‘ALL’/‘EVERYTHING’
Many replies, notes and subtle edits are left off the home page - I try to limit the attention required in order to follow this blog. However, I am also finding myself in more conversations all the time. I provide this complete list of activity - so as not to hide it all, but to sate any curiosity.
This page has its own raw unfiltered feed.
He hadn’t even gotten the letter into the envelope when he was sprayed down with Ending Gel. I know what the letter said because I was the one who sprayed him down. I tore the letter from his gnarled, dead grasp. It was an honest mistake, killing him — he was naked at the time, just lounging around in his car without a stitch of clothing on, the spitting image of an enemy soldier.
— p. 118, Super Flat Times by Matthew Derby
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Back at it - scrapchat today (Sept 21st) at 6 PM Eastern with Talita of UH. Starting with the topic of Sunshine69 and moving outward from there. Talita is like one of my favorite people ever, so I am personally very excited about this.
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Upcoming scrapchat livestream tomorrow Friday, Sept 17th at 10:30 AM Eastern. Talking with @rebane2001, keeper of the Taia777 Archive (and various other Minecraft, ASMR, MLP channels). Talkin web archives and ‘checkpoints’. twitch.tv/kickscondor.
✤ Full video is archived here. Or read the finished transcript at Figma.
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Also keep an eye for a scrapchat next week with Talita of Unimaginable Heights - should be Tuesday eve. Likely 6 PM Eastern.
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Finished my personal archive of the classic Flash website.
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!
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Net.art? Literature? Zine? No, an Internet onion.
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!
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A very impressive ‘wiki’/‘zettelkasten’/‘directory’ - not to be missed if you’re into FedWiki or Andy Matuschak’s notes.
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.
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77,898,996,714 years of DRM-free musical tracks.
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.)
This particular track is -47’22". I clicked on it and nothing played. But I also might have just finished it. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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Is becoming a rather foundational location on the altweb methinks…
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.
Like an iceberg - this comparison was made in Hypertext 2020 - ‘layers of hypertext that become progressively more personal, or which become more detailed, or perhaps even more (or less) ephemeral as you go through the layers.’ ↩︎
Maya: ‘I’m really sick of people complaining that RSS is dead. RSS isn’t dead!’ ↩︎
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Talking my way out of this self-created labyrinth.
Today I actually caught up on h0p3, chame, sphygmus, alienmelon, sadness and so many of the others that I like to keep up with. It was so good to just have some time to read and focus on their lives and - to follow some of the links and music that they’ve posted.
I especially loved reading h0p3’s anonymous interactions on Omegle. I felt tempted to log on and do some chatting there. But I didn’t really know what to type into the box as an interest. Hypertext? Vaporwave? Maybe it would work.
My personal life has been in such upheaval since April. I’m now set up in a little card table in a basement. All my belongings are packed away in a storage unit. I’ve been granted a stalking injunction against a guy. This means I’ve been entirely dependant on the courts and the police. They’ve all been good people - but have been mostly useless in helping to solve the problem.
It was nice to represent myself. I just watched videos - watched other stalking injunction hearings and read up on the different forms. I got very used to the Certificate of Service form. (Things get so meta with that form - I swear I saw a Certificate for serving the Certificate of Service somewhere.)
But, in the end, I just don’t trust the police and the courts to fix the problems. I left a neighborhood that I really loved. I haven’t even said goodbye to Kathy. I just keep telling her, “we’ll see.”
I knew every house. The guy who plays the euphonium. The guy who walks with his weights swinging by his side. The Hindi couple who lost a baby. The tall guy who loves formula racing. The lady behind me with the beautiful garden. We never talked but we always smiled and nodded. I never turned on music out there because I wanted to enjoy her radio sounds.
It’s embarassing to slink off and leave them in the mess. I guess we are all really strangers. Everyone minds their own business. Even when things get crazy.
Digging upwards, to find some light.
I have been so buried that it’s been tough to make time for Fraidycat, Multiverse or the HrefHunts. I was so comfortable before - even I would forget that there was a real person under here.
