Kicks Condor

#art

I use three main tags on this blog:

  • hypertext: linking, the Web, the future of it all.

  • garage: art and creation, tinkering, zines and books, kind of a junk drawer - sorry!

  • elementary: schooling for young kids.

29 Aug 2021

The Life and Death of an Internet Onion

Net.art? Literature? Zine? No, an Internet onion.

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.

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

Internet Onion Decay 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!


  1. And here’s a snapshot from a few months into its decay. (Notice the barely visible ‘peel’ button in the lower-left corner.) ↩︎

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23 Jan 2021

Squiddo’s Podcasts

Anything can happen.

Episode one of this podcast is a rereading of the ‘Cars 1’ movie script. Episode two is Squiddo and sister explaining every character in the Danganronpa universe. (Doesn’t matter if you know anything about that - 1. they will teach you from the ground up and 2. they mostly talk about restaraunts.)

Most of the time you can’t hear what’s being said bc the mic is too far away. This is a recently discovered podcast recording technique that is the FINAL discovery unlocked in our planet’s World Technology story line. Squiddo is ‘known’ for the Secret Memes Vault playlist.[1]

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.


  1. Insofar as it is possible for one to be known for their playlists. ↩︎

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17 Oct 2020

Whimsy.space V2

The zine is back for season two.

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.

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.

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30 Mar 2020

Mackerelmedia Fish

Experience the adrenaline rush of downloading and installing it as many times as you like!

Holy hell - Nathalie Lawhead is at it again. Expanding her ‘Mackerelmedia’ joke from Electric Zine Maker into its own thing. Gotta say - it’s crazy the mileage this one gets out of potatoes and fish.

I’m simply obligated to link this - because it glimmers with the true affection and pity that any reader of this blog must have for the Whirled Whipped Web.

YOU TRAVEL DEEPER INTO THE DARKER PART OF THE FEED. AS YOU REACH FOR A PIECE OF INFORMATION THAT SEEMS TO LOOK PROMISING PART OF THE FEED THAT YOU ARE STANDING ON GIVES OUT.

YOU FALL FAR, PAST WHAT SEEMS TO BE DOZENS OF RSS ENTRIES DESCRIBING HOW FISH WENT MISSING. PORTIONS OF COMMUNITY COMMENTS BEMOANING THE SUDDEN DISAPPEARANCE OF FISH, AND SOME SPECULATION AS TO WHERE THE FISH WENT…ALL ZOOM BY. YOU FINALLY HIT THE GROUND. THE FLOOR IS STABLE HERE, UNFORTUNATELY IT’S JUST AS DARK. YOU CAN BARELY SEE ANYTHING.

YOU DID LEARN A LOT FROM THE FALL: FISH WAS ONCE LOVED. ONE DAY FISH DISAPPEARED AND NOBODY KNOWS WHERE IT WENT. THERE ARE SPECULATIONS THAT YOU MIGHT BE ABLE TO FIND FISH IF YOU LOOK IN THE RIGHT PLACES…TRACES OF WHERE FISH MAY HAVE GONE HOVER AHEAD, IN THE DARKEST PART OF THE FEED. IT’S FEARFULLY DARK THERE. IT SEEMS VERY UNSAFE.

There are also dozens of strange Apache error pages and HTML fake outs. I couldn’t help but feel that browsers have crippled Nathalie tho - what if she had the full palette of crazy popup windows and window resizing tricks of the past??

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. 🤣

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27 Mar 2020

Kalil Haddad

Just a basic desktop site with farm_boy.jpeg and such.

I mentioned to syxanash earlier that I hadn’t run across any computer desktop-inspired web sites lately - and then this one happened to turn up today.[1] (And BTW - syxanash was showing the Denzel Curry site - also amazing. Smoking Clippy and the trippy Windows XP phantasms.)

Kalil’s site is very simple, but it feels inviting the moment you hit it. I don’t know about you, but I think the desktop metaphor evokes this feeling of comfort. Feels like his website is my personal desktop. Or that I’ve logged onto someone else’s and it gets me curious about what’s in the folders.

Anyway, I think this is a new minimalism for this form of website. No boot screens or draggable windows. But still has the icons in disarray. And the file extensions. That’s good enough.


  1. Incidentally, I know I’ve already linked to simone.computer quite a lot, but this new page is such a solid collection - and is just a kickass layout. I have to pass it on. ↩︎

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Sendinganemail

Glorious sticker art and pixel recreations of real estate listings - by Bianca Hockensmith.

Discovered this site today on the Fraidycat Funtime stream[1]. I was looking through special.fish and found Bianca. In a way, this sticker art (the ‘past.present.with.stickers’ collection) feels extremely covid-19 to me, because it’s like a layer removed from reality. Actually it reminds me of kids putting stickers on a glass door - or yeah kids also do it with sticky semitranslucent slime-type shapes - and so it transforms these outdoor images into indoor images. A pleasantly trapped sensation - do you know what I mean?

