I had also planned to revive the Bob Dylan ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ - which was down for a year or so - but it is back in business. Another possible target for my archive is Pharrell’s 24 Hours of Happy, which just isn’t quite functional any longer.

It’s interesting that The Woodcutter has disappeared from the Internet - while other contemporaries like Fly Guy have managed to find their way to Flash preservation sites across the Web.

Maybe it’s just not as well known. Hope you enjoy it!

Part of what really pushed me to posting about this, though, is this amazing spreadsheet:

From a blog post where the stylesheets are laid out.

The internet onion is decaying by phases because it has to be, given the basic hand-coding HTML and CSS we are using. We could write a script, but we are lazy, and there won’t be that many more phases of decay than this, Laurel thinks to herself. (Although down the line, Laurel would like to also degrade the content itself and source code, but that will be in Late Decay.)

So this is like the full 90’s web reenactment here.

I hope this continues to be a staple of the Web. The bots can’t keep up with the handmade Web. It’s too small - they can’t even BE that small!

I know it bills itself as a ‘commonplace book’ or ‘Zettelkasten’ - I like to view it through the lens of a personal web directory - simply a collection of links and knowledge that acts as a portal to other things.

To the author, it’s a box to store things. But to us it’s a way of finding the vital pieces of this beautiful disastrous Web - which becomes more beautiful and more disastrous by the day!

Some of the entries are links with summaries; other entries are quotes and excerpts from larger articles.^[2]

Oh but what sets BWB apart is this triptych view.

The left is an index of tags and creators. The center contains the entries beneath the selected tag or creator. And the right-hand side shows details for related articles and entries that link back.

To use the detail pane, you click on any of the attached excerpts or bidirectional links at the bottom of an entry.

Sometimes these excerpts are fragments inside of a larger entry. For example, here ‘Its place in the web of nature’ is linked to ‘crafting repair’ - even though its just attached to ‘A Pattern Language’, the book the thought comes from.

This also gets used to group together metapages - such as the (basically) ‘about’ page.

I’ll leave it to you to explore now. I feel like we could see some really interesting riffs on this setup in the future. It’s great.

A very interesting track, though, is ‘A Lovely Pear’. Knowing that this kind of stuff is in there makes this whole project a lot more than just audio file math.

I discovered this group while plowing through the recordcollector1972 wiki - which is another story, conveniently linking some recent interests on this blog.

Recordcollector1972 is a YouTube channel adjacent to SiIvaGunner. However, instead of high-quality video game rips, the channel posts high-quality music tracks. These are mostly all mashups, but there are some very straightforward rips, such as Depeche Mode’s ‘Enjoy the Silence’.

The channel departs into strange terrain sometimes with very obscure tracks, like this Nero’s Day at Disneyland mashup - never thought I’d run across such a thing! Or this New Deluxe Life parody.^[2]

And, okay - what’s this?

(Also want to mention here, while we’re off on abandoned trails, that SiIvaGunner’s recent foray into Aphex Twin / Space Jam / GTA V territory is pretty frightening. This will obliterate many college educations.)

To celebrate the inaugural year of maya.land, there is a very precious gift - in the form of this carefully annotated blogroll - a very good map of nearby ‘altweb’/‘outerweb’/‘yesterweb’ people!

I harp on about personal directories THEY ARE SAVING US and this lovely little catalog gives me a serious, uhh, shall we say… well it gives me the pringles all over. It’s really amusing to me that the 88x31 tiles are making such a come back. I mean we’re really getting quite specific with those dimensions.

Maya.land is also a kind of touchstone for the current pragmatic Indieweb stuff. Webmentions bring in mentions from Twitter and other websites like mine. RSS feeds are still around.^[2] Bit of whostyles in there. And a lot of posts get crossposted (manually?) to Lemmy.

I think this shows a kind of middle ground of easy-to-reach protocols that should be more achievable to people. It gets you connected to our world of chatter enough that you’re not alone out here - but also gives you your own iceberg to carve.

Rebane - who runs the ‘hobune stream’ YouTube archive says on Reddit:

Hey, I’m an internet archivist and I archived the taia777 channel and also the comments on it. Now that Nintendo has struck down many of the videos, I’m going to share my archives.

This reminds me of a tweet I recently saw from Robin Sloan:

I have developed a pretty strong habit of using youtube-dl to grab “tenuous-feeling” videos, especially those that qualify as some kind of research, and stashing the files away.

I have a stash too - I’m sure many of you have your own! If anyone out there is working on archival tools or has some pointers, please pass them on. It’s a good time for that.

Oh also: this playlist is an incredibly solid directory in this world - and also happens to be SiIvaGunner/Soundclown adjacent. Go get a good education!

Since the site is on Neocities, there is a page cataloguing the recent updates. I’ve been using Neocities’ RSS feeds - but they are very limited - no indication of what has changed, just a timestamp.

