystalForce is a great example I recently stumbled into.

If you’re interested in more backstory, look for interviews with Chaze the Chat.