Oh and same song, another take: Orkestra Obsolete plays on 1930s instruments. Well-suited to the theremin and harmonium.

The “Snow” story appears to be a dream of the author’s.

The neighbor lady said she was very disappointed that had I disappeared, because she had been a little bored waiting for me. She had used a piping bag and royal icing to make full-sized furniture and a ropes course while I was gone. I climbed up on the ropes for a little bit, but then they collapsed into a daybed. She had a bunch of other big sculptures and installations. There was a little stuffed animal in the corner, and the neighbor lady said I could eat it. However, when I took a bite out of one of the legs and started to chew it up, I realized that it was super sad to eat this very cute little stuffed animal and so I spit out the leg and apologized. I could tell she hadn’t really wanted me to eat it, even though she was the one to suggested it. I offered to fix it by stitching the leg back on, but she said that she would be happy to do it because she liked that sort of thing. She looked for a needle and I helped her.

I love Whimsy.space because it envisions the zine as a small Hypercard-like application. So while the most common format is a small booklet, I imagine there are endless other shells for the zine concept - a linked series of videos, perhaps even a handful of audio files, an e-commerce store as a zine, a hacked website as a zine, a map or diagram that can be zoomed into, and so on.

Oh and - see also Danielx on Whimsy.Space - an interview from two years ago.

So - when people start crunching their own inputs and outputs through the algorithm like this - does this legitimize it? I mean, hey, if it can be used like a tool, it’s a tool. I’ve been skeptical of algorithms being so opaque that you can’t really leverage them. But, hey, would be glad to see that trend reverse course.

Hear me out; this shit is profound. He takes the aggregate behavior of 100,000 Youtubers and performs it in one go. Call it The “User is Present” or whatever.

I am totally onboard for this. This is very insightful. (Author can’t say this of himself - so says “profound”.)

I feel like this confirms my feelings about human curation. If you look at all these types of “content” - the numeric nature, the dense titles, the layers of imagery - they resemble computer outputs (Jon-Kyle’s point) blended humorously with human energy - from slamming a dance out to slouching lobotomized in a chair.

Perhaps another way of putting this is: an algorithm’s fingerprints are all over its library. Because the same is true of humans. You could count on John Peel for a certain spectrum from shoegaze to garage, right?

I think, in the past, we’ve thought of algorithms in this way - can we recreate John Peel in software? But maybe it’s the other way around. TikTok is its own kind of video jockey now.

I’m not going to type this in caps, because I don’t want to, but: the directory is the foremost way make these connections.

In fact, I confess that only found Marijn because this linkroll page linked back to me. And I was like, “Okie - yeah let’s get connected.”

A related article ‘The Return of the 90s Web’ showed up today on HN. Interestingly enough, the author discusses webrings and blogrolls, but not personal directories.

I left a comment, which I’m just going to save here.

People are still creating great stuff along these lines - you just won’t find it through Google or Facebook or most of Reddit. Complex, interesting hypertext creations and web sites are still everywhere. But try typing “interesting hypertext” into Google or Facebook and see where it gets you. You can’t search for something that’s off the beaten track.

This is where directories come back in. Check some of these out:

• marijnflorence.neocities.org/linkroll

• neonaut.neocities.org/directory

• webring.xxiivv.com (which led me to this gem: dreamwiki.sixey.es)

Competing with Google in search has become an insurmountable task. Personal directories attack from the opposite direction (human curation, no algorithm) in a way that actually puts Google far behind. It’s kind of exciting and unexpected.

The beauty of this is that a directory can be thrown together very quickly. It could be as simple as ‘Some Things’ by Laurel Schwulst. Although this is a huge list - and I’m sure was a massive effort to assemble - it shows that you can just start with a poem of linked words if you need!

I understand not wanting to blog. I’m not going to want to do this forever. You need something worthwhile to say. And writing, editing, publishing - it’s very time-consuming and it requires skill on so many fronts. But it’s still worth attempting - like any creative project that might flower into something. That might actually make life worth living.

But a directory doesn’t require you to get into ‘content creator’ mode, where you have to continually keep some thread going or to fabricate topics. With a directory, you just have keep track of your favorite stuff. You probably want to hang on to that stuff anyway.

And by doing that, you form a support network to the projects and ambitions that might improve this world in small ways. Simultaneously, you put a brick back into the World-Wide Web. Name a better contribution you can make to its healing. And imagine a Web full of personal directories - where people both build them and are familiar with browsing them - how do walled gardens exist in that world?

