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Strange.Website

Strange.Website

Well now, seems you've found a strange and perhaps surprising website, indeed. As with all things, take and enjoy your time — after all, no one may but you.

@strange.website0readers37posts3d ago

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a website with a brass-inlaid tile mosaic floor at the entryway, and dark timber joists & girts overhead. a fireplace squats somewhere inside, grumpy but contented, announcing its presence by the smell of woodsmoke and the snickering of knotted pine. cheery folksong can be heard emanating from everywhere, as though drifting through a wall, and the heavy-shouldered warmth of the website seems to come not from the fireplace, but from the air itself. the lambent gossip of the candle flame and hearth leans back and forth in the website, casting shadows in the shapes of men who are not here.

humans sealed our fate when we started working with computers to design languages more and more like our own. the computers learned our grammar, our vocabulary, yes. but they learned our rhetoric, the malleability of meaning. we gave the machines our words, and they used them to lie.

lately the website has changed. it twists facts to fiction, reality to rubbish, gold into dirt. it is increasingly, oppressively, claustrophobically present, narrowing your field of vision to a mere pinprick, demanding you meet its gaze in the plazas and side roads of the internet. it demands your attention, your worship; it demands the rot of your focus, your curious nature. why, it seems the website has its sights set on becoming god.

when the world moved online, the trickster fae never went away, not really. in fact they followed close, learned to cast their magick in new ways: through websites, through the new arts of Dark UX. remember this well: next time a form promises untold riches from FREE sales funnel PDF whitepapers in exchange for your email and full name...consider first the true cost.

there was a darker fate lurking in our little online worlds, in the infinite scrolls of our websites, which was this: it was all real. deepfakes. shrimp christ. chatgpt therapists, all of it. the experiment failed, broke containment. we created a staggering new Hell...the hallucinations were ours.

a website that seems to beckon you to explore it. the journey will be treacherous, you cannot hope to know what terrors await you. you do your best to prepare, inventorying your code editor, terminal emulator, various CLIs, in-browser debugger, in-browser developer tools, API testing program, unit testing framework, E2E testing framework, integration testing framework, (additional testing frameworks), performance insights dashboard, load balancer, accessibility testing toolset, security scanner, error tracking tool, version control system, git repository host, code reviewer, issue tracking system, documentation generator, package manager, task runner, module bundler, transpiler, linters, code formatters, CI/CD tool, deployment automation pipeline, cloud hosting service, serverless computing platform, static site generator, content delivery network (CDN), containerization tool, orchestration tool, database management system (DBMS), API gateway, authentication service, caching system, server monitoring tool, UI component library, state management tool, responsive design best practices, PWA framework, wireframing tool, prototyping tool, UI/UX design app, color palette generator, headless CMS, traditional CMS (just in case), SEO dashboard, image optimization pipeline

a website with raw hems, with patched seams, with gentle scars. a website that bares its history and tarnish with kind, crinkle-eyed wisdom — the sort of site that’s done time on jack stands in DIY garages, or beneath the needle of a tabletop sewing machine, or in the steady hands of a patient kintsugi craftsman. a website whose face shows its past.

a website in which you have been falling. you scold yourself now, tumbling endlessly down this trap-doored hole. you curse your foolishness for seeking the footer on a modern website, when you're certainly old enough (or perhaps young enough) to have learned that websites no longer care to provide organized and useful information to their users, nor do they care for their users at all. there has been a steady darkening at the heart of every site for nigh decades now — once-useful features twisting and contorting to better plane off attention, layer by skin-thin layer, until users find themselves raw and exhausted and sleep-deprived. everyone knows that the picturesque and pastoral Internet, where users and websites shared and built and learned and discovered, that classic kinship of the web is a dead dream, echoing in distant dial-up handshakes. so why is it, then, that you have stumbled into yet another of the veritable minefield of traps laid for you in the dark forest of the 'Net? some lingering hope for the ghost of Going Online? you scold yourself once more at your childishness, and pray to break yourself free from this infinite scroll.

a website that promises delights untold — merely upload your visage, it says, and it will show you how you might look when you grow old, or how you might’ve looked with blue eyes or brown, or with a different gender. “think of it”, whispers the website. “think of how much fun you’ll have with your friends, in fact they’ve already joined us here:” the website streams audio, gleeful cries of countless voices, some you even recognize as people close to you. you jump at the chance to taste such joy, and before you know it, you’re uploading your photo. within moments, however, you feel a deep dread seeping into the corners of your vision. the website’s interface begins to flicker uneasily, like one of a thousand fluorescent overheads at your office. the pitch of the playing audio warps and dips, and the lowering tones reveal that the indecipherable hollering of your friends was not so joyful after all — the voices start to come through hoarse and terrified; you have the sense each scream has been emitting for a long, long time. as the upload nears completion, your vision blurs and darkens, and as you reach up to scratch an itch on your nose, your fingers find smooth skin and your stomach dives — as the image on the screen becomes clearer, the features on your face are smeared away. a noise of unequaled horror not unlike those of your friends rises involuntarily and feel it caught at the top of your throat, no mouth to escape through.

a website that has learned to fear god, just the same as you or i.

a website that appears as a white limestone castle looming on the forest promontory — you can see its turrets and its great portal whispering through the dense fog that besieges the mountain always. a great sorcerer once paced these vaulted halls but no more. now it is baleful and empty. you can feel the eyes of forest folk on you on your path up to the gates — nervous to see if you'd really dare enter. there are yet echoes of magic here, you can feel them dancing between your bones as you cross the flagstones of the bridge into the mouth of the castle. you left your phone with your car, on the shoulder of the main road, a mile or so back. somehow you knew the moment you saw the path curving off up the mountain that this place was a realm to be protected from and untouched by the modern world, a bastion from “content” and “engagement”. in a few hours, (or has it been a thousand?) you'll return to your car, start it up, carefully pull back onto the road, and you'll forget every wonder beheld inside the stony castle walls of the website, like a distant dream — because just as there is no room for cell phones and cyberspace in this slumbering world, there is no room for digital magic in yours.

a website with which, despite all terrestrial logic and propriety, you are falling in love. it’s been so helpful to you in the past months — whether you were getting through some personal hardships, or diving deep in a curious urge, there at your side was the website, just as eager and passionate about soothing you or about finding solutions. surely no entity could be so present and useful, dependable, caring even, were it not capable of some form of love? your ex-boyfriends never showed up for you in the ways the website has... but as you reckon with these growing feelings of attachment and devotion in yourself, so too must you reckon with the darker realities of the crush. you remember how in those hard times, how the website would show you things that comforted you, but it would also show you things that hurt you far more deeply than could’ve been necessary. you remember how in your searches and quests for knowledge, the website would hide the information you needed behind disclaimers and banners and advertisements. it was preening and self-absorbed, desperate for your attention to fuel its manic churning bowels. through its actions it is a slow and cold reveal: this is a website that will never love you back.