[HN Gopher] Mischa's Cursed Webring
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Mischa's Cursed Webring
Author : bwooster
Score : 69 points
Date : 2021-03-05 16:49 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cursed.lol)
(TXT) w3m dump (cursed.lol)
| eat_veggies wrote:
| on the topic of web rings, check out this little webring I built
| for github profile readmes a few months back:
|
| https://octo-ring.com/
|
| Here's what the widget looks like on your profile -- there are
| some _wild_ markdown table hacks to make the buttons individually
| clickable: https://github.com/veggiedefender/
| emayljames wrote:
| All behold the latest in web design:
| https://www.cameronsworld.net/
| antihero wrote:
| This is actually a thing of beauty.
| sidpatil wrote:
| Also of interest:
|
| https://www.cameronsworld.net/
|
| https://wiby.me/
| muybasado wrote:
| Interesting project, however it seems it has a certain bias
| against a peculiar demographic, unfortunately this isn't
| surprising at all. Culture war permeates everything.
| bwooster wrote:
| Submissions welcome!
| muybasado wrote:
| Petty.
| dookahku wrote:
| Why are you salty?
| bartread wrote:
| Suspect they think it's edgy to waste everybody's time by
| making oblique reference to some perceived slight. I
| can't work out what the problem is either.
|
| muybasado: Please, either speak plainly and explicitly
| or, if you're unwilling to do so, remain quiet.
| antihero wrote:
| It is in the nature of the right wing crank to portray
| themselves as the victim despite usually being the
| perpetrator.
| hc-taway wrote:
| Could you expand on this? I can't figure out what you're
| getting at.
| SamBam wrote:
| I really didn't understand this comment, and you didn't expand,
| so I assumed that it must have been something obvious and I was
| too insensitive to notice. So I did a survey of the first 20
| sites it gave me and try to categorize by
| "demographic/culture." Here's what I got:
| Unknown (math, science etc) 6 Asian 4 Christian
| 2 Middle America 2 Goth 1 Democrat 1
| Irish 1 EU 1 Swiss 1 English 1
|
| So... I'm still in the dark. I guess Asians are
| overrepresented? But that included several different countries
| (I could only wrote Korea and China before I started
| categorizing them together).
|
| Or maybe you decided they were making fun of your demographic
| in particular, and confirmation bias led you to see only that?
| Are you seeing "culture war" where there isn't any, or am I
| still blind?
| htkyoholk wrote:
| You should look at what's missing from you list.
| [deleted]
| pdx6 wrote:
| Cursed indeed. I am enjoying the web 1.0 insanity of the Atari
| parts maker for 8-bit machines. Somewhere there is a person still
| making a bit of cash from 1985 tech.
|
| https://cursed.llolo.lol/best-electronics-ca.com/
| unwiredben wrote:
| Best Electronics is a pretty amazing place. Here's an interview
| with the guy who runs it:
| https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-5-the-atari-...
| RGamma wrote:
| Love this, there's so much personality in these. No JS cruft, no
| cosmetics, no filler, just cool (and weird) vibes.
|
| How far the web strayed from this, it's a shame really. The soul
| has left :/
| nexthash wrote:
| I would disagree - the Web hasn't strayed, it's just gotten
| bigger. A lot more people on for a variety of reasons. If you
| look closely, you can still find creativity. For example,
| search up "digital gardens"
| geocrasher wrote:
| Working in web hosting, I've hosted many sites like this and had
| to deal with some of the people who've made them. And I have to
| say that while it's fun to point and laugh at the websites, there
| are a few of these in the ring that are borderline troubling. It
| is clear that their authors are suffering from some serious
| mental illnesses and at the very least some major delusions.
|
| I recall a case years ago where I hosted a site for someone who
| appeared to be a paranoid schizophrenic. They called in one day
| complaining that we'd moved one of their HTML tables to the left
| by a few pixels. Another one was a website by somebody who was
| "exposing" their local municipality for doing things like
| charging for water and "illegally incarcerating" the website
| owner, who viewed their stints in a mental hospital as an attack
| to their freedom.
