So yes this kind of podcast is like something you’d find on a cassette tape at a thrift shop. That these recordings are now available to the general public is a boon and an artifact. The world thanks me for finding the courage to unearth these.

It’s my honor to link to something this lowbrow. No one else offer this kind of comprehensive package.

Some are GIF landscapes with a halftone touch. Others are caught in a wave. Sometimes you are reading fragments over a feather flitting over the hand.

Pretty neat. See what you find.

From @bgdotjpg:

i’m just a normal person, who doesn’t want to write a blog or start a newsletter.

I think this is one of the things that killed blogging - you basically had to be an essayist to do it. (In the perceptions of Internet travellers.) So people jumped ship for these other mediums that weren’t so exhausting.

i’ve tried a lot of site builders. none of them have felt quite right. i don’t want a splashy, highly customized landing page. i’m not an influencer.

i’ve got some cool links though, and some half-formed ideas.

This vibe was actually a big part of the olden Web - all the Geocities pages were like this - a smattering of links, a gif collection, some construction cones. “Hi, this is my page!” And I like to see this mood live on.

Related tweet from @valstals:

i swear neocities is getting really good

On the New Year’s Scrappychat (pdf), tinyfluff mentioned wanting to use Glitch for other things:

I desire a nice glitch friendly indieweb blog that supports all the nonsense like webmentions that anyone can start up as easily as a tumblr, so we can get back to a nice place where people had feeds that were just stuff they follow, and people could make stuff accessible to those feedreads very easily, instead of this weird nightmare zone of trying to scrape instagram or whatever. instagram-private-api is pretty nice but I shouldn’t have to emulate a chinese android phone to be able to include content from my friends in my feeds

I think a good start is just to see people continue to use Glitch and Neocities for whatever ideas pop into their heads! It’s the tultywits thing. Webmentions and feeds are nice - but they don’t fill with amazing things on their own.

I mean: is there a way to do this right now without needing to build something elaborate? Like…

• Make pages on Glitch or Neocities (or Github Pages).
• Setup an account on Webmention.io and include the HTML snippet on the home page on all of your pages. (I do this on href.cool.)
• Then, submit your page to a tag on Indieweb.xyz. (Can be done here.)

That tag could then act as the ‘feed’ for your pages. (Or even for a group of people sharing their pages.)

And webmention.io has feeds for incoming messages you get.

I don’t disagree with tinyfluff’s wish at all. But I think that understanding how to cobble together your own little thing - like above - could both help someone put together a tool - and would help anyone wanting to dabble with hypertext in this way.

I also think Gossip’s Web is showing that you may not need a feed for everything. If you can submit to a little directory, then you have a doorway to others as well.

Soundcloud page is here. Another great track is ‘nowhere fast’.

I don’t know what covid has done to turn this all into a music blog… but I swear that there are a variety of interesting things coming up once I get my act together. Pray that these HTMLs will manifest themselves to us.

This is also reminiscent of Robin Sloan’s recent Brian, the Angel of History EP. (Also very good imho!)

Now, please, if you link to THE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE - and, you can’t see it, but I am shamelessly begging you to do just that - do not link to my flimsy post here, but link straight to the original essay. No one should be an extra click removed from such a wonder.

This is also a microcosm of rare linkhunting. Scroll and scroll and scroll, then stop. And pay attention to where you stop. That’s the drill. This is the minigame.

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?