It’s not that I think anyone is disappointed - even Weiwei, who is so helpful at every turn. But I am disappointed. I want to be doing all these things. Not sifting through hours of security footage or regrouting a bathroom. Searching for a place to live is insane right now.
But hey - my cup of water is full, the card table is holding up, and there is so much good stuff to go through - filling up the Web in the interim. I love the world.
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Ahh! Amazing that you were able to save so many comments in the first place - hard to call such an impressive archive, a ‘hack’. Hardly!
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No one had ever given him such an effusive, heartfelt handshake, never had anyone but intimate acquaintances stood so close to him, knee to knee, and as a math teacher Herman never did anything to encourage such impulses.
— p. 38, That Time of Year by Marie NDiaye
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Rebane has checkpointed the checkpoints, after a DMCA takedown by Nintendo.
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!
Replace /videos in the URL with /comments to see them all. I assume
Rebane has a good reason to not directly link to that comments page - so I’m
respecting that here as well. ↩︎
The making of the video happened to coincide with the deletion of ‘the lost sanctuary’ - as the author writes in Discord: ‘I was making a video about the original stickerbrush video, and as I was finishing the editing process, and looking for comments, I discovered that the video was blocked by nintendo.’ ↩︎
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Livestream June the 10th at 2 PM Eastern. An urgent scrapchat with @devonzuegel - exploring her recent ‘Field Notes: Miami’ and other fine hypertexts. Should be a good afternoon. twitch.tv/kickscondor
✤ Full video is archived here. The finished doc, on the other hand, is over heeeere.
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Personal directory through-and-through - got some Neocities pointers for you as well.
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.
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And not as a separate app - but as an integrated part of the browser.
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.
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‘A mascle is a voided lozenge—that is, a lozenge with a lozenge-shaped hole in the middle—and the rarer rustre is a lozenge containing a circular hole. A field covered in a pattern of lozenges is described as lozengy; a similar field of mascles is masculy.’
— Wikipedia article for Lozenge, “Heraldry”
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The world of checkpoints in the YouTube comments.
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.
It actually is so much better than a normal comment. ↩︎
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@kicks Wow! I love these sorts of projects. Such a nice way to make website-building feel less imposing and restrictive.
The designer in this case has just done great work refining over the past six months. To pour that much time into a single-page tool! I really think this project has legs.
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Personal home pages strike back – an incredibly elegant and friendly tool from @xhfloz.
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.
@kicks Wow! I love these sorts of projects. Such a nice way to make website-building feel less imposing and restrictive.
@kicks Wow! I love these sorts of projects. Such a nice way to make website-building feel less imposing and restrictive.
The designer in this case has just done great work refining over the past six months. To pour that much time into a single-page tool! I really think this project has legs.
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Track ripper extraordinaire of the imaginary video game kingdom.
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.
The wiki also says for “misleading content”. It’s a rough time for fiction. ↩︎
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Someone’s hyperactive spider got loose.
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.
Happily, the RSS feeds are still up. (Sssssh! Let’s not jinx it!) Sample URL: https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/t:chiptune ↩︎
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The greatest (HEAVIEST) linkdump of our era emerges without skipping a beat.
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.)
They have actual RSS feed, you don’t need “email to RSS”: https://webcurios.co.uk/feed/
Aha 
Ok - didn’t spot that. Thanks, krisu!
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They have actual RSS feed, you don’t need “email to RSS”: https://webcurios.co.uk/feed/
Aha Ok - didn’t spot that. Thanks, krisu!
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Looks like e-worm.club uses Flounder, a gemini hosting software: https://admin.flounder.online/
Ok wow - appreciate this insight! Had played with the browsers, but wasn’t familiar with the extension. Sure enough - e-worm.club is browsable with Gemini.
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An 11-person HTML community.
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 is unrelated sorta - but I didn’t share it at the time, so I’m going to tack it on here as well. One person I met on special.fish some months ago is mikael.
But mikael’s pinboard is the place you want to go. A lot of great links. Furthermore, the homepages tag of mikael’s is fii-urrr. Ugg saying it like that doesn’t help. How do I express enthusiasm here suitably? It’s good. It’s very good.
