kickscondor

See the Harrison Ford vid linked at the end of the original article. Billy Dee Williams also gets inserted. There’s no doubt that this technique will defeat CGI Youngface.

This has been my experience over the past several years as well. My particular issues have been with the Canvas element and with SVG support (which is insanely buggy - even the dev tools are bugged) but there are also occasional layout issues.

I definitely feel like comparisons to IE are apt.

I don’t enjoy ActivityPub related specs - they give me SOAP vibes - and I’ve struggled with interoperability. (Tried to make my blog act kind of like a Mastodon instance and the learning curve was just way too out there. I’m happy with feeds.)

If you're interested in furthering RSS (and Atom, JSON Feed) - one way to help this along is to continue extending it to bring it modern. For instance, I've documented an extension for adding temporary 'status' to the feed - useful for pinned posts or broadcasting that a livestream is beginning.

https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/wiki/RSS-Atom-Exten...

It feels like there is still a lot of room to extend these formats - part of the advantage to them is how easily they can be extended. The media enclosure extension is the reason they've been so useful for podcast subscriptions.

You can do this! If you look at the source code for the landing page, there is a way to embed a post and specify a size for it as well.

I'm sorry. Sometimes I don't know how to relate to people who are very serious about the topic at hand. I'm sorry - you asked the question earnestly and I disappointed.

Not at all - we’re just a team of two though and have had to cut corners to get to this point.

Absolutely agree with you as well. I do think it’s “dangerous” - or perhaps it’s better to just call it a “tradeoff” - because you give people greater power over the design of the site. But obviously a tradeoff we’re all willing to make.

Wow - this is a very encouraging post. Thank you! If you happen to still be reading - what was the site builder you worked on? Have you written anywhere about your experience on that project?

Just a correction - my previous employer was Grape Nuts Marketing. They did a retrospective on me earlier this year: https://web.archive.org/web/20210201092129/https://kickscond...

I know this just makes things worse. But at least it could help be a decisive final blow to my reputation that you all are looking for?

We are six levels deep in an HN thread. It’s not looking good.

Multiverse.plus is a personal project (of glitchyowl and mine.) And I am a personal project of Facebook Labs.

Or possibly the CIA? I get email from two agents who claim to be my handlers and to "come home already". But I don't really know whose story to believe. Can't just look in the mirror to find out.

Ok wow - I am rubbing myself the right direction now!

Oh shoot - I missed this comment. There is a sign-up form on the home page: https://multiverse.plus/ Just under the image of the PC.

> Nostalgia is the antagonist of new voices, not the friend.

There are negatives to nostalgia - but this isn't necessarily one of them. I would use vaporwave as a counterpoint. (Or any resurgence of a genre.) The nostalgic element is the familiar part; the artist might then be unfamiliar. I personally discover new artists all the time in these nostalgic genres.

Not arguing against your general points about writing vs fashion. (And you make a lot of fun points!) But I don't think a rebirth of hypertext styling is dead in the water. Podcasts were originally seen as just the rebirth of AM radio. And they were - but it turned out to be time for that - and enough innovation transpired that they stuck.

Yes it's true that I was invented by Facebook and that my website was shutdown by Disney (and then the FBI - as the other commenter points out - for the Disney shutdown turned out to have been a hoax.)

This is all terrible and I hate my origin story - I agree completely. I understand if you need to bow out on this one. I rub myself the wrong way a lot of the time.

"Disaster" is also hyperbole.

Livestream if you want to peek in on Multiverse.plus or ask questions: https://www.twitch.tv/kickscondor/

Well it's dangerous to give people the tools to design themselves - it's a rare skill and very difficult to blend it all together into a cohesive community! I think many startups of the 2010s saw Myspace design as a disaster.

We're hoping that by having some default color palettes and some common patterns and fonts - as well as limits to paddings, margins and border sizes - that it helps people stay in the ballpark of what a Multiverse post looks like. (Kind of like how you can spot something made with LEGOs from a distance.)

