It's sites like these that make me dearly miss the old internet.
Then I remember that the old internet is mostly still there, just buried under the ad-riddled mass-produced garbage pile of the current internet, and there are ways to dig through to it, but I never do.
I’d like to add that I’m grieving the discoverability of all these ingenious self made often a bit unpolished experiences.
Platforms come to provide a shiny space for the makers and then slowly enshittify everything snuffing out the life out of the originals. Just like Disney ;)
I clicked around to an old Fluxus Blogger site and I saw a bunch of comments from about 2018 and I thought, "Yay! People are still into Fluxus!" but then I read the comments and realized they were all spam.
I miss the old internet too. It's bigger than ever now, but most of it is garbage.
Is there any particular technique anyone uses to find sites like this? About the only way I know of is to happen across a link to them on some forum, like this instance.
> In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.
The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as pages indexed are more suitable for their performance.
I made a server that redirects you to a random site from a selection of are.na channels, where users actively add interesting sites. There’s a bit more to it than that - you can read about it on the homepage: https://moonjump.app
Not the World Wide Web, but Gemini and Gopher has this feel. There are multiple aggregators [1][2] that bubble up new and interesting content from individuals.
Kinda makes me sad that I read this, saw the date and then thought "I hope this person is still alive". 24 years is a long time. I quite enjoy content like this, especially the tagline (maybe a definition of a word that I don't know?): Fluxus: "Unfettered play in search of uncharted insights."
I like your take on that but I have automated my house, self-host and have a family. To whom I enforced 2Fa for key applications.
It means that if I died they will be in an ocean of trouble if I did not take steps to facilitate the transition.
The first part is to have a paper backup of everything important, and keep it up to date.
The second, requested by my wife, is a tutorial on how to de-automate the house and what things they should worry most about (moving the self-hosted Bitwarden and making sure domains and email are paid for).
This preparation doe not bother me at all on the emotional level but rather on the documentation one...
One reliable way to carry on a paid service after your own death is setting up an estate or trust which pays living people to ensure everything stays online.
As long as your trust set-up is sufficiently well-funded and well structured the trust could in principle live on for generations. Obviously, the success of the venture depends on, well, trust.
The trust structure would have the obligation to maintain the website. Provided they make backups, which is totally a thing you could write into the contract (every five years a lawyer copies the site onto whatever document storage system they're using at the time, or puts a new tape in a safe), that would outlive any individual company.
So your best bet is to establish a community of people interested in preserving your website, or websites in general, and have them run a long term nonprofit for that purpose.
Why? You want to host a blog in the afterlife? All kidding aside, why not just hand over your internet assets to a trusted family member who will handle everything when you are gone?
I really wish more people did Fluxus [1] - related art activities in the time of cheap digital media. Its so cheap to document and describe, while still retaining intentionality.
Tangentially, just yesterday I traveled with an old train from Oslo and one thing that I notice again and again there is the sliding glass doors between the train cars have a "button" on them that does nothing except when you reach out to touch it you trigger a photosensor.
Doorknobs and handrails in public buildings transitioned from wood and stone, to polished metal during/after the 1918 pandemic. Turns out wood is a fantastic, warm material to make doorknobs and handrails from, but it's almost impossible to clean and sanitize in a functional fashion.
> it's almost impossible to clean and sanitize in a functional fashion.
Metals are not all equal in that either. Stainless steel is markedly worse than brass for door handles. Clean brass is antimicrobial and also kills influenza and other viruses.
I firmly believe the number of upper respiratory infections I have each year is directly proportional to the number of doors I have to touch throughout the day. Once worked for a well-known fruit company with a reputation for paranoia and secrecy, and because of that secrecy, everything was behind locked doors. Therefore, I constantly had to handle doors throughout the day to do anything at work. I'm pretty sure during those years I was on average sicker than ever.
Upper respiratory infections don't seem to transmit by contact that much. They do, but not as much as through the air. Stomach diseases are more likely to be transmitted this way.
