Didn't expect to see something I made on HN while my wife is trying to find something to watch on TV.
So about the site in case anyone is interested. I made it with a friend who was studying multimedia. He helped with the data and I did the coding. Took about a week or two.
The site was originally Flash (remember that). But I ported it to HTML5 a few years ago. It still has those Flash vibes I think. Posted the code to GitHub when I ported it. I did this mostly to keep it alive for old times sake.
So about the mobile support. I planned to do it but got sidetracked building a custom WebGL map renderer because phone performance was poor. However I never finished, life finds a way to get in the way and all that... I have some mobile designs lying around.
The other issue was when I first built the site YouTube didn't really play ads much at all, just those little text ads, and you could embed the player really tiny. So it worked better. In the original flash version I actually hid the video player. But that got the site blacklisted from YouTube, I asked a Google engineer on a dev forum to put a word in and they removed the block, very different times, this was back when Google was a different beast, and you could chat to real people online and the dev communities were much smaller.
I have a illustration of a much bigger map in my sketchbook. It has a lot more subgenres and interconnected things like historical events and so on. But it's huge unfolded, like 2x1.5m or something ridiculous.
I miss those days when the web was full of weird and experimental stuff. I grew up with Newgrounds and Geocities, I'm sure it's all still out there buried under a giant pile of SEO optimised refuse.
bfeist 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks so much for this write up. It’s not often thought of that when you put something weird and experimental online just for fun that you’re signing up for years of careing and feeding. But that’s also kind of nice, it makes you go engage with your cool thing long after your impulse drove you to make it.
This is a cool thing. I hope you enjoyed remembering about it again today.
xtracto 35 minutes ago [-]
Younger people would never understand how amazing the internet was back in the 90s. Particularly before ads and SEO became an industry.
Also Flash, most people don't realize what we lost with Flash. The amount of non-professional multimedia content available was so great. It was a cooking ground for people to experiment with animation ideas. Very low hanging fruit.
HTML5/Canvas/CSS just don't have that accessibility.
Now the internet is a complete different beast. There are 10 main websites that everyone sees only, and everyone wants to monetize. All content is full of "antipatterns" to maximize monetization. It's very very sad.
Aaaanyway, sorry for the rant. I love your website. I'm a Metalhead myself, and this year I'll go back to Wacken for a 2nd time after 15 years!!
Very nice! As soon as I saw the landing page and the loading/start button I immediately thought of Flash.
glenstein 2 hours ago [-]
Absolutely fantastic project! I completely understand you've got other things going on, but for me on Firefox mobile, I'm seeing a YouTube pop-up window for Black Sabbath and I don't see any obvious way to close it.
pjgalbraith 2 hours ago [-]
Sorry about that. Its definitely a desktop kinda experience anyway.
petros 2 minutes ago [-]
Very cool visual representation of metal history. I'm working on something similar for basketball history.
NoSalt 7 minutes ago [-]
Given this is Hacker News, this easily could have been some re-vamped "table" of metal elements or what the linked site ultimately is ... LOL. Personally, I am more happy with the actual site than metallurgy.
voidfunc 16 minutes ago [-]
I'd love of this showed me the spiritual successors of a band / sub-genre even if they're not mainstream or well known. For example, I really love Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and a number of other "classic" Heavy Metal bands with a slow, hard but not sludgy brooding sound and amazing vocals. But it's hard finding modern acts with a similar sound. What tends to happen when I search for modern metal is I end up finding stuff that is more a descendant of speed metal, or thrash, or black metal... and none of that really strikes the right chord for me.
There used to be a thing like 20-ish years ago called Musicovery that could sort of do this if you clicked around.
dot_treo 2 hours ago [-]
Reminds me very much of https://music.ishkur.com/ which is the same kind of thing but for electronic music.
zaitsev1393 38 minutes ago [-]
Wow thanks for sharing, went straight to Eurotrash and it didn't dissapoint
TwoNineA 2 hours ago [-]
Great map. There might be some categories missing, couldn't find any Katatonia, Agalloch, Alcest nor Tiamat. Alcest and some Deftones are considered blackgaze and Agalloch, Wolves in the Throne Room fall more into grey metal.
yawgmoth 1 hours ago [-]
It's interesting because some of these bands are older than these terms. Alcest wasn't considered blackgaze until albums inspired by their own sound became popular, for example.