Which also is a fun website - to just visit domains that are in the listing. ↩︎
Looks like e-worm.club uses Flounder, a gemini hosting software: https://admin.flounder.online/
Ok wow - appreciate this insight! Had played with the browsers, but wasn’t familiar with the extension. Sure enough - e-worm.club is browsable with Gemini.
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Ah it’s worse than that - Microsoft Windows (not activated).
But have to push back - it’s your glitch that’s sooo sick!! Haven’t had this much fun since MacPaint. Filling with emoji is a thrill…
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Draw amazing emoji mosaics - by Shannon Lin
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.
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for sure - right here: https://github.com/kickscondor/hypertext2020
apologies. never intended for use outside of me. run: ruby ht2020.rb ht2020.yml
you can go back to commit 3207526 to see the full transcript. thanks for peekin in.
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Okkk - notes from the second Clubhouse I attended with S. Joy Mountford.
(This is the second transcript I’ve taken of a chat with Joy. See the first at Notes from Clubhouse w/ Joy Mountford. This took place on March 11th, 2021 at 6 PM Pacific.)
HOPE I’M ACCURATE HERE. IT’S KIND OF A BLUR AND I’M READING IN THE LINES.
Specifically discussing the Human Interface Group in the 90s.
We take for granted all the space and computing we have today. At the time, she joined Apple, she started on a Macintosh SE. It was a $2,000 computer with two 800k floppy drives, 1 meg of RAM. And they were trying to do Quicktime with pictures the size of postage stamps.
In those days, they couldn’t do illustrative or animated story-telling - and we also take for granted that story-telling is a part of design work.
She had a connection with NYU ITP - and thought that they would bring a few students in to gain exposure to computing. Dan O’Sullivan was one of the interns. He had a camera pointed at a Coke can for like a month. Another person was taking a picture of water droplets over and over.
She thought, “What are we doing? This is going nowhere.” She was told, “Leave everyone alone. Just be patient. Something is happening.”
Lol. “Trust me, trust me. Something will happen.”
They’d been filming thousands of pictures into a giant circular movie. People gasped in shock at the view all around the scene.
People were standing next to a machine with freon to cool it down - presumably while it rendered.
The summers were full of interns experimenting and it sounds like Joy would write up job descriptions for them that would provide them with a cover while they
She described John Lassiter’s “Pencil Test” short - and the release to coincide with Quicktime.
Hypercard. Teachers were excited about it bc they could pick off images and build presentations. It become easier to make content. The game Myst.
The idea of going up to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a Mac Plus. Had a harddisk attached as well. Was bigger than the elevator to go to the top. So it was hoisted up next to the elevator. There was no ground up there - just cables.
Dan O’Sullivan had to go up. Last minute, he mentions he is afraid of heights.
Again - thousands of pictures stitched together into an interactive scene, above the Golden Gate Bridge. They began to give beautiful interiors the treatment - palaces in Russia and museums.
Presenting to Russia, their first demo of the VR image had no reaction. No clapping, no response. They were devastated.
It turned out that they didn’t believe it was real! Afterward, they had to impress upon one of the faculty that the demo was real by putting his hand on the mouse and illustrating that the room in Pavlov’s Palace could be navigated.
A day in the life of Australia - with 30 different countries represented among the workers attending. This was a series of photographic books - and Joy loved that the series showed photographers taking the pictures and some behind-the-scenes stuff. She felt this was important bc “if you’re going to tell a story outside of reader’s worlds, you should show the connecting story that bridges to their world - to draw them in.”
Americans in the 90’s were less impressed by demonstrations than other cultures because they were exposed to it so frequently. Once we are exposed to an innovation, our imagination catches up to it and other things become less of a stretch.
Reminiscing on “background printing”. Before PCs could multitask, you had to wait for documents to print.
Re: developing guidelines for developers, to ensure that Apple products were consistent. There was no “police force” at Apple, it was designers writing well-written, simple-to-follow guidelines to ensure that everyone was on the same page.
“It wasn’t as glamorous as going to Russia, but it was just as important.”
