Throwback Tuesdays?

[got_quiet]

I've been seeing and feeling a lot of nostalgia for ye old web, and the recent Friday Five about bookmarks prompted me to look at them for the first time in a while. I don't know about anyone else but I used to bookmark a ton of stuff back in the web 1.0 days, and once 2.0 settled over us almost never went back to look at them. But those sites are still there, waiting for me. Well, some of them are. A lot of them are gone forever, with nothing but wayback machine fossils keeping their memory alive.

Since these small websites are nearly impossible to stumble upon nowadays maybe I'll just share them here and see if other people find them interesting too?

The first cool one I came across was the website of the artist Kurt Wenner. He's big thing is Trompe-l'œil, aka optical illusions, and most of them are large enough to walk into. He's also just a very good classical artist. I look at his stuff and think, oh yes, when I have one bajillion dollars he's painting my ceilings.

Anyone else want to share random links from their ancient bookmarks?

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

Those pictures are very cool!

As it happens, I sorted through my decade+ old "games to play when bored" bookmarks recently, and the oldest still playable one on the list was Entanglement, which I now play again every now and then: https://entanglement.gopherwoodstudios.com/en-US-index.html

[got_quiet]

Entanglement is such a classic game! Funny enough I had just recently played a different version cause it was in the last Steam demo event but this one is free!

[autumndaze]

I still regularly use bookmarks to be honest, mostly for shopping, bills, and longer articles I plan to read... at some point lol I even try to clean them up on a semi-regular basis. I used to be really efficient about my webcomics (at one point I had them separated in folders by day of update). I still keep them semi-organized, but not to that capacity. Mostly it's just "here's the completed ones, here's the hiatus'd ones, here's the ongoing ones". I've also got a bunch of recipes I want to try, work finding bookmarks, creative resources... But here's an ASCII animation version of at least Star Wars Episode IV I was shown in college https://www.asciimation.co.nz/#

[got_quiet]

Oh that's wonderful! /And/ the guy has a link to a home made steam powered record player. Talk about a go getter.

[autumndaze]

This was definitely more functional than the sadly defunct Glider browser site. But I did find sites you can download it on, anyway.

Here's one where you can win Solitaire https://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/effects/solitaire/

Here's one where you can create raindrops https://dw.neocities.org/drops

Here's a Listen to Wikipedia thing that I think tracks searches and turns them into music http://listen.hatnote.com/

[got_quiet]

I definitely have been to that solitaire site before, or if not that one another doing the same thing. It reminds me of when when pointer effects were all the rage. They can be neat but I'm glad my mouse pointer doesn't sometimes randomly turn into a unicorn anymore.

[autumndaze]

Did you ever download those funny screensavers that did like weird effects in the background? The ones that had like a 50-60% chance of being outright viruses, but sometimes were like... cute animations building bricks across your screen or whatever?

[got_quiet]

I don't think I ever downloaded them but I do very much remember them. I also remember back when you could modify the color of all the windows elements and I turned mine into the absolutely disgusting pumpkin orange/yellow theme and kept it for years. I have no idea why.

[autumndaze]

Because it gave us power and made us feel like we were programming masters alkdjalj