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Comment by Hnaomyiph | Hacker News Reader

This was one of the most surreal and irritating posts I’ve ever come across on hacker news.

Landing on a page that just says “ This site is formatted for viewing in 1024 x 768 or higher resolution.”

Followed by “ I am sickened by the recent acts of terrorism inflicted upon thousands of innocent people. You may scare us, but you WILL NOT terrorize us.”

Then trying to Google DaVinci Ice, only for google to interpret my in-quotation search, as me looking for photoshop tutorials on how to make an ice effect. So thanks google…

Had I just read the broken html archive site further I would have seen I could enter the gallery without being on desktop. Through two redirects and an alert, mind you. Only to find that any of the tutorial links don’t load images, or require you to download an .exe

I’m not sure where this comment is going. This whole experience was weird and makes me long for days that I wasn’t even a part of. Thank you?

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DaVinci's website is 25+ years old now. In some way the art is from the beginning of the earliest more creative websites.

1024x760, for some, is a statement that demands a decent computer. A lot of people had 800x600 resolution. And DaVinci Ice made it clear that his art required more.

I hate to say, but by internet standards the website is an archaeological artifact.

The web.archive.org link shows the last time the site was up. It is gone now. Goggle returns nothing. The subdomain return DNS errors.

As to the UX. Back then we used to put up these dumb a$$ door pages, before you entered a website. It is like a splash screen, in many ways.

And this was right after 9/11 so DaVinci Ice passionately, and angerly, put up the banner.

This is the world of the old Hacker Manifesto, my friend. Which is extremely valid today due to the nuclear threat just made on the free world.

I am sorry, but the past must not be forgotten. Even if it does not work well on modern gadgets.

Here is another piece of history, from that era, The Hacker manifesto in text, not crazy HTML goofyness.

http://www.phrack.org/archives/issues/7/3.txt

And here is Loyd Blankenship himself, with annoying microphone noise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tEnnvZbYek

I never knew who DaVinci Ice was, I just came across his work on the internet, and loved the colors and art so much, that I remembered to look him up 20+ years after that.

I also posted a link to Fravia, https://fravia.net/ which may even be more confusing.

It breaks my heart to know he passed away in 2009: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia

(Ps, to me the modern web is broken, my general purpose computer can't handle javascript, I love my PI Zero and this other cheap $35 thing that can't render big images without crashing. I can't view many sites, most. And I only know instagram as a website with thots that was bough by facebook. I never got it to render on my screen and I don't care enough to pull it up on my desktop.)

I am sorry, I wish the website worked for you the way it used to in 2000. That art was amazing, still is.

I appreciate the further context you provided! Sincerely. I replied to your comment because I didn’t want my random thoughts outshining the post’s/your’s!

I didn’t mean my initial comment to be overly negative, though, reading back through it I can see how it can be. I was born in 1995. I wasn’t aware of the internet until much beyond that time, so I greatly appreciate posts like this, despite being held back by modern standards and modern search engines.

I’m a designer at heart. I absolutely adore old internatage, the weirdness and frustration upon finding this post were within context. This all is so old to modern-day life that having to work through examining and processing it is a task within itself, and an enjoyable at that. Especially if anyone else is like me and only uses their phone during the weekends to read hackernews!

I got a lot of enjoyment going through the archive webpage links as they are on a phone, but come Monday, it’ll definitely be the first thing I peruse :)

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