She developed color designs on a monochrome screen, during the transition to color! Flipping down color foils over the black-and-white screen. Starting without color monitors. She asked for a color monitor. “Don’t be ridiculous, you can’t have one of those.”
Some people did not want Hypercard to be produced. Bill Atkinson worked offsite. It didn’t fit into the culture at Apple. Like asking people in the UK to switch the side of the road they drive on - people just didn’t see the reason to put on a new paradigm.
“It was a totally different way of computing. And people got confused. No shit!”
People needed to see it in a new light - but they saw it as a different model that offered no benefit. “You don’t play Call of Duty in the same way that you listen to audiobooks.” (LOL!)
Don Norman walks by - first card is an index card with a fish and a telephone number. “A fish doesn’t have a telephone number.” “Don, it’s a graphic, not a real fish.”
These creative tools opened computing to women, who had been isolated from the male-dominated world of programming. Anyone who looked different at the time was sent to Joy because she cultivated a team with a wide variety of talent. But it wasn’t just an appearance thing - she discovered that most of the people she was drawn to had a background in music.
They had to spent a lot of time in the office because most of the computers couldn’t be transported home easily. “Luggables”: computers like the Powerbook that were somewhat transportable but not easily. They still had to use pen and paper quite a lot with no Internet to keep their home and office work in sync.
Education was not a lucrative thing to pursue, never has been. Apple had to compete with IBM. There was no competition in the “entertainment” front. And games were just for children. Mechanical Universe (from JLP) was a foundational work to teach Physics. But it was an uphill battle to get to those shifts.
Re: “productivity”. Work was developing plans, producing spreadsheets. Visualizing those things was quite controversial. It seemed extraneous to spend time designing the view of a project. Now it’s taken for granted that you can design post-its as “productivity”. (This feels like a jab at Kanban boards. XD)
She’s bagging on icons again. But hey - what could be more iconic? (Esp those original slanty Mac icons.)
Mention of a female mathematician who had long hair - and all the male workers assumed she was a designer. “She’s a mathematician - don’t go asking her to make you icons.”
Story of people cutting their fingers installing graphic cards in the computers. Dripping blood would short the boards! The execs had no idea the difficulty people were having until they did studies and filmed videos of people doing the installations.
With the new color monitors, people didn’t understand that the screens were still black. (When powered off and during early boot stages and stuff.) So they would return the computers bc the monitors weren’t “color”!
Lol. Going off on “A.I.” again. The word “intellegent” and “deep” being bandied about. “Why do people not know what Eliza is? How many lines of code was it? And when was it written?”
“Ivan Sutherland will say: I’ve done nothing.”
While talking about how many great works from the past have been ignored and not followed. “Newness is very overprojected and underdelivered.”
Interesting story about getting people to open up creatively by having them cut up magazine images and Xerox their collages. People were shocked at what they were capable of.
“I listen to music today - and I hate it! But I learn new things by listening to it.”
“We don’t sit and watch enough - we react. But it can be practiced: What is that person thinking? What would happen if a ball fell on them. Practice observing.” She mentions a Welsh four-year-old who discovered a large dinosaur footprint while the father was on his phone, standing by her.
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Love that album soooo much. It’s a classic! Looking forward to everything else you do.
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The lore behind a mythical PostScript file now in my possession. Relayed to me by Herbert Quine, 2020 Sep 14
Electronic mail received From herbquine@<redacted>.