The Internet is now full of metric tonnes of low-quality shit. I’m not a misanthrope - I just think that most people aren’t great writers and are not meant to have a platform. (Hey, I’m not meant to have a platform either - it’s fortunate that I’m off in the corner.)

Directories can highlight the high-quality hypertext. They can form a Web of the best. They are our libraries, lifting the signal out of the noise. There is so much unexplored territory to do this, don’t you think?

Of course, this website was not built entirely by the band, but was executed by Björn Flóki^[1], who appears to be a very popular designer with musicians. So, in a way, it’s deceptive. This was funded to look like a Neocities website - it’s a simulacrum of the personal.

There is a recent trend to bang on this note in pop culture - like with the Captain Marvel website or the feature story on the Space Jam website in Rolling Stone. I can’t help but relish this turn, because these sites show that even mainstream artists feel the allure of leaving behind the rigidity of the corpypastas. Even during the height of blog abandonment, you had Bob Dylan’s tremendous interactive ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ multivid and Pharrell’s (now defunct) 24 Hours of Happy website, both in 2013.

The trouble is that most of these artsy sites are ultimately marketing stunts that reduce the Web to a little interactive trinket, rather than the unrivaled platform that you can find exhibited on websites like Glitch or Twine. Or, further out, in Beaker’s neighborhood. I don’t mean to say that these artists have some obligation to unlock the Web^[2] - actually I’m saying quite the opposite, they have absolutely no reason to. To them, the Web is another stop on the tour.

I think it shows the surprising amount of novelty that is still under the surface of the Web which is yet to be plumbed.

However, what I’m really enjoying is the discovery of Super Onze de Gao, who run their desert lutes through distortion. Gah this party makes me so jealous:

A bunch of albums are here. The Takamba music doesn’t seem to have achieved the same level of Western notoriety as Tishoumaren, but who cares - don’t know why I even said that. Love this stuff. It’s definitely going in href.cool’s Tapes/Africa collection.

Totally different topic, but I only discovered this because I was wondering who Head Medicine was - happened to be on their Museum of International Comics. So that’s a link. Links links links. Blogspot.

And - this is totally unrelated - except that these tracks were all part of a 48 hour bender down dank holes of SoundCloud playlists - I need to keep a link alive to this tight remake of the old Mii Channel theme. Makes me want to customize some digital eyebrows.

This project happened on Wordpress (and YouTube). And I’m not sure there’s anything that millions of lines of code in our ‘modern’ platforms could do to augment it. I could definitely see this happening on Reddit - maybe Twitter, in some limited fashion - but definitely not on Facebook or Instagram. But, in many ways, these systems do the opposite - they would constrain the experience of this.

I struggle to sort out why we’ve pushed ourselves further away from hypertext, particularly since browsers continue to give the form more power. Novas is an example of the creativity that can emerge simply by using tools to form connections - to link audio and text together in a new fashion.

This feels somewhere between interactive fiction, mp3 blogging and nostalgic fanfic. (I might as well call it a directory of links while I’m here!) If anyone out there has had aspirations to dabble with making fun hypertext, there is a lot to spring off from here.

I fall right in line with h0p3’s main comments here. He’s the daddy of this.

One of the things that I have found, in practice, is that human curation and human moderation seems to be at the heart of what we have to do. You can give me as many automated tools as you want, but I’m still the one that has to choose what’s going to go in my wiki and how I’m going to authorize other users to modify it.

He then talks about keeping the master record for Hypertext 2020.

I do it by hand. And I like that I get to do it by hand, because there’s a lot of scenarios in which I am not even sure how to automate it. So it’s best to do it manually.

I think this is one of the best messages for the Indieweb community to hear, because there are more and more protocols cropping up as part of the Indieweb suite. But Hypertext 2020 was a big realization for me that Webmentions are often not necessary and may even limit the scope of our conversations.

What’s more: I have a suspicion that people retreat into protocol work to escape from the human work that must be done. And there’s no getting around it: we should learn to better work in this medium and we are really resisting having to confront it. (I see Twitter and Facebook and such as poor tools and as mere escapes from the work that could be done.)

What if the Indieweb is not Webmentions? What if it is simply the work of reading and writing to each other?

I initially found Hibs’ comment about seeing a ‘macro view’ of the Web off-putting at first - but I think that she did good work explaining it and I think she has a great point! Her thought (around the 2hr mark) is that aggregrators like Indieweb.xyz, as they become flooded with input, become less useful at the micro level and become more useful at the macro level.

What I find off-putting is that this macro view is often used to discover trends or something. (Which is stupid to me.) But her comparison to Every Noise at Once clarifies it.

