I've added quite a few Easter eggs and a few old school games. Let me know what you think?
Blue dots are locations of previous visitors.. it all works well on desktop, the games need a bit more love to work well on mobile.
On the Internet: any movie I want to watch; any song I want to listen to; an endless parade of games to play via Steam et al.; about a zillion games I can play online with friends; numerous app store options, and an entire other world of smartphone games I can play alone or with friends; inexpensive LLMs I can do almost anything I want to with, wherever my imagination takes me; porn, a lot of porn; infinite social media; infinite videos on youtube; any skill I want to learn, there is - what might as well be - unlimited material on how to do it; any book I want to read; communications, email, instant messaging, tele-whatever; just about any kind of get-x-done software I could ask for, and if it doesn't exist an LLM will create it for me tonight; shopping, whatever you want to buy, you can shop for it, research it, look at it; want to start an LLC? Internet. Want to file a trademark? Internet. Want a passport? Internet. Book a flight/hotel/B&B/car rental? Internet. Plot a holiday? Internet. Have a hobby? Communities on one platform or another. And on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on.
did you really not understand what the author meant by “internet” in the colloquial sense or are you being needlessly pedantic?
It's a great book :)
> this site is built with Eleventy and Sass, and uses ~no JavaScript~ a very small amount of JavaScript for the House of Leaves post.
So, HoL confirmed.
I am especially befuddled by all the comments stating "This is how the web used to be!"; no it wasn't, and I can only imagine those who think so collate their view of web history purely through what others say on Mastodon and Twitter (who in turn probably constructed their view of the time from the twelfth or so chinese whisper down the line of various blogs and manifestos).
Some of the presentation (such as the inverted / mirrored square) is pure art. In an admirable sense: art.
While I get the commentary — that bit reminded me of House of Leaves which has been criticized for the same thing — there’s a real human behind this, who obviously cares deeply about the issues they’re communicating about (and has the skill to do so quite incredibly.) Sometimes I wonder, in the ease of critique, what it’s like for the anonymous person on the other end, and I don’t feel good here. I feel like your comment doesn’t quite account for the humanity of someone else, nor of someone doing something with passion.
Here's a better look at how the "anonymous person on the other end" sees things [1]:
> “i’m always polite to chat gpt so it remembers me later ” you are going to die from water-poison-related typhoid in the Great American Megadesert after a particularly nasty heat surge evaporates the rest of the drinkable rations. you will be buried in the sand.
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/strange.website/post/3m33mnmcyys2t
I'd agree if the site covered some history, shared recipes, or even just ranted about the author's favorite movies. But this guy is just trash-talking the entire internet.
"the website has changed. it twists facts to fiction, reality to rubbish, gold into dirt." ... and so on.
If you're going to be cruel, you might get some cruel feedback.
There’s no real value here. No new info, no original content. Just clunky web design and rants about 'social media bad.'
That’s not how the web actually was. Everyone used to bring something to the table, instead of just talking in circles about the table itself.
Try search something on https://wiby.me for example and then tell me if all you get are people writing about the web.
It is also true that Facebook and its ilk did destroy huge swaths of the online community. Example: I'm a automotive tinkerer, and online forums used to be a rich source of information, community, crazy builds...people actually creating stuff for the sake of creating. All that is gone now and the purity of an open space to put creative pursuits has been infiltrated with perverse engagement incentives, ads, algorithmic curation and the like.
I get what you're saying, but it doesn't mean that OP is wrong even if you find it exhausting.
When I was a kid in the 80s there were fake 1950s diners everywhere, with jukeboxes and malt machines, bubble gum music and greasy hamburgers. They were a cheap nostalgic simulacrum of something not originally all that special. That was because there were still a lot of people alive who were teenagers in the 1950s and wanted to show their kids or grandkids something kinda-like the world they grew up in. It drifted further and further from reality along with the people who inhabited that world, who grew old and died. Now we just have faux 50s diners and a lot of old movies to look at.
Even if we completely deleted the Internet and started from scratch, or any other technology for that matter, enterprising people will want to use the technology to deliver some sort of value to society in return for goods and services. This is both a good thing for the people in question, as they can be paid for something they love doing, addresses previously thought of use cases (such as online shopping or video streaming, in the case of the Internet) that people would be willing to pay for, and leads to commercial exchanges with many positive downstream effects (internet providers laying infrastructure, companies investing in software, and associated employment for many people).
Certainly, I owe all of my jobs and many of the friendships that I continue beyond their meatspace boundaries, precisely because the Internet and commercial services on top of it that enabled it to happen.
Without this aspect, the Internet would likely be left in a niche, which makes it far less useful to most. This is the primary reason why projects like Gemini, etc. will not have much success, because it is intentionally designed to be not useful to most people; and guess what? You can always make plain HTML/CSS websites and set up a Matrix server for your buddies to talk to; you don't need a new protocol and sing praises about the indieweb to make this happen.
Meaning: also no images.
"my cathedral-seeing eyes finally came in the mail, really excited to try these puppies out. oh holy shit"
/s, if it wasn't obvious...
A man stumbles upon the idea of a thing that itself is borne off the account of someone else that never actually came to pass. Madness ensues. And madness perhaps precedes the event. ‘Weird and eerie’.