2020 Sep 14 12:34 PM.
(Ed. Note: I don’t pretend to fully understand this unsolicited e-mail from an anonymous maze scholar. However, it is like toxic materials in my hands. I must pass it on. For some reason, I get more e-mail about printable mazes than I do about anything else! I suppose they are truly the most formidable pillars of this, The World-Wide Web…)
To whom it may concern,
I have closely followed your ongoing fight against cybercrimes committed on the web property of kickscondor.com and would like to express my gratitude for the FBI’s efforts to highlight printable mazes as a valuable tool of cyberwarfare. Even though I wholeheartedly support your work, I must admit that I was initially reluctant to write you this message, given that my relationship with Jerry Bruckheimer Films has been somewhat troubled in the past. But I have finally come to the conclusion that a possible contribution to the war effort on my part far outweighs any misgivings I might have regarding Jerry Bruckheimer Films’ handling of the National Treasure franchise, which is why I am enclosing an Infinitely Printable Maze in the hope that it might be of value to the FBI.[1]
I originally sent the same maze to the Jerry Bruckheimer Films department involved in the development of the upcoming National Treasure project as I had high hopes that the enclosed maze could play the same pivotal role in the hands of Nicolas Cage as John Wilkes Booth’s diary had played in the past. You see, the Infinitely Printable Maze has been part of my family’s estate for many generations and is in fact the only item of value that my grandfather was able to carry with him to the old continent when he made the perilous journey by sea in the hopes of finding a better life as a university professor in post-68 France. Well versed in French Theory but barely fluent in French, he was unfortunately never able to capitalize on the infatuation with self-reference and all things meta en vogue at the time and finally returned to his home country after many unsuccessful attempts to popularize printable mazes as an object of study. Regret and dementia made a potent mixture in the following years, which is why I cannot say with certainty how many of his stories about the origin of this particular printable maze were completely fabricated, but as far as I could tell the setting of most of his tales seemed to vacillate between a carpet weaving mill on the outskirts of Shiraz and the desolate hinterlands of the Basque countryside. In either case, it seemed that some time in the 14th century, one of our ancestors, the original Creator, had realized how much time could be saved in the production of printable mazes if only their construction could be mechanized somehow and thus went on to devise a rudimentary set of instructions to teach others the art of drawing printable mazes with just the right level of difficulty. But since each of these mazes had to be unique, their creation turned out to be impossible to automate on a printing press and so dozens (hundreds in other versions of the story) of local children were instructed in the interpretation of these maze drawing commands, to the point where this subject was judged more prestigious than Basque music (or Persian poetry, depending on the story). But when the Creator suddenly died, his creation nearly died with him, as his students began to fervently advocate for different maze drawing techniques, all of them slightly different and changing from generation to generation. Peaceful discussion turned into heated debate, debate into heresy and before you knew it most of the Basque countryside (or the entirety of the province of Fars, depending on the story) had been ravaged by a supposedly holy war. This dark age ended only when one of the daughters of the original Creator realized that only a canonical source of the drawing instructions, inscribed in the maze and reproduced with every maze drawing, could put an end to the senseless bloodshed by irrevocably linking the maze with its architecture[2], the source with its expression. She quickly found out that this endeavour was more difficult than initially imaged, as not only the instructions for drawing the maze had to be included in the maze, but also the instructions for drawing the instructions for drawing the maze and so forth. After what must have seemed like an eternity, she finally succeeded, but not without considerably changing the language of instruction that had heretofore been used, which in turn extensively shaped the language spoken in that area. Some of my relatives have attributed the unique features of the Basque language to that episode, others see the refined beauty of Persian poetry as emblematic proof. In any case, every maze produced by the Creator’s Daughter and her ancestors henceforth carried with it a copy of its instructions which itself contained instructions for drawing both the maze and its instructions and have not changed to this day, as far as I was able to trace the lineage of the maze in my possession.
Now, I know what you will object to my version of these events (and it is exactly what the production team at Jerry Bruckheimer responded to a similarly worded letter of mine): How could it be that the instructions for drawing the Infinitely Printable Maze are valid PostScript, given that PostScript was only invented and formalized in the 80s by Adobe? I myself have long been puzzled by this fact and actually once took it as proof that the stories my grandfather told me must have been a product of his vivid imagination. Perhaps my memories of seeing the Infinitely Printable Maze on our wall as a child in the early 80s were merely hazy recollections of similarly looking mazes, or perhaps my memory was off by a few years and my grandfather had manufactured the maze just after PostScript printers had first hit the market?
