The website of the Nintendo founder's family office. It..is just beautifully designed, and a homage to the original game consoles and the entire art form of PC gaming when it started.
Wow! I've been using the internet since the 90s and I have never had my hair blown back by a webpage before. The isometric view certainly hits the nostalgia button.
Edit (from the site):
"Japan was once globally renowned for its people's quality of unique creativity teamed with a pioneering mindset. Their innovation and inventions changed the world. But that golden era has long been gone. It seems that the quality Japanese people once possessed is overshadowed by worry and fear."
It's really interesting to hear that coming from the family office of one the largest companies in Japan. I can't imagine an American leader making a public statement like that (about the USA), probably because US companies prey on fear and FOMO.
It's bold of the Nintendo family to make such statements about Japanese society when they can't even get their own company under control themselves. Nintendo is probably the most universally hated gaming company and it's true of other Japanese companies as well. They seem to be scared of the internet and goes out of their way to claim copyright infringement on anything fan made having to do with their intellectual property. They will try take down everything they possibly can, it's so bad you have to fear covering any of their games, even their music on platforms such as YouTube. Any efforts to preserve old Nintendo games via e.g. emulation is quickly met with a lawsuit. Whether or not you comply with their requests they will try to sue you for millions, even children. Just check out all the recent cases on Google. https://www.google.com/search?q=nintendo+sues
Nintendo is probably the most universally hated gaming company
What? I think you need to step out of your echo chamber, I would argue Nintendo is probably the most universally beloved game/toy/entertainment company out there, maybe tied with Lego.
Charlie's definitely on the right track here, but I think it's worth mentioning that the vast, vast majority of Nintendo consumers don't know/care/understand about Nintendo's scummier practices.
I think it's possible that it can both be true that Nintendo doesn't always treat its fans very well, but Nintendo also makes far better games than any other publisher.
I'd agree that they're horrible and artificially make their products worse in order to sell you their pointless subscription service, but that doesn't mean it's not the most beloved gaming company at the moment.
I think I understand why Nintendo heavily protects their IP. Their strategy dates back to when Nintendo first expanded into the US in the 1980s after the video game crash of 1983 (which partially happened because of the overwhelming amount of low quality games being produced then)[1]. They deeply care about quality and being associated with it. When they launched the NES, they heavily filtered 3rd party studios and created the "Golden Seal of Approval" for all of their licensed games. Their strategy works. People trust Nintendo to give them high quality entertainment. They even went as far as designing the NES box to look like a VCR appliance, not a video game console, all because of the negative association people had after the VG crash!
So expanding from that, they (rightfully, from a business culture perspective) don't want their IP being tampered with, nor associated with a product they themselves did not create. Nintendo probably spends a much higher percentage on R&D than the average video game company. They don't want all their efforts to be watered down from mimicry. They don't want someone to see Mario in a meme post on YouTube and associate Mario with that video. They want Mario to equate to the production quality they work really hard to produce again and again.
You're wrong about Nintendo being hated. People love them, because they trust Nintendo. And Nintendo in turn works extremely hard at building and maintaining that trust.
> Nintendo is probably the most universally hated gaming company
That's a _fascinating_ claim. Just off the top of my head, I can think of Blizzard/Activision and EA who I think of as more-hated (for labour practices and working conditions; and for microtransactions and sequel-itis). I've never heard any opinion below ambivalence for Nintendo, and its fans are rabid.
> Nintendo is probably the most universally hated gaming company
You are just not anywhere near objective reality [1]. Nintendo is one of the most beloved brands in the western world and I can't even comprehend what echo chamber you are in to think that Nintendo is hated.
There are certainly fair criticism of the company, I believe they are incredibly over zealous about their IP enforcement, but I doubt many people ever think about that when they are getting 100's of hours of entertainment value out of their hardware and 1st party software.
