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I’m fond of feeling lost in abandoned villages that have succumbed to failing industry. If you’re like me, you should bookmark Ghosttowns.com, a guide to America’s lost civilizations. The site itself feels like an abandoned corner of the internet. For example, when you click the map, it automatically downloads a MIDI file called “cowboyj.mid,” an upbeat ragtime banger that will accompany you in your search for desolated destinations. The pages for each town contain detailed descriptions of what remains, including ominous comments like “no current living residents, just ghosts of old miners.” Get on and get lost.
Related Recs
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Old school geocities-core Web 1.0 blog maintained by the coolest goth girl named Heather Shade (who I desperately wanted to be when I grew up) about paranormal, strange, and liminal spaces in my West Texas hometown…
Jan 20, 2025
geocities (RIP) was such a special place, and I've been thinking about the kinds of websites that we lost from Ye Olde Internet. This is a visual representation of 650 gigabytes worth of saved geocities sites, spread out in map form.
Feb 21, 2024
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I know nothing about art but the one exhibition I ever truly enjoyed was these artists showed the death of Geocities. It was through the account @rhizomedotorg...and they work with the New Museum. That exhibition has long been over but there exists a trove of archival content on oocities.com. I love the weirdo nothingness oblivion of the internet and people’s obsessions, and Geocities was a great place for the meeting of those worlds. The original K-hole! Shame it’s over, but with geocities, some of these relics exist, though a lot of links are dead.
Jul 8, 2021
Top Recs from @arjun
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In 2006, a YouTube account called Artssiren uploaded a series of clips for an amateur documentary called “New York City Subculture ‘96.” The doc is set in the East Village and mostly features downtown squatters hanging out on St. Marks stoops talking about tattoos, philosophy, and love. Characters include Kia, a topless punk who confronts a pig, Bernie, a squatter who wants to convince you he doesn’t look like a squatter, and Randy, the most emo boy in America. The film was made by Nia Janeen Brown, who now goes by Chloé Le Roux. She deserves a retrospective.
Sep 13, 2022
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It’s a weird way to end a recommendations list, but there are things you should just keep to yourself. Also, you should be comfortable with the fact that there are things from which you’re gatekept. Anyway, thanks for reading my recommendations lol.
Sep 13, 2022
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If you don’t have a DAW like Ableton you can use Audacity, an open source music software, to slow down time. Audacity comes with an effect called Paulstretch, named after an old program called Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch that was used to make this iconic YouTube video. It allows you to slow down audio files by inordinate amounts, turning silly little love songs into monumental drone landscapes. You can discover hidden melodies buried in the waveform and imagine life outside of time.
Sep 13, 2022