Anyone wanna share interesting things?

[malymin]

I kind of miss how easy it was to see people talking about media, technology, history, etc that I'd never heard about before on Cohost... despite Cohost having some structural similarities to Tumblr, I just don't get that experience there.

I'm pretty bummed out by recent events (to put it mildly), and I imagine a lot of other people here are too. Anyone wanna share stuff that brings them joy, or at the very least positive stimulation? Books you're reading, hobbies you've gotten into, etc.

I had been reading Who Owns this Sentence by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu, which is very good, but had to take a break because it was just making me depressed thinking about how we're going to get out of the enclosure of the cultural commons on top of... everything else. I've had a bit of fun with a short free fangame RPG on Itch.io, made by a user going by Atena. And I'd like to share an old middle-school favorite website, "Dog Coat Colour Genetics" by an artist named Jess, as well as the even bigger and older "MessyBeast" website run by Sarah Hartwell, which is an especially thorough as a resource on cat color genetics, but has many other interesting alleyways to explore.

Comments

[malymin]

Clipart? Fuck yes I love clipart. Something strikes me as very distinctive about the art style of some of these, especially the animals and people... like, that they're drawn in a way that was fairly popular in commercial and pop art of the 90's, but not so much the decades before or after. Am I misremembering things, or...? Like, I'm thinking about how I saw this book at my library job and immediately pegged it as being published in the 90's from the cover art alone.

Long-time Macintosh users likely remember HyperCard, Apple's strange hypermedia system that was sorta like a cross between index cards, web pages, and 90s interactive edutainment software. HyperCard left a pretty big legacy for the Web to come, influencing everything from JavaScript to wikis to the pointing finger thing for links on pages to fuckin' Myst.

Oh I desperately want to know more about this.

[tresfoyle]

you're definitely not misremembering things; this whole aesthetic sensibility was inescapable back in the day if you lived in an environment where people were printing shit out and pinning it up for public reference, I feel like.

[malymin]

if you lived in an environment where people were printing shit out and pinning it up for public reference

That's the thing - I didn't, and yet it felt like it filtered its way into mass media (cartoons, etc) I was exposed to.