I think you're being downvoted for exaggerating an opinion that's really only shared among some content creators. But you make a good point about their overzealous copyright enforcement. It seems hypocritical to bemoan fear and lack of innovation when your company is perhaps the most prolific user of the courts (in the industry) to squash any creators who might possibly be infringing on your IP. It creates a chilling effect around games.
No one hates Nintendo. Imagine being so impotent that you rage against likely the most popular gaming company in the US as a hobby. That's really fucking sad.
I don't know anyone spending more than one day a week in an office in the UK. Trains are very under-utilised. Business owners in city centres are still grumbling about the lack of trade.
I think it’s Univers, designed by Swiss type designer Adrian Frutiger in the mid-50s. The lower-case ‘a’ was the first glyph I saw distinguishing it from Helvetica and Helvetica Neue, and the uppercase ‘R’ was the first I noticed distinguishing it from Helvetica Now, Arial and Frutiger.
There’s a zillion fonts that look like Helvetica/Univers/Akzidenz-Grotesk but most professional treatments will just use one of those and make sure it’s leaded, kerned, weighted and laid out properly. The Helvetica documentary is a fun watch that will also give a useful overview of these sorts of type families.
The differences are pretty subtle. Though the typeface is beautiful, a less skillful design would render it unremarkable. The typesetting and overall design— i.e. contrast, relationship among elements, controlling the path of the eye with visual hierarchy, etc.— is What makes the type really shine here. If you like this vibe, you might enjoy the posters of long-time MIT graphic designer Jacquelin Casey.
Just a warning that exploring James Lileks' site will suck you into spending a completely unreasonable number of hours marveling at his outstanding sense of humor (he wrote a great piece last week on the passing of P.J. O'Rourke) as well as the simultaneous wonderfulness and awfulness of mid-century American culture and life. The Gallery of Regrettable Food is a destination on its own, and the Matchbooks Collection will leave you amazed that they are so interesting...
I agree about the matchbooks. Some are hideous, but the best leave me astonished: the design talent there is really humbling. Imagine being able to make a tiny matchbook so beautifully evocative, so full of promise. Look at this one: http://www.lileks.com/match/museum/bars/1.html. I want to go there now.
I love https://www.luigicases.com - it's the web site for an Italian gentleman who makes leather cases and straps for Leica cameras. But the web design is straight out of the 90's, along with loads of extraneous text and even some family photos. And you can't actually buy anything via the website - you send the guy an email and a corresponding Paypal payment (https://www.luigicases.com/a000-PURCHASE-info.htm).
If the goods are handmade then the bad UX serves as a rate-limiter to constrain demand to supply. I'm assuming the system works well for him as otherwise he'd switch to a better solution.
If you'd ever done A/B testing before you probably would not make this statement. Also, it's quite possible they prefer to stay small and don't want more business.
A private artistic project by Russian artist Oleg Paschenko. Very strange, creepy, interesting, and years ago, it was interactive (flash). Now it's just a walkthrough video that doesn't provide the same mystique. And it seems some of the creepier skeletal sections aren't shown. I think it might be a different version from the original.
Back when I first stumbled upon the site (90s), it was like a curiosity amplification engine for my young mind. What is it? Why would someone spend time on something like this? And why wouldn't they provide information about what it is or who they are? Am I using it right? Are there easter eggs I'm missing out on?
It was depressing, creepy, and intriguing. I wasn't able to find any writeup on it when I first found it (pre-google) and I was just so drawn in. I'd click in one place, and something weird would show up on the screen, then I'd click again and nothing would happen. I'd see random flashes of skeletal structures or a small child that appeared to be crying. And the sounds were just as disturbing as the visuals. I never forgot it.
Paschenko is a pretty curious guy. IIRC he makes both digital art and physical works, and—again IIRC—they tend to be atmospheric like this site, if perhaps a bit less cryptic. He's big time into Orthodox Christianity—supposedly the dominant religion in the country, but most ‘believers’ here just have this checkbox in the back of their minds that they're Orthodox, and that's it.