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.)


  1. I enjoyed meeting 0xadada and syxanash and tuna and H0P3 my old friend. Thankyou for sharing your links and hanging out listlessly for a bit. ↩︎

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03 Feb 2020

The Life of D. Duck II

From shitty website ‘Best of Bjørnar B.’

This website of scribbled art purports to have sprung from the mind of a teenage Norwegian, however I’m not buying it. It appears that this site was covered somewhat closely by Something Awful years ago - and was perhaps originally hosted there. The site mostly contains drawings and games featuring a character called D. Duck who has to deal with an unruly Uncle Jubalon and fears losing his girlfriend Dasy to his cousin Anton. (YouTube vids here, if you’re rightfully wary of downloading.)

I have not dug deeply here - the game mostly seemed to be fat jokes and funny mispellings - but I think the game is a bit more impressive work than the reviews say - and there are only like three one-star reviews out there. The animation and visual style is quite unique - there’s no doubt that some decent work was poured into this. I love hand-drawn games - this Homeward Bound game and this Hanging Gardens game come to mind as other scribbly designs that look unlike anything else. But D. Duck is so scribbly that you almost can’t make out the characters’ appearances - their bent heads and distorted bodies are almost Cubist. The soundtrack also seems too good for a teenager. Who knows tho!

In an age where so much design has become bland and smooth, or simply striving toward realism, I think we could use a lot more mess and distortion. I feel like Charlie McAlister would have made a game like this.

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30 Jan 2020

Ei Wada TV Jam

Sick bar code and TV licks from @crab_feet

Wow, am I late to this party. Ei Wada has been making music since at least 1998, much of it on TV tubes and magnetic tape. And still posting mind-blowing bar code freeform on Twitter at @crab_feet in the now. (Like this one - wait till you see what the shirts are for…)

The handle comes from an early piece called ‘Crab Feet Man’. Some of my fave vids I’ve run across:

  • Factory Fan Bass. I’m amazed how well the optics of the upright bass have been translated here.
  • Ei Wada + Nicos Orchest-lab. Holy shit - TV four-piece and six-piece bands! I love the mallets on a TV. Seriously makes me love life.
  • Tape Tapping. To do this without breaking the tape and compensating for the slack.

I love Ei Wada’s infectious and playful way. Please post any other sweet vids you find - searching ‘electronicos fantasticos’ and ‘open reel ensemble’ can reveal others.

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31 Oct 2019

Neauismea

Devine Lu Linvega’s completed series on the b&w dithered world.

I’ve been seeing a lot of monochrome lately—like what’s at peterburr.org, the killer layout at SILO or the coming World of Horror—so, as a shout to all that high-contrast dither, I commend to you the tales of Neauismetica. This is more than your normal ‘inktober’ project. I’ve linked to the XXIIVV directory before—it’s an incredible hypertext project, connecting artifacts like the Lietal language and the conceptualization of time as Horaire.[1]

Perhaps you’ve seen Rekka & Devine’s work before in games like Hiversaires and Oquonie. This crew has done more for black and white than anyone on Earth.

Oh and I would be remiss to not also point out Sphygmus’ XXIIVV page which is a kind of casual tour—and a definitive tally of the productivity time trackers encountered! Somehow XXIIVV seems at the crossroads between austere, machine-like efficiency and stark punk creativity. I’m an outsider, so this is just an impression.


  1. See, the database is here. ↩︎

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29 Oct 2019

Broken Land Bar

Uhhh—ANSI graphics inspired cocktail menu?? This looks like a warez NFO.

This Brooklyn (pun?) bar—well, there’s not much to say, just go look: the olde BBS style boxes-and-lines art. This is actually really nice and clean, totally usable in its own way.

On top of this, tho—this is signed ‘jgs’. Are we talking Joan G. Stark??? (Aka Spunk. Also covered here.) I’ve gotta track her down.

Couple other related somewhat-campy genius sites:

  • AAAAN.NET: I don’t know, I feel like this site is my evil twin! Something feels related. The whole thing is so dry, but a crack-up. I love the checkbox on all the pages to return home.
  • twtxt.xyz: Federated plain-text messaging (via chameleon once again), how rad—I kind of want to make a mirror of this. (Oh, wait, raw source is here!)
  • ALL HAIL LORD ENKI: A home page can still just be a massive orange directory. Feels like I should make an href.cool theme that is like this.
  • SQL Murder Mystery: Yeah. Just submitted this to HN, since I generally don’t cover tech sites—but this is just a fun concept. SQL is, perhaps, already an escape room.

But if you’re just in the mood for more ASCII, here’s a little town to visit.

