Doors I touched today (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Doors I touched today (1999)

fluxus.org

326 pointsohaikbai99 comments

It's sites like these that make me dearly miss the old internet.

Then I remember that the old internet is mostly still there, just buried under the ad-riddled mass-produced garbage pile of the current internet, and there are ways to dig through to it, but I never do.

Exactly my sentiment.

I’d like to add that I’m grieving the discoverability of all these ingenious self made often a bit unpolished experiences.

Platforms come to provide a shiny space for the makers and then slowly enshittify everything snuffing out the life out of the originals. Just like Disney ;)

There's a search engine for it.

https://wiby.me/

Thanks for reminding me!

Also, for those who already had wiby on top of their minds, https://search.marginalia.nu can be used to look for old or old-style websites.

"enshittify" for the win

Look up Corey Doctorows post that coined it. It is beyond brilliant.

Enshittifying is deeply encoded in the mechanisms of VC money and unlimited growth.

It's so much harder to find the good parts of the web like this than it used to be that it drains a lot of the fun out of it.

Is there any particular technique anyone uses to find sites like this? About the only way I know of is to happen across a link to them on some forum, like this instance.

There's this search engine which seems to show some cool older-style websites:

https://wiby.me/

> In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.

The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as pages indexed are more suitable for their performance.

EDIT: I found it via this HN thread that you might find interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31999259

I made a server that redirects you to a random site from a selection of are.na channels, where users actively add interesting sites. There’s a bit more to it than that - you can read about it on the homepage: https://moonjump.app

Add https://moonjump.app/jump to your bookmarks if you want a shortcut to jump to a random site.

Not the World Wide Web, but Gemini and Gopher has this feel. There are multiple aggregators [1][2] that bubble up new and interesting content from individuals.

1. https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/capco...

2. https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/rawtext.club/~sloum/spacewalk....

I clicked around to an old Fluxus Blogger site and I saw a bunch of comments from about 2018 and I thought, "Yay! People are still into Fluxus!" but then I read the comments and realized they were all spam.

I miss the old internet too. It's bigger than ever now, but most of it is garbage.

you dug through today, barbs

I would say the old internet is everything before about 2000 or so. It was getting pretty commercialized around that time already.

A good rule of thumb is hand coded content > content managed by a CMS.

Kinda makes me sad that I read this, saw the date and then thought "I hope this person is still alive". 24 years is a long time. I quite enjoy content like this, especially the tagline (maybe a definition of a word that I don't know?): Fluxus: "Unfettered play in search of uncharted insights."

The author does seem to be alive and well today, has a load of various websites and projects. Also on instagram https://www.instagram.com/allenbukoff/

Anybody know how to get reliable hosting after your inevitable death?

The main reason I'm looking forward to being dead is that I will no longer have to worry about whether some website is working or not.

I like your take on that but I have automated my house, self-host and have a family. To whom I enforced 2Fa for key applications.

It means that if I died they will be in an ocean of trouble if I did not take steps to facilitate the transition.

The first part is to have a paper backup of everything important, and keep it up to date.

The second, requested by my wife, is a tutorial on how to de-automate the house and what things they should worry most about (moving the self-hosted Bitwarden and making sure domains and email are paid for).

This preparation doe not bother me at all on the emotional level but rather on the documentation one...

Tech should make lives easier, not harder

If you have spent at least ten minutes around post-Y2K computing, you know this is not the case.

To end users - sure. To developers and geeks, certainly not. Where would be the fun otherwise.

Well it sounds like, if you haven't, you should start documenting the important things immediately.

It's in place for years already :)

archive.org

One reliable way to carry on a paid service after your own death is setting up an estate or trust which pays living people to ensure everything stays online.

Really? What happens when the website host crashes and burns? You know, some companies are outlived by humans.. Many.

As long as your trust set-up is sufficiently well-funded and well structured the trust could in principle live on for generations. Obviously, the success of the venture depends on, well, trust.

The trust structure would have the obligation to maintain the website. Provided they make backups, which is totally a thing you could write into the contract (every five years a lawyer copies the site onto whatever document storage system they're using at the time, or puts a new tape in a safe), that would outlive any individual company.

There are however legal rules against trusts in many jurisdictions: https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/100782/1/Article%20-%20The%20r...

So your best bet is to establish a community of people interested in preserving your website, or websites in general, and have them run a long term nonprofit for that purpose.

Depends on how much you have to spend. A trust and lawyers and stuff could work well.

GitHub or something as a poor mans might work for some time.

Archive sites could be around.

