Why'd you FPP a broken link?

November 19, 2009 11:31 AM

For each unique visitor it receives, Temporary.cc deletes part of itself.

(archive video with project description)

posted by flatluigi (44 comments total)

I don't get it. Seriously.
posted by dersins at 11:34 AM on November 19, 2009 [2 favorites]

This confused the hell out of my iPhone. v
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:34 AM on November 19, 2009 [2 favorites]

Best of the we
posted by EarBucket at 11:35 AM on November 19, 2009 [12 favorites]

Well, linking it on Metafilter's going to kill it real quick, huh?
posted by Caduceus at 11:35 AM on November 19, 2009

It adds a v to the end of all your posts v
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:35 AM on November 19, 2009 [2 favorites]

I just see a page with code. Am I doing something wrong? The video shows colours.
posted by kudzu at 11:36 AM on November 19, 2009

It's a link I'm actually afraid to visit!
posted by hippybear at 11:36 AM on November 19, 2009 [2 favorites]

Lies! It just makes the background and text the same colour and doesn't actually delete anything. I feel violated.

dersins: Its art, nobody gets art.
posted by Sargas at 11:38 AM on November 19, 2009 [1 favorite]

It's kinda like the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle of websites.
posted by Caduceus at 11:38 AM on November 19, 2009

kudzu: I just see a page with code. Am I doing something wrong? The video shows colours.

That was it at the beginning; a lot has been deleted since.
posted by flatluigi at 11:39 AM on November 19, 2009

Sht! ts a vrus! Ever snce vstng that ste, everythng that type has the letter "" deleted.
posted by googly at 11:45 AM on November 19, 2009 [1 favorite]

Hmmm...wonder if we could make other sites do the same...
posted by VicNebulous at 11:45 AM on November 19, 2009

IIS used to do the same thing back in the day...
posted by samsara at 11:47 AM on November 19, 2009 [3 favorites]

From the description on the video page:

Temporary.cc deletes part of itself. These deletions change the way browsers understand the website's code and create a unique (de)generative piece after each new user.
...
Eventually, like tangible media, Temporary.cc will fall apart entirely, becoming a blank white website. Its existence will be remembered only by those who saw or heard about it.

Right now, it's in it's last phases. Scroll down, and you'll see some colors (at least I did, at the time of writing this). I think there are 38,300 characters to be deleted (assuming the site retains all the basic structure information (header, title, style, body, etc).
posted by filthy light thief at 11:48 AM on November 19, 2009 [1 favorite]

Well, linking it on Metafilter's going to kill it real quick, huh?

One can only hope.
posted by edgeways at 11:49 AM on November 19, 2009 [1 favorite]

I get it.
posted by fire&wings at 11:50 AM on November 19, 2009

It deletes part of the underlying HTML code, which is why

dv lass="p"&gr;

shows up when, at the start of the project, it was

div class="p">

I'm going to make a genetic website that randomly ADDS characters, gets people to rate two of the sites, propagates the winner code to subsequent generations, and therefore creating the ultimate web site.

It's probably going to end up being ASCII porn.

Actually, that's a good idea. Please MeMail me if you're interested, k?
posted by sleslie at 11:51 AM on November 19, 2009 [27 favorites]

Screw MeMail, I'm just going to favorite this idea.
posted by explosion at 11:57 AM on November 19, 2009

This is Rupert Murdoch's ultimate plan for all of his websites, right?
posted by Joey Michaels at 12:00 PM on November 19, 2009

I checked it out from my laptop and my phone, just to speed up the process...
posted by dabitch at 12:03 PM on November 19, 2009

Would it be too cliched to call it Candlejack's home pa
posted by Sebmojo at 12:10 PM on November 19, 2009 [8 favorites]

So: either every unique visitor who can visit, visits it, and it achieves an unchanging state that way,
or
Enough people visit it, and it erases itself.

Either way, the end result is permanent. Am I missing something?
posted by not_on_display at 12:37 PM on November 19, 2009

Dang! Now pvpry timp I hit an "p" I gpt an "e"!!!!!
posted by drhydro at 12:50 PM on November 19, 2009

Well, it's not permanent yet. Which is a pretty good definition for "temporary" if you ask me.
posted by nebulawindphone at 12:55 PM on November 19, 2009

What'd truly be cool is if the domain deleted itself. I guess that'd be done by redirecting to domains; i.e. to temprary.cc or something. Which would require a domain (and a site with underlying code) to be created in the first place.

Truly there is no such thing as impermanence on the web.
posted by zer0render at 12:57 PM on November 19, 2009

Man, that's deep. Like glowing aliens living in a secret city on the bottom of the Cayman Trough being visited by Ed Harris who disarms a warhead that threatens them deep.

