Finding out that this is over 10 years old has made me profoundly sad. Despite the age of LLMs arguably unlocking massive amounts of productivity and agency for developers and non-developers alike, it feels as though we are living in a dark age of creativity on the web, maybe even a dark age for computer culture in general.
I'm keenly aware, I have a pretty extensive collection of Hacker News bookmarks. It's hard to articulate why I think these are different, but I think the best way to put it is that cachemonet feels a lot more avant garde, and perhaps also a reflection of a very particular form of "web culture" that has no clear successors.
People are experimenting with what you can do on the web, but the experiments aren't very "aesthetically inspiring". For that reason I'm kind of lukewarm on neal.fun.
EDIT: so I think a better way to describe it is that when artists experiment with technology, you get something like cachemonet. When developers experiment with technology, you get a web experiment that challenges conventional notions of what you can do with the web, but with varying degrees of creativity. I think terra.layoutit.com is best appreciated by other web devs who can appreciate the sheer amount of work required to figure out how to render a terrain map in CSS, but otherwise it's basically just a tool to generate terrain height maps, and not a particularly good one. Generating terrain maps in CSS is not a feature, but a handicap.
I posit that periods of relatively high creativity [ in art science music literature ] coincide with periods of relatively low inequality.
ie. if everyone is working so hard to pay rent / college, nobody has time to work on side projects in the garage, or go deep into books, or dedicate spare time to a craft or do down a science research rabbit hole.
Im not sure LLMs will free up much time for people in the middle of the economy - they might produce more but get paid the same.
There's a (not so visible) info button top right. It says:
cachemonet is an exploration into the serendipitous collisions that
occur between two randomly generated arrays. the arrays contain a mix
of custom and found .gifs sourced from tumblr and are set to
music. the output is autonomous, generative, art made possible through
curation & code.
I forgot about this, thank you! It was literally my screensaver all through the digitalocean build and got me through a lot of rough days. The clicking, I dunno, I spent too much time getting into weird click rhythms on this site. I would buy whoever made it dinner. https://www.cachemonet.com/save/
Sound on!
Song name is: Windowdipper from ꪖꪶꪶ ꪮꪀ ꪗꪖꪶꪶ by Jib Kidder
https://jibkidder.bandcamp.com/track/windowdipper
also, seems like they have another project https://feel.thatsh.it/ and I'd love to find that song as well if you can help haha
what's the symbols for that `ꪖꪶꪶ ꪮꪀ ꪗꪖꪶꪶ ` font? where can I find these
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai_Viet_script
thank you!
I discovered this page like back in 2015 and I am grateful to find it on hackernews again, I forgot even its name in the meantime.
Finding out that this is over 10 years old has made me profoundly sad. Despite the age of LLMs arguably unlocking massive amounts of productivity and agency for developers and non-developers alike, it feels as though we are living in a dark age of creativity on the web, maybe even a dark age for computer culture in general.
New interesting artsy web projects are being posted on hn all the time. neal.fun is an obvious example but there are plenty of others as well.
https://ambient.garden/
https://cannoneyed.com/isometric-nyc/
https://terra.layoutit.com/
https://ambigr.am/hall-of-fame
https://autism-simulator.vercel.app/
I'm keenly aware, I have a pretty extensive collection of Hacker News bookmarks. It's hard to articulate why I think these are different, but I think the best way to put it is that cachemonet feels a lot more avant garde, and perhaps also a reflection of a very particular form of "web culture" that has no clear successors.
People are experimenting with what you can do on the web, but the experiments aren't very "aesthetically inspiring". For that reason I'm kind of lukewarm on neal.fun.
EDIT: so I think a better way to describe it is that when artists experiment with technology, you get something like cachemonet. When developers experiment with technology, you get a web experiment that challenges conventional notions of what you can do with the web, but with varying degrees of creativity. I think terra.layoutit.com is best appreciated by other web devs who can appreciate the sheer amount of work required to figure out how to render a terrain map in CSS, but otherwise it's basically just a tool to generate terrain height maps, and not a particularly good one. Generating terrain maps in CSS is not a feature, but a handicap.
I wonder when peak demoscene occurred .. some of those mini code demos seem artistically and technically innovative.
I posit that periods of relatively high creativity [ in art science music literature ] coincide with periods of relatively low inequality.
ie. if everyone is working so hard to pay rent / college, nobody has time to work on side projects in the garage, or go deep into books, or dedicate spare time to a craft or do down a science research rabbit hole.
Im not sure LLMs will free up much time for people in the middle of the economy - they might produce more but get paid the same.
If you liked this, you'll probably also like https://ytmnd.com/
Shameless plug of the YTMND site I made more than a decade ago: https://fvcks.ytmnd.com/
Such a simpler time.
Biggest surprise here is that this website is still around. I was browsing it 20 years ago
Newgrounds still exists.
Having to pass a vote before you were uploaded and available for real I think was a good way to do things. Like a shitty peer review but for coolness.
Heh, my all time favorite: https://whatishoth.ytmnd.com
Cool stuff, but why is there an entire loading screen and intro animation, then a play button, when it could just link to a gif?
Made me lose interest in browsing real quick
It's to make sure the GIF is in sync with the audio. It was a bigger issue when connections were slower.
I genuinely can't tell if this is satire or not.
2010 OG account. He's been holding in this opinion for over a decade, waiting for his moment.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100527013827/http://www.bio-ba...
Somehow reminded me about the biobak website from 2010s, unfortunately only available in the archive now, but still functional.
THAT WAS TOTALLY WICKED!!
I don't know what this is, but I like it
There's a (not so visible) info button top right. It says:
You can even turn on sound...and it sounds like "cash money"
That probably depends on what is being displayed... at some point I had sounds of USB connect/disconnect (possibly from the Windows 7 era).
I think GP is referring to the name of the site, which sounds like "cash money" if you pronounce it with a thick American accent.
I'm so delighted you guys are discovering this for the first time. It's been around for a long time. I think I first saw it in 2011.
You're the man now, dawg.
I forgot about this, thank you! It was literally my screensaver all through the digitalocean build and got me through a lot of rough days. The clicking, I dunno, I spent too much time getting into weird click rhythms on this site. I would buy whoever made it dinner. https://www.cachemonet.com/save/
An all-time classic, glad to see it's been unchanged for at least a decade
And you dip dip, dip...
How can I self-host this?
Just for the legacy of this, I need to make sure this never vanishes
The track is Jib Kidder Windowdipper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwAYU4rlwmA
Thanks. Been grooving on this for a solid 30 mins
I thought I was safe on here.
I can rock out to that all day
Love it
strong overtones of Blank Banshee going on here.
good times
Love it, thank you. Because Wayland doesn't support screensavers, I finally found a solution for my older monitors. This is a perfect replacement.
Mmmm, funny shapes go brr
Now I know what to do with my extra monitor that I used to use for a home dashboard.
On a somewhat related topic:
There's an actress called Cashae Monya
https://m.imdb.com/name/nm13392714/
Works almost like stereograms (with duplicated object)!