He was employed since '99 by Art. Lebedev Studio, one of the first web design companies here, known also for the Optimus keyboard. And he wrote some time later that it took him a while to realize that Lebedev, the company's owner, was just giving him money to let him continue making his art.
To this day, it's the only time I got over a minute of laughter out of someone (to the point that they cried) simply by showing them a thing they haven't seen before (this site, back when it was still new). Its absurdity can kill you, lol.
Not sure if it's just me or if it's not as bad as I remember it back in the day? Maybe my ad-blocker is interfering or Safari simply can't keep up with this level of madness?
Man, if it were the early 2000's, I could give you a seemingly endless list of sites. There was a a network of sites like designiskinky, k10k, praystation, and many others that existed to curate, and showcase interesting websites. A lot of that creativity was due to graphic designers learning Flash, and putting up their experiments. A really interesting period of time.
Sadly, I don't really know of anything like that anymore. I'll run across a random Tumblr from time to time. Or, strike gold with a random Pintrest list. But, it's nothing like it used to be, in regards to out-of-the-box web design.
Yup the design scene around the turn of the century was a magical time. Really happy to have been a part of it. Wish it still existed but we went from being punk 20 year olds trying to prove ourselves to middle aged adults with families and careers. Not everything can last forever.
i’ve met this dude irl, he used to shop at the computer store i worked at. wore a timecube hat but i never asked for details because i can recognize mental health issues
Mental health issues can often be unpredictable and dangerous.
A missing arm is almost never a sign of danger.
A missing arm could be the result of many things, birth defect, boating accident, or dangerous behavior, but is not a commonly accept indication of danger to self or others.
I remember reading about this on SA a long time ago, but never really followed up on it. It wasn't until I saw the Down the Rabbit Hole video years later that I realized how tragic this guy's life was. It's sad, but I would be lying if I said I didn't get some amusement reading his hypothesis.
Kevin Brown's mathpages [0] are really something else. I keep falling into them again and again when trying to solve very different technical problems. Each time, he surprises me with several crucial insights that were already there 20 years ago. The wonky math equations are a lovely plus.
In Sweden, we use week-number quite often, but it is nowhere to be found in our calendar software, so, there is a webpage that just displays what week it is now, nothing else..
I always feel cognitively impaired for a few seconds when I am discuss some planing aspect with product managers, they all keep using week numbers as if that provided any form of intuition to other mortals.
For those using macOS or iOS, week numbers can be toggled on in the calendar settings! Really useful if you need to frequently reference the week. Unsure about Windows and Android.
hehe, came here to post the same page :-) I'm using it every week since in the software development project I'm in we're using week numbers for all planning. Fun fact for vecka.nu, the favicon is updated each week so as to show the number of the week.
Its a family tree of zoo-born red pandas with almost 30,000 pictures (hand-tagged and searchable) and over 1300 animals.
I'm proud of making it for many reasons, but this is the biggest one: if you pick an animal and swipe through a few dozen photos, you start seeing a little life, growing and changing, and eventually ending. It's a precious lens on the world.
Wow. I think my mind just blew a fuse. I like the concept. I like that one took the ability to detect being offline as a awy to create not only a statement, but also exemplify it.
I would have (if I would ever have had such an idea - unlikely) and added footnotes like in scientific writing instead of not linking out. But whom am I to judge.
It's a huge compilation of weird technologies and inventions. Most of them are crackpot, of course, but some of them are legit and truly fascinating. Rex Research predates the Internet, you used to have to order from little ads in the back of Popular Mechanics. Back then this was pretty much the only way you could learn about this stuff. Nowadays some of the less crackpot tech is more widely known, and some of the inventions even have their own Wikipedia pages, e.g.:
Hilsch-Ranque vortex tube "a mechanical device that separates a compressed gas into hot and cold streams. The gas emerging from the hot end can reach temperatures of 200 °C (392 °F), and the gas emerging from the cold end can reach −50 °C (−58 °F).[1] It has no moving parts."
http://www.rexresearch.com/ranque/ranque.htmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_tube
Maxwell's Demon! Although it does not violate thermodynamics.