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13 Sep 2019

MARINA NOSEQUÉ

Marker art and other sites found among the ‘crazy cool’(?) group.

This longscroll website full of marker art is a perfect pickup for my ‘dank’ tag. Some of these drawings of Maria’s are even animated! Annnd there is this one drawing down the page of some blue-violet fat-bodied nun with a flesh-colored bat face who is slurping this long noodle of electricity out of the bum of a vermillion pair of disembodied legs. This is like the most interesting marker page I’ve ever seen.

I got this off the ‘crazy cool websites’ Facebook page. Their website seems to be down—but there is an accompanying interview site that’s cool.

Some other links that caught my eye in their collection:

  • Javascreen: don’t know why it’s called that and you kind of have to wait and click on the center part to get it going—this is a bit of code that generates palettes and shapes to accompany imagery. I like how they turn out.
  • Simon Sweeney: You scroll in a big circle until you hit the beginning.
  • STUPID SHIT NO ONE NEEDS & TERRIBLE IDEAS HACKATHON: I’ve seen this years ago—seems like it was on Waxy. But there is newer material: some brilliant stuff in there.

Ok, sorry to be noisy today. Forget I was ever here.

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12 Sep 2019

Dror Bar-Natan’s Academic Pensieve

How a mathematician self-modeled over the last 20 years.

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.

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05 Jul 2019

r4ms3s.cz

A single-page home page done in ‘outrun’ style.

From what I can tell, this page doesn’t go very deep—but it’s another very lovely and imaginative home page, in the vein of The Preposterous Official Website of Erik Bernacchi or Mariano Pascual. The vertical parallax scrolling is slick and I love subtleties like how scrolling down into the building removes the audio bass-boosting. Novelty websites have really lost their scene in recent years, despite there being a handful of insanely inventive sites like Nathalie Lawhead’s Tetrageddon or the mind-blowing Retronator zine. I have to encourage these sites, because it still feels like ripe territory!

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05 Jun 2019

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Reply: Curse of the Garden Isle

Jason McIntosh

Two years ago I played, enjoyed, and wrote about John Baker’s all-but-forgotten John’s Fire Witch. And last summer, I had the pleasure to play Ryan Veeder’s Curse of the Garden Isle within days of its release. In the year since, I realized I’ve mentioned the game again and again in different contexts to friends and colleagues as a wonderfully accessible and rewarding example of modern parser-based interactive fiction, a real stand-out work. And yet, I have seen essentially no other mention of it online, not even within dedicated IF discussion spaces. Let me try to help rectify this, examining why I find it a quiet exemplar of the form.

This review coaxed me to start playing the game.

I really appreciate this review! I’ve kept myself quarantined to mostly Twine-style clicker fiction—though I’ve sampled stuff like “Everybody Dies” and “Lost Pig”. But this review got me really intrigued, so I’ve started playing Curse. I’ve found it very simple to get into.

I like that you can type anything you want for the first few scenes and you gradually work your way into the story. Wresting the parser is (I’m sure) always an accessibility problem you deal with in IFTF, yes?

[A] very minor but still noteworthy facet of its in-browser presentation: the static text that appears around the main gameplay pane, linking permanently to helpful resources (including that Googel map), and in particular the text parser tips displayed in the lower left margin. Its just a short bullet-list of the most common parser IF commands, readable in a few seconds. But thats the thing: I cant think of another modern parser game with a browser-play mode that bothers to offer a tiny cheat-sheet like this, even though many might link to longer-winded how to play IF guides.

So I made the poor decision to start playing on a phone while I was waiting somewhere—and it worked great! I was kind of relieved that the game didn’t use Parchment or some standard theme—just because I like that it has its own look. (Although it seems that most highly-rated interactive fiction does this.)

Also, having been to that island before, it was nice to know the rough directions and envision the map mentally while I played. I’ve never experienced that before—it helped me stay aware of where I was without any effort.

Anyways—I also like that your IF reviews are tagged. I’m going to keep an eye on this tag and post further on /en/games when I finish Curse.

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14 May 2019

Nathalie Lawhead’s Electric Zine Maker Beta (With Goldfishies)

At the crossroads between dank and useful.

This is sick—Nathalie Lawhead (who I’ve covered as Tetrageddon before) has made this paper zine maker that recalls Paint Shop Pro, Kid Pix and Kai’s Power Goo. Design the pages and it’ll put the fold lines in. Love the pattern tool.

I’m pronto all over this in my school clubs—but here’s her announcement:

@alienmelon:
It’s out!
The Electric Zine Maker (public beta)
⚡ Easily create, draw, write, and print zines!
📝 Folding instructions included!!
✂ You can save them, and re-import them.
☺ Made with collaboration in mind.
✨ Try it! It’s free!! ✨
(rt’s appreciated 💕)
pic.twitter.com/0DgiC24XaN

Additionally, have to cite this feature she dropped a mention for:

@alienmelon:

…the other one is an “authenticity filter” that will put an authenticify shader over the zine to make it look like it was photocopies and printed a million times (kind of halftones + thresholding). so you can easily & quickly have an authentic looking zine.

