[duxup]

I miss the whimsy of the old web. I suspect even the folks who participated in that whimsy and now turn their nose up at a site with an odd design, or sound are to blame.

Whimsy is still out there to some extent but just not as prevalent.

[kixiQu]

In case anyone wants to sniff around for some, there's some left in personal sites, often with an explicitly nostalgic vibe: https://yesterweb.org/webring/members.html

https://www.kickscondor.com <- anything in the kicksverse

http://tetrageddon.com/ <-- nathalie lawhead has some wild net art projects

[michaelpb]

kickstcondor has a cool art style, but from my understanding it isn't exactly a personal site, given it's run by multiple people pretending to be a single person, who actually are doing this for work at Meta / Facebook: https://usesthis.com/interviews/kicks.condor/

I hadn't heard of some of these other ones, and they look cool, thanks for sharing!

[kixiQu]

"We're on YouTube a lot. But of course. The modern container for personalities. A lot of our characters are blended from vlogs and streams. For whatever reason, we pull a lot from the amateur cigar-smoking community."

One cue that it was a joke is that the "multiple people" are supposedly a brother and sister pair named "Cody" and "Jody". Also the quote above. Also "Jody: We both use a lot of VR to interact with the different people we come out with."

So, again, this is not saying that the kickscondor.com website is run by two Facebook employees, it is explicitly saying that "Cody" and "Jody" have created a fictional personality who has done all the blogging that refers to a single person's life, and that that's kicks condor, and that it's pulled from the amateur cigar-smoking community, and that they interact with him in VR. And also they like Segway shoes.

Were that not enough to cue one that it was Maybe Not To Be Taken Literally, the interview with the "claim" to being from Facebook was preceded by a LARPy revamp of the website where it was all supposed to be sentient Disney IP run amok, and there was a hidden puzzle game (and telnet BBS, the thing was genius), and you could also email completed mazes to a particular address, and then another revamp had the whole thing "seized by the FBI", with police lights and noises...

[kixiQu]

see also: https://web.archive.org/web/20210201092129/https://kickscond...

> Grape-Nuts Media Lab announces a new partnership with the brilliant duo behind the beloved Kicks Condor intellectual property. This is a new page in our history—a crisp, brittle new page. (By brittle—we do not mean fragile or frail—we mean “firm and crackly” and “feels fun to touch, crumbles in the hand in a satisfying way, similar to a page fabricated from 3-D printed and nutted grape-based matter.”)

> Cody and Jody, the precocious brother and sister team hailing from Facebook Labs, have perfected their recipe for an iconic blogger-type character, one who is very difficult to describe in marketing terms, but which has caught the TiddlyWiki enthusiast worlds by storm.

> By now, it’s very clear that Kicks Condor was a secondary (or tertiary) character in the shelved script for National Treasure 3: How the West Was Done. But lowly beginnings have never stopped the Grape-Nuts® family before. Our founder, Joshua Jonathan Grape-Nuts took his original portfolio of grape-nuts sample textures to the Del Monte/Bloomberg Corp on a northbound Greyhound Bus back in 1863! That’s right in the middle of Civil War I!

[bluejellybean]

These types of links are why I'm still hopeful for the internet as a platform. What a hit of crazy weirdness out of some random persons brain, just excellent.

[kixiQu]

https://maya.land/blogroll.opml <-- You can open this in your browser and look around at what I follow, the neocities and altweb sections in particular being relevant.

The cool web isn't dead :) and I'm not even sure it shrank -- the less-cool web just got a lot bigger right next to it.

[nkrisc]

Auto-playing music was obnoxious then and it's obnoxious now. I didn't think there was anything whimsical about it. About as whimsical as getting an air horn blown in my face when I walk into a room.