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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<a href='https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/56371373.pdf' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Dangerous writing: the necessary risks of writing for "real"</a>: 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…

<a href='https://archive.org/details/gwmtft-japanese-tape' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>VeggieTales: God Wants Me to Forgive Them!?!Japanese VHS</a>: 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 <a href='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Black Perl</a> a lot. Code poems seem rarer, now. That's why I liked <a href='https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comment ... f_nowhere/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>ChatGPT going a little crazy</a>. The code samples were beautiful.

<a href='https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4166378/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>What is a "sense of foreshortened future"?</a>

I think about this <a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eKyHPLwFpM' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>SoftBank advert</a> 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 <a href='http://thedjbway.b0llix.net/index.html' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>this page on 'the djb way'</a>, or more concisely, <a href='https://skarnet.org/software/skalibs/djblegacy.html' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>his legacy</a>, or this pile of <a href='https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>john carmack's plan files from the 90s</a>.

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

An archival team I was a part of unearthed this <a href='https://archive.org/details/editor.pc-saiban.jp.7z' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>official Ace Attorney casemaker</a> written in Flash from 2008, predating all fan efforts. Also old and written in flash is <a href='https://www.bfxr.net/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Bfxr</a>, a sound effect creation engine which is a fork of a port of the original <a href='http://drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Sfxr</a> 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 <a href='https://www.bfxr.net/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Bfxr</a>, a sound effect creation engine which is a fork of a port of the original <a href='http://drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Sfxr</a> 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 <a href='https://flixel.org/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>flixel</a> and <a href='http://useflashpunk.net/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>flashpunk</a> 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 -- <a href='https://singleservingsites.cool/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Single Serving Sites</a> this is a webpage that curates a list of webpages with only a single page meant for a singular purpose, like a <a href='http://boba-ipsum.com/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>ipsum lorum variant generator</a> or a honestly very convenient <a href='https://whatisthefuckingweather.com/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>weather app</a>, others are more so little art pieces like <a href='https://infiniteflowers.net/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>this infinitely zooming prortrait</a> or this <a href='https://www.touchforluck.com/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>zen relaxation game</a>, and others are more so regular documents like <a href='https://www.titledrops.net/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>an analysis of title drops</a>, <a href='https://10foot6.in/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>this one particular bridge in washington</a>. Another one I've actually seen in the wild is <a href='https://deadsimplesites.com/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>this index of website with minimalist-styled CSS</a>.

There's also a few music apps on here: <a href='https://poolsuite.net/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Poolsuite FM</a> 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 <a href='https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/index.htm' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Ian's Shoelace Site</a>, 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 )

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 [url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150826143 ... youts.html]archive of all its past layouts[/urls] 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.