devtrotter

specimen no. 001 · first sighted 2023·12·11 · france

curious about crypto, digital art, and the strange corners of the internet.

fr curieuse de crypto, d’art numérique et des recoins étranges d’internet ✦

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01 / depth 120 m

recent rabbit holes

one tab leads to twenty more. each card shows the trail and the page i stopped on. open a trail and follow it yourself.

hole 017sep 2026

a receipt for nothing, and gold in the seine

  1. yves klein
  2. immaterial zones
  3. the receipt ritual
  4. a 2017 remake
  5. burn addresses

23 tabs · 1 h 40

ended at an address ending in dEaD

the earliest thing i’d call an nft came with no image, and the full version of the sale ended in a fire. i’d like to know how klein’s buyers felt, walking home with empty hands.

follow the trail
  1. yves klein a painter famous for one shade of blue. this story has no paint in it.
  2. zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility 1959. you paid klein in gold, and he wrote you a receipt for an empty zone.
  3. the ritual. if you wanted the complete work, you burned the receipt and klein threw half the gold into the seine.
  4. 2017. mitchell f. chan rebuilds the idea on ethereum, receipts included.
  5. burn addresses. you send tokens to an address with no known key, and they stay there. klein ran the same idea on a river, sixty years earlier.

hole 016sep 2026

a million pixels at a dollar each

  1. milliondollarhomepage
  2. pixel ads
  3. dead links
  4. r/place
  5. basepaint

31 tabs · 2 h 05

ended on today’s basepaint canvas, with the brush open and no plan.

the buyers kept their squares, and a lot of them let the domain behind the square expire. i clicked along one row and stopped counting the dead links halfway.

follow the trail
  1. the million dollar homepage 2005. alex tew, a student in england, sells a million pixels at a dollar each to pay for university.
  2. the story in january 2006 tew auctioned the last thousand pixels on ebay. you can visit the page today, frozen at that moment.
  3. dead links. click around and you land on expired domains, parked pages, and the odd shop that made it.
  4. r/place, 2017. for three days, each reddit user could place one pixel, then wait five to twenty minutes. you get flags, and strangers negotiating treaties over border feuds.
  5. basepaint a new shared canvas each day. strangers paint it together, then collectors mint the result as one piece.

hole 015sep 2026

algorithms without a computer

  1. vera molnár
  2. machine imaginaire
  3. 1968
  4. georg nees, 1965
  5. art blocks

18 tabs · 1 h 10

ended rereading (des)ordres and measuring how far each square drifts from straight.

she wrote algorithms for nine years before a computer ran one of them. i think of her when a client asks for a framework before we’ve talked about the problem.

follow the trail
  1. vera molnár born in hungary, based in paris from 1947, one of the first artists to make work with computers.
  2. machine imaginaire. from 1959 she ran algorithms by hand, following simple rules on paper, step by step.
  3. 1968. she gets access to a real computer. by then she has nine years of rules ready to run.
  4. georg nees stuttgart, february 1965, one of the first shows of computer drawings. some of the artists who came did not accept it as art.
  5. art blocks the artist writes a script, and your mint runs it to make a new output. molnár’s method, plus a wallet.

hole 014sep 2026

websites that skipped the redesign

  1. berkshirehathaway.com
  2. space jam, 1996
  3. info.cern.ch
  4. view source
  5. oldweb.today

27 tabs · 1 h 25

ended on info.cern.ch, clicking through the first website’s plain blue links.

the oldest pages i opened loaded fastest. the next morning i went back to a client’s homepage and deleted two scripts.

follow the trail
  1. berkshire hathaway one of the largest companies in the world, with a homepage made of plain links in a list. it loads before your finger leaves the trackpad.
  2. space jam, 1996 the studio kept the original movie site online. tables, gifs, a starfield.
  3. info.cern.ch cern restored the first website in 2013. its subject is the web itself.
  4. view source. a lot of people learned html this way: open someone else’s page and read it. i commented this one for that reason.
  5. oldweb.today you open old sites in emulated old browsers. netscape navigator feels like a place you visit.

hole 013aug 2026

art that runs as long as the chain runs

  1. autoglyphs
  2. code in the contract
  3. terraforms
  4. hic et nunc goes dark
  5. teia

35 tabs · 2 h 40

ended asking each “onchain” piece one question: where does the image live?

most “onchain art” stores a link to a file on someone’s server. owning one of the few that don’t feels different, in a way i haven’t pinned down yet.

follow the trail
  1. autoglyphs 2019. larva labs put the drawing code inside the contract, so each of the 512 glyphs comes out of ethereum itself.
  2. code in the contract. you call a function and get the glyph back as plain text characters, ready to paste anywhere.
  3. terraforms a land-art piece by mathcastles. the contract builds each parcel from chain state, character by character.
  4. hic et nunc, november 2021. the founder takes the site down. the contracts keep running underneath.
  5. teia the community puts a new front end on the same contracts within days. collectors find their pieces where they left them.

