Websites vol. 1

Bookmark folders feel to me like endless drawers in which I put things that I hope that I return to¹. Just like real drawers, though, we only get back to it at random moments in our lives²³. When I say “return to”, it’s important to me that we are not the same kind of person who put the thing in storage in the first place. In this sense, I no longer act as creator/archivist, but rather as receiver/public, and if the thing was just tossed in a box with no context, time affects the meaning we can get from it when we retrieve it (picking up a piece of paper in the drawer: “what was this again?”).

However, this kind of temporalization⁴ can shift if more people are involved: one person (me) can archive and immediately publish it, and another (you) will get to receive it in its meaningful way. Since someone becomes one’s own stranger after enough time has passed, presenting work to a (potential) stranger right now gets rid of the need for time to pass by for the meaning of an object to be made explicit. There’s probably a thin layer of personal experience that is tied to such object, but that’s an acceptable price for sharing.

So here’s a first batch of what I found from my bookmark drawers. In case the website is down, you can always try the wayback machine⁵.

• Brotherʼs car service - It looks like some fancy german graphic designer made a website for the car service of a dude who drove him around ethiopia. I have mixed feelings about digital nomads, but this seems the least disconnected version.
• Death Row last statements - The state of Texas in the U.S.A. publishes the last words of the people they kill.
• yoo.ooo - Simple but brilliant. When I learned the TLD .ooo existed I immediately tried to see if someone seized the occasion, and I was not disappointed.
• fourmilab.ch - The website of the guy who co-founded one of the largest and most monopolistic computer-aided design software autocad. He also meticulously documented his life and thoughts in the Swiss mountains.
• quantum natives - A lonely person creates whatever world. Each of these tracks have less than a 100 plays.
• unz - Good old alternative media, conspiracy fountain in the 2010s.
• pptArt - Unidentified corporate art object. It seems to be a barely realistic company which organizes its own corporate art fair awarding its own members.
• sincere - Last survivor of the golden guest book age. Drop by, have a good time, and sign off!
• Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems - A study to figure out if “huh?” is the only universal word.
• astronaut - Watching live YouTube from space. I made something similar for SoundCloud.
• photo requests from solitary - A website documenting the kinds of pictures that are requested by prisoners in solitary confinment.
• unlwd - The weird world of people who create languages.
• headgear - The non-linearity of lines and paragraphs.
• polynesian stick charts - People used to have other (better?) ways of moving around.
• wonders of street view - Speaking of maps.
• 4m3ric4 - Flat rendering of the U.S standard—the road trip.
• timeline of technologies for publishing - Useful framing of how we write mechanically.
• ExRx - The most extensive exercises for exercising.
• ritual engineer - Strong vibes of satanic software engineering.
• affirmations for my existence - Combinatorial visual poetry.
• hufeisensiedlung spare parts - An exhaustive documentation of the different parts that inhabitants of the hufeisensiedlung might want to refer to. Created by a couple of architects who really like the place.
• dwitter - A weird computer graphics community.
• the ghost in the mp3 - MP3 is a lossy compression format. What does the lost data sound like?