Strange.website

https://strange.website/

by abelanger • 7 months ago

220 70 7 months ago

strange.website

PlunderBunny• 7 months ago

Also check out this guy's postings on Bluesky [0] - some comedy gold there:

"my cathedral-seeing eyes finally came in the mail, really excited to try these puppies out. oh holy shit"

0. https://bsky.app/profile/strange.website

patcon• 7 months ago

This is definitely inspired by the print book "house of leaves", a strange work of ergodic fiction: The subset box layouts with backward text, the coloring of a single word a bright color throughout ("house" and "Minotaur" in HoL)

It's a great book :)

yallpendantools• 7 months ago

Colophon:

this site is built with Eleventy and Sass, and uses ~no JavaScript~ a very small amount of JavaScript for the House of Leaves post.

So, HoL confirmed.

lagniappe• 7 months ago

Zampano was here

omgmajk• 7 months ago

I laughed out loud when I saw computers in blue text, always fun to see a HoL reference.

Freebytes• 7 months ago

This reminds me of the way the Internet was in the past. And the random sites to which this site links. (If you have not seen Neocities, it is another similar place which is the predecessor of Geocities before Yahoo! bought it and killed it.)

AndrewStephens• 7 months ago

The world needs more idiosyncratic and opinionated hand crafted websites like this.

GaryBluto2• 7 months ago

I was just thinking to myself about how much the internet was lacking in self-important esoteric gibberish. I am unsurprised to see it came from the same person as "A Website to Destroy All Websites".

I am especially befuddled by all the comments stating "This is how the web used to be!"; no it wasn't, and I can only imagine those who think so collate their view of web history purely through what others say on Mastodon and Twitter (who in turn probably constructed their view of the time from the twelfth or so chinese whisper down the line of various blogs and manifestos).

akoboldfrying• 7 months ago

Agree. It reads like something an LLM would generate in response to the prompt "Edgy dystopian gloom about the state of the modern web" if you kept replying "Edgier!" until it made everything lowercase.

TeMPOraL• 7 months ago

Nah, LLMs do a better job. This is clearly human.

vintagedave• 7 months ago

I feel this is a slightly cruel comment. It’s a website of creativity, very well executed. Also, if you read the text, it is right.

Some of the presentation (such as the inverted / mirrored square) is pure art. In an admirable sense: art.

While I get the commentary — that bit reminded me of House of Leaves which has been criticized for the same thing — there’s a real human behind this, who obviously cares deeply about the issues they’re communicating about (and has the skill to do so quite incredibly.) Sometimes I wonder, in the ease of critique, what it’s like for the anonymous person on the other end, and I don’t feel good here. I feel like your comment doesn’t quite account for the humanity of someone else, nor of someone doing something with passion.

boca_honey3• 7 months ago

someone doing something with passion.

I'd agree if the site covered some history, shared recipes, or even just ranted about the author's favorite movies. But this guy is just trash-talking the entire internet.

"the website has changed. it twists facts to fiction, reality to rubbish, gold into dirt." ... and so on.

If you're going to be cruel, you might get some cruel feedback.

derangedHorse• 7 months ago

Sometimes I wonder, in the ease of critique, what it’s like for the anonymous person on the other end

Here's a better look at how the "anonymous person on the other end" sees things [1]:

“i’m always polite to chat gpt so it remembers me later ” you are going to die from water-poison-related typhoid in the Great American Megadesert after a particularly nasty heat surge evaporates the rest of the drinkable rations. you will be buried in the sand.

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/strange.website/post/3m33mnmcyys2t

boca_honey3• 7 months ago

Exactly. Have you noticed that most of these 'weird web' sites don't actually talk about anything besides the web itself? Every other 'indie web' site I stumble upon is just about the indie web.... or worse, just a list of links pointing to other similar sites.

There’s no real value here. No new info, no original content. Just clunky web design and rants about 'social media bad.'

That’s not how the web actually was. Everyone used to bring something to the table, instead of just talking in circles about the table itself.

GaryBluto2• 7 months ago

You've captured my thoughts better than I could. It feels very much like these projects are cargo cults. The strange (and always off-feeling) attempts to recreate badly-written Geocities websites (out of all the aspects of the 2000s internet to recreate, why such a narrow and dull target?) that are posted here feel very much like how the Melanesians built fake airstrips and conducted pseudo-military drills to attract "cargo", which is in this case is a confused and distorted concept of the "old web".

peterldowns• 7 months ago

Haven't updated it in a while but here's my attempt at bringing something to the table, you might find it interesting. https://freezine.xyz/

manuelmoreale5• 7 months ago

You are clearly not browsing enough of these “weird web” sites if that’s your take. Or the only ones you’re clicking on are the ones that are posted here on HN.