Thankfully, I finally learned the truth one fateful October morning, when I met some distant relatives of mine that I had not had the chance of meeting before. Our family has been spread out over multiple continents for many generations (which is one reason why I like to think that perhaps both versions of the story have certain grains of truth and the events described here took place both in the Basque countryside and around Shiraz, merely at different points in time), and so it was not unusual to meet distant cousins for the first time in my 20s or 30s. As it turned out, one of these distant second cousins had worked under Charles Geschke at Adobe in the late 70s and early 80s and was responsible for the design of most of what later became Postscript. He found it entirely surprising that I had ever doubted the family story (apparently his mother had been more lucid in her retelling of the family tale than my grandfather had been) and assured me that he had made sure to include all of the instructions in the PostScript standard that were necessary to draw the maze, with a single exception: Of course our ancestors had no notion of “seeding” a random number generator, they simply used two 8-sided dice to generate a single integer between 1 and 64, but this fact proved problematic in the PostScript standard. Without such a seed every PostScript printout would have generated the same printable maze, which of course would have completely defeated the purpose of the Infinitely Printable Maze. To accommodate this fact, my distant second cousin had included the realtime" and srand" instructions in the PostScript version of the Infinitely Printable Maze, which marked the only departure from the original instructions in hundreds of years. As I later learned, this actually lead to a feud between different factions in our family and while I am certainly not unsympathetic to the purists that emphasize faithful reproduction over modern convenience, I took the liberty to send you the slightly modernized version of the Infinitely Printable Maze that will supply you with a unique maze every time you print it. (In fact, I also addressed it to the FBI FEM-CUT Quine Division and hope you will forward it accordingly, should this not be the correct email address.)
I hope that you can see what a huge mistake Jerry Bruckheimer films have made by passing on my offer to include the Infinitely Printable Maze in the upcoming National Treasure 3, but perhaps it is all the better if the maze can now take a place in your arsenal for cyberwarfare instead.
Yours faithfully,
Herbert Quine
And attached was this (please be careful) file: infinitely_printable_maze.ps ↩︎
Emphasis mine. ↩︎
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The beginning of a new series where readers thoroughly interview themselves.
Some time ago, I had a reader send me a very curious e-mail. It was an interview that they had conducted. In fact, they had interviewed themself!
At first, this was very puzzling.[1] But, on some reflection, I realized what a gift this was! I don’t like my part of the interview very well anyway. This is the answer!
Also I can’t stress to you enough - THIS IS NOT FICTIONAL OR SOME KIND OF HOAX. This is actually an e-mail I received of someone interviewing themselves. Feel free to contribute your own if you want to. I am beyond serious. I’m in some kind of state of eigenseriousness that goes by the street name of CAVE. AGED. CHEDDAR.
> Herb Quine enters the digichat.
Herb Quine: You are invited to a house boat party at Ted Nelson’s place. What do you bring?
Herb Quine: A dozen balloons and a first edition of “Lagos During The 80s - The Birth Of Competitive Knitting In An Era Of Overinsurance” by Lula Drury. Also, a pet hamster in case Werner Herzog shows up.
Herb Quine: Speaking of Werner Herzog, name at least one film missing in his filmography and how to fix this grave mistake with the help of a voucher for 53 free time machines minutes to be used for a single travel to a time before October 1995.
Herb Quine: Easy, the film in question would be the missing biopic of Mike Tyson focusing on his time as a scholar of Medieval Media Studies in the field of Carolingian Reality TV, played by Bruno Schleinstein and filmed entirely in Yiddish. How to use the time machine should be obvious enough.
Herb Quine: More seriously now, why a pet hamster?
Herb Quine: Pet hamsters are the closest thing to miniature grizzly bears, a fact which is of course entirely unrelated to their remarkable characteristics as party animals (the hamsters, not the bears, though they might qualify, too…). The purpose of the hamster at Ted’s party is thus twofold: In the unlikely event that a discussion of Xanadu’s future turns into an attempt to establish the Seasteading Republic Of Hypertext, someone needs to keep the engines chugging along. And secondly, you need a fluent German speaker to reminisce about Wagner with Werner (coincidentally also the title of the longest running radio show in Nigeria’s Yiddish enclave).
Herb Quine: You walk down to the shore to buy a new edition of “Learning Perl”, as you do every Thursday. But when you reach the ice cube factory, you suddenly realize that Unicode is pointless. Sure, you can play quite a few nice little language games with all these emojis they keep adding, but the burrow only goes so far. And then you hit the parking lot of the Consortium’s reserved committee parking spaces and tumble head first onto the seat of a convertible. Which makes sense, I guess, until you realize that the wonderful weather of the bay area is no bueno for rhizomes and others of their ilk. They need constant watering, don’t they?
