There’s a particular kind of website that I think about more often than is probably reasonable. A type of site that doesn’t try to keep you online, doesn’t try and make you more productive, and that has no ambition of being any more than it is.
It’s just a little website that somebody made because they wanted to make something.
Maybe it’s a collection of strange animations. Maybe it’s a tiny game about absolutely nothing. Maybe it’s a virtual recreation of a place that doesn’t exist, or a website that pairs Nietzsche quotes with Family Circus comics for reasons that I can only assume made perfect sense to somebody at some point.
Whatever it is, you stumble across it, spend twenty minutes clicking around, and briefly remember that the internet can be a place you explore.
I miss that feeling. Not necessarily the old internet itself, which was frequently ugly and slow and full of things that looked like they had been designed during a particularly bad fever, but the sense that there were strange little corners everywhere, built by people who wanted to share something with whoever happened to find it.
I have a habit of collecting little websites like that in an extensive note, and over time, my collection has gotten pretty unruly. So, I thought it would be fun to just go through them one by one and see what it is that makes them tick; simple as that.
1. Lofi Town: a little virtual coworking space
Imagine a little pixel-art town where everyone is quietly going about their business while you sit at your computer trying to convince yourself that you are, in fact, going to finish the thing you said you’d finish three hours ago.
That’s essentially Lofi Town.
It’s a cute browser-based coworking space that gives you a little digital environment to inhabit while you work. There’s something charming about the idea of sharing a virtual space with other people, even if the entire interaction consists of sitting near one another and occasionally remembering that other human beings also have things to do.
It’s the online equivalent of going to a café to work, except you don’t have to buy a coffee you don’t particularly want just to justify occupying a table for four hours.
I also like the underlying idea that productivity doesn’t necessarily have to be an entirely solitary activity. Sometimes it’s enough to feel like you’re doing something alongside other people, even if everyone is just a tiny animated character on a screen. As someone whose job could often be described accurately as “content goblin”
Anyway, it’s a nice little place to exist for a while.
2. Anna’s Garden: a tiny garden on the internet
I don’t think every website needs to justify itself.
Sometimes a little garden is just a little garden. You visit it, look around, and enjoy the fact that somebody decided to put a garden on the internet.
There’s something particularly lovely about small digital environments that ask very little of you. No urgent notifications, no endless feed of things you should probably be paying attention to, no suggestion that your time could be better spent engaging with seventeen different pieces of content.
Just a little garden, akin to a slightly sleeker Facebook game from the early 2010s.
I think we’ve become so accustomed to software being designed around what it can extract from us that it’s genuinely refreshing to encounter something whose appeal is simply that it exists. You don’t have to optimise the experience. You don’t have to get better at it. You can just visit.
A small patch of internet greenery. Frankly, we could do worse.
3. Drive & Listen: go for a drive somewhere else
This one lets you virtually drive around cities around the world while listening to local radio.
This premise is far more entertaining than it has any right to be.
I’ve spent a strange amount of time watching this website on my 2nd monitor as I work, write and such. Cars pass, people walk along pavements, buildings slide past the window, and somewhere in the background a radio station is broadcasting to people who are actually there.
It’s not quite travelling, obviously. You’re not going to discover a tiny café down a side street and accidentally spend the afternoon talking to somebody who lives there. But it does give you a small window into the ordinary rhythms of somewhere else.
And I think that’s what makes it interesting. Travel websites tend to show you the extraordinary bits of a place: the famous buildings, the scenic viewpoints, the things that look good in a photograph. Drive & Listen is more interested in the everyday, with part of its appeal simply coming from how mundane it all is. Traffic lights. Shopfronts. Streets that are probably not particularly interesting to the people who use them every day.
I’m not sure how to word this correctly, but watching and listening feels like you’re experiencing archival footage of your own time, as if one day, all of this will have such significance that gets lost as you’re going through it in real time.
There’s something comforting about watching a city continue its life without you, and at times when I’ve felt as if I would very much like to be anywhere but at my desk, it gives me a bit of that.
Pick somewhere you’ve never been. Put on the radio. Go for a little drive, and live.
4. Orisinal: the wonderfully strange world of one-person game development
There was a time when the internet was full of tiny browser games made by people who seemed to have no particular interest in creating the next great entertainment platform.