But whatever - creating ugly things should be part of the world. Looking forward to the future of 'ugly', 'bad', 'shoddy' design on the Internet. <3

I can totally see this perspective, lokl! We are very uncertain that we're achieving our goals. I think I agree with you that Multiverse doesn't go too far off from Tumblr - and that's deliberate - we wanted to see if we could offer a stepping stone. Start at a familiar place but move in a different direction.

I'd be interested to hear more about achieving expressiveness in a "deep sense" - don't know if you mean offering more hypertext features - something more in the way of Roam or Notion. For us, aesthetics are rather deep - and offering design tools for fleshing out posts and designing frames seemed like something that had gone neglected. I think the posts that are being published so far show a lot of promise. Perhaps we can offer further stepping stones from here, to build more elaborate hypertext.

Really great question - this is exactly what we talk about between each other as well. Thank you for all of the feedback as well. Very much appreciated.

Trying signing up on the home page. If it says your email already has an account, try here: https://multiverse.plus/signin

You can also email us at hello@multiverse.plus and we'll look into it. Might be a specific browser issue.

So we are glitchyowl and kickscondor - this is a collaboration between us - an attempt to make 'blogging' more expressive and visual, possibly to break a piece off and reboot it, now that it's fallen out of fashion.

The Web seems to have converged on a color called 'gwalb' - gray with a little blue. We've gone from home pages - which users could dump endless animated gifs and marquees on to - to giving everyone a roughly 680x680 square to put a picture or some unstyled, unlinked text into. We think being on the Web can still be expressive and casual.

Multiverse is a place for creating visual essays and collages - closer to comics or slideshows than to a 'blog' on Medium or Substack or Wordpress - which are very close to essays. You can also design colorful frames for your posts, to increase the sense of identity, beyond a name and an avatar.

We're not trying to go head-to-head with social media here - just offering a new tool that breaks ranks from the other software out there. We know many of you care about the Web - it has a very fun and freewheeling side to it that we want to help foster, as well as standards like RSS and Webmentions that still make sense! And it's still a great place to meet people and make memories. We've spent the past six months on this. We will probably offer a paid plan if it becomes interesting to people. Are we on the right track here?

- glitchyowl & kicks

> They shaved Little Caesar’s chest.

Would love to see the full documentary on this one.

And very down to earth. He recently took time to track down a bug in Fraidycat:

https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues/220

> [Referring to Yahoo!] Within only a few years, this system was hopeless. The web exploded exponentially, in terms of “sites” but also it evolved ever-shifting ways of presenting and producing bits and pieces of content, such that the directory format of top-level sites was not even a great way of cataloging the world, let alone finding your way in it.

While this is true, personal directories are still tremendously useful - and could definitely threaten search again - now that search has lost its way (SEO, sponsored items, etc.)

See stuff like:

* http://marijn.uk/linkroll/

* https://goodtuff.simonpanrucker.com/

* https://gossipsweb.net/

* ... any “awesome” list for a language/topic

Curated personal directories can be really powerful in most niches. Many subreddits have these as well. It’s just the monolithic ones that have lost steam.

Amazing! I loved seeing the binary dump slides of the executable headers and ZIP portions narrated. This is the true hacker spirit incarnate.

A fantastic essay by Eugene Wei on how TikTok’s tool set makes this possible: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2021/2/15/american-idle

Yay! (≧◡≦) Let's see how long this lasts.

e.gg never actually launched, right? And the others just don't have the same flare at all...

Not the creator, but looking at the source - everything is sized using 'rem' units. (Height, width, positioning of all the elements.) Kind of like using a percentage.

    style="height: 0.160992rem; width: 1.00383rem; left: 0.5rem; top: 0.273827rem; ..."

This can be used because `font-size` on the root html tag is set to the width in pixels of the screen - or 600px maximum.

And then font sizes for all the elements are specified individually.