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.

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.)