That page was often used at Opera Software as a example and benchmark for weird and wonderful things "web designers" throw against rendering engines :D
I should update this website more often, but no one visits art websites so much these days. I think in 2010 I'd average 200 visits a day, and I think it's about 30 these days. So if you're here, thanks visiting my website.
It appeared to be some kind of augmented reality game leaving trails of (very) difficult clues to follow. The website itself used hand-written pages that appeared to have been scanned in and posted as images (some as image maps that linked to other pages depending on which hand-written words you click on).
Some of it was very funny, some of it was quite spooky, and none of it made any kind of sense to me. It was great.
"There is no terror but freedom from the illusion"
https://jrwr.io -- It's my personal website with a fun "fake" terminal with a custom command set with a set of challenges to solve to gain more access levels in the machine. Its been fun to watch the commands come in.
Web search for pages which are "simple in design. Simple HTML, non-commerical sites are preferred.
Pages should not use much scripts/css for cosmetic effect."
I think this has to do with it possibly being the most successful least technological (as in, the ratio of success to technology investment is nearly infinite) capitalist enterprise in existence.
> I didn't know you could load assets from a chain on the web
Presumably it's just using a proxy? As far as I know there's still no way to have the browser interact with the blockchain directly unless you use a non-standard extension like MetaMask.
JS can interact with an RPC endpoint directly, but the individual would have to provide one (either as you're suggesting via a proxy) or directly in code. This project is actually by a friend of mine, i should ask him...ive never bothered despite also working in the web3 space myself. All our work is done server side, so we just use our own RPC endpoints and nothing is shared with the public.
I wonder how many great websites we lost with the death of Flash.
Off the top of my head, I remember visiting the website for the movie Donnie Darko back when the film was originally released and being blown away at the strangeness and creativity of it.
This is a website I've built cataloguing high-effort and unique websites, if you don't mind the shameless self-promotion.
One of the most distinctive websites I've found on my journeys is http://www.deuceofclubs.com/ . I've visited many times and it is still impossible to categorise.
In the worst design category, it is hard to top the website from a few years ago of Yvette's bridal and tux shop, archived here [1]. Archive.org also has it [2] but the p1r8.net archive seems to be a little more accurate.
Interesting that so many of these "unique" sites are ones that are more about the unique person behind them or a vision of an older internet. One that I think is unique on it's own merits:
A little confusing, but it allows advanced searching across multiple image search sites - set your filters then it shows you all the sites you can search with those settings and deep links to the search results for each one.
I've been reading through these for years when on public transit and just this week passed the 500th SCP. It's quite difficult to tell apart different writing styles, so it really does feel like one giant database of scary objects.
Three extraordinary examples from the earlier days of the internet.
taxi1010.com. A veteran taxi driver (?) organizes his thoughts around "verbal self defense," creating a highly crosslinked database of adversarial conversational openers, and possible ways to deflect them. Reasonable starting point: http://www.taxi1010.com/stargate01.htm#sitemap
everything2.com: another free-form database mixing facts, fiction and personal notes written by an unusually literate subcommunity. Adjacent to slashdot and h2g2, even documents some early reactions to wikipedia. https://everything2.com/
My Boyfriend Came Back From The War: net artist Olia Lialina crafts a poem in the browser by exploiting properties of the medium. Remixed dozens of times by other net artists. Archived by Rhizome with a simulated slow load over Netscape. https://sites.rhizome.org/anthology/lialina.html
I'll be that guy and point out that "Unique" is interesting because it falls in the same category of words as forever, infinite, dead, and pregnant, adjectives which do not take comparative qualifiers because they describe Boolean states. You don't get to be the most pregnant or most dead person in the room, or live more forever than your friend. You can have something that is Aleph-1 rather than Aleph-nought, but you don't get to have something that is more infinite that your neighbor. In a similar vein, your thing can not be more unique than your co-worker's thing though one of you may have the more unusual thing, just as you could live longer, be more injured, have been carrying more kids in your uterus for longer, or have something that is bigger, longer, or more expansive.