What can I say? I love everything about this. This will go in href.cool, too easy.

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11 Mar 2019

Wyrd Britain

I don’t know what it is—but this blog has stuck with me. I can’t even trace the links I went through to get here. (I think I started at either Nannygoat Hill or jill/txt—which are also very interesting blogs that I’m still trying to sort out.) I originally started at the post where a guest author talks about seeing Cocteau Twins for the first time—and then I just started occasionally stopping in to read back. There are some really cool video shorts linked throughout this blog.

I don’t know what you call it when you were nostalgic for times and places that you never experienced—sometimes I can feel this the minute I start some old Russian sci-fi flick or whatever Iranian ‘slice of life’-type footage I happen upon. But this blog has that kind of sensation. (I’m also wondering why I’m just linking to blogs and Tumblrs like these rather than commenting on them and trying to strike up a chat. I’m short on time lately—I need to remedy this.)

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22 Jan 2019

Box Vox

Where does one put company blogs?

I confess to having many sour feelings for capitalism—so I don’t ever link to company blogs, out of a kind of disgust. But I am trying to do better: I can’t let those feelings turn into yet another kind of misanthropy. Here I’ve found a splendid blog about packaging design that has been running since 2007, authored by Randy Ludacer.

It’s difficult to gauge the obscurity of a blog, but this one seems to have few comments and few incoming links, given its age. Perhaps it is quite prestigious in some circle out of sight—well deserved, if so. It is a trove of exquisite shapes and diagrams. The author has a true passion for the crafting of cans and boxes. The age of this blog has also paid off—many of its posts go several levels deep with an investigation.

Nearly every post has something good. A sampling to start with:

FURTHERMORE: Randy has an album of Songs About Packaging? This is above and beyond, mate.

This 7 song CD is part of larger project, partly funded by COAHSI-(Council on the Arts & Humanities on Staten Island)-including a live performance at the former Staten Island landfill, now Freshkills Park.

My god—I think Charlie McAlister would get a kick out this! Freshkills Park!

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14 Dec 2018

‘I recognize her. She was on the school advisory board a few years ago, an ardent mother, heavy-hipped, quarrelsome, rarely pleased. I recognize her, because a field trip I’d organized had roused her indignation, on the grounds that the museum we visited housed several photographs of mingled fleshes, white, cold thighs, blue-veined feet pressing on white, cold buttocks.’

— p 18, My Heart Hemmed In by Marie NDaiye

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Reply: Don’s Zatoichi Sketch

His Wordpress blog gets Webmentions.

This is mostly a test comment. Mostly just saying hello!

But I also need to watch some of these films. I put off watching Beat Takeshi, instead going for the films of Katsuhito Ishii and stuff like Happiness of the Katakuris and Survive Style 5+. Need to at least watch this one, though.

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Endless Jingling

brokenrecord.elf

This link is a few years old, but I get the sense that it never saw much traction. An elf troubadour, rambling through an endless, senseless disaster of Christmas strumming. For some background on this project, see here.

From 2014, but feels very much like the 90’s web. I think this is a fun take on the hyperactive, head-spinning 24/7 side of Christmas. See also: EVERY CHRISTMAS SONG PLAYED AT THE SAME TIME.

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02 Nov 2018

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21 Oct 2018
19 Oct 2018

The Zymoglyphic Museum

A corporeal directory to another world.

In my travels about the hypertext kingdom, I happened upon a rare portal[1] to a so-called ‘Zymoglyphic’ world—islands of Earth ‘formed by the upwelling of molten magma from the underworld.’

I had not ever known of the creatures of this land! We talk of museums, libraries, cataloging and labeling here, do we not? Therefore, I awkwardly flailed out in my typical shock-curiosity to Jim Stewart—the Museum’s curator.

kicks: I recently discovered an interesting local museum a few blocks from my neighborhood after being unaware of it for five years. I drove behind it all the time and would have immediately spotted it had I driven on the other, parallel street. It took me five years to drive on that other, parallel street.