hole 012aug 2026

a globe full of radios

  1. radio.garden
  2. a faroese talk show
  3. numbers stations
  4. uvb-76
  5. the conet project

22 tabs · 3 h 05

ended at 3 am, listening to a buzz.

strangers log a buzzing frequency with dates and times, some of them for years, with no answer in sight. i admire that patience, and i know i don’t have it.

follow the trail
  1. radio.garden spin the globe, land on a live station. i landed in the faroe islands.
  2. a faroese talk show. i understood none of it and stayed twenty minutes. the host laughed a lot, which helped.
  3. priyom.org volunteers log numbers stations here: voices reading digits over shortwave, with no government willing to explain them.
  4. uvb-76 a station on 4625 khz that has sent a short buzz for decades. now and then a voice reads out a few russian words.
  5. the conet project irdial-discs, 1997. four cds of numbers station recordings, free to stream on the internet archive.

hole 011aug 2026

please be patient, this page is under construction

  1. under construction gifs
  2. geocities, 1994
  3. the 2009 shutdown
  4. archive team
  5. one terabyte of kilobyte age

26 tabs · 2 h 15

ended on a tumblr bot that publishes a rescued geocities page every twenty minutes.

thousands of strangers apologised, in blinking gifs, for pages they had not finished. i have a staging server full of pages that deserve the same gif.

follow the trail
  1. under construction hundreds of “under construction” gifs saved from geocities. you can read the old neighbourhood in most of the file names.
  2. geocities founded in 1994. from 1995 you could claim a free homepage in a themed neighbourhood, with a street number of your own.
  3. october 2009. yahoo, which bought geocities in 1999, closes the us service. the japanese version lasts until 2019.
  4. archive team volunteers download as much as they can before the deadline. a year after the shutdown they release it as one torrent, 641 gb compressed.
  5. one terabyte of kilobyte age olia lialina and dragan espenschied dig through the torrent and publish screenshots of the pages, each one shown in a browser from its year.
02 / depth 300 m

things i like / things i made

on the left, strange corners i keep going back to. on the right, small toys i made for this page.

bookmarks.html

made daily glyph

i seed each day’s glyph with the date, counting from my first day on x. an homage to autoglyphs, without the contract.


        

          
          glyph
          
          
        

      


      

        
made rabbit hole roulette

        
press the button

        

          
          
        

      


      

        
made bubble machine

        
tune the bubbles that follow your cursor, or press b anywhere on the page.

        
        
        
        

          
          
          
          
        

      


      

        
made 88×31 button maker

        
personal sites used to swap these little badges. make one for yours.

        

          
          
        

        

          
          save png
        

      


    

  







  

    03 / depth 480 m
    
visual archive

    
small generative pieces. you get a new set on each visit. click one to reseed it, and save the ones you like.

  


  

    
specimen 001 · (des)ordres, after molnár

    
specimen 002 · dithered dusk

    
specimen 003 · flow field

    
specimen 004 · truchet

    
specimen 005 · soap study

    
specimen 006 · map of nowhere

    
specimen 007 · block study

    
specimen 008 · moiré

    
specimen 009 · glyph weather

  







  

    04 / depth 640 m
    
onchain, without the prices

    
i leave the charts to other people. these are the ideas i keep returning to, each with the part i can’t settle yet.

  


  

    

      
art2019

      
autoglyphs

      
interesting because you ask the contract and it returns the image as text. to see a glyph, you need ethereum and a text box.

      
not sure yet i suspect people in fifty years will look at thumbnails and skip the code.

    

    

      
culture2021

      
nouns

      
interesting because one auction each day, with no end date. the treasury pays for strange public things, glasses and short films among them.

      
not sure yet i’d like to see the ritual in year ten, once the novelty has worn off.

    

    

      
socialprotocol

      
farcaster

      
interesting because your account id sits in an onchain registry, and a shared network stores your posts and follows. you can switch apps and keep both.

      
not sure yet i’d like numbers on how many people switch apps once they can. my guess is few, as long as their friends stay put.

    

    

      
identityens

      
names you own

      
interesting because one name can point to a wallet and a website. you hold it the way you hold a token.

      
not sure yet i haven’t decided how i feel about an identity you can lose by forgetting a renewal.

    

    

      
wallets0x…dEaD

      
burn addresses

      
interesting because you can watch the balance grow on a block explorer, and no one holds a key to spend it.

      
not sure yet i can’t decide if a burn is a statement or accounting with better branding.

    

    

      
bitcoin2009

      
the genesis block

      
interesting because it quotes a headline from the times of 3 january 2009, and its first 50 coins can’t be spent. people keep sending it small amounts anyway.

      
not sure yet i can’t tell if tipping an unspendable address is devotion or a guestbook with fees.

    

    

      
artbase

      
basepaint

      
interesting because whoever shows up paints the day’s canvas, collectors mint it as one piece, and the painters get a share.

      
not sure yet i’m curious what happens to the pictures once painters start optimising for the payout.