Metal also has history where a genre is aesthetically defined as well as sonically, which complicates things.
loganc2342 38 minutes ago [-]
Black Sabbath, the consensus originators of metal as a whole, weren’t considered metal until albums inspired by their sound became popular, either.
kubanczyk 49 minutes ago [-]
I see Tiamat at Goth Metal.
deppep 47 minutes ago [-]
i also made something like this. it cover 17M entities across tracks albums artists and labels. posted on show hn a few times but it went unnoticed (hate u (joking))
And here I was thinking it would be a materials science map
broken-kebab 50 minutes ago [-]
Looks great! However I'm not sure how it is supposed to work. Like, should it play doom when I click doom? For me it started with Black Sabbath, and it doesn't change
To be excapt:
This is a Mäp of Metäl, no hair was cut in making the map.
mr_mitm 2 hours ago [-]
As a German, metal umlauts look so confusing
voidUpdate 1 hours ago [-]
m̈ëẗäl̈ üm̈l̈äüẗs̈ (awww, you can't put an umlaut on a space) (oh wow the HM font does not like what I just did. It looks fine in the monospace font)
Kelteseth 55 minutes ago [-]
Nu Metal not having any Linkin Park songs is a crime.
So about the site in case anyone is interested. I made it with a friend who was studying multimedia. He helped with the data and I did the coding. Took about a week or two.
The site was originally Flash (remember that). But I ported it to HTML5 a few years ago. It still has those Flash vibes I think. Posted the code to GitHub when I ported it. I did this mostly to keep it alive for old times sake.
So about the mobile support. I planned to do it but got sidetracked building a custom WebGL map renderer because phone performance was poor. However I never finished, life finds a way to get in the way and all that... I have some mobile designs lying around.
The other issue was when I first built the site YouTube didn't really play ads much at all, just those little text ads, and you could embed the player really tiny. So it worked better. In the original flash version I actually hid the video player. But that got the site blacklisted from YouTube, I asked a Google engineer on a dev forum to put a word in and they removed the block, very different times, this was back when Google was a different beast, and you could chat to real people online and the dev communities were much smaller.
I have a illustration of a much bigger map in my sketchbook. It has a lot more subgenres and interconnected things like historical events and so on. But it's huge unfolded, like 2x1.5m or something ridiculous.
I miss those days when the web was full of weird and experimental stuff. I grew up with Newgrounds and Geocities, I'm sure it's all still out there buried under a giant pile of SEO optimised refuse.
This is a cool thing. I hope you enjoyed remembering about it again today.
Also Flash, most people don't realize what we lost with Flash. The amount of non-professional multimedia content available was so great. It was a cooking ground for people to experiment with animation ideas. Very low hanging fruit.
HTML5/Canvas/CSS just don't have that accessibility.
Now the internet is a complete different beast. There are 10 main websites that everyone sees only, and everyone wants to monetize. All content is full of "antipatterns" to maximize monetization. It's very very sad.
Aaaanyway, sorry for the rant. I love your website. I'm a Metalhead myself, and this year I'll go back to Wacken for a 2nd time after 15 years!!
> It still has those Flash vibes I think.
I can say I noticed. I wondered if the site had been Flash.
There used to be a thing like 20-ish years ago called Musicovery that could sort of do this if you clicked around.
Metal also has history where a genre is aesthetically defined as well as sonically, which complicates things.
https://toposonico.com/#lon=14.4313&lat=-1.0200&z=9.10&entit...
https://www.artsy.net/artwork/ward-shelley-history-of-scienc...
https://websites.umich.edu/~esrabkin/sf/HistoryOfSFVisualize...
It might be fun to have a sort of gazetteer for the map so we can find bands.
Btw, the map interface is very well implemented, what is it based on?
[0] https://openseadragon.github.io/