Herb Quine: Sorry, was there a question?
Herb Quine: Yeah, all right, enough with the rambling. Let’s get down to business. What’s your affiliation with the FBI and are you or have you ever been an agent engaged in any work of endeavor related to printables, convertibles, mazes or any combination thereof?
Herb Quine: I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information sought. Also, classical logic is overrated and all these lying Cretan hipsters are not nearly as interesting as they think. If you ask me, and you just did, they are just lazy bums who came up with this lying-business as an excuse to get out of the real work of building tremendously beautiful walls like real Cretans do. These kids nowadays, let me tell you…
Herb Quine: Dat / Hypercore / Beaker sure look very interesting, but aren’t they a technical solution to a problem of the medium? One great aspect of Fraidycat is that it doesn’t care how established or indie your chosen medium is, in a way it feels as if Fraidycat is rerouting and connecting existing media to extend and create new media. It doesn’t care if you’re Kylie Jenner or Ted Nelson, it doesn’t (much) care about the underlying technology, because it changes the topology of the existing pieces while not denying that centralized sub-parts of the network still exist. Is a more foundational project like Dat / Hypercore / Beaker orthogonal to that idea?
Herb Quine: I know I’m mostly answering rhetorical questions at this point, but this is one that I’m really not sure how to answer. I do love the spirit of Dat / Hypercore / Beaker, I am just a bit suspicious of any attempts to revive the good parts of the personal web without paying attention to why it became less important as a medium (the non-app-web, that is), because I would be hesitant to point to technical reasons. To me, IPFS and SSB in particular often look like solutions that fix all the underlying tech in a very admirable way, without really changing the medium that they are producing or favoring. A decentralized Facebook will still result in a medium very much like Facebook, just at a disadvantage because the technical forces can never be fully aligned with the forces of the medium.[2] I do think that Dat / Hypercore / Beaker are not as susceptible in this regard and I really hope that they do not end up emulating existing media too much. But really, I don’t know, what do you think?
Herb Quine: Is the treasure hunt over? What are we supposed to do now? Wait for National Treasure III? IS THIS REALLY IT? What about CGI Youngface and all the hard shell kayaks that are still lying around in undiscovered places on the globe? What about annie dark?
Herb Quine: Yeah, I don’t think I’m equipped to answer this one. But damn, it was an amazing ride so far.
In an attempt to shed some light on what is going on here, this person DOES preface the interview with a note to me which reads: “I am writing you this electronic letter to defuse the somewhat bizarre situation of having sent you an unsolicited printable maze that perhaps put you in an awkward position. After all, how are you supposed to react to such a strange and perhaps unexpected offering from a stranger on the internet? Well, since the printable maze in question has already escaped into the tubular ether, there is no going back and we might as well get to know each other a little better, what do you say?” (That other e-mail is reprinted in A Verbal History of the Infinitely Printable Maze, for completeness’ sake.) ↩︎
Fine, fine, I’ll cut in here. Can’t you lot just interview yourselves and
gotdamn leave me out of it??
I feel what you saying so acutely - making
a distributed web is actually a minor change on the surface - who would
notice? (And I’m levels down: not a zealot - I just think it’s fun.)
But I think there are cascading effects. When the app and the data and
the whole thing is on Facebook’s servers, that has implications. And when the
app and the data and the whole are on home computers, that has
implications.
For me, Beaker DOES pay attention to the original good
part: view source. It brings view source to the modern ‘ye-app-web’ relevant
part you speak of. That’s all. ↩︎
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You know how certain issue / ticket tracking software lets you specify the type of link between two issues or tickets? Jira has four types, one that I use in my life uses more – “is caused by”/“causes”, “is fixed by”/“fixes”, etc. I want flexible types of relations between notes along these lines. “This reminds me vaguely of this” separately from “I found this when I was looking into this” separately from “I think this is the same thing as in this other domain over here.”
