Finding out that this is over 10 years old has made me profoundly sad. Despite the age of LLMs arguably unlocking massive amounts of productivity and agency for developers and non-developers alike, it feels as though we are living in a dark age of creativity on the web, maybe even a dark age for computer culture in general.
I'm keenly aware, I have a pretty extensive collection of Hacker News bookmarks. It's hard to articulate why I think these are different, but I think the best way to put it is that cachemonet feels a lot more avant garde, and perhaps also a reflection of a very particular form of "web culture" that has no clear successors.
People are experimenting with what you can do on the web, but the experiments aren't very "aesthetically inspiring". For that reason I'm kind of lukewarm on neal.fun.
EDIT: so I think a better way to describe it is that when artists experiment with technology, you get something like cachemonet. When developers experiment with technology, you get a web experiment that challenges conventional notions of what you can do with the web, but with varying degrees of creativity. I think terra.layoutit.com is best appreciated by other web devs who can appreciate the sheer amount of work required to figure out how to render a terrain map in CSS, but otherwise it's basically just a tool to generate terrain height maps, and not a particularly good one. Generating terrain maps in CSS is not a feature, but a handicap.
There's a (not so visible) info button top right. It says:
cachemonet is an exploration into the serendipitous collisions that
occur between two randomly generated arrays. the arrays contain a mix
of custom and found .gifs sourced from tumblr and are set to
music. the output is autonomous, generative, art made possible through
curation & code.
Song name is: Windowdipper from ꪖꪶꪶ ꪮꪀ ꪗꪖꪶꪶ by Jib Kidder
https://jibkidder.bandcamp.com/track/windowdipper
Somehow reminded me about the biobak website from 2010s, unfortunately only available in the archive now, but still functional.
https://ambient.garden/
https://cannoneyed.com/isometric-nyc/
https://terra.layoutit.com/
https://ambigr.am/hall-of-fame
https://autism-simulator.vercel.app/
People are experimenting with what you can do on the web, but the experiments aren't very "aesthetically inspiring". For that reason I'm kind of lukewarm on neal.fun.
EDIT: so I think a better way to describe it is that when artists experiment with technology, you get something like cachemonet. When developers experiment with technology, you get a web experiment that challenges conventional notions of what you can do with the web, but with varying degrees of creativity. I think terra.layoutit.com is best appreciated by other web devs who can appreciate the sheer amount of work required to figure out how to render a terrain map in CSS, but otherwise it's basically just a tool to generate terrain height maps, and not a particularly good one. Generating terrain maps in CSS is not a feature, but a handicap.
Made me lose interest in browsing real quick
And you dip dip, dip...
good times
There's an actress called Cashae Monya
https://m.imdb.com/name/nm13392714/