However, I think I'd disagree. The reality is we all knew what OP meant because the colloquial (non-CS) definition of unique is just "very unusual". It isn't often in meatspace that humans are trying to distinguish completely physically unique items, so such a constrained definition is understandably rare in normal conversation.
> I'll be that guy and point out that "Unique" is interesting because it falls in the same category of words as forever, infinite, dead, and pregnant, adjectives which do not take comparative qualifiers because they describe Boolean states.
In common contexts "unique" just means "unusual." It's like how "theory" can just mean "hypothesis" in normal discussion, but in strictly scientific contexts it only applies to explanations that are supported by a large body of evidence. So if one is in a rare context that is sensitive to the strict boolean definition of "unique," then you are correct. All other times (i.e., most of the time) you are incorrect.
When it comes to language, the most common usage is the correct usage. This may occasionally annoy us (see: "literally", "begging the question", etc.), but the fact is that languages are fluid and evolving, and there was no moment in history when the English language was frozen and declared perfect. Language is inherently democratic, and sometimes one is outvoted.
Granted, it's fine to try to realign the language to match your preferences, but more often than not this is a fool's errand.
Met the the guy who started this (now deceased) many years ago at a concert while I was in college. He owned the company that provided the PA and lighting, and was wondering around wearing the the most ridiculous motcross boots I had ever seen, struck up a conversation and he told me about this site, and I still think about it from time to time.
Rather simple design, just a couple of images and text.
But the text is German dadaist poetry, and I'm not really sure if parts of it or the pictures aren't computer-generated, based on the sheer amount of content, supposedly created by a single person for fun.
On the other hand, the creator is kind of a genius, so maybe he really did write it all himself
It's a comical March Madness bracket tournament. The winner gets a candy bar, and everyone gets some lovely funny email updates as the month goes on. In addition to human competitors, you compete against a 1000 chimpanzee army and their own predictions. Each page on the website has a velociraptor button.
Iniital thought: "eh, might be a cool free version of Ancestry, with some huge limitations because 'free' means 'bad'".
An hour later, I became convinced it was the most interesting website I've ever seen, both in what it provides and the technology behind it. It basically gameifies building your family tree.
Plug in a name of your grandparent. The site goes: "Hey, here are three documents you might want to attach." The documents are indexed by all the information they provide: age, sex, birth location, etc. Adding one document gives the site higher confidence in finding other documents. It results in a cascading effect where the more info you add, the more family members it finds, all in real time as you continue building out the tree.
Eventually, you add an ancestor that is the common ancestor of someone else, who already build out THEIR tree, and that tree becomes instantly available to you, and suddenly you see hundreds of relatives.
"No court order has ever been served; any order served will be published here -- or elsewhere if gagged by order. Bluffs will be published if comical but otherwise ignored."
https://glassanimals.com/ - I remember the first time I came across their site I was just having a blast and wanting to explore. It looks slightly different than I remember, but love the idea.
A former version of sandberg.nl from circa 2005. It was Flash based and if I recall correctly the work of Luna Maurer, a Dutch designer. I am not sure it is safe to admit it here but I am nostalgic for the heyday of Flash.
Wow that gave me Flashbacks of both Flash websites and Metal Gear Solid. Flash was great for a time but was not the way of the future and I’m glad it died.
I wonder what Steve Jobs would think of the new Flash, super bloated JavaScript websites.
Wow that gave me Flashbacks of both Flash websites and Metal Gear Solid. Flash was great for a time but was not the way of the future and I’m glad it died.
It’s well known, but https://slatestarcodex.com/ was the best I ever found for just really interesting and thought provoking essays that changed my mind.
The website of the Nintendo founder's family office. It..is just beautifully designed, and a homage to the original game consoles and the entire art form of PC gaming when it started.
Earlier thread on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803201