My new crush questions what I am doing

April 8, 2022 7:57 AM

🌸 home sweet homepage 🌸 is a comic about growing up online from sailor mercury aka @sailorhg.

Sailor mercury has has been busy with putting the soft in software with their clothing line, including the amazing making art, breaking hearts jacket, fruit shaped art computers and the lovely Animal Crossing Planters ceramic project.


sailorhg previously on mefi: Froggy computer and a nicer coding environment (the cute compute is the best), Bubblesort Tech zines & transit card ring and the now seminal Coding Like a Girl.

[Warning: Scrolljacking]

posted by zenon (25 comments total)

I like the comic and the story, but loathe the 'scroll to advance but it doesn't scroll instead it animates the next slide and there's no indication if you've gone far enough so you often have to scroll back to read something that animated out before you could see it."
But nice comic.
posted by signal at 8:38 AM on April 8, 2022 [13 favorites]

Yes that interface made it unreadable, for me.

'scroll to advance but it doesn't scroll instead it

... just sits there with a blank screen, for me. Probably because of a way my browser's set up. Why do clever web-heads think disabling the scroll bar is cool?
posted by Rash at 8:45 AM on April 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

Super cute! Thanks for sharing.
posted by me3dia at 9:12 AM on April 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

There's a transcript version, but no simple workaround for the scrolljacking.
posted by zamboni at 9:23 AM on April 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

I could use the spacebar to navigate through the pages as a simple workaround for my desktop. I asked the mods to hope me into a warning letting folks know about the scroll jacking.
posted by zenon at 9:45 AM on April 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

There's also a PDF version, for scrolljack-haters!

(Via her tweet here)
posted by Nossidge at 9:48 AM on April 8, 2022 [12 favorites]

Ahhhhh, I came here prepared to resist the urge to say terrible snarky things about the scrolling, but I see that it is not an urge that has been generally resisted.

Still, despite the interface blowing, I thought that was really sweet and amazing. The feeling of finding your people and your place online when you didn't seem to fit in properly anywhere else is one I know really, really well. I miss that era of the internet. You can still find your tribe, no doubt, but there's so much other noise surrounding you.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:02 AM on April 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

seconding the "sweet comic, bad UI comments". OTOH, now I know the buzzword scrolljacking, and that I am not alone in thinking it sacrifices usability for vague aesthetic purposes.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 11:46 AM on April 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Maybe if we could all please take it as acknowledged that "there are many reasons people might not like this format and those reasons are valid", and go back to the content?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:50 AM on April 8, 2022 [11 favorites]

This is sweet and inspiring and hopeful. Love this and made my day. Thank you!
posted by tipsyBumblebee at 12:03 PM on April 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

As a person who was also into Vanessa-Mae and Sailor Moon in junior high/high school and also from a small town in a state that starts with M, I loved this! I also remember the fun of using the Internet at my dad's work and the excitement when we finally got dial-up at home...but could only use it for 30 minutes at a time because someone might be trying to call on the single phone line. Oh boy.
posted by kittensyay at 1:21 PM on April 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

So, in the interests of starting a conversation about something other than the UI:

Were you on the internet in the Geocities era? Did you have your own webpage? What was on it?
posted by jacquilynne at 1:23 PM on April 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

I sure did! It was for Myst fan art and poetry. I feel this comic so much!
posted by rivenwanderer at 1:48 PM on April 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I did, I had an illustrated walkthrough, with lots of screenshots, of the first game of NetHack I ever won! I put it together in Microsoft Publisher, of all things, so the HTML on each page was Table Cthulhu, but I liked it.
posted by JHarris at 3:52 PM on April 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

As for the page linked, it was nice! I agree the scrolling was a little difficult to deal with, but it was by no means a deal breaker. I greatly miss that age of the Internet, enough that some of us have started an indie gaming and news blog in imitation of late lamented GameSetWatch!
posted by JHarris at 4:08 PM on April 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

That was so lovely. Hooray! (I hope that last crush grew the fuck up, too.)
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 7:25 PM on April 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm pretty sure my Geocities page had Gargoyles fanfic, short stories, and poetry. I remember I later added a set of pages whose content was all drawn and written on torn out pieces of lined notebook paper -- I think they were the absurd world domination plans of some not-very-competent villain character. There was a midi player in there and a long playlist, within the frames. It had frames. I loved frames.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 8:00 PM on April 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

I want my website to be interesting and useful but how?

Animated gifs. Lots of animated gifs.
posted by Phanx at 12:25 AM on April 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

Do not pay any attention to:

Copyright
Relevance
Consistency of style
Aspect ratio
posted by Phanx at 12:27 AM on April 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

I loved this; and I think the eccentric interaction design is part of the whole intention. We are talking about narrative which involved Tamagotchis and Geocities pages after all. You: the reader are part a select club for the very reason that you have even attempted to master the quirks of the non standard UI. And remember it is non standard because there aren’t really standards just now - only experiments. Willing to accept those terms? … then let the story continue. That is how things were online in 1997: any maybe also how it feels to uncover a new world at 12.
posted by rongorongo at 2:51 AM on April 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

Oh no I am crying because it is too cute and I was 10 years older than her but I still had that entire feeling about the Internet and how I could meet people like me on it and talk about neat things to people.

I wish I had found her tamagotchi website though - it would've immensely helped me figure out what the heck to do with my tamagotchi.
posted by Katemonkey at 8:21 AM on April 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

That was great. I like the format - just keep hitting page down, and when your scroll bar is at the bottom, its over. There are some blank pages.

I missed the whole geocities thing, my introduction to the internet was through compuserve, and I mainly just played a bunch of online games. Looks like fun though. I do finally have my own website now, decades later.
posted by Ansible at 9:51 AM on April 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

I've spent so much time on the Internet that I was constantly steeling myself for horribleness I was sure was coming any second.

So it was such a relief to get to the end, and it was... actually happy. How delightful.
posted by panglos at 10:48 AM on April 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

the spacebar or pageup/pagedown is exactly the right amount of scroll
posted by secretseasons at 9:01 PM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

thank you so much for sharing. it made the room a little dusty.
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 6:13 AM on April 17, 2022