paralogue.org

i think i'd like to make a place for sharing strange, ephemeral online content. the sort of stuff you happen upon while clicking around and feel the need to tell someone about. the mundane trinkets scattered about which stick out to you – which speak to you.

for instance…

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Dangerous writing: the necessary risks of writing for "real": i wanna say i was looking into the methodology popularized by palahniuk and landed here instead: at a 1990s academic paper about teaching english composition to young children in a way that doesn't drain their souls and snuff out their creative spirit. at times it's kinda touching…

VeggieTales: God Wants Me to Forgive Them!?!Japanese VHS: i can't believe veggietales was an anime all along…

I love this idea, but it's been a while since I've made a whole cache of weird material... so for now, let me scour the archives.

I think about Black Perl a lot. Code poems seem rarer, now. That's why I liked ChatGPT going a little crazy. The code samples were beautiful.

What is a "sense of foreshortened future"?

I think about this SoftBank advert a lot. I never know when to show it to anyone. It always feels like a nonsequitur because it is.

what a nice thread. that softbank advert is such a banger youve shown it to me twice lol.

i have a lot of random code philosophy stuff like this page on 'the djb way', or more concisely, his legacy, or this pile of john carmack's plan files from the 90s.

Here's a couple interesting old things I've found on my ~travels~.

An archival team I was a part of unearthed this official Ace Attorney casemaker written in Flash from 2008, predating all fan efforts. Also old and written in flash is Bfxr, a sound effect creation engine which is a fork of a port of the original Sfxr from 2007 by the inimitable DrPetter, who has many other interesting old projects on his homepage.

thanks for the good good detritus everyone~

in1tiate wrote:

Also old and written in flash is Bfxr, a sound effect creation engine which is a fork of a port of the original Sfxr from 2007 by the inimitable DrPetter, who has many other interesting old projects on his homepage.

oh god bfxr takes me back… i remember when that and sfxr were the sfx tools that every indie dev used when they were starting out… i wanna say that this was also around when flixel and flashpunk were a lot of people's frameworks of choice, and when releasing your games on flash portals was a very viable strategy for success.

Found what's probably a cool source of internet detritus -- Single Serving Sites this is a webpage that curates a list of webpages with only a single page meant for a singular purpose, like a ipsum lorum variant generator or a honestly very convenient weather app, others are more so little art pieces like this infinitely zooming prortrait or this zen relaxation game, and others are more so regular documents like an analysis of title drops, this one particular bridge in washington. Another one I've actually seen in the wild is this index of website with minimalist-styled CSS.

There's also a few music apps on here: Poolsuite FM has some inspired design, but the volume mixing is all over the place so it almost blasted my ears out on the second song D:
I don't really have a use for most of these (weather app aside) but I think their sweet as they are the equivalent of those tiny novellas or short stories listed for 2 dollars on Amazon, but by the presence of them on Amazon or their own domains gives them extra attention in a way that being on a larger aggregator service like AO3 or as singular page on a much longer site might not.

My favorite bit of the internet is probably Ian's Shoelace Site, which is a kind of exhaustive accounting of everything involved in lacing and tying shoelaces. This helped a bunch when in turned out I wasn't tie some laces right and they kept being undone.

(Ssshh, you didn't see the version of this post with all the broken URLs :P )

making a note of this promo for the tokyo fm radio program "jet stream," because the catch copy kinda hits.

Jet Stream – Dream Skyward

JennyDog wrote:

Found what's probably a cool source of internet detritus -- Single Serving Sites this is a webpage that curates a list of webpages with only a single page meant for a singular purpose,

ooh… one of my friends is planning to see nicki minaj in concert soon, and i should send her isthisnickiminaj.com to help her more easily figure out which person there is nicki minaj.
i figure there's gonna be a lot of people, so it'd probably be easy to lose track of her.

I came across this via Bulbapedia the other day and want to expound a bit on it: We All Live in a Pokemon World is a Pokemon fansite made by a former schoolteacher as a sort of apologia against parental dismissals of Pokemon, and as an argument for the benefits of the Pokemon message.

In sum it clarifies Pokemon one topic at a time with a good amount of detail, examples from the games, epigraphs with dialogue that emphasise the loving nature of the Pokemon series. There's even an archive of all its past layouts that remain charming in their own right.

In turn, as Ash once said, "If you're not out making friends, then what's the point?"¹ And unfortunately, I've made just as many enemies as I've made friends because of my interest in Pokémon. But instead of fighting, I have always believed that education and truth is the best way to close the gap. If I can reach even one parent, teacher, or critic on "the other side", my site will have served its purpose, which is why I welcome both supporters and opposers of Pokémon to not only read my page, but to read it together. It is your mediator. Today, the craze and much of the controversy might be over, but it's never too late to make peace.

Wanted to do a brief mention of the Teen-Beat records website. I recall in an interview that Mark Robinson said it took literally months to redo the site into this splaying, "magazine-like" layout that had extensive info about every release, era-appropriate photos, just everything you'd want if you were following the band. I think that is absurdly friendly for a record label and an indication of how Teen-Beat sees its own mission: a sort of repository of work for a scene.

Now technologically it feels almost mixed-media? That is to say, it's doing a lot of print graphic design stuff and trying to adapt it to the internet format, and so as a result it has a fixed layout; it's not tables, but a bunch of absolutely positioned divs within a hard-coded height parent wrapper. So if you go to most pages, it's kind of too big and there's empty space at the bottom, like you get one-size scroll for as much or as little as you want to say. Apache server, jQuery for interaction, some Shopify integration for the storefront but only sometimes? There's a PayPal cart and a Shopify cart depending on what item you pick.

It's an organic hodgepodge growing on top of a huge art project of memorialisation and it's still alive and maintaining itself and idk. I'm not complaining about any of this. I think it's pretty.

But I was thinking a bit today about fixed layouts and sites working toward more rigid, "print design" aesthetics and constraints. Using materials and textures. I was raised as a designer to be very austere -- Are.na was the name of the game, and Swiss design reigned supreme. As I got older typographies got larger, you were allowed to do more and more animation and effects, but the fundamental idea was moving boxes of photos along white pages. So I try to use older paradigms now to kind of escape my own constraints, my own minimalism, and consider the older constraints and what they were trying to declare in their design: smaller typefaces, materials, tables, it was all pre-mobile, information dense, little artworks.

Some layouts you can use... the downloads don't seem to work but you could probably just gather the layouts in your own editor well enough. Even a Lain one! How nice.

maru wrote:

Some layouts you can use... the downloads don't seem to work but you could probably just gather the layouts in your own editor well enough. Even a Lain one! How nice.

these are so kyuuute!! and very era-appropriate… they give me the same kind of pop-cultural time capsule feel that i get from like winamp skin collections.

this is also making me think about how fandom culture may have changed between then and now… like, it feels much less common now to see people make sites (or i guess profile pages) where every single element is decked out in the iconography of one particular franchise. i could potentially see the trend still having a space on tumblr – or, if it still exists anywhere then it has the best chance of being there.

(i did ask Chemicalsheep about this, since she actively uses tumblr, and she said that people with this same kind of singular fandom obsession do exist there but they're (disparagingly?) referred to as "fandomites." most people who are heavily invested in fandom now are more diversified in their interests)

anyway, time to remake my site to be entirely cardcaptor sakura-themed…