So what are your visitors like? Unsuspecting tourists? Neighbors that happen to drive by? Pilgrims?

jim: All of the above. Probably the majority of visitors are tourists and locals looking for “offbeat” things to see and do.[2] Some are specifically interested in personal museums, natural history, curiosity cabinets, or a rust-and-dust aesthetic. I do get a fair share of people just passing by as well and have met a lot of neighbors this way.

kicks: So, did you have any idea in mind of who you were looking for when you started the museum or were you just glad to have anyone and everyone?

jim: At first I was just doing it for myself, then when I went public I was happy to have anyone appreciate it. Nowadays (after 2000 visitors) I’m mostly looking for the people interested in a more in-depth connection with the museum.

kicks: I love the guide[3] you have, advice for curating your own museum. In a way, I took it as advice for the blog-hunting I do. You even have a section on ‘outreach’—I have a little group of online friends where we call this ‘find the others’—the pejorative word here might be ‘self-promotion’—to what degree do you engage in this kind of thing for the Zymoglyphic?

jim: Very little at his point. The blog has not seen an entry in years and the twitter account is inactive. Events are announced on Facebook and I have a mailing list that gets used 3 or 4 times a year. People who visit leave reviews on review sites and photos on Instagram, and I am on a lot of “quirky things to do in Portland” lists. The place is small and can’t really accommodate many people. Also, I think the fact that this is a physical place and not just an online presence puts it in a category that generates its own publicity.

kicks: Perhaps the museum is ‘complete’ and has no need of updates? Or is it in constant flux—are you always cooking up new exhibits?

jim: The basic format seems pretty stable. I’m working on a lot of different but related projects, such as a library and computer-generated aquarium.

kicks: You also have this profound quote in the book: “Once the museum is complete, it could become a private sanctuary for contemplation, since the museum will be like being inside your own subconscious mind.” This reminds me of the work at philosopher.life—where a fellow is cataloging his life and correspondence in a huge singular oracular HTML file. So when someone visits, are they able to absorb you through this portal—almost as if it is a stand-in for you—or is it as mysterious to you as it is to them?

jim: Very hard to say exactly what other people get out of it. Many are quite enthusiastic I think mostly they are finding something in themselves that they had not been able to express in just that way. I know from personal experience that it is possible to get a lot out of a work of art and not be able to relate to the artist as a person.

kicks: Haha, I love the idea that someone could relate more to the Zymoglyphic Mermaid[4] than to you. 😄 Well—and you say on the website that you like to give the visitors their space to peruse and not be badgered or guided through. (Have I got that right?) Does it matter to you what the effect of the museum would be on somebody?

jim: Yes, the museum is on the second floor and I just send people up when they come in (even if they want a quick introduction). When they come back down is when I engage them about their reactions (if they seem open to it) and answer questions. I’m definitely interested in what their take on it is, and what it means to them. I keep track on the web site of all the reviews, blog mentions, etc. It’s especially meaningful if someone gets inspired to do something similar.

kicks: Having lived in towns with small museums, junk art houses, religious shrines—you have given your city and the world a great gift.


  1. The Zymoglyphic Museum. ‘The Zymoglyphic Museum’s primary mission is the preservation of the unique natural and cultural heritage of the Zymoglyphic region. In addition, the museum hosts a variety of special collections and online exhibits related to zymoglyphic themes of natural art, celebration of decay, and museums as curiosity cabinets.’ ↩︎

  2. Also: vloggers. ↩︎

  3. Creating and Curating Your Own Personal Museum. Furthermore, the publications contains a myraid of other enchanting documents, such as the Museum’s Manifesto and A Guide to the Collections. All very worth your time. ↩︎

  4. ‘Somewhat of a spokesmodel for the museum […] its sinuous body and delightful smile grace the museum shop’s drinkware, clocks, and clothing.’ More. (See also: Jenny Haniver.) ↩︎

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09 Oct 2018

Makefrontendshitagain.party

The name is odd; the campiness is tuned in.

So this thing starts off as a kind of old-school banner ad but—scroll, scroll—it’s a link directory! Pretty sweet—I like that it’s just a bunch of tiles and you have to wonder what’s behind them. (And wondering about its creator.)

Like here’s a personal homepage that was crammed in there. The counter says only 40 people have been there. And you might say, “What is even there? Why would I even spend time here?” Is bouncy text not enough for you? Is being the 41ST PERSON not enough??

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05 Oct 2018

The GeoCities Research Institute

A gateway to the Old Web and its sparkling, angelic imagery.

I try not to get too wrapped up in mere nostalgia here—I’m more interested in where the Web is going next than where it’s been. But, hell, then I fumble into a site like this one and I just get sucked up into the halcyon GIFs.

This site simply explores the full Geocities torrent, reviewing and screenshotting and digging up history. The archive gets tackled by the writers in thematic bites, such as sites that were last updated right after 9/11, tracking down construction cones, or denizens of the ‘Pentagon’ neighborhood.

Their restoration of the Papercat is really cool. Click on it. Yeah, check that out. Now here’s something. Get your pics scanned and I’ll mail you back? Oh, krikey, Dave (HBboy). What a time to be alive.

But, beyond that, there is a network of other blogs and sites connected to this one:

Pixel art of woman onswing.

I was also happy to discover that the majority (all?) of the posts are done by Olia Lialina, who is one of the original net.artists—I admire her other work greatly! Ok, cool.