This is fantastic - and reminds me of some of the flexibility I’ve seen with Webmentions. (They can be used to summon, they can be used to chat, they can be used to just plain bookmark…) And it reminds me of some of the metadata used in Webmentions: like one can imagine u-is-caused-by in a microformat.[1]
But yeah - a free text equivalent to that would be sweet. You’re on to something. Keep it rolling, my friend.
This then means that there has to be some thought put into the UI about letting an author privilege certain edges other people have applied, while still allowing discovery of that persons wrong opinions about accents.
I personally would just moderate contributions that show up - sure that means that I end up with a queue and conversation isn’t real-time that way. But that’s a fine tradeoff I think. And if you want real-time, you can make unmoderated additions monochromatic or something to set them apart.
In a federated world, I wouldn’t want to publish stuff if I don’t know what it is - and sifting through all that stuff and hand-selecting the good stuff is key effort that I think we have to get used to.
You can decide how to shape it all.
I mean the other way of doing this is like the public self-modelers did. They just gave each other direct access to each other’s wikis and trusted each other to take care of it. That worked really well.
Oh! You should also check out everything2. They’ve been doing this kind of thing for a very long time. I bet there’s some good nodes about this.[2]
paragraph based, not an outliner
Yes yeah.
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This meme will not die for me - here’s a compilation.
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!
However, I think this video is very useful.
I am doing really good on this post for once.
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glitchyowl, the future of 'people'.
jack & tals, hipster bait oracles.
maya.land, MAYA DOT LAND.
hypertext 2020 pals: h0p3 level 99 madman + ᛝ ᛝ ᛝ — lucid highly classified scribbles + consummate waifuist chameleon.
yesterweblings: sadness, snufkin, sprite, tonicfunk, siiiimon, shiloh.
surfpals: dang, robin sloan, marijn, nadia eghbal, elliott dot computer, laurel schwulst, subpixel.space (toby), things by j, gyford, also joe jenett (of linkport), brad enslen (of indieseek).
fond friends: jacky.wtf, fogknife, eli, tiv.today, j.greg, box vox, whimsy.space, caesar naples.
constantly: nathalie lawhead, 'web curios' AND waxy
indieweb: .xyz, c.rwr, boffosocko.
nostalgia: geocities.institute, bad cmd, ~jonbell.
true hackers: ccc.de, fffff.at, voja antonić, cnlohr, esoteric.codes.
chips: zeptobars, scargill, 41j.
neil c. "some..."
the world or cate le bon you pick.
all my other links are now at href.cool.
Reply: Hallstyles
Aha - since you’ve got Webmentions up, let’s do this!
Hey Jacob! I’m familiar with your website - I covered your linkroll in Directory Uprising.
It’s really comforting to see you interested in projects like directories and whostyles that aren’t necessarily protocols - which the Indieweb can get very focused on. Whostyles are definitely a tough one to turn into a protocol - since CSS evolves over time and it’s tough to know how to restrict the styling. (But it’s also important bc perhaps you don’t want to load a bunch of whostyles that blow up your site.)
Your introduction of
all: revertis exciting - didn’t know about that!So this is exactly what I do as well - just manually create the whostyles and apply them once I get into a longer dialogue with someone. This gives me (and hopefully you now) plenty of time to mess with whostyles in the field.
This is another thing I think about as well - and I guess I was going to take it on a case-by-case basis. If h0p3 has a new style, I might make a new ‘h0p3_2’ style for him - or might just update the old stuff if it makes sense.
Ok - as far as your proposals, they look good! My original plan was pretty shaky - so am glad to see improvements. Just feeling a lot of gratitude that you took the time and have energy to put into it.
I guess, as a bit of additional response, I should also mention that I’ve thought about doing this as a JSON format rather than as CSS.
Here’s a look at the JSON format we’ve been using for Multiverse box styles.
For fonts, we could keep an expanded list of font names that are supported - or at least a kind of registry - just like browsers already understand Verdana, Arial, Courier, etc.
So perhaps this paired with a font registry format would do the trick. I don’t have a strong preference tho - and am just throwing this out there.