Interesting Links – and an interactive family tree of extremely wrong elephants
The first year I was using Cohost, the stats-free social media site where I spent much of my online time over the last two years, I was trying to change my relationship to the internet. I deliberately spent a lot of time using "alt" search networks and trying to find interesting, small websites about strange and unique topics. I wanted to try and rediscover that attitude I used to have toward the internet, back when it was more common for users to own their own domains and create their own strange celebrations of niche topics, outside the format of "a post."
I ended up recording some of these finds on Cohost under the tag "interesting link"--sometimes with a lot of commentary, sometimes with very little. I figured I would move some of those posts over here to this blog.
It's rather in vogue now to find "the old web" valuable or interesting--many millennials I know from online spaces are creeping into a mid-life-crisis which involves re-appreciating that kind of creativity. I've even seen a lot of extremely online younger folks deliberately emulating the Geocities aesthetic in their creativity online, making small sites on services like Neocities. Some of the small sites and videos I posted as "interesting links" were from this "old web," but a surprising amount were current. I think that there are fewer people doing this kind of unusual personal work outside of social media platforms these days, but people ARE still doing it, and there are so many more humans using the internet today than in the mid-2000s that there are still quite a lot of interesting and strange contemporary things to find on the internet. I'd love to keep posting some of them here if I stumble across them... but I won't make any promises, haha.
Here's one of the first "interesting links" I posted to Cohost, over a year ago:
Interactive family tree of extremely wrong elephant illustrations
This interactive family tree shows how each badly drawn medieval or early modern elephant influenced each other badly drawn elephant. This was created by artist Uli Westphal as part of a masters' thesis; each elephant links out to the original source (though many of the links are now broken).
Props to my friend at work for finding this over here and sending it to me!