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25 Sep 2018

‘After walking through a few other rooms, thinking about The Rose, I returned to look at the painting again. I read the placard again, though I had read it less than an hour before. Everything that is is a record of its process, I thought; this description of The Rose in front of me had more to do with where it had been composed and when than with what The Rose itself was struggling to be. Had the curator lacked imagination, or was it our language that lacked imagination? I looked again at the radiating folds of paint, like rock chipped away by the wind and the rain. Each one recorded the time that had passed while DeFeo worked on The Rose. All the placards around me were lists: a title, an artist, a place, and a time. The best the curator could do was log the facts. Facts are a set of coordinates, in space and in time. Causation, motivation, character—all the rest is fiction.’

— p134, Madeleine E by Gabriel Blackwell

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14 Sep 2018

Danielx on Whimsy.Space

Ok, trying out an interview here—throwing some questions to the author of a beloved ‘zine’/‘operating system’.

I try to go out looking for links as much as possible.

(God’s sake, man—why?? Who needs more links, I can give you links—don’t toss yourself into the brambles—)

But I love to see the horrors and grotesques—to measure and inspect them. I aspire to be a grotesque and must be very studious about achieving it!

It all pays off when a link like whimsy.space comes a long.

kicks: Daniel, had a few questions about whimsy.space. (I really love glitch, too, of course—and hope it’s doing well, but the zine hits a nerve for me.) So, what ‘works’/‘zines’ inspired whimsy.space?

danielx: I was inspired by sites that have a lot of heart, things like the original Geocities. Also the feeling of personal computing from the mid 90s like win 3.1 and Win95. I’m also a fan of things like Dwarf Fortress and Bennett Foddy’s games.

Not necessarily that they are inaccessible for the sake of being inaccessible, but that if they were simpler they would be something different. Philosophically I’ve read and respect Alan Kay “The real computer revolution hasn’t happened yet” and Bret Victor.

kicks: Yeah, oh man, Foddy. I teach at an elementary school and a favorite activity I do is to play Foddy games with the kids hooked up to wires (Makey Makey-style) so that when they close the loop (by jumping on the floor or slapping hands, for instance) then CLOP hops around. It’s a credit to the simplicity of his design that we can do that.

What do you hope for it now? Was it just a momentary plaything—or is it an obsession?

danielx: It has been an on and off obsession. It depends on what else I’ve got going on in life and work outside of my own esoteric pursuits.

It’s definitely the hobby that brings me the most joy when I get to dig into it and see where it goes. Early on I decided that it would be for my own personal enjoyment and I wouldn’t look for ways to “make it a success” or “turn it into a business”. I want to keep my work and play separate you could say 😃

kicks: I like that it doesn’t explain itself. I didn’t even get that it was REALLY a zine the first time I visited. I still don’t really understand how the filesystem and social media inside of it works. And I can’t help but feel that its opacity is symbolic. It feels like a hidden trove - like a person is or maybe like an animal is. You probably don’t care about ease of use - how did you design it?

danielx: I’ve created a lot of different web applications and sites and things over the years. Some of them for fun and some as businesses. With whimsy.space my goal was to have it be a curated collection of all my works along with other things I find interesting. About eight years ago I built an online game development environment at pixieengine.com. Now it’s been simplified to a pixel editor and art community. Whimsy.space is the spiritual successor to that, I want many different applications that can interact and contribute to creating content. To recreate the part of personal computing where the operator of the computer could combine small components in interesting ways to get profound results.

I care some about ease of use, though it’s not been my top priority lately. Similar to Bennett Foddy’s games I want it to be as easy as it can be without losing its essence and becoming something else.

The design and implementation is a lot of custom code and some integrations of existing components. The site itself is serverless/static hosted on AWS with S3 and CloudFront. I use AWS Cognito for the My Briefcase authentication feature and each user can upload to their own S3 subfolder. The UI is all my custom js/css inspired by Win3.1/95. The code editor is Ace. The apps run in iframes and talk to the system over postMessage. I use CoffeeScript for most of the code.

The essence of the zine part came from my tendency to always go too deep on architecture and infrastructure, so by having a periodic release of content it would force me to prioritize only the features that aided the content and not be a system of pure mechanics with nothing to showcase it.

kicks: Jeepers, didn’t expect that. Is this a kind of backend that you would recommend to hobbyists? I’m used to static HTML and JS.

danielx: I wouldn’t recommend going deep into AWS or other Cloud services for hobbyists. Since I do software engineering for my employment I’ve gained a lot of experience on “industrial strength” solutions.

The challenge is finding the subset that actually solve more problems than they cause.