    

    

      
archive2023

      
inscriptions

      
interesting because casey rodarmor worked out how to write images into bitcoin blocks. you can pull a jpeg out of the same ledger that records payments.

      
not sure yet each full node stores those images for good. i haven’t seen a fair answer on who should carry that cost.

    

  







  

    05 / depth 800 m
    
notes from the internet

    
short field notes. i write them the day i find the thing, before i forget the details.

  


  

    
    
    
    
  


  
    
    
  1. onchain notes
    i reread the opening pages of the ethereum yellow paper. i follow more of the notation than i did last year, and i look up fewer greek letters.
    2. 
    
  2. things i found this week
    radio.garden again. this time a station in the azores playing accordion music. i kept it on while i fixed a client’s footer.
    3. 
    
  3. things i found this week
    i scrolled neal.fun’s deep sea page all the way down during a coffee break. the coffee went cold somewhere near the bottom.
    4. 
    
  4. onchain notes
    people call yves klein’s 1959 zones the first nft. i read them as the first burn address: buyers who wanted the full work burned the receipt, and klein threw half their gold into the seine.
    5. 
    
  5. internet rabbit holes
    started at a 1996 movie website, ended at the first website ever. both load faster than my bank’s login page.
    6. 
    
  6. internet rabbit holes
    an evening on 88×31 buttons. one collection holds thousands of them, from the nineties to now. i went to bed with a button maker half written.
    7. 
    
  7. onchain notes
    before i look twice at an “onchain” piece, i check where the image lives. in most cases the answer is a server that somebody has to keep paying for.
    8. 
    
  8. onchain notes
    satoshi sent the first bitcoin transaction to hal finney in january 2009, ten coins as a test. i like that the first payment went between two people on the same cryptography mailing list.
    9. 
    
  9. things i found this week
    a museum of endangered sounds: dial-up, a floppy drive seeking, a nokia keypad. i recognised each of them and decided not to count the years.
    10. 
    
  10. things i found this week
    rafaël rozendaal sells websites as artworks, and the collector’s name goes in the page title. i read browser tabs with more care now.
    11. 
    
  11. internet rabbit holes
    numbers stations. one shortwave frequency has carried a buzz for decades, and a small community logs each change with a date and a time. i keep going back for the logbooks.
    12. 
    
  12. internet rabbit holes
    i followed wikipedia’s unusual articles list to the emu war of 1932: soldiers with lewis guns against emus in western australia. the emus split into small groups, and the army gave up.
    13. 
    
  13. onchain notes
    i read the early posts on another new social protocol. a test, then a complaint about the old platform, then the same complaint in french.
    14. 
    
  14. onchain notes
    i scrolled the token list of the 0x…dEaD address on etherscan. hundreds of projects i’d never heard of sent tokens there to show their supply went down.
    15. 
    
  15. things i found this week
    on window-swap i got a rainy kitchen, lisbon i think, and watched it for the length of a coffee.
    16. 
    
  16. internet rabbit holes
    vera molnár ran algorithms by hand from 1959 and got time on a computer in 1968. i tried one of her rules on graph paper at lunch and lost patience at row six.
    17. 
    
  17. things i found this week
    poolsuite.net in a background tab: summer mixes in a fake mac os 9, and a grey sky outside my window.
    18. 
    
  18. onchain notes
    the bitcoin genesis block quotes a newspaper headline, and each block since links back to it through the chain. i like that satoshi opened a payment system with a citation.
    19. 
    
  19. things i found this week
    the library of babel contains each possible page of 3,200 characters. i searched for my name and found it, surrounded by nonsense. i’ve seen search results like that.
    20. 
    
  20. internet rabbit holes
    cameron’s world, a collage of old geocities pages. i lost count of the “under construction” signs on the first screen.
    21. 
  







  

    06 / depth 960 m
    
about

  


  

    

      
      
self-portrait as a soap bubble, 2026. the reflection is my window.

    

    

      
i’m lisa, from france. i build websites for clients during the day.

      
devtrotter is dev plus globe-trotter, though most of the trotting happens between tabs.

      
i’m curious about crypto, digital art and the stranger corners of the internet. i read the fine print, and i tend to have one more question.

      
client work means i check a site’s load time before i look at the design. the old sites on this page pass that test with ease.

      
with crypto, i read the contracts and the design docs and leave the price talk to others. my standing question for a new project: who changes their behaviour once real money is on the line?

      
i keep my finds here and add to the page when a tab survives a full week. if you know a strange corner i haven’t seen, send me the link.

      
colophon · i wrote the html, css and a little javascript by hand. the page sets no cookies. i keep a small visit log: time, page, country and city, network, browser, where you came from and how far you scrolled. the log holds no ip addresses, and i delete entries after 90 days. fonts come from this server: bricolage grotesque, instrument serif, space mono, silkscreen. the small bubbles are canvas, and the big one is a webgl shader.

    

  




















  
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