Web Wanderings #23
Rediscover the joy of online exploration! Web Wandering shares a hand-picked selection of the most awesome websites you won't find anywhere else.
Helloooo again fellow web explorers! It’s summer, it’s hot, it’s too bright outside. Let’s stay inside with AC on and check out the latest, coolest websites. I have some REALLY good ones for you.
By the way: Cloudhiker currently runs the Summer Sale with 33% off the Premium subscription! 👀 Interested? Have a look here. ☀️
This edition is also available on Cloudhiker as a Collection so you can find, like and collect the sites of this Edition: Web Wanderings #23
Tasmania LAN Party Photos Archive
https://issung.com/posts/lanphotosarchive
Oh sweet nostalgia (again)! Have you ever been to a LAN party? Uhm… do you even know what this is? I mean, there only was a short time in history where people had computers capable enough to play games together, but without doing that over the internet. And yes, that requires bringing all the computers into the same room and connect them over (LAN) cables.
Just imagine a couple dozen 14-year olds playing Counter Strike 1.6 on their bulky machines, with old CRT monitors, eating chips and drinking cheap soda, for multiple days in a row. A LAN party actually was the first and last time that I stayed up for three consecutive days. I then slept for 16 hours in a row. Good old times. 😍 🎮
Snowflake Maker
https://supersnowflakemaker.com
I bet you cut snowflakes out of folded papers too, when you were younger, right? Like, really bad snowflakes, with badly cut holes and edges, barely looking better than everything else little kids produce. Let’s not waste more paper and just do that digitally, right?
Subway Stories
New York City is one of the largest, most flashing and bright cities in the world, with currently about 8.8 million people living there. And such a city needs a robust infrastructure. So it comes, that the NYC subway is handling billions of train rides every year. I love how this website takes all that data and visualizes it in a easy to understand way: what are the gateways, which lines are used commonly on different days, where people come from and where do they go. It’s amazing to explore how the city behaves, just by looking at a train map.
Unplatform
https://unplatform.fromthesuperhighway.com
I deleted Instagram and Facebook about 8 years ago, back when it still felt like a slightly crazy thing to do. People asked how I’d keep up with anyone. I didn’t have a great answer at the time. I just knew something about the endless scrolling, the ads, the feeling of being studied rather than connected to, made me want out. They all give a shit about your privacy and rights.
So I’m glad something like unplatform exists now. It’s an interactive guide built to walk you through actually leaving the data-harvesting platforms for the Indie Web, the older, weirder, human-run internet that never actually disappeared, it just got buried under five websites’ worth of engagement bait.
What I like about it is that it doesn’t just tell you to log off and touch grass. It assumes you had real reasons for being on those platforms in the first place, art, news, community, and it tries to help you find where those things actually live now.
Leaving the shitty social networks for something better. ❤️
Seized
This is a giant archive of official seizure banners. You know, those red-white-and-blue eagle graphics made with Photoshop 2003 that pop up when the FBI yanks a website offline. Silk Road’s in there. So is Megaupload, KickassTorrents, some guy’s fake Manscaped storefront, a site called “Isak’s Auto Sales,”. Some entries even have video versions of the banner, because apparently the feds render intros now.
Somewhere, someone in a navy windbreaker is clicking a “Seize” button right now and then uploads some mediocre eagle graphic to the website...
Do you like all those websites and want to explore more? Cloudhiker has 31,000+ sites all waiting for you to be discovered! Totally free, no account needed.
Dear next Visitor…
https://www.dearnextvisitor.com
There’s a message waiting for you, written just for your eyes by whoever was there before you. But you don’t get to read it until you leave one of your own for the next stranger in line.
30,000+ messages passed along like this, one to one, a chain of total strangers writing to each other in the dark.
It’s such a small idea and it kind of wrecked me a little. 🌿 Such a wholesome, loving website.
(And no, I won’t tell you what somebody wrote for me, or what I wrote.)
Google Sheep View
https://www.googlesheepview.com
Sheep are weirdly cute. On the one hand those large cloudy fluff balls are jumping over the grass, eating it and enjoy life, while that one named Merle for some reason enjoys to Meeeehhh at you.
And somebody took the time to make a website dedicated to the loving wool canons - photographed by Street View cars. Photographed mid-meeeeeeh. Or it's staring dead into the camera like it knows. Or it's just a butt in a field in Ohio, because apparently the sheep was too busy eating grass to notice the photography car rolled by.
"Ongoing art project." Ongoing! Since 2015! For sheep! 🐑
The Triology Meter
The Trilogy Meter takes every movie trilogy you can think of, Star Wars, The Matrix, Godfather, Jaws, Rambo, RoboCop, and pulls their IMDb/TMDb ratings side by side so you can see exactly how much each series nosedived by part three. There’s a “delta” score for every trilogy, basically a quality-collapse index, and some of these are brutal. RoboCop has a delta of 3.4. Jaws somehow hits 4.4.
Meanwhile Lord of the Rings sits there smugly at a 0.2 delta like it’s never lost an argument in its life, because it hasn’t. (I still don’t like Bilbo and think Sam should have just taken the Ring…)
A pretty great time waster if you've ever needed to prove numerically, that your friend is wrong about Spider-Man 3.
Parallel Lives
https://janwillemtulp.github.io/parallel-lives
Parallel Lives is a scrollable timeline of 5,000 years of history, showing who was actually alive at the same time as who. And it shows that we have a really distorted perception of time. Did you know Cleopatra lived closer to the moon landing than to the construction of the pyramids? Or that Newton, the physics guy, wig-and-quill era, could have talked with Ben Franklin if he went on vacation to Philadelphia? Or that Galileo could have taught astronomy at the Harvard University which was founded in 1636?
Pretty wild, huh.
Meow.Camera
Somewhere on this planet, there’s a cute kitty eating right now. Chances are high that you can watch one doing so. Some can watch their own cat. Some have to visit meow.camera for that (if you are a sad soul like me who would like to get a cat but somehow doesn’t own one). 🥲
I love cats. Much love to all cat people out there, and those who will be one in the future.
Thanks for reading through Web Wanderings #23.
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When you’re done with this episode, why not hop on Cloudhiker and see what weird and wonderful corners of the web you can find? 👀