Try search something on https://wiby.me for example and then tell me if all you get are people writing about the web.

iammjm• 7 months ago

It seems like literature suffers a similar fate: it feels like at least 50% of all non-fiction books are about writers trying and struggling to write their next book. Unable to create something interesting and/or worthwhile, we naturally fallback into some meta-bullshit

rozap• 7 months ago

Both things can be true. It's true there's a whole circle jerk around complaining about how the web used to be better, and the much of indie web movement is just talking in circles about this phenomenon.

It is also true that Facebook and its ilk did destroy huge swaths of the online community. Example: I'm a automotive tinkerer, and online forums used to be a rich source of information, community, crazy builds...people actually creating stuff for the sake of creating. All that is gone now and the purity of an open space to put creative pursuits has been infiltrated with perverse engagement incentives, ads, algorithmic curation and the like.

I get what you're saying, but it doesn't mean that OP is wrong even if you find it exhausting.

noduerme3• 7 months ago

What's wrong with some retro-lite doom bait?

When I was a kid in the 80s there were fake 1950s diners everywhere, with jukeboxes and malt machines, bubble gum music and greasy hamburgers. They were a cheap nostalgic simulacrum of something not originally all that special. That was because there were still a lot of people alive who were teenagers in the 1950s and wanted to show their kids or grandkids something kinda-like the world they grew up in. It drifted further and further from reality along with the people who inhabited that world, who grew old and died. Now we just have faux 50s diners and a lot of old movies to look at.

supriyo-biswas• 7 months ago

Apart from the sibling comments that makes some excellent points, the commercial aspect of any endeavor will almost always coexist, or in some cases, overshadow the "artisanal" aspect that the "indieweb" people seem to be going for.

Even if we completely deleted the Internet and started from scratch, or any other technology for that matter, enterprising people will want to use the technology to deliver some sort of value to society in return for goods and services. This is both a good thing for the people in question, as they can be paid for something they love doing, addresses previously thought of use cases (such as online shopping or video streaming, in the case of the Internet) that people would be willing to pay for, and leads to commercial exchanges with many positive downstream effects (internet providers laying infrastructure, companies investing in software, and associated employment for many people).

Certainly, I owe all of my jobs and many of the friendships that I continue beyond their meatspace boundaries, precisely because the Internet and commercial services on top of it that enabled it to happen.

Without this aspect, the Internet would likely be left in a niche, which makes it far less useful to most. This is the primary reason why projects like Gemini, etc. will not have much success, because it is intentionally designed to be not useful to most people; and guess what? You can always make plain HTML/CSS websites and set up a Matrix server for your buddies to talk to; you don't need a new protocol and sing praises about the indieweb to make this happen.

asukachikaru• 7 months ago

His portfolio / blog site is aesthetically my favorite blog of all time out there.

https://henry.codes/

only-one1701• 7 months ago

I thought that "A Website to Destroy All Websites" as a bit precious but like this for the "I'm feeling lucky" logic alone. The author is right. The internet was good and now, I'm sorry to say, sucks. I'm worried something's gone for good.

adventured• 7 months ago

The Internet is fantastic. The Web sucks.

On the Internet: any movie I want to watch; any song I want to listen to; an endless parade of games to play via Steam et al.; about a zillion games I can play online with friends; numerous app store options, and an entire other world of smartphone games I can play alone or with friends; inexpensive LLMs I can do almost anything I want to with, wherever my imagination takes me; porn, a lot of porn; infinite social media; infinite videos on youtube; any skill I want to learn, there is - what might as well be - unlimited material on how to do it; any book I want to read; communications, email, instant messaging, tele-whatever; just about any kind of get-x-done software I could ask for, and if it doesn't exist an LLM will create it for me tonight; shopping, whatever you want to buy, you can shop for it, research it, look at it; want to start an LLC? Internet. Want to file a trademark? Internet. Want a passport? Internet. Book a flight/hotel/B&B/car rental? Internet. Plot a holiday? Internet. Have a hobby? Communities on one platform or another. And on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on.

urban_alien• 7 months ago

Care to elaborate on where you're drawing the line between The Internet and The Web? Your comment doesn't make it clear.

toofy2• 7 months ago

The Internet is fantastic. The Web sucks.

did you really not understand what the author meant by “internet” in the colloquial sense or are you being needlessly pedantic?

regenschutz• 7 months ago

This is why we all should just use hieroglyphs instead. You don't have to worry about where to put icons when everything is an icon!

/s, if it wasn't obvious...

nice_byte• 7 months ago

Strange.website

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