This is definitely inspired by the print book "house of leaves", a strange work of ergodic fiction: The subset box layouts with backward text, the coloring of a single word a bright color throughout ("house" and "Minotaur" in HoL)
This reminds me of the way the Internet was in the past. And the random sites to which this site links. (If you have not seen Neocities, it is another similar place which is the predecessor of Geocities before Yahoo! bought it and killed it.)
I was just thinking to myself about how much the internet was lacking in self-important esoteric gibberish. I am unsurprised to see it came from the same person as "A Website to Destroy All Websites".
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).
I thought that "A Website to Destroy All Websites" as a bit precious but like this for the "I'm feeling lucky" logic alone. The author is right. The internet was good and now, I'm sorry to say, sucks. I'm worried something's gone for good.
For something a bit more “substantive” (or perhaps earnest) but still reminiscent of the same aesthetic this evokes, I recommend spending a few minutes poking around big gulp supreme: https://biggulpsupreme.neocities.org/
The book that this website is inspired by...its plot seems to echo my impression of what these “Old/small web elegies” are becoming.
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’.
Curious detail: the button/widget icons of the browser chrome are composed of multi-layered box-shadows (i.e. one box-shadow definition per pixel or line, concatenated to a sting) of a `:before` pseudo element. (I don't think that I've seen anything alike before.)
Wow Yeah I definitely see that a lot in its larger structure. The House of Leaves stuff is kinda all on its sleeve, but the kind of serial structure of it feels so much like Invisible Cities now that you say this.
As soon as I saw the scrolling "made by henry (from online)." at the bottom I thought "marquee" tag. Sure enough when I inspected the DOM it does use one.
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[ 294 ms ] story [ 1262 ms ] thread"my cathedral-seeing eyes finally came in the mail, really excited to try these puppies out. oh holy shit"
0. https://bsky.app/profile/strange.website
It's a great book :)
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).
/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’.
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.
Meaning: also no images.