semolino

Great doc. Also recommend the classic Encounters: Twitchers (1996) as a spiritual precursor.

The PS2 save file models also had state animations. For example, if you hovered over "delete", a character would get on their knees and beg to be spared…!

Are those tubal ligation scars on the mascot?

Ah yes, the button that summons the "cannot edit avatar while driving" toast upon accidental press.

Trailers are there to give you time to complain to the projectionist about chromatic aberration and have them fix it before the feature.

Lots to dig in to here — thanks for posting. Internet Archive says the site has been around since ~2010, which is a likely indicator that its current iteration is handmade :)

Most webpages that function as simple documents can be built without JS. If you build webpages, you probably have an intuition for what kind of functionality necessitates JS. When a webpage requires that users enable JS, then, when it doesn't seem like it should need it, that's a signal of either developer laziness or nefarious behind-the-scenes activity (tracking, etc.).

Upon inspecting with developer tools, I was pleased to find that <marquee> supports GPU acceleration. I vaguely recall reading lore of someone refactoring it up to modern standards in chromium a few years back.

I didn't intend to sound so sure :)

Yes, perception of entities during psychedelic experience is unhinged paredolia: psychedelic substances obliterate the squelch for our pattern recognition systems, of which paredolia is one. Deepdream slugdogs are sort of a synthetic analogue to this.

The page would benefit from

  image-rendering: pixelated;

in the CSS which would probably(?) prevent the headache-inducing effect, which I'm guessing comes from the hard edges of the background image tiling contrasted with the bilinear upscale blur.

The site looks like it was abandoned in 2023, however.

You can style a link however you want, and nest a <span> inside it if necessary.

EDIT: CSS also has appearance: button;

Awesome. Such clean abstractions are inspiring and make me wanna do something with canvas. I also like that the homepage animations are done with CSS.

Here for additional modern demoscene-style websites if anyone knows of any.