I often feel like I’m crawling around in Jeff Bezos’ spaceship trying to bring alien technology to the people.

kicks: Are handmade ‘blogs’/‘zines’/‘home pages’ dying? Would that be a bad thing - like: is there something else?

danielx: They’re dying in the sense that every living thing is in a constant cycle of death and rebirth. There are probably more handmade blogs and home pages today than ever before (in an absolute sense) but proportionally they make up a smaller part of the internet.

I would like to see more people sharing personal computing and smaller internet communities. Businesses exist to consume consumers, by getting our hands dirty and crafting using technology individuals can gain knowledge and understanding of how these systems work so we might not be so vulnerable to all these forces trying to devour us. The web is a modern marvel, not quite as complex as nature, but it has its own evolution and ecology. I enjoy the first hand experience of digging around in it to see what I can learn about systems as well as myself.

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12 Sep 2018

Caesar Naples Wiki Social Media Website

I created Caesar Naples so I could have an influence in social media sites. The name is part of my personal brand of writing that only I can write. Over the past 3 years, I’ve been gathering influence on different popular social media sites, and I’m almost to a point where I can give control of the brand over to an organization of writers all aligned to the same purpose. He’s like an action figure, when he is friendly, fun, and inviting. But the information he delivers to people is often very uncomfortable for them to accept.

I think I am prepared for Caesar Naples to have an influence on me. I don’t know if you all will see it, but this ‘wiki’/‘book’/‘presence’ is at the crossroads of a lot of things that seem to be going on around here.

I see faint threads to Lion Kimbro’s serious and informationally whimsical work in Caesar’s Social Media Marketing Book, excerpt:

  1. Do you make odd faces when you’re thinking? This is know as tardive diskinesia and is a sign that you’re being controlled by a drug user.

  2. Do you make hand gestures at weird times? You’re basically lost at this point; it’s a satanic method of marking their territory.

  3. Does your mood shift greatly depending on your behaviors? It’s not that you’re learning how to control your emotions; it’s that an Illuminati controller is.

(From the section titled “Manchurian Candidates: The wild-card in your campaign.”)

There are echoes of zine culture in this—Charlie McAlister would love this, I think. The author is active on /r/conspiracy and seems to be forming a group there to write under this and other personas—though it’s difficult to tell whether it’s all made up—don’t think I care, I think it’s very exciting.

I see h0p3 in there too: in the Caesar Naples Wiki, there is reference to autism as a horcrux—this seems uncanny, given Sphygmus’ recent usage of the horcrux as a metaphor… What is going on??

Unlike h0p3, his writing is scattered everywhere, laced together with a bunch of Google sites—the copypastapublishing one is a good place to start, with the story Publishing Company 2002 and the To OK Gov piece. More are here. Some of the stories appear to be based on Markov chain generated text, others are quite lucid.

(Ah, I am not familiar with the ‘copypasta’ thing—this is my first exposure to it—it seems to want to take conspiracy-sounding or overserious rants out of context? I don’t know if it is a political thing—I am naive about all of that. There is a prolific person under this. I also am starting to see that people likely suspect my own self of being fradulent, of being h0p3, of being alt-right, of being an ARG, of being Brad Enslen, of being a schizophrenic, of being a radical leftist, of being a greatest showman—I am fine with all of these explanations and I think it would be a fortunate thing to even be thought of by someone somewhere.)

This person also has an understanding of community dynamic, another topic that is bubbling up lately.

I let my Caesar Naples act pour mercilessly into my communication with the writers of this community. There were personal details I shared that would make anybody uncomfortable related to my schizophrenia. I would host imaginary games where I pretended the chat room was a group of survivors in the apocalypse. I also made some very unreasonable claims and tried my damnest to justify them - all part of the Caesar Naples act. Eventually, I was kicked from two communities that I very much wanted to be part of, because they represented my instant recovery from exile.

Now that I’m no longer a part of those communities, I try my hardest to balance the wild, incredible parts of Caesar Naples with something more human.

Posts can be found under ‘CaesarNaples2’ on Reddit.

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23 Aug 2018

Ticker Tape Parade

It’s good to be a little ‘river’ of thoughts—apart from the estuaries.

Inspired by the concept of Ripped Sheets of Paper, I began to see a new blog design in my mind that departed from all the current trends. (Related: Things We Left in the Old Web.)

The large majority of blogs and social media feeds out there are:

  • Highly rigid visually—a linear list of paragraphs.
  • Mostly blue and white (with a little gray.)
  • Bland. Often all posts are structured virtually the same, unless there are images.
  • Alike. There are common templates.

So, yeah, no wonder the Web has deteriorated! We just don’t care. It’s understandable—we experimented for a good ten or twenty years. I guess that’s why I wanted this site to border on bizarre—to try to reach for the other extreme without simply aspiring to brutalism.

To show that leaving social media can free you to build your own special place on the web. I have no reason to scream and war here in order to stand apart.