But there may be some correlation. Closed doors possibly means poor ventilation. Also, more doors to touch can mean being more active and in contact with more people.
Not a comment to you, personally, but I saw someone the other day struggling to follow this philosophy. She struggled to open the door to a cafe for what felt like a whole minute because she refused to touch the handle with her hands.
All I could think was "if only there was some sort of technology that would leverage our biology to make opening doors easy."
(For the record, I was not close enough nor in a position to help out. I'm not that cruel. But I also feel no guilt for laughing inside - it was a spectacle.)
So does silver, to the point it’s used in advanced wound dressing. They aren’t cheap though - ask my insurance company! There isn’t that much silver in them, but a 2x2” square is about $4 or so, compared to a few cents for a plain gauze pad.
Silver is 0.72 USD/g at the moment so the price of silver alone does not account for the difference in price. A two inch square piece of silver weighing a gram would be more than a tenth of a millimetre thick.
Never mind surfaces, which are probably cleaner in the 20th century than at any time previously, it's the airborne ones people seem to have forgotten about.
My experience with caffeine withdrawal is horrible each time it's happened (and I didn't take great care to taper slowly). This is one of my favorite articles about it "Worse Than The Flu": https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2007/04/worse_than_the_flu.h...
So few. Im at work right now and I think i've opened at least 15 doors just between my bed and my desk. It was five doors just between my bedroom and my car. (bedroom door, out apartment, into stairwell, out of stairwell, out of building). Then car doors, security gates, building external, internal hallways, into my department, into my section, into my office ... I guess I live in a door-heavy environment.
By one of those weird coincidences, I found this on HN just after shopping for cabinet pulls on Amazon.
It also made me think of a hotel stay the night before a marathon run. I went to close the window blind and scooting between the chair and the desk my bare thigh came in contact with the drawer pull of the desk which was nearly as sharp as a razor and gave me a deep cut.
There's a show I like called How To with John Wilson. It's hard to explain, but it's kind of just a guy digging into a topic each episode, going down rabbit holes of various subcultures and industries, winding up meeting strange people in strange places, and filling a lot in with mundane footage captured in his day-to-day life in New York.
I have trouble giving an elevator pitch for the show, it's better watched than described. But I think "finding the interesting in the mundane" is what makes me enjoy the show so much.
Not quite so mundane I suppose, but the meticulousness reminds me of Dan Graham's Homes For America: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/105513 It's a detailed description of the pseudo-choice offered to buyers of tract houses in the 1960s.
For 1999, these are remarkably clear and high definition photos. This person must have had one of those big digital cameras with a floppy disc in the side - or similar - which wouldn't have been all that convenient. Interesting that they were motivated enough to do this.
Fair enough. In the late 90's we had one of the Sony Mavicas, and at the time I wasn't involved enough in photography to really know of much else on the market. Thinking about it now though, Compact Flash had been around since the early 90's right?
If this was me there would be about 50 entries of me opening the fridge door, staring for a minute and then closing it without taking anything out (also a fair amount of walking into rooms and forgetting why I was there).
No OP, but I take photographs of infrastructure stuff, especially if I think I might later want to investigate what the deal is. So e.g. I don't have a photograph of the view from the tourist elevator which comes out of a fake chimney on what was Battersea Power Station in Central London (London's electricity was once supplied by huge coal power stations right in the city, today Bankside is a world famous modern art gallery "Tate Modern", while Battersea is basically a mall plus apartments), because you can presumably buy that on a postcard, but I do have a photograph of the interior of a service elevator which accesses that area because I was interested in how it behaved when the idiots running the attraction overloaded that elevator.
When I'm doing home repair and my endoscope isn't handy I use my phone as a periscope.
Because of this it is full of "pointless" photos e.g. dozens of out-of-focus shots behind my AV receiver in my stereo cabinet to make sure I didn't over-strain a cable while pushing it back.
Then I remember that the old internet is mostly still there, just buried under the ad-riddled mass-produced garbage pile of the current internet, and there are ways to dig through to it, but I never do.