Or start a religion.

Slow-clock processing on Voyager 3, heading for the stars, who wants to invest?

Posthaven does something like that but only for blogs

Why? You want to host a blog in the afterlife? All kidding aside, why not just hand over your internet assets to a trusted family member who will handle everything when you are gone?

If you are just hosting text popular blockchains might be viable.

If you like seeing these doors, check out doors _in Antartica_: https://brr.fyi/posts/doors-of-mcmurdo

Nice! Reminds me of The Door Problem: https://lizengland.com/blog/2014/04/the-door-problem/

Hilarious.

I note it applies to just everything, as long as you have these number of different roles in the added value chain.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1741/

I really wish more people did Fluxus [1] - related art activities in the time of cheap digital media. Its so cheap to document and describe, while still retaining intentionality.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxus

Tangentially, just yesterday I traveled with an old train from Oslo and one thing that I notice again and again there is the sliding glass doors between the train cars have a "button" on them that does nothing except when you reach out to touch it you trigger a photosensor.

So it feels like the door anticipates you.

I remember those. It was quite disconcerting the first time. But when I thought about the engineering involved I was really impressed by the solution.

Have those on trains in Sweden too. All the veteran commuters just wave their hands in front of the sensor instead of trying to push the "button".

If you like this, you will love the book The Design of Everyday Things. You will never look at a door the same way again. https://a.co/d/65WzcpJ

Instead, you'll learn to get mildly angry every time you come across doors so poorly designed it _must_ be on purpose.

It's amazing that pathogens capable of living on surfaces haven't wiped us out already. Thanks immune system.

Amazingly brass has antimicrobial properties.

And the only brass knobs he used were in his own home!

And lead, so it's a bit macrobial too :D

So does silver, to the point it’s used in advanced wound dressing. They aren’t cheap though - ask my insurance company! There isn’t that much silver in them, but a 2x2” square is about $4 or so, compared to a few cents for a plain gauze pad.

These properties also cause some people to attempt injecting or swallowing colloidal silver as a purported panacea, sometimes with unintended results:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argyria

Silver is 0.72 USD/g at the moment so the price of silver alone does not account for the difference in price. A two inch square piece of silver weighing a gram would be more than a tenth of a millimetre thick.

Brass does, but the oxide layer that forms quickly does not.

For public doors I use every part of the body except my hands to open and close them.

Not a comment to you, personally, but I saw someone the other day struggling to follow this philosophy. She struggled to open the door to a cafe for what felt like a whole minute because she refused to touch the handle with her hands.

All I could think was "if only there was some sort of technology that would leverage our biology to make opening doors easy."

(For the record, I was not close enough nor in a position to help out. I'm not that cruel. But I also feel no guilt for laughing inside - it was a spectacle.)

Some bathrooms have a toekick thing you can use to push the door open, and it extends so you can pull it open with your feet.

But as more and more places install the handicap door openers, the more you can open the door just by bouncing off the very large button.

Lately I’ve seen motion sensors instead of large buttons for the handicap openers. Unfortunately they seem less reliable.

Gross, I can't believe you open doors with your mouth.

You don't want to see how he closes them.

I firmly believe the number of upper respiratory infections I have each year is directly proportional to the number of doors I have to touch throughout the day. Once worked for a well-known fruit company with a reputation for paranoia and secrecy, and because of that secrecy, everything was behind locked doors. Therefore, I constantly had to handle doors throughout the day to do anything at work. I'm pretty sure during those years I was on average sicker than ever.

Or maybe that office had drier air?

Dry air isn't an infectious entity

Dry air is hard on the lungs and makes infection more likely.

Upper respiratory infections don't seem to transmit by contact that much. They do, but not as much as through the air. Stomach diseases are more likely to be transmitted this way.

But there may be some correlation. Closed doors possibly means poor ventilation. Also, more doors to touch can mean being more active and in contact with more people.

Washing your hands regularly really helps

Also, your skin already has a ton of pathogens.

Doorknobs and handrails in public buildings transitioned from wood and stone, to polished metal during/after the 1918 pandemic. Turns out wood is a fantastic, warm material to make doorknobs and handrails from, but it's almost impossible to clean and sanitize in a functional fashion.

> it's almost impossible to clean and sanitize in a functional fashion.

Metals are not all equal in that either. Stainless steel is markedly worse than brass for door handles. Clean brass is antimicrobial and also kills influenza and other viruses.

Never mind surfaces, which are probably cleaner in the 20th century than at any time previously, it's the airborne ones people seem to have forgotten about.

