Weird Websites

Soo sooo tired of “normal” internet!!!
Everything is so standard and commercial and booooooorrriiiing…

Does anyone still remember 90s and all the fuzz about weird web sites / strange topic projects / absurdism etc… ???

Want to discover something in this direction again…
Something Free, Liberating, Trashy, Crazy, Useless or Simply Beautiful

Some examples I’ve found so far…

http://astronaut.io/#

http://anniealbagli.com/giselle-and-marco-intro.html

http://ninjaflex.com/

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The internet is basically a shopping mall these days. I don’t have any weird websites to share but I did enjoy this tweet: https://twitter.com/pervocracy/status/1370505905763184640?s=20

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…psyhigh school seems a nice place to go…

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http://dinnerinabottle.com/

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Ah, for the good old days, when people put up sites like “allnudeteenstickfigures.com”.

Who remembers this gem?

http://www.realultimatepower.net/index4.htm

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Yes, we do! At least I do

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This cool art project was originally done in Macromedia/then Adobe/ Flash
http://conclaveobscurum.ru/

Since the format is dead now - here is a “video” version of site walkthrough:

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Something happened when Jobs killed Flash on the iPad. I did have a slight moment of mourning the other day when Adobe Flash Player informed me to uninstall itself, as the product was now discontinued.

Sure, maybe Flash was an inefficient app processor / power management wise, but that shouldn’t be the only metric by which to measure a service.

Fact is, Flash enabled artists to create rich content for the web, that nowadays requires you to be a coder or developer.

It’s kinda sad. At least with Flash, you could dabble in coding but still do everything on the timeline, and even more hard core coders were doing the hardcore data vis type stuff.

Today we have a bunch of dev tools for doing digital arts, but rarely does any artist or painter have the chops to compete in that world. Instead it kinda becomes the playground for creative engineers, which is great for the them, but it’s cut a lot of people out of the game.

To me I guess Oculart was a key site back in the day, I don’t know if this site even works anymore (it definitely won’t load on your iPhone or iPad), but maybe check it out on a laptop or desktop browser. Original site is now archived at the artists website.

http://www.geoffreylillemon.com/OculartArchive/

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AI imagining what humans are supposed to look like. These are not collages or rearrangements of preexisting photographs. Hit refresh for new soulless “humans.”

https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

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Flash plus naive users was hell when trying to manage enterprise-wide PCs - but supposedly the first series of Metalpocalypse was created with it so all is forgiven.

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There are still things like that for html animation that don’t require directly coding. Timeline and everything…

Just an example but I’m sure there are more /better ones than that.

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It was also full of security bugs.

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Remember Geocities?

Well here :slight_smile: fill yer boots with weird, fringe, and nostalgia.

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Was this thread inspired by the tragic recent loss of spacejam.com?

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https://www.jediakatemia.fi/engpaa.htm

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https://www.heavensgate.com/

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Yes!! I also associate the decline of interesting websites with the killing of flash!

I used to dabble a bit in web design stuff, and loved exploring cool designed sites. I still have a couple of Taschen books - one with examples of great music websites, and the other focused on flash IIRC

I miss the flash days!

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I think a properly weird website shouldn’t have been made to be weird on purpose, which is why there are so few anymore. People who are actually into really weird stuff don’t bother with a website, they just use social media, and there’s nothing interesting in a weird facebook group.

Most if not all of the modern weird websites are just random internet humour.

yeah need to find time to get back my degree…