Selected group websurfing blogs:

Double Happiness

Supercentral

Nasty Nets (disclosure: I'm in this)

The heirs to SCREENFULL and 544x378(WebTV)? The latter were daily blogs with original audio and visual work, now sadly archived, that were heavy on recycled/mashed Internet/pop culture content. I suspect it was hard for two people (jimpunk and Abe Linkoln) to sustain that creative pitch, but with a group blog the work is distributed more evenly. Whether they'll last any longer is another question. All have a certain ad hoc quality that keeps them unpredictable but Internet creative chemistry is so flighty. On the other hand, what happens with real-world co-ops is that one or two people end up doing all the work (and therefore laying down rules for the others) but low overhead and a low bar to participation makes the Internet model potentially different. Still, someone has to deal with the nightmare of comment spam and other realities of the internet, even if all costs are shared equally.

Update: There is something on the Nasty Nets front page that is either crashing my browser or prompting me to install non-existent Quicktime add-ons. I think it is the embedded "Mr Wizard" file. (I have Firefox on a PC.) It will soon be gone from the front page after a couple more posts. It would be good if this could be fixed because I have a commenter blaming an excess of animated GIFs for "harming" his computer--this completely killed any discussion of the content of the page.

- tom moody 6-22-2007 1:23 am

Love these sites, but when will these types of places come up with a design that doesn't involve the default loading of hundreds of flash and gif animation objects at once right on the home page? They always make my browser freeze, can barely scroll, then a crash even, regardless of computer or browser. The fun is over before it starts. Negative Happiness. Or is an ass-sucking web design all part of some punk rock lowfi attitude?
- ssr (guest) 6-22-2007 7:52 pm


They all loaded fast on my system.
- L.M. 6-22-2007 7:59 pm


Tend to have lots of tabbed pages loaded on my browser, maybe that's why? Ironic that all it takes is a collection of 100K puppy dog and michael jackson gifs to crash my shit...
- ssr (guest) 6-22-2007 8:10 pm


SCREENFULL was all about crashing your browser but the three I linked to in this post are more surfing friendly. Broadband may be a necessity, however (depending on what's up on a given day).
- tom moody 6-22-2007 8:11 pm


Well, browser performance issues with animations (gifs, flash) has little to do with bandwidth nor connectivity. Its browser ram required to animate them. You can have the same 100K object in a page 1,000 times, the gif itself is loaded from server just once and then is both ram and disk cached. Easy enough. But to animate/play them locally is what takes the cake.
- ssr (guest) 6-22-2007 8:47 pm


Saying "love this ____" and then crapping all over it is really annoying.
We don't care about your browser!
"100K puppy dog and michael jackson gifs"--such commentary is not welcome here.*

asterisk added 7/5/07--see below for footnote
- tom moody 6-22-2007 9:42 pm


I have no problem with surfing, consuming, harvesting AS art. Have no problem with gifs either, be they puppies or whatever. And I do love these sites and this type of art in general. Just seems that if people are going to consume internet content as an art form, an understanding of browsers, memory, loading, navigation etc would at least be something worth considering or discussing. But then again maybe not, I don't know. Guess I'm not allowed to critique certain things here.


- ssr (guest) 6-22-2007 10:21 pm


>>"Just seems that if people are going to consume internet content as an art form, an understanding of browsers, memory, loading, navigation etc would at least be something worth considering or discussing."

That is way condescending. Just because your browser can't handle the page you assume the artists are ignorant of these basic issues.

>>"Well, browser performance issues with animations (gifs, flash) has little to do with bandwidth nor connectivity. Its browser ram required to animate them. You can have the same 100K object in a page 1,000 times, the gif itself is loaded from server just once and then is both ram and disk cached. Easy enough. But to animate/play them locally is what takes the cake."

Almost everyone reading this page knows this. My comment about broadband went to the speed of loading things like embedded video files, not their playback.

>>"Or is an ass-sucking web design all part of some punk rock lowfi attitude?"

Isn't critique, it's abuse, and also condescending.


- tom moody 6-22-2007 10:50 pm


You are right, on all points.
Bitch slap deservedly taken.
Emotional critiques unsuccessful.
Browser crash moodiness complete.

