A few days ago, it was announced that Glitch.com is effectively shutting down.

Others closer to it have written more about the details:

• jenn schiffer: on ‘important changes coming to glitch’
• Keith K: The End of Glitch (Even Though They Say It Isn’t)

It’s quite sad! Glitch made it extremely easy to publish and get interesting things out there. It’s what I would have recommended to anyone trying to create anything unique.

I’m struck that this announcement comes at a time when we’re seeing an unprecedented abstraction of the creation process: now you can type some prose into an LLM-powered generator like bolt.new or repli.it, and receive functioning code.

But removing the craftsmanship from the creation process itself reduces the output to a mere utility. It removes the process as a form of expression, of refinement.

Today I was looking through my browser history for Glitches, and found one that is effectively a diaristic essay expressed through the browser’s console.log debugging tools by (presumably) identikitten.

I do not know her and cannot remember how this glitch came my way (Twitter, probably, before it turned to X). But it’s obvious to me that this work exists to help the artist process a memory, an emotion, a feeling. It doesn’t matter which, specifically. It’s art. But can you imagine if she’d just entered into bolt.new:

Make a terminal inspired web page that uses the browser’s console.log to output text to the user. The theme is identity and self-actualization, and should be told in a confessional style. There should be ambient background sound effects of a serene night. Accompany each text sequence with a textmode-animated image starting with some clouds and …

Pretty gross if someone tried to pass it off as personal art!

Maybe, if someone wrote pages and pages of text, detailing each moment of an interactive work, I’d be more amenable. This follows the principle I’ve discovered with LLMs in practice: if you put more into them than what they’d output, it can be eligible as a creative endeavor. Because you worked through the process and gained more than just the output.

I think Glitch was a platform that forced you to work through the process. And it relied on people to be the collective “brain” you could build upon through remixing: someone more experienced could make a Glitch that enabled someone less experienced to remix it and express themselves. It seemed to place its faith in people, in community.

Anyway. I was not very prolific on Glitch, but wanted to preserve what I’d made regardless. Here is a short listing and where to find each:

Image Melter

• Original
• Self-hosted / latest

Sometime in early March 2018 I think I was reading about DOOM, or maybe I was playing Castlevania? Or I was learning about fast inverse square-root… or maybe I was reading something from Fabien Sanglard? It’s hard to remember. But I wanted to learn how they did the screen wipe effect as a transition between various game elements. So I built it and themed it like a somewhat period-appropriate DOS application.

It works on mobile too, although since the resolution of photos is so large you have to give the GIF Encoder enough time. Perhaps one day I’ll speed it up! (and convert it to typescript and update dependencies and migrate to vite 🤦).

Alone.io

Code

Written in one night, June 20, 2018, after a lunchtime conversation. “How would you know if you were the only person left alive on the planet?” Maybe it’s looking at a website that others are looking at.

I didn’t spend enough time to solve the problem of differentiating between viewing and signaling. A view of the page shouldn’t cause it to tell you that you are not alone! It had to have been a different IP or a separate button or something. As usual, my indecision killed the project before it really started.

Card Adventure

Code

I had been playing T.I.M.E. Stories, and was interested in a programmable version of that system where you could slot in decks that somehow contained logic. Additionally, I felt there was a simpler version hidden in Redux Saga’s patterns that could enable these decks. I expanded on that in a later (or earlier??) github project. Around March 14 - 18th 2018 I prototyped it on Glitch, using an obtuse text adventure style. Not really worth looking at, it’s just here for posterity.

Fun fact though: we played every “white cycle” T.I.M.E. Stories scenario as a (mostly) New Year’s Eve tradition. We started on Dec 31, 2017, and finished on March 12, 2022. As a reason to be with people you love, it’s great. But it’s not a good game.