zombo.com was launched in 1999. I remember in high school you’d see the new fancy web kiosk’s the school put up just displaying it as a joke. and being locked out of the address bar so you couldn’t change it. The fact that this url has been renewed, maintained, and updated with all the advancements web browsers have made in the last 24 years, just to have this useless site still exist amuses me to no end.
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It doesn’t surprise me since the infinite is possible at zombocom.
The only limit of course, being ourselves.
It’s very interesting and almost kind of sad to me that ‘kids these days’ I think truly don’t get how… scrabbly the early internet was. It was this truly and genuinely unique environment where people were kind of scrapping things together into things that probably just they thought were funny or cool, and then just kind of sending it out into the world.
It’s so different from today where advanced algorithms and profitability guidelines have co-opted that almost anarchic environment
I mean there still is stuff like that all over the place, probably more than ever, it’s just harder to find because the SEO drowns it out.
Back then you didn’t find those sites through search engines. You found them through word of mouth.
Today, the people around you just don’t share sites like this anymore.I think we’re maybe just too busy to be involved enough in the late-90’s irc-ish corners of the web to see it.
I bet there’s more than ever of it out there… You and I are just now into a perspectosphere of higher profitability, but lower keepin-it-surreality… If that makes sense
Which is kinda how it ahould be… The youth with their lack of responsibility own the edge of culture which they will eventually sort out to the worthwhile and the forgettable as their kids overtake the edge.
Zombocom is certainly in the worthwhile bucket. It encapsulates and distills so much pf the late 90’s into such a simple, light-weight package
Relevant xkcd
Still the best site on the internet, you can do anything there…
Excuse me but we all know what the Best page in the universe is.
Oh man Maddox! Thanks for the reminder!
Oh, of course. What was I thinking? That is the best page in the universe. I mean if it wasn’t, then it wouldn’t say so at the top of the page.
You can do anything at Zombo Com.
Anything at all?
The only limit is yourself
Are you lost? http://perdu.com has you covered since June of 1996!
Oh damn I had completely forgotten about that one!
Zombo is still amazing. One of my other favorites: https://chickenonaraft.com/
Ah yes, I sometimes reminice about all the good times I spent with a chicken on a raft.
Remember looking at the time counter to see when the first verse would repeat? Ah, good times.
I clicked on this using Voyager for Lemmy, and won’t stop playing now that I’ve closed the browser window, lol
Really amped up writing this comment, though
haha you’ve been pwned by a chicken on a raft. rather distinct!
I think when Flash died the regular site became HTML5, did it not?
Yes, it was down for a few days… but remember “You can do anything at Zombocom.” So it came back.
Yeah, pretty sure they ported it.
I love the “view source” commentary and the fact that you can grab the ogg oir mp3’s there.
updated with all the advancements web browsers have made in the last 24 years
That’s one of the neat parts of the web-- it’s very backwards compatible. Maybe they upgraded to https when that became a thing, but the maintenance costs of a site that small/simple are fairly low. Still, it shows that someone cares enough to keep it going!
It was done with macromedia flash initially, if I remember correctly
I took a look, they updated their FontAwesome dependency sometime in 2016-ish and their site looks good on mobile. Looks like they do occasionally update it after all.
FontAwesome itself is 13 years younger than zombo.com :D
That’s wild
I got to thinking about IRC some time ago, and how much creative time we spent solving the fundamental problem of how, exactly, to use the internet without needing some sort of middleman, like a crazy person hosting a server for no clear reason, so that we could all communicate together.
That and designing the thing so that even if the hardware in your closet got hammered with a bajillion visits it wouldn’t stutter because it was all too light weight for that. But also, fuck no I would rather throw myself down the stairs than arrange it so that I have to maintain it a lot. That type of thinking defined an era, and that’s why zombo.com still works.
I have to put more maintenance into my Gmail account than the zombo guy does into the entire website, is what I’m saying. Return to monke, is what I’m saying.
Okay, while we’re talking about really old novelty websites, I’ve got one I remember, but can’t find. The best way I can describe it is “organic paisley Flash.” It was just a lot of colorful alien-biological shapes that, when you clicked on certain parts of them, would move around and change in an animated transition to another weird abstract scene.
Anybody know WTF site I’m describing?
No I dont but I must see this. What is/was it?
I wish I knew!
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