Whilst I’m not sure that saying you were part of the “Newgrounds” generation holds much cultural cache, I can say that it meant a great deal to me at a certain point in my life to feel as if I was connecting with people that had as niche interests as I did. People would have an idea, and the rudimentary tools of Flash would allow them to bring that idea into fruition. The same can be said for dozens of online hangout spots (I was big into Second Life and Gaia Online, which I’m sure I’ll discuss in a separate blog).
Orisinal is a lovely example of that tradition, with a collection of whimsical, often adorable games created by independent developer Ferry Halim. The games have a soft, storybook quality to them, filled with little animals, gentle colours and simple ideas that somehow become much more absorbing the more I went into them.
They’re the sort of games that feel as though they should be played on a computer in the corner of a bedroom while you’re supposed to be doing homework.
Which, to be clear, is an endorsement, especially when you work a job that is, essentially, extended homework.
What I find most appealing about projects like this is their specificity. They don’t feel like products designed by committee to appeal to the largest possible demographic. They feel like the work of someone with a particular sensibility who decided to make a bunch of things that reflected it.
The internet has plenty of enormous games with enormous budgets, but as time goes on, I can’t help but feel the desperation to take money from me in them. I’m certainly not above AAA games and larger experiences (my literal thousands of hours in Final Fantasy XIV can attest to that), but nevertheless, I have always preferred the types of games where I feel like I’m connecting with another person’s hyperfixation.
5. Draw a Fish: put a little fish in a little pond
You draw a fish. The fish enters an animated pond. You get to see your little creation swimming around.
That’s the pitch, that’s it; what more were you expecting?
I could probably spend several paragraphs trying to explain why this is a beautiful example of interactive digital art, but I think that would miss the point somewhat. Sometimes the best thing a website can do is let you draw a beautiful little fish and watch it swim around with all the other beautiful little fish.
There’s a particular joy in seeing something you’ve made become part of a shared environment. Even when the thing you’ve made is a lopsided collection of coloured lines that barely resembles an aquatic animal.
Especially, perhaps, when it looks like that (my beautiful son):
You make a fish. It swims. Life goes on..
The internet is still full of little places
I think what I like most about these websites is that they represent a different way of thinking about the internet, and one that I’ve always felt stuck on.
I used to think I was just nostalgic, and that that interest was some kind of arrested development where I could never truly escape the idealism I felt for the internet when I was younger. However, after many years, with AI and bots and the encroachment of all kinds of monetisation, it really does sink in how special an internet run primarily by its users can be.
Not every website here is old. Some are relatively recent projects, built with modern tools and hosted on modern infrastructure. A few are more elaborate than anything the average person could have made on their own twenty years ago.
But they share something with the old personal web: the feeling that the internet can be a place for making things simply because making things is enjoyable.
A garden doesn’t need a monetisation strategy. A tiny game doesn’t need to retain its users for forty-five minutes a day. A personal blog doesn’t need to become a media company. And a website that pairs philosophical quotations with newspaper comics doesn’t need to explain itself to anybody.
There’s a particular kind of freedom in that.
For a long time, it has felt as though the internet has been getting bigger while somehow becoming smaller. More people, more content, more services, more things to watch and read and buy, all concentrated into a relatively small number of enormous platforms. We have access to an extraordinary amount of information, but it’s increasingly difficult to escape the feeling that we’re all visiting the same handful of places.
These little websites offer an alternative, however modest. They’re reminders that the internet is not just a collection of services we’re permitted to use. It’s also a medium in which people can create things, experiment with ideas and leave behind little traces of themselves.
Some of those things will be brilliant, and others will be absolutely atrocious. Some will be visited by thousands of people, and some will sit quietly in a corner of the web for years, waiting for the right person to stumble across them.
I think there’s something lovely about that last possibility.
Somewhere out there, somebody has made a website about something they love. It might be an elaborate collection of pixel art, a virtual garden, a tiny game about a fish, or a personal page dedicated to a television show that hasn’t been popular in twenty years.
They made it, they put it online, and now it exists.
You don’t have to do anything with it. You don’t have to subscribe, follow, share, like or buy anything. You are free to experience them as they have a use for you, and shift away at times when they don’t.
And if you ask me, that’s still one of the best things the internet can do.
About the Author: Samuel Shepherd is a writer and cultural critic interested in the strange corners of the internet, obscure media, digital nostalgia, and the ways the things we create shape our memories. His writing blends personal reflection, offbeat cultural observations, and philosophical musings on art, technology, and being human.