Oh wait, no it's not.
posted by killdevil at 1:01 PM on November 19, 2009

This is such an elegant response to the current state of the internet. I mean, it really is. We all use social websites that are furnished and generated by humans interacting with certain mechanisms. MetaFilter, for example, produces what it produces because of a (human-powered) mechanism that makes a certain kind of communication felicitous, and cuts out certain other kinds of communication. Facebook is like this, too. EHow.

So here we have a website which is actually deprived, more and more, by interaction with it. And we can't see the damage that we do to it. It's the opposite of having a favourite count or a number of friends, the exact cosmic opposite. Instead of being knowingly involved in creation you're unknowingly involved in disintegration. What a beautiful artifact, right?

This is so so so awesome.
posted by voronoi at 1:21 PM on November 19, 2009 [6 favorites]

Goodtimes will re-write your hard drive. Not only that, but
it will scramble any disks that are even close to your computer. It
will recalibrate your refrigerator's coolness setting so all your ice
cream goes melty. It will demagnetize the strips on all your credit
cards, screw up the tracking on your television and use subspace field
harmonics to scratch any CD's you try to play.

It will give your ex-girlfriend your new phone number. It
will mix Kool-aid into your fishtank. It will drink all your beer and
leave its socks out on the coffee table when there's company coming
over. It will put a dead kitten in the back pocket of your good suit
pants and hide your car keys when you are late for work.

Goodtimes will make you fall in love with a penguin. It will
give you nightmares about circus midgets. It will pour sugar in your
gas tank and shave off both your eyebrows while dating your
girlfriend behind your back and billing the dinner and hotel room to
your Discover card.

It will seduce your grandmother. It does not matter if she
is dead, such is the power of Goodtimes, it reaches out beyond the
grave to sully those things we hold most dear.

It moves your car randomly around parking lots so you can't
find it. It will kick your dog. It will leave libidinous messages on
your boss's voice mail in your voice! It is insidious and subtle. It
is dangerous and terrifying to behold. It is also a rather
interesting shade of mauve.
posted by GuyZero at 1:22 PM on November 19, 2009 [7 favorites]

Ah, good times.
posted by Dr-Baa at 1:28 PM on November 19, 2009

Infinite monkeys with infinite delete keys will eventually expose a browser vulnerability .. ? (profit .. ?)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 1:33 PM on November 19, 2009

This table will self-destruct. The top of the table is structured as a grid of concrete pixels. Each time a new table is produced, one pixel is removed from the design.
posted by gac at 1:58 PM on November 19, 2009

This thread is still here?
posted by mazola at 1:59 PM on November 19, 2009

mazola: "This thread is still here?"

yes, but for every person who visits the thread, a comment is deleted
posted by idiopath at 2:01 PM on November 19, 2009

I didn't get there fast enough. Now it looks like somebody took spaghetti code and ran it through a food processor.
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 2:05 PM on November 19, 2009

Any chance of injecting this code in SomethingAwful.com?
posted by Hardcore Poser at 2:14 PM on November 19, 2009

Okay, so how about a web site that builds itself, character by character, with each unique visitor, until instructions for locating a buried, extremely valuable object are completely revealed, and then first one to get there gets to keep it?
posted by davejay at 2:20 PM on November 19, 2009

oh, and once revealed, it starts to disintegrate with each non-unique visitor...
posted by davejay at 2:21 PM on November 19, 2009

sleslie: I'm going to make a genetic website that randomly ADDS characters, gets people to rate two of the sites, propagates the winner code to subsequent generations, and therefore creating the ultimate web site.
I think in order to really do this right, you would want to add viability restrictions to the randomly generated characters. Say a 25% chance that when < or > or & or another html entity is selected, it automatically converts it into the appropriate entity. The other 75% of the time it just sets an internal flag that the next randomly generated character will be surrounded by markup randomly selected from a lookup table. It might be wise to weight that lookup table heavily in favor of <blink>.
posted by bastionofsanity at 2:55 PM on November 19, 2009 [1 favorite]

It's sort of the Samson of the internet.
posted by mammary16 at 4:15 PM on November 19, 2009 [2 favorites]

mammary16: "It's sort of the Samson of the internet."

This website may be worth a moment's chuckle, but that, sir, is Art.
posted by idiopath at 4:22 PM on November 19, 2009

Judging from start of the video, this "site" wasn't much to begin with. Nobody will miss you when you're gone, little page.
posted by planetkyoto at 4:42 PM on November 19, 2009

Is this Teresa Nielsen Hayden's home page?
posted by armage at 6:45 PM on November 19, 2009

Well, a better way would be to use a DOM tree creater, and use those as the genes instead of individual characters. Create a site with separately mutable domains of DOM, text, and css... ignore pics for now.
posted by sleslie at 10:53 PM on November 19, 2009

But if i ate myself would i be twice as big or disappear completely
posted by polymodus at 11:21 PM on November 19, 2009 [3 favorites]