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.

God, it’s weird writing on this blog - it doesn’t feel the same. Something has happened to it. I can’t seem to get this post to get through. (I also keep getting e-mail that’s like, “Why can’t I connect to kickscondor.com any more?” But I just fixed it!)

Meanwhile, I’m trying to get word out on Whimsy.Space Volume II, Episode II: Thinking Machines // Fever Dreams.

You dive deep into the crevice and consult the chuds living deep underground. You find a small cave system, filled with chuds. You tell them what happened, and they say that you should be able to escape back home

This remarkable ZineOS continues to be a wondrous source of esoteric Notepad text files. The Spongebob mashup is good. (Also love this one.) This issue also seems to have some AI Dungeon transcripts.

Ok, thanks to chameleon, here’s normality.pdf—good luck reading through the splatters and commas, , , , . BWYT M BWYTJ XXXDXXX. (Although, the poem “THE MAORI JESUS” by James K. Baxter is included and can be used as a character module. I don’t know what a ‘sad old quean’ is.)

The two authors began on a two-year journey of rage and frustration at the state of the world, and the reactions of those around them to their concerns. We became filled with hatred toward the roleplayers we encountered at local games and conventions, and so we set out to hurt them. To make them cry. We very nearly succeeded.

I can’t play this because it’s so brazenly misanthropic—but my love and appreciation for humans truly eclipses any of that—this is just another marvellous mess in the pile of our history, something to wrap our fish in—just as Van Gogh’s paintings were first repurposed. (Little-known fact from the pdf.)

I’m tempted to label this guy the “Anti-Tufte” because of the MS Paint academic style on this website and the slapdash text layout. I hope this isn’t an insult—I find all of this work inspiring, quite inspiring in a way, it’s like dense mathematics have somehow wrapped around to zine aesthetics. (A lot of the visuals I’m talking about are linked on the ‘handout browser’ wiki page.)

Also really cool: this directory where Dr. Bar-Natan follows students projects.

The directory of blackboard shots is kind of like an interesting take on a timeline. I keep seeing interesting timelines out there—this one is cool because it extends in the future. There was another one, but I’ve lost track of it. I thought the site was too commercial, so I let it go. But now I just want it back for a minute. Ah well.

Not the most obscure link—but I’ve not run across it before, despite it being around on Blogspot from 2010-2014, then on Tumblr until a couple months ago (“since tumblr is full of narcs now”) when it moved to the link above. The pic thief behind the blog is “Babs”—who did an interview with Vice in 2015. I collect these kinds of candid photodumps on my Visuals/Images page. This one mostly focuses on white trash photos dating from about the 1970s.

Relevant comment (to all my fellow hyperlinkers) from the article:

Has it been become more difficult to maintain the same level of quality and find compelling images and videos over the five years you’ve been doing this?

Yeah I feel like it’s harder to find photos actually. I have a bunch of tricks I use to find photos on the Internet and now so many photos I’ve already used come up which can be frustrating. I’ve gotten more submissions lately, which is so awesome because a lot of them send in photos of themselves/their own friends in the 80s/90s, and they’re not already on the Internet.

It’s still strange to think that the early Internet seemed like it was filling up with photos and writings and ringtones—it seemed that it would just be an avalanche from then on. And it is, but it’s all become mostly unreachable, much harder to find. I wonder how much of it is deliberate and how much is the nature of the platforms.

Seven issues total in this zine—I’m counting the gorgeous ‘FP’ complementary issues—which brings together scans of human hands caught in the Google Books scanning process. There is another zine out there of the same name; this is the one by Aliza Elkin—who also fashions animated GIFs from her findings. (Some background on this Twitter thread.)

She also points to this cool book from 1977: Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn By Atomic Bomb Survivors. This is all very eye opening. Some of the better high concept zines that I’ve seen!

While surfing today, I ran across this article—The Ballad of Jaime Levy—that goes over the history of an old 90s e-zine called Word.com. Man, had I forgotten. Boring name, yeah—but they were doing some really sweet stuff back then. This archive doesn’t do the zine justice; many of the best years were done in embedded Shockwave and Quicktime, but it sounds like they’re working on restoring those issues. I vividly remember the screenshot above—there was a kind of parallax scrolling going on in the banner.