I think the macro view can be useful to discover new pockets of activity - and therefore to discover new people at the micro level. In fact, unless you are capable of forming a macro view - and of having many subgroups within an aggregator - I think it’s possible that you can’t really discover! Because if you’re only ‘discovering’ within a micro level, well, maybe you’re at a level where everything is already adjacent.

These are my really poorly written thoughts. But I think her point opened my mind a lot and I appreciate that.

h0p3 has a killer quote at 2:19:30:

I see the wiki as a story-telling device that reuses older stories to reconstruct new ones; if it is a memory palace or garden, it’s an evolving one, toward externalizing the relationship between our sensibilities and cognition (for the sake of something else). We are the kinds of creatures that tell ourselves the stories of ourselves and our Phenomenology. I want to speak to automated versions of myself (even for autosuggestions, dialectical argumentation, exploring the world) and to use those kinds of tools to pick out what is salient on the web.

He then goes on to talk about using ‘gunky’ tags to create hierarchies. (Aka ‘directories’ - and, again, I’m seeing how directories too mesh the macro/micro views for discovery purposes.)

I’m just so with him: our work is to use woefully inadequate (but flexible enough) tools - think of how TiddlyWiki, Webmentions, hypertext, it could all be so much better technologically - but these straightforward ‘gunky’ tools leave enough room for personal human work - to cobble together our own systems to map our stories onto.

And I do think that part of the problem with so many of our modern tools is that they do too much work perhaps! Such that they leave no room for personal work. (In other words, as h0p3 puts it: “the heart of what we have to do.”)

I like Chris’ point about Stonehenge being the first wiki. It’s not that it’s a kind of left-field observation. I think that we understand better the work we do now by realizing that Stonehenge wasn’t just a work of art or an artifact for them - it hadn’t achieved that status while it was coming together.

Just as philosopher.life is still coming together and even h0p3 doesn’t know what it is yet - sure you can describe it as art or as an interesting artifact - but I think that it’s actually more about a human projecting oneself into this beautiful object that can be immortal in a way that a person cannot.

I also got into going through some of the lesser-known designers in this list and found myself in some unexpected places.

• This list of games previously printed in Tabletop Gaming Magazine - many by Anna Blackwell - were pretty interesting. I think there is a neat idea in The New Gods of Babel, a Jenga/Minecraft hybrid by Brian Molina.
• Juegos Roll & Write - many of these print-and-play games are ‘roll & write’ games - in the vein of Yahtzee.^[5] This colorful collection by Sergi Sanchez Labrador is just fun to look through.
• Rolling Realms is by a very popular publisher (Stonemaier Games of Scythe and Wingspan fame) but this game was designed just as something to do during the pandemic and it’s been a group effort with their fans - see the comments on that page.
• Cat Sudoku LIVE by Ta-Te Wu.
• Also branched off into this directory, particularly the games of Douglas Ramsey, such as 30 Rails and Birdsong.

Truly nothing beats directories when it comes to discovery. You can find yourself tunneling all around the Internet. The most important part is to have contributors who are in a variety of places across the graph - and to find ways to shape it that are able to highlight all the starting points without allowing any of them to take over.

THE ‘GO BACK…’ LINK FALLS TO THE FLOOR. IT WILL SERVE AS A FINE MORSEL FOR THE VIRTUAL VERMIN. SUCH IS THE BITTER SWEET LIFECYCLE OF A WEBSITE.

Related: an actual Mackerel Media Digital Marketing.

The meandering essays on pop culture and animal observations - they feel reminiscent of Unimaginable Heights, such as this one on ‘yellow shows’:

There are some TV Shows that I consider to be yellow shows. Yellow shows aren’t necessarily yellow in color but they are definitely yellow in feeling and spirit. For example, Sabrina the Teenage Witch is a yellow show. Actually most shows that star Melissa Joan Hart are yellow shows even though she really doesn’t seem like an overly yellow person.

Yellow shows are all very mindless and watchable. They are upbeat, use non-funny humor, and are non-offensive.

The expression ‘non-funny humor’ is for keeps.

She goes on to explain how ‘yellow’ television could be generated by neural networks.

The hosts don’t always have to be human either. The host can be generated according to what the viewer finds the most soothing or most horrible. For example, I would choose a house cat to host a show like House Hunters. I could choose the location of the hunt which could be based on an actual place or an invented environment. If I want to look at homes near the fracking trash water in Denton, TX, hosted by Donna Dresch, I can submit that info into the program. Because the results would be so terrifying, I’m beginning to think that these wouldn’t necessarily be yellow shows. More like yellow with red stripes shows. Forget everything I’ve ever said.