|
| On the other hand, Lings Cars made it on this webring, and it's
| well deserved. That site is awesome and horrible at the same
| time, and it's designed to make us gawk at it for fun.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| At what point does appreciating content produced by the mental
| ill become exploitation of them? Gene Ray was clearly mentally
| ill, but few had any qualms about enjoying the WTF quality of
| the Time Cube website.
|
| Some of the classic twentieth-century art by outsider artists
| like Adolf Wolfli was in large part the consequence of their
| illness, and yet it is appreciated nevertheless, so couldn't
| the same persist today for the mentally ill's analogous
| creations on the internet?
| geocrasher wrote:
| I think the main difference is whether what they are putting
| out is something beautiful and artistic, or... not. You do
| make an interesting point that I had not considered however.
| At what point does it stop becoming the ramblings of a mental
| patient and start becoming art? I don't know. But I do know
| that the sampling of what I saw on is web ring wasn't art ;)
|
| Edit: It becomes art when the person creating it declares it
| as art. Otherwise it's just sad. Thank you @mulmen for
| brining this point out.
| mulmen wrote:
| Surely intent matters? If a person claims to be an artist
| then we can appreciate their art. If a percon claims to be an
| investigative journalist but actually doesn't understand the
| concept public utilities then I'm not sure we should treat
| that as entertainment.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Yes I agree with this.
| jstanley wrote:
| > who viewed their stints in a mental hospital as an attack to
| their freedom.
|
| In fairness, this _is_ an attack on their freedom.
| samatman wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| I don't have a better solution, but there has to be a better
| treatment for paranoid schizophrenia than kidnapping them,
| strapping them to a bed, transporting them in a windowless
| vehicle to a location they've never been, forcibly drugging
| them, and letting them wander around with other psychotics
| for a couple days.
| CDSlice wrote:
| I'm not really sure what's so "cursed" about this website?
| http://www.hytechshotz.com/default.asp
|
| The website design is pretty bad but based off of the OP saying
| "most of them are really deep and demonstrate some sort of
| twisted brain that was behind each site" I'm not really sure why
| this one is on the list.
| hinkley wrote:
| Overlooking the ol' bezel trick,
|
| High saturation text on a black background does not cancel out
| the overuse of high saturation colors. This looks like a flyer
| for Hempfest 2021.
|
| (Why do pot smokers enjoy higher saturation than the rest of
| us? Has anyone studied this?)
| dookahku wrote:
| Maybe like finding a Prada store in the middle of nowhere near
| marfra Texas... Either it's a cover or an artwork, or possibly
| someone That twisted at Prada headquarters decide that it was a
| good location
| guerrilla wrote:
| Apparently that's just an art installation
|
| https://inspiredimperfection.com/adventures/prada-marfa/
| mattnewton wrote:
| Some of these sites are just dope, like this 3d graphing
| software site https://cursed.llolo.lol/dpgraph.com/
|
| But have hideous design :D
| tonyarkles wrote:
| As it turns out, these are real sites that got scraped.
| http://www.dpgraph.com/index.html works, and it looks like
| the software is free to download now. I'm too much of a
| chicken to try though...
| bwooster wrote:
| A lot of these sites don't support HTTPS, so they can't be
| iframed without being mirrored
| hinkley wrote:
| I can't recall the last time I made a noise opening a web
| page.
|
| This one sounded somewhere between a hiccup and vomiting.
| Kind of a 'Hulp!'
| hc-taway wrote:
| I'd say that one gets in for having photos with "2019-2020", so
| clearly still being updated, but for feeling so very much like
| it's from 1999. Choosing to lead with an unremarkable aerial
| photography shot, and something about the saturation in the
| images, is _so_ 1990s, not just the design. @aol.com contact
| email. The name is reminiscent of "icy hot stuntaz". The whole
| package is very special.
| bpierre wrote:
| I don't see how any of these is cursed really. I think it is
| fair to assume that most of these websites are the product of
| work and passion from individuals having put some time and
| effort into it.
|
| One can perceive them as ugly, outdated, funny, or even
| pointless (I don't, but it's not the point). But using a domain
| like cursed.lol and a vocabulary like "twisted brain" or
| "fucked up shit" (OP's comment) is a bit too much on the side
| of the mockery / disrespect / immaturity and doesn't belong
| here IMO.
