Erstellt am: 5. 9. 2016 - 13:40 Uhr
Today's Webtip: Time Cube
This summer, well, last month, the internet sort of exploded with html nostalgia. The reason was the 25th anniversary of the first webpage being made available to the general public.
It was all a bit confusing since the web was actually first proposed in 1989, the first page made available to CERN at the end of 1990, and didn't actually go completely public until August 22nd, 1991. To make things even more confusing, the official day of celebration was declared as August 23rd.
Anyway, the whole thing had me looking back at my own history with the world wide weird, fondly remembering some of the more mind-blowing things I ran across, not pining over the loss of the blink tag, and for some unexplainable reason, suddenly getting rickrolled again.
And yesterday I ran across someone who brought up one of the most curious sites I ever recall running across.
Gene Ray
As someone who spent a bit too much time as a teenager crawling questionable bookstores and befriending people with some very complicated realities, it was one of those things that felt uncomfortably familiar. It was also confusing, entertaining, frightening, and just generally full of what-the-fuckery.
Needless to say, it enjoyed a certain degree of infamy back in the day. It actually went offline on August 24th 2015, appeared to come back for a short period of time, and the final snapshot available at the Internet Archive is from January 12th, 2016. But it still gets discussed, and there is a surprising variety of approaches people have taken to trying to deal with the content. Dr. Gene Ray even had multiple opportunities to present his ideas in an academic context, giving presentations at places like MIT, and Georgia Tech.
Yes, it seems to be a massive collection of crackpottery, delusions, racism, and all sorts of other fun things, but it is also a good example of what some of the less-known corners of the web looked like back in 1997. It might also feel sort of familiar to anyone who has been reading The Donald.
For those who would like to spare their eyes and braincells, a simple read of rationalwiki.org will give you some background about the site, as well as one of the best descriptions of it I have ever read:
No one really understands it, especially since the website looks as though Dr. Bronner loaded up on LSD, composed a few thousand soap bottles, and had them translated from English to Xhosa to Chinese and back to English by someone who speaks only Basque.