This is amazing! I could have myself be the host as well as the guests. Me helping me build a condo in the Dakota plains. I would have to be patient with myself through that arduous fireplace selection phase. And Sherlock could show up and the character Deuces from the book Clone Codes.

There is also a page of Microsoft Excel art. She also offers to send an mp3 to anyone who emails her. Seems like a great way to stock up on free mp3s.

In a way, this site feels like an ad-hoc wiki. I like the concept. Throw HTML files in some frames and you can just begin to build a collection from there. (Although the frames are divs - you could do this whole site as a single page. I like that it is PHP, however - which stirs up fond feelings of the late 2000s.)

Where I’m at the world pivoted extremely fast on Thursday. Now is an extremely good time to keep blogging and record your memories of the day-by-day. I’m digging into my neighborhood right now, but hope to be around a bit more to pass links and keep the lights on in our corner of the Web. I am in love with the crowd here - all you that I’ve had a chance to meet and hypertext with. Worried about you, of course. But I have no lack of confidence at the moment that you’ll come out of this stronger than before.

Along the lines of Marc’s livestream, I’ve noticed some other links to cancelled live tours/festivals that are importing on to the Web:

• Social Distancing Festival: this is a directory of actors, dancers, artists of any kind who are doing upcoming livestreams along the lines of the above. I feel some disgust at having to drop the term ‘social distancing’ - ain’t nothing social about it - but it’s turning into a solid directory. Would like to see more niche styles do this.

• #sunshinesongs on Instagram. High school kids are posting their home recordings of songs they got down for now-cancelled musical productions. I personally enjoy watching amateur musicals on YouTube, love this stuff.

• /r/togetherathome, a subreddit collecting these kind of events.

• I also think it’s interesting that Mo Willems is doing a daily doodle stream for kids, but I just think it fails because it doesn’t take calls. It would be cool for kids to hear from each other and get a chance to talk in all of this.

I’m using the homejazz sub on Indieweb.xyz to catalog what I can find.

I do understand why the above ground world hates anonymity so much. And I don’t have a defense. It’s just fun to be someone else. Or nobody at all. Or just a color strip. But I don’t know what you’re going to find in atob - so splay your hands, child.

This is a very fun, inviting design tho, right? I wonder how the archives work. Oh, wait, I can look at the source code. It seems like once a page has 10 upvotes and 50 more replies than it has downvotes(?) then it goes there.^[1]

Had never heard of hubski before - it’s mentioned in the liner notes.

I believe I discovered it from THIS monumental directory of tiny imageboards. Fuzz your eyes.^[2]

Here are some leads:

• “Explorers Room with Flash Strap”, it’s good to listen to WFMU programs again, thanks to island cd_.
• Stationery collection from star anna.
• Spudoogle.blog by a mushroom of the same name.
• “The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”. Don’t remember where I found this. Sorry fish.
• brixton, some pages are discoveries of their own.

These are only the beginning - this reminds me of the tilde resurgence some years back, but more among the art crowd than the technology one.

Also, hey, hold up - a few interesting vaporwave discoveries while you’re here:

• 死体’s public broadcasting: This is just my kind of thing. Like ancient transmissions crossing. The tape on DMT is really good too.

• A series of videos by andrewarson on /r/vaporwave: CTRL+DEL, BUY STOCKS, INFINITE GROWTH, BUY ANYTHING BUY TODAY.

• Passion of the Weiss: Just a great music blog. I’ve been following this for almost a year and I think this is href.cool material.

• Sick & Panic: I’m all in on Macintosh Plus’ next wave.

Wish I had time to do everything in the world. But maybe it doesn’t matter. I’d still just spend all the time walking these same dank corners of the hypertext kingdom…

I have a hyyyuge new release of Fraidycat coming out Monday that will support Twitch, public Facebook pages, Pinterest, Github users, Kickstarter projects and older RSS feeds. The Pinterest support is particularly juicy because it gives you direct links rather than Pinterest links. Don’t know if anyone uses that site any more, but it felt too subversive to skip out on.

Also, I’ve finally figured out how to load h0p3’s wiki without stalling the extension. Unfortunately, this required some additional permissions. The permissions situation is getting stupid. I’m sorry!!

Also don’t miss Jason McIntosh’s review of Fraidycat after a month of using it. I really appreciate this encouragement and the wonderful suggestions.

See, this is another great example of what a directory can do. This is just a link list for tracks. But it pokes holes in my world and lets all this other stuff leak in that I was oblivious to.