Exaggerated Importance

When I started laying out the main ‘river’ of strips on my various feed pages—here’s my August archive, for instance—I started to want the different posts to have a greater impact on the page based on what they were.

Screenshot of the new home page.

A tweet-style note thing should be tiny. It’s a mere thought.

A reply to someone might be longer, depending on the quality of the ideas within it.

And the long essays take a great length of time to craft—they should have the marquee.

It began to remind me of the aging ‘tag cloud’. Except that I couldn’t stand tag clouds because the small text in the cloud was always too small! And they also became stale—they always use the same layout. (It would be interesting to rethink the tag cloud—maybe with this ‘river’ in mind!)

It’s All There

Even though these ‘river’-style feeds are slender and light on metadata—for instance, the ‘river’ is very light on date and tagging info—it’s all there. All the metadata and post content is in the HTML. This is so that I can pop up the full post immediately. But also: that stuff is the microformats!

Why bother with microformats? I remember this technology coming out like a decade ago and—it went nowhere!

But, no, they are actually coming into stride. They allow me to syndicate and reply on micro.blog without leaving my site. I can reply to all my webfriends in like fashion. They have added a lot to blogging in these times—look up ‘Indieweb’.

Honestly, they make this blog worth using. For me. I feel like the design should be for you; the semantic structure is for me.

This lead to a happy coalescing of the design and the structure: I could load individual posts on a windowing layer over the home page. This is a kickback to the old DHTML windowing sites of yesteryear. (And, in part, inspired by the zine at whimsy.space.)


Screenshot of right-clicking on a post.

What’s more—nothing (except the archives dropdown, I should say) is broken if Javascript is off. You can still center-click on the square blog post cards to launch them in a tab. URLs in the browser should line up properly without filling your history with crap.

I do have some new kinds of post layouts that will be cropping up here are there—such as how this article is made of individual tiles. But it all flattens to simple HTML where I need it to.

One of the struggles of the modern Indieweb is to have uniqueness and flair without sacrificing function. I have to do a lot of customization to integrate with Twitter, micro.blog and RSS. But I hope you will not need to work around me. So that remains to be seen.

At any rate: thankyou! So many of you that I correspond with offered juicy conversations that stimulated this new design. My muse has always been Life Itself. The experiences and conversations all around --> inspiration! I feel fortunate to any eyes that wipe across my sentences from time to time.

Time to get back to linking to you.

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17 Aug 2018

Turn of the Century Photograph of Charlie McAlister

“He never knew he was sick. And he died in the arms of a gal!”

It really sucks that Charlie McAlister died last year. I had really hoped to write to him more and maybe talk to him one day! Back in 1998, I found this cassette of his and it’s still out there! But you won’t find lyrics and tabs out there—he was truly underground. (There is a section of my upcoming link directory devoted to the muckpile of this rambling maniac.) In the meantime, please enjoy these wonderful lyrics to the second song.

Bog Man
He never knew he was sick
And he died in the arms of a gal!
Who threw his body into the bog
Next to the rice canal.
Next to the rice canal.
And ten-thousand years later they found
His body buried in the moss--
And his skin and eyes had turned to leather
And his bones had turned to rock.
His bones had turned to rock.
So then they took him to a museum
And put his body in a case.
And people came from miles around
To see the bog man's face.
To see the bog man's face.
But late one night after the museum had closed,
The bog man came back to life--
And he went out into the streets in a rage
And strangled the mayor's wife.
And strangled the mayor's wife.
So the next villager to die only had one leg
And couldn't run to escape.
And the bog man hit him with a cinder block
And a pointed rake.
And a pointed rake.
So the next villager to die was blind in one eye
And didn't see it coming.
And the bog man hit him with the pointed rake
Till the blood started flowing.
Bog man, bog man, you are an evil man.
Bog man, bog man, you are an evil man.
Bog man, bog man, you are an evil man.

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16 Aug 2018

The Word.com Archive

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.

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01 Aug 2018

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18 Jul 2018

Catalog of Internet Artist Clubs

Here’s a web directory I stumbled onto—all the links you could want related to the “surf clubs” of the mid-2000s. I like the tight structure and the histories woven in. I’m beginning to think that the failure of early directories was that they were just piles of links with no sense of an editor or curator. (Oh and I had also long forgotten about Google Directory, which was shuttered in 2011.)

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30 Jun 2018

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02 May 2018

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01 May 2018

F.A.T. Lab is Dead

Geez I was really hoping the ending would reveal that they were all dead the whole time. Now we’re going to need to band together, in order to resist this intoxicating urge to deify F.A.T.

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PLUNDER THE ARCHIVES

This page is also at kickssy42x7...onion and on hyper:// and ipns://.

MOVING ALONG LET'S SEE MY FAVORITE PLACES I NO LONGER LINK TO ANYTHING THATS VERY FAMOUS

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.