So when I visited Unimaginable Heights’ recent updates page, I was happy to see that it shows thumbnails that are linked to the pages that have changed.

I’ve added support for this to Fraidycat, so that you can keep up with updates to these sites - just follow the url (https://unimaginable-heights.neocities.org/, for example) and it’ll show you a feed of that ‘recent updates’ page.

I like this a lot - no need for a blog - just build your home page on Neocities and people can have a window into what you’re working on day-by-day. Would love to see this on mmm.page!

Oh also - you can find sadness on Spacehey.

Kind of wish you could hook into the RSS ‘subscribe’ button in extensions - but hey at least it’s there! The icon shows up in the address bar when feeds are detected - and you can click there to subscribe.

There’s also a preview window to show you the contents of a feed. Nice touch to see if the feed shows the full text of a post.

I think this is one of the better RSS integrations among browsers over the years. Firefox used to have a way of monitoring RSS as a ‘live bookmark’ - which was REALLY WEIRD. This was removed in 2018.

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.

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.

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.

Anyway, SiIvaGunner isn’t a single person. There are about 300 active contributors - more than 900 people having contributed to the catalog.

So this is obviously a deep well to try to dive into with a massive Discord channel and wiki and network of YouTube and Twitter accounts, regular livestreams and ARG events. I think my favorite place to point people is the GilvaSunner Bandcamp page, which regularly releases new compilations assembled by the collective.

There is a wider “high quality rips” scene - like CrystalForce is a great example I recently stumbled into.

If you’re interested in more backstory, look for interviews with Chaze the Chat.

This is unrelated sorta - but I didn’t share it at the time, so I’m going to tack it on here as well. One person I met on special.fish some months ago is mikael.

But mikael’s pinboard is the place you want to go. A lot of great links. Furthermore, the homepages tag of mikael’s is fii-urrr. Ugg saying it like that doesn’t help. How do I express enthusiasm here suitably? It’s good. It’s very good.

However, I think this video is very useful.

• Show off your new 4K projector sound set with this video. It has the full range!
• One day when a larger “…but it’s…” feature film comes out, documenting the saga, this can be a special feature on the disc. (I would release this vid direct to theatres - but COVID.)
• The next step is for bands, visual artists and essayists to rally around this subgenre and build a scene. The obvious “band of Bitconnect samples” is open as of now - it’s crazy! Get in.
• I think there’s a real opportunity here for Marvel to cash in with Vision “Hey Hey Hey” and Vision “I LOOOOVE” merch.

I am doing really good on this post for once.

Also - we’re doing this diary at Futureland, which is really great. If you’re looking for a (somewhat minimalist) hideaway to blog at - but with much more style that the pastebins and a nice community - give it a go.

Of course there’s not the autonomy of a self-hosted customized TiddlyWiki or Neocities site - but it’s a community. Think of it as a replacement for the old message boards.

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?

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.

However, what I’m really enjoying is the discovery of Super Onze de Gao, who run their desert lutes through distortion. Gah this party makes me so jealous:

A bunch of albums are here. The Takamba music doesn’t seem to have achieved the same level of Western notoriety as Tishoumaren, but who cares - don’t know why I even said that. Love this stuff. It’s definitely going in href.cool’s Tapes/Africa collection.

Totally different topic, but I only discovered this because I was wondering who Head Medicine was - happened to be on their Museum of International Comics. So that’s a link. Links links links. Blogspot.

And - this is totally unrelated - except that these tracks were all part of a 48 hour bender down dank holes of SoundCloud playlists - I need to keep a link alive to this tight remake of the old Mii Channel theme. Makes me want to customize some digital eyebrows.

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.)

Where I’m at the world pivoted extremely fast on Thursday. Now is an extremely good time to keep blogging and record your memories of the day-by-day. I’m digging into my neighborhood right now, but hope to be around a bit more to pass links and keep the lights on in our corner of the Web. I am in love with the crowd here - all you that I’ve had a chance to meet and hypertext with. Worried about you, of course. But I have no lack of confidence at the moment that you’ll come out of this stronger than before.

Along the lines of Marc’s livestream, I’ve noticed some other links to cancelled live tours/festivals that are importing on to the Web:

• Social Distancing Festival: this is a directory of actors, dancers, artists of any kind who are doing upcoming livestreams along the lines of the above. I feel some disgust at having to drop the term ‘social distancing’ - ain’t nothing social about it - but it’s turning into a solid directory. Would like to see more niche styles do this.

• #sunshinesongs on Instagram. High school kids are posting their home recordings of songs they got down for now-cancelled musical productions. I personally enjoy watching amateur musicals on YouTube, love this stuff.

• /r/togetherathome, a subreddit collecting these kind of events.

• I also think it’s interesting that Mo Willems is doing a daily doodle stream for kids, but I just think it fails because it doesn’t take calls. It would be cool for kids to hear from each other and get a chance to talk in all of this.

I’m using the homejazz sub on Indieweb.xyz to catalog what I can find.