- ssr (guest) 6-22-2007 11:21 pm


Also I'd say condescending is a bit strong of a word, as I don't have much knowledge of these artists nor your readers. I have no assumptions here. And I think artists that make work which knowingly could cause harm to the viewer, shouldn't be too surprised when a victim critiques that, emotionally or otherwise. ('harm' and 'victim' are rather extreme word choices in this case, sorry) Not that anyone reading here gives a shit for my thoughts at this point...
- ssr (guest) 6-23-2007 2:18 am


yo Tom, very insightful! I think part of me wanting to do this 'net sleepover so bad is to get a sprinkling of the benefits of real-world co-ops that were unmentioned above (i.e. talking is a very fast way to transmit ideas, the occasional physical object can get constructed, etc.) if only for a few hours.

ssr- yo sorry about your browser dog! man I post stuff all the time and I crash my own browser doing it. For me the crashing, dirt-style design I find reflects the medium well, like yeah it is a part of the whole experience, cause we're collecting and presenting this content and at the same time interfacing with servers, software, hardware, etc. And also for me there is definitely "ass-sucking"/not giving a fuck kind of lofi aesthetic, an outlet for my anti-web2.0 slickness that is all over these nets.
- bennett (guest) 6-25-2007 8:30 am


Hi, Bennett,
Generally none of these sites crash my browser. I have no problem with dirt style--I think VVork is pretty dirt style--it's just loading an off-the-shelf template up with what it can handle, I wouldn't say overloaded (SCREENFULL was another story--it was extreme.)
My tantrum was because I'd rather talk about the art on these pages than browser performance issues--like borna's vertical strips of weird alien masks getting progressively smaller as they move to the right. That seems really original to me.
- tom moody 6-25-2007 9:28 am


>>Or is an ass-sucking web design all part of some punk rock lowfi attitude?

seems like this has been covered already, but i will unabashedly say yes, it is.



hey tom - cool website.
- borna (guest) 6-29-2007 11:24 pm


Thanks, borna,
Nice work on your site!
- tom moody 6-30-2007 12:00 am


I seem to remember one week where Nasty Nets had that Werewolf autoplay youtube, among other things, which prompted a silver surfer "bump" post, which itself prompted someone else to threaten to post even more autoplays. at one point I posted some loud flash stuff on double happiness, to similar effect.
I think it is a mistake to think of these overloads as necessarily framed within some sort of structural, "know what you are loading on the browser" context, especially in a group blog setting. the resulting effect just sort of emerges. and I think its rad
- Jeff S (guest) 6-30-2007 1:02 am


Ah, yes, the good times. It was two autoplaying Manimals plus four autoplaying Moonwalkers that prompted the post of the Surfer to push them off the page.
- tom moody 6-30-2007 3:16 am


*Just by way of explanation since several people thought it was uncharacteristic for me to "bust" ssr's "chops" the way I did.
We have a history. He had posted several times before under another name. I had told him after he made a rather lengthy comment explaining some computer basics that I thought readers of this blog were familiar with those issues. He has a way of burying a dig in a stream of apparent praise and after about the third time he did it I started getting annoyed. I did not just suddenly "go off" on a first time commenter, as some assumed. I should have made it clearer sooner.
- tom moody 7-06-2007 1:57 am


Given:
blog, comment form

Allowed:
any username, any comments

Shown:
usernames, comments

- anonymous (guest) 7-06-2007 9:50 am


Or:
cranky blogger, no comments
- tom moody 7-06-2007 12:19 pm


yo Tom Moody-

in the depths of the comments of this now-dated post, I wanted to let you know that I have created a blog for the Great Internet sleepover so that soon we can begin planning what we want to do there.

just thought I'd let you know cause I'll know you'll read this.

I'm not even done making it/haven't invited anyone yet but nonetheless

I'll prob export it to my site pretty soon.
b
- Bennett (guest) 7-07-2007 12:56 am


Thanks, Bennett,
I link-ified your URL and will keep an eye on the blog.

- tom moody 7-07-2007 1:25 am


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- Hanna Witzel (guest) 12-19-2022 2:34 pm





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