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by wodenokoto 1656 days ago
While I hate tons of javascript as much as the next HN'er, do yourself a favor and scroll _up_, enjoy the view and press play. So awesome!
3 comments

This gets a pass because:

- It looks awesome

- It doesn't hijack scrolling, it reacts to it, but scrolling down scrolls down, without pausing or going left and right or any kind of weirdness

- It is a large page, but not that large. In fact the two screenshots are the biggest thing on the page, the entire animation (more like a demo) on top is only 168 kB (+ the streaming music if you press play).

- If you don't care about all the fluff, you just have a blog post, you actually need to do something (scroll up) of you want to see it.

- The page is usable with and without an ad blocker. No annoyances like popups.

And the page works fine without JavaScript (with an image fallback for the pipes).
Also, after scrolling up, there is a 'settings' button (gear icon). Along with various options (including alternative shaders!), at the top there are 8 empty circles that are worth investigating...

I'm trying to avoid spoilers, so I'm obfuscating more specific hints:

  # A good first step (very mild spoiler)
  echo Q2hlY2sgdGhlIGNvbnNvbGUhCg== | base64 -d

  # A direct hint about where to look 
  echo RmluZCB0aGUgaGlkZGVuIGFjaGlldmVtZW50cygpCg== | base64 -d

  # A very spoilery JS statement that has side effects
  echo YWNoaWV2ZW1lbnQoJ2NodHInKQo= | base64 -d
Very nice! Even the play button has a groovy effect if you hover over it!

I used to spend an inordinate amount of time watching the 3D Pipes screensaver, wishing there was a mode that would travel along the pipes after they are drawn. This is like that but mostly its own cool thing.

Very cool tune too!

As well as screensavers, the visualizer in winamp was a great time sink for me with effects like [1] which bears a striking resemblance to the acko intro.

Not much surprise then that they were made by the same person [2]

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhm7uFv4ZOQ 2. https://acko.net/blog/avs