The artist sure loves him some diet coke

Some people are literally addicted to the stuff https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/feb/02/the-real-thing-...

That's totally frightening... makes me feel better about the trouble I had reducing my coffee intake. Caffeine can be pretty rough, addiction-wise.

My experience with caffeine withdrawal is horrible each time it's happened (and I didn't take great care to taper slowly). This is one of my favorite articles about it "Worse Than The Flu": https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2007/04/worse_than_the_flu.h...

Fluxus is great. Visit their French museum someday: https://en.fondationdudoute.fr/

So few. Im at work right now and I think i've opened at least 15 doors just between my bed and my desk. It was five doors just between my bedroom and my car. (bedroom door, out apartment, into stairwell, out of stairwell, out of building). Then car doors, security gates, building external, internal hallways, into my department, into my section, into my office ... I guess I live in a door-heavy environment.

I loved the list of observations at the bottom.

eg > I got the idea for this research project upon awakening on June 3rd, 1999. I immediately decided to do it that day

By one of those weird coincidences, I found this on HN just after shopping for cabinet pulls on Amazon.

It also made me think of a hotel stay the night before a marathon run. I went to close the window blind and scooting between the chair and the desk my bare thigh came in contact with the drawer pull of the desk which was nearly as sharp as a razor and gave me a deep cut.

What really shocks me is how he goes to the office at 2pm and leaves at 8pm.

It's unusual, but shocking?

This is so weird but cool

Is there a genre of art like this?

That focuses on seemingly mundane stuff?

Not quite so mundane I suppose, but the meticulousness reminds me of Dan Graham's Homes For America: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/105513 It's a detailed description of the pseudo-choice offered to buyers of tract houses in the 1960s.

Edit: And Hans Haacke's America Is Hard To See: https://archive.curbed.com/2015/9/2/9924926/hans-haacke-phot...

There's a show I like called How To with John Wilson. It's hard to explain, but it's kind of just a guy digging into a topic each episode, going down rabbit holes of various subcultures and industries, winding up meeting strange people in strange places, and filling a lot in with mundane footage captured in his day-to-day life in New York.

I have trouble giving an elevator pitch for the show, it's better watched than described. But I think "finding the interesting in the mundane" is what makes me enjoy the show so much.

This really reminded me of life before I went remote.

Makes me grateful for my hands and motor skills. That's 83 challenging moments for someone out there...

Nicholson baker would love this

For 1999, these are remarkably clear and high definition photos. This person must have had one of those big digital cameras with a floppy disc in the side - or similar - which wouldn't have been all that convenient. Interesting that they were motivated enough to do this.

Probably compact flash. All the cool cameras used it back then iirc.

Fair enough. In the late 90's we had one of the Sony Mavicas, and at the time I wasn't involved enough in photography to really know of much else on the market. Thinking about it now though, Compact Flash had been around since the early 90's right?

Around 94 according to Wikipedia.

The floppy camera was cute because floppies were cheap and available; compact flash was really expensive for quite awhile.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/photography/features/a-... - some of them were using full-size PCMCIA!

Oh wow, some real blasts from the past in that article!

I love how it ends with him having a midnight snack.

If this was me there would be about 50 entries of me opening the fridge door, staring for a minute and then closing it without taking anything out (also a fair amount of walking into rooms and forgetting why I was there).

Does the photographer not flush?!

It's doors, not handles!

...and I thought I was the only one photographing apparently pointless stuff.

I like this.

Context? What "pointless stuff" do you photograph?

I'm partial to taking pictures of graffiti, especially on trains. It's like a mobile art gallery with the occasional unskilled swear word thrown in.

No OP, but I take photographs of infrastructure stuff, especially if I think I might later want to investigate what the deal is. So e.g. I don't have a photograph of the view from the tourist elevator which comes out of a fake chimney on what was Battersea Power Station in Central London (London's electricity was once supplied by huge coal power stations right in the city, today Bankside is a world famous modern art gallery "Tate Modern", while Battersea is basically a mall plus apartments), because you can presumably buy that on a postcard, but I do have a photograph of the interior of a service elevator which accesses that area because I was interested in how it behaved when the idiots running the attraction overloaded that elevator.

Or as many people know it… that thing from the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals.

When I'm doing home repair and my endoscope isn't handy I use my phone as a periscope.

Because of this it is full of "pointless" photos e.g. dozens of out-of-focus shots behind my AV receiver in my stereo cabinet to make sure I didn't over-strain a cable while pushing it back.

Does this count as pointless stuff?

It could! The art is in the curation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com