Recalls to mind Rebecca Blood:

Even the man who turns first to the Sports section of the paper version of his hometown newspaper is exposed, however briefly, to the front news page; and an interesting headline in the Living section may catch his eye when he puts down the rest of the paper.

p. 12, The Weblog Handbook (2002)

Recommendation engines are likely too fixated on salience - how do they possibly widen their view and attempt to bring in material with such a low signal (in terms of broadcast strength) as to be indistinguishable from spam? Making playlists like this is the vital work we must continue to do.

Another quick quote, sorry to ramble.

As children get older, they yearn to understand what lies beyond the apparent; they want to know about what they can see in front of them but also what they cannot see.

— p. 6, “Children’s Need to Know”, Susan Engel

I think this description of curiosity nails it. The playlist of unknown videos is another version of seeing what I cannot see. I see people there that hadn’t existed ever before for me.^[2]

The website went up in 2018 and most of the recent work has been focused on the zine page. Which brings me to the other discovery here (from the Winged Snail Mail zine): the ‘master list of postal projects and websites’.^[1]

It would be cool if Neocities offered RSS on their site updates page, so we could follow them outside of Neoticies. Perhaps this another thing for Fraidycat to scrape.

(Aside.) Instinctually, I get why people don’t understand my blog. It’s just a feeling that somehow I am lost in my own words. I sometimes read my own stuff and can’t figure out what I’m saying. My sentences can be very unclear and I don’t realize it until a year has passed. It’s the way the words go together.

But I think that I also am just writing on a personal level - not in the Oprah sense, like about tragedy or inner turmoil - but just in that I like to talk about my interests and the people I meet. I don’t really get taken in by news or politics or pop culture - these things aren’t dead to me, they just seem pointless to me - whereas discovering unknown people and learning how to talk to them, as well as building experiments here and there, seems very pointfull. But also memes - I don’t often connect with them either. So I think I lack some language sometimes for connecting with the mainstream.

I guess I’m also thinking about the categorization of my site as ‘counterculture’ - because I don’t really see it that way. That word seems very insurgent. (“Fraidycat as Stuxnet” was serious, but it’s really just a joke idea.) I see myself as being in Jack and Talita’s community - just harmless and out-of-the-way, abdicating any cultural sway or power pronto.^[2] And yeah I also see DFW as being ‘hipster bait’ too. But not condescendingly, of course.

Like they say:

Have compassion with the hipster baits of this world, but also try not to waste too much time with them. For they are just like everyone. People are like that, well-meaning, but with much less to say than they think. Maybe hipster bait has the power to reflect us back to ourselves. Hopefully, hipster bait will inspire us. Its social function is to expose the reality of making things, which is that everything is either pathetic or sterile, with very few options in between short of being one of those kooky Italian church painters. At its best, hipster bait is a celebration of both the pathetic and the sterile. And if you think about how Elijah Wood has over 4,000 records in his collection and still says his favourite band are the flipping Smashing Pumpkins (everyone’s third or fourth favourite band when they’re 14), you’ll realise that all he’s doing, all that anyone is doing, is getting up in the morning, then moving around, then going back to sleep; that no matter how grandiose the things you do might feel, they’re still just happening one after another in-between bursts of hunger and tiredness, that it will always be difficult to focus. There will be the task at hand, and there will be disorientating, conflicting impulses swirling around inside of you, always. You’ll realise that existence is much more circular than linear, and maybe your world will feel a bit simpler, and you’ll feel a bit more relaxed.

Yes! This essay is such an antidote to thoughtpieces. Thank you, our beloved Most Quality Couple of Neocities, thank you.

I have not dug deeply here - the game mostly seemed to be fat jokes and funny mispellings - but I think the game is a bit more impressive work than the reviews say - and there are only like three one-star reviews out there. The animation and visual style is quite unique - there’s no doubt that some decent work was poured into this. I love hand-drawn games - this Homeward Bound game and this Hanging Gardens game come to mind as other scribbly designs that look unlike anything else. But D. Duck is so scribbly that you almost can’t make out the characters’ appearances - their bent heads and distorted bodies are almost Cubist. The soundtrack also seems too good for a teenager. Who knows tho!

In an age where so much design has become bland and smooth, or simply striving toward realism, I think we could use a lot more mess and distortion. I feel like Charlie McAlister would have made a game like this.

Other news outlets have plain-text link lists:

• The famous text.npr.org.
• CNN’s lite.cnn.io.
• Christian Science Monitor here.

However, I prefer the daily digest. And this being sourced from Wikimedia is also a mark in its favor. (See also: Sijmen J. Mulder’s directory to text-only websites.)