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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.)

---

1. This particular track is -47’22". I clicked on it and nothing played. But I also might have just finished it. ↩︎

2. Which is DEFINITELY a musical recommendation that I can make. It kind of cancels out your college education if you haven’t brought it current by listening to this album. Good knowledge here. ↩︎

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.

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]

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.

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/.

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]

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.

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.

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.)

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.)

Found this off the creator’s website: anemon.es. Which is also good fun - click on “my old site zzz” as well - good stuff in there too.

But back to e-worm club. It’s basically just a shared directory of files. Some of them are doing twtxt.txt^[1] - but many of the pages are .gmi files?? Anyway, just click around on names and files and you’ll find hidden blogs.

Wish more people got to build the little out-of-the-way community that they want to build. This is custom!

This fantastic art tool is going right into my href.cool Web/Participate collection! Made by Shannon Lin - equally fascinating website at hello-shannon.com - what a sensation to use the fill tool to pour lollipops and little external hard drive icons into circles and squiggle shapes. I’ve recently had some fun with MacPaint - and this stirs up all the same freewheeling spraycan feelings!

My poor rendition of Toulouse-Lautrec is here no here - for some reason the link isn’t working, might be too big of an image.

Kind of a cool facet that the images show up differently on the different platforms.

@s_han_non_lin:
mobile support has been solved!! thanks @bwasti – the animated emojis are still coming … please do hold your breath n stay tuned

Links to canvases can get huge - but glad it’s all there in the query string. Keep a URL shortener close.

I don’t imagine this meme has had longevity outside my personal skeleton - it’s been three years now. I put this meme on my best of 2010s list and thought I was done with it. But I just keep coming back to it via stuff like this.^[1]

This vid is a collection of my favorite set of a certain subset of Bitconnect meme vids: the “…but it’s Bitconnect” vids. (X-Files but it’s Bitconnect, Universal Studios but it’s Bitconnect,…) I already loved the sensations I was feeling in other Bitconnect videos - uncovering a whole subgenre within the wider Carlos Matos movement was quite thrilling!

I’m basically a Bilbo, content to stay at this corner of Bag End, being a layabout, munching wiki squares and playing all of Soundcloud chronologically in the background. (They were right about this ‘cozy web’ thing!)

Now glitchyowl has snatched my coat collar and dragged me into the woods on adventures. My pipe is still spinning in the air.

This is the tale of purple desert designs, silent HTML livestreams, MacPaint toolbars, Mario Kart-inspired JavaScript and disgustingly gaudy drop shadows.

We’re starting to draw the curtain on Multiverse - our combination of a new ‘blog’/‘wiki’ aesthetic, paired with some Indieweb sprinkles.

Episode one of this podcast is a rereading of the ‘Cars 1’ movie script. Episode two is Squiddo and sister explaining every character in the Danganronpa universe. (Doesn’t matter if you know anything about that - 1. they will teach you from the ground up and 2. they mostly talk about restaraunts.)

Most of the time you can’t hear what’s being said bc the mic is too far away. This is a recently discovered podcast recording technique that is the FINAL discovery unlocked in our planet’s World Technology story line. Squiddo is ‘known’ for the Secret Memes Vault playlist.^[1]

I originally first stumbled across Dioramas by way of Elisabeth’s other photo blog Abject Sublime. I can recommend all of it. And more links to other designs and essays at this website.

Of all of it, so far I really get into Dioramas the most. Elisabeth does some clever things with GIFs - but the full-window experiments at Dioramas are beautiful and thought-provoking. It reminds me of early hypertext experiments, in the best way.

Here we go: more surprising news in the personal directory front. Who woulda thought. Perfect tiny directories - you all are always asking me about this.

Tray^[1] is much like other link page / one-page tools (linktree, carrd, about.me) which lets add you add links and notes to build a rudimentary web page. But it adds a key element: subpages. When you add a subpage, it is linked from the page you added it to. And you can add more inside that new page.

So we’re looking at kind of barebones wiki here. Ingenious.

This also feels more freeform and ‘fresh’/‘clean’ than those others.

Spotted this mixtape on Gossip’s Web: not just an mp3 entitled “A Walk to Remember”, but a really cool page of floating paper wads, apparently done for a Secret Santa exchange.

It’s a good feeling, examining the paper scraps and wondering who is behind them.

something fun to say in German is
nebeneinander
which means : next to eachother / sidebyside

You can find a number of similar uses of Glitch on Gossip’s Web.

One thing I love about Meat Computer - every single song has the same “I like this new generation of music” sample. But really - this is just the same thing I am always posting - very slapshod, goofy and overlooked little bits of whatever.

these fangs
r 4 u
only

death threats
@ my head
jus 4 bein me
super creatine
ya
fck my chrons disease

drinking kratom
like it’s fucking lean
now im sleepin
in my mommas jeans

Of course, you can barely make any of this out, because the vocals are so perfectly rushed and faint in the far upper reach of falsetto octaves.

I am having a very hard time believing that these albums (by human Eryk Salvaggio and computer counterpart Francois Harddisk) have been overlooked. But it’s the same story week after week - who can find anything in the mess of the Internet anymore - with absolutely abyssmal search engines and recommendation engines getting in the way.^[1]

Oh and I daresay - the above link is a very thorough, very juicy tracklist.doc of how the creative effort was seeded.

I asked Jukebox to produce new samples from libraries that created music in the style of Francois Hardy, but in the genre of Experimental Hip-Hop, which from what I can tell means a music model trained on Death Grips records. I took these generated pieces (which were maxed out at 1:20 seconds long), cut them up and reassembled them - the same way old records might be sampled for any other hip-hop record. This would form the basis of a handful of these tracks, though in some cases the generated samples were removed from the final product after serving as stems from which the rest of the song would be built.

But this goes even further beyond that! Lyrics are generated by tools such as GPT-2, then fed through a speech synthesizer to produce the singing. The “Oligarchic Ganglions” vid also has a neat bit of “deep fake” ancient history to it.^[2]

Ftrain captain and Classic Internet uncle Paul Ford dropped this charming little bit of code back in August that throws up random Internet Archive images.

@ftrain:
I’ve replaced Twitter on my phone with a tiny web app that selects page images randomly from a few hundred thousand old books, plus some museum images, and it’s…basically the same mess of America being problematic, goofy memes, and women dunking on men.

It’s good fortune that this is such a mix of random photographs, scientific diagrams, magazine covers and such. So it’s a rather cool corpus - compared to Google Books, for instance - which might just turn up legions of dry bricks of out-of-date text. This done with Gutenberg might fare better, who knows.

I mean these random samplings are a nice feeling for an archive. There’s definitely some boring things - a scan of a giant page of identical stamps, a ledger of unreadable faint cursive - but you can’t beat the speed of hopping from image to image until.