pjgalbraith
today at 11:47 AM
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.
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!!
ravenstine
today at 5:22 PM
Amen! The only things that made the early web bad by comparison were popup ads and the lack of tabbed browsing. Popup windows that didn't rely on user interaction were always a bad idea and should never have existed. But besides that, yeah, I miss those days. I miss the days when I was a kid and I could stick some HTML on a server and people would actually find it. No SEO, ads, or shameless self promotion required.
> popup ads
Have you open any US news website in 5 years? Usually there are 2 or 3 layers of popups: subscribe!, cookies box, and news video stream playing on top of everything.
Lack of tabbed browsing? Opera begs to differ.
Seriously. EVERY game style that is now on the app store with ads between levels was completely free and hosted on sites like kongregate, ebaumsworld, or other flash game sites. Incremental games specifically were available in droves. It was a pretty cool time.
errendgame
today at 8:21 PM
Youâre the man now, dog!
With LLM's, I wonder how far away we are from "a cooking ground for people to experiment with ideas"
bigfishrunning
today at 8:11 PM
Getting further all the time; with LLMs you're offloading all of your experimenting to VC jerks
> 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.
This was going to happen regardless of if we had Flash or not
You can sort of get that old-internet vibe today from the I2P network.
> Younger people would never understand how amazing the internet was back in the 90s. Particularly before ads and SEO became an industry.
I donât even think theyâd value it to be honest. The culture of putting stuff out online now is to view everything as a potential revenue stream. If you canât monetize it, why do it?
Wow! I didn't expect to see mapofmetal on HN, and I *definitely* didn't expect to see the author's response.
I just wanted to say thank you for making it, it was really important for me when exploring music back in 2010s. It was also great to see the "big picture" of metal genres, and start the long journey down the rabbit hole.
In a fun turn of events, I showed this to my wife just a few days ago, to show what I was up to when I was younger. And now less than a week later this is submitted to HN. Fun coincidence.
Thanks so much for this write up. Itâs not often thought of that when you put something weird and experimental online just for fun that youâre signing up for years of careing and feeding. But thatâs 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.
Very cool. Explored a lot of nodes, rekindled some old bands. I was wondering how this was vibe coded, since it was done so well, art wise. Then I read your post. This has such a different feel for whatever is usually made today, I really enjoyed it. Cheers
Do you disagree with hardcore punk influence as being one of the key disambiguation between thrash from speed metal? Personally at least that's what I feel. I do understand this means for example a lot of Metallica won't count as thrash but I like to say if you slow down Metallica it sounds more like Black Sabbath while slowed down Slayer or Anthrax sounds quite different, so I feel there may be a hard physical evidence for my theory. I found it a bit odd you didn't have this aspect written in the statements about differences between speed metal and thrash metal.
I do like and agree that you put Slayer - Necrophiliac under the development of death metal. Though by those same accounts I'd have moved Kreator - Ripping Corpse from the thrash column to the death metal column, but that's just a personal line.
I also feel your tech death is biased too much toward 2000s rather than stuff like Sadus, Demilich or Disciples of Power.
Absolutely loved the inclusion of death n roll, one of my favorite substyles.
YeGoblynQueenne
today at 9:21 PM
Well, sped-up Cathedral sounds like Bathory so... I don't know what that's physical evidence of? But I accept your theory as a valid theory, just because there's a test for it, even though I don't understand what the test shows.
hardbass
today at 10:14 PM
I think Cathedral is closer to death metal structure in my personal view compared to classic Black Sabbath, so that should not be too surprising. My test is simple, the history of thrash itself shows a lot of it coming from combining hardcore punk influence directly to metal, a lot of old thrash feels to me having mild to overt hardcore sections or riffs at points. And I think that's the aspect that gives thrash its political themes and more direct lyrics compared to the more fantasy or generic bragging style of older metal.
Your map was very formative for me when I was exploring metal, thanks a lot !
I would love for this Map to be expanded to modern subgenres. There are lot's of subgenres that completely changed in the last decades (notably, the *cores and the tech* ...)
And it's definitely missing Thall (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtV9pcHh8vM). :D
This is an awesome visualization. I have always enjoyed 'structural taxonomies' as a way of visualizing data relationships. I appreciate you keeping it alive.
I was looking through this, seeing the years radius and having my expectations validated/refuted was really fun! Lots of yeah but no, or no way but yeah? The curation of it is really respectable no matter my own taste and that is something that is in real low stock. Thanks for making my day and I'll add a few respectful issues when I can
Starman_Jones
today at 6:08 PM
This was hugely influential on a younger me! I remember tracing forward and backwards from the bands I liked, finding and checking out new bands at every stop. Thank you!
Semaphor
today at 12:53 PM
Any chance to get a high resolution photo of the sketchbook version? Would love to also have a look at that :)
owlninja
today at 12:21 PM
Very nice! As soon as I saw the landing page and the loading/start button I immediately thought of Flash.
glenstein
today at 12:04 PM
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.
If you switch to the desktop version in the menu it works fine
pjgalbraith
today at 12:12 PM
Sorry about that. Its definitely a desktop kinda experience anyway.
I see you chose the superior version of 43% Burnt by Dillinger. It blows my mind that he never became the new vocalist.
Maps, a great way to present music. Congrats for the work, brought back fond memories.
So glad you took the time to keep the site alive!
GuinansEyebrows
today at 3:12 PM
i haven't seen this since the flash days. so cool. glad you ported it so it's still accessible!