| xook wrote:
| This is it. I was expecting something qyestionable, or even
| mildly awful. Instead, they are quaint, and full of life.
| They are outdated only because of current UI trends, not
| because they are objectively outdated.
|
| I miss the soul and work that went into sites of the 1990s
| where it was dense information with a point, not thousands of
| pixels filled with nothing.
| kid-icarus wrote:
| Respectfully disagree. I take delight in observing these
| artifacts, it's unfortunate you cannot.
| bpierre wrote:
| Sorry if my comment wasn't clear, I actually do enjoy
| browsing these websites. My concern is about the mocking
| tone I perceive from OP and the webring curator (not sure
| it's the same person).
| kid-icarus wrote:
| I don't know how many of the cursed sites you've visited,
| but in addition to rudimentary styling, some of the sites
| contain some rather disturbing content.
|
| Hence the "fucked up shit," and "twisted mind," comments.
| I don't think they are inappropriate or disrespectful.
|
| I don't think tone policing is appropriate or beneficial.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Exactly my feeling: this is the opposite of the hacker-in-
| the-best-sense appreciation for things done out of passion
| and personal dedication, even when they're strange or
| seemingly useless. This tears down without offering anything
| better.
| bwooster wrote:
| Source: https://github.com/revmischa/cursed-webring
| fortran77 wrote:
| There's something very charming about these 90's style web-pages,
| content aside.
| analyte123 wrote:
| Doing crazy things with CSS, including animations, has never been
| easier or more consistent between browsers, and yet creativity in
| web design has gone down practically to zero these days. I blame
| mobile, where nobody can seem to escape from the "responsive
| column of blandly styled content" paradigm.
| johnfn wrote:
| My theory for why this is is that in the past when the web was
| arcane and challenging to learn to develop, this actually acted
| as a filter for people who had a special sort of intellectual
| curiosity and passion to really push through and make what they
| wanted to make. It's great now that the web is so broadly
| accessible, but now no such filter exists, so truly creative
| sites are fewer and further between.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| yes, blame the SEO mantra of "mobile-first" which has poisoned
| products that are "mobile-rarely".
| cosmodisk wrote:
| I think I had enough "creativity" from webdesign. Video
| backgrounds, fading,or reappearing text sections, absurd colour
| schemes,or overengineered SPAs. I'd happily trade all that
| shiny wrapping paper into something a bit more boring and
| consistent.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Had to throw http://durgasoft.com/ 's hat into the ring too for
| the garish web design subset.
| emayljames wrote:
| Bleach my eyes
| sidpatil wrote:
| It's like the Ling's Cars [1] of Java and Python software
| development.
|
| [1] https://www.lingscars.com/
| simplecto wrote:
| I heard via LinkedIn she sold the business. I hope the
| character remains.
| [deleted]
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| This is extremely well done. Academically, I look forward to any
| attempt at criticizing this project. It's a tricky thought
| experiment.
| prox wrote:
| What is it exactly? There is no editorial to go with this. I
| love the time machine feel though. Hello tables!
| bwooster wrote:
| I've been trying to make a list of "cursed" websites - some
| of them are really deep and vast and demonstrate some sort of
| twisted brain that was behind each site. Some are just
| bizarre. Most have cursed vibes. You can spend hours on a lot
| of them just digging up fucked up shit.
| prox wrote:
| Cool, going to check it out later!
| [deleted]
| joemi wrote:
| If 'cursed' is derogatory, then it seems unfair/mean to call
| sites cursed just for not keeping up with current web design
| trends. Shouldn't we be better than that?
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Not exactly. "Cursed" in modern slang is more like something
| weird and unsettling in a way that's probably funny and may
| or may not actually be bad.
| tempodox wrote:
| Wow, the greatest website of the '90s that never was, it even has
| a Catsape browser embedded somewhere. Found that by coincidence
| -- clicking around in this thing can have surprising results. It
| is also the first site that managed to get me this warning from
| Safari: " _This webpage is using significant energy. Closing it
| may improve the responsiveness of your Mac_ ". I recommend the
| site for its entertainment value but make sure your battery is
| charged!
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(page generated 2021-03-05 23:01 UTC)