‘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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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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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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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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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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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: Such Nice
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.