Post an intriguing project you found on the internet

[milkanannan]

I was going to start a thread dedicated to Umami's Interface (see below), but when I got to writing this opening post I realised what I really wanted was to ask this community for other interesting relics encountered online. So just for some fun - please reply to this thread with the weird, inspiring, spiritual, confusing and/or thought-provoking projects you've come across on the world wide web. Could be any build type -- a game, movie, bit of writing, photo collection, website, community, art collection, etc -- I think we should be OK to share most media so long as it doesn't step outside the forum's content guidelines (for reference: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/faq/).

OK so a quick step back to Interface. I came across this project during COVID lockdowns when its creator (Umami) was building it in short snippets and publishing these as the project was being made. I just found (and still find) the art style, original characters, slow pacing and music to be intriguing and a welcomed break from reality. Umami also did some cool live streams that let you peek behind the curtain and see how everything was made - all of this as-it-happens media put a very cool meta spin on the work. I really enjoyed feeling like I knew the creator and knew the process that went into the build.

For those interested, the project has been threaded together and published as a whole to YouTube:

Even threaded together, the narrative can be a bit hard to follow (at least for a dense person like me), so if it's helpful this Redditor's grouping of the themes and interpretation of the story gives a good point of reference:

Spoiler

"Without going too in-depth with exploring the many deeper meanings, contexts, imagery, symbolism, ideas, and interpretations of the series, here is my attempt at a summary of the objective story plot of Umami's Interface series.

In 1943, a military vessel in Philadelphia tested what was described to the crew as an experimental stealth cloaking technology, I would assume it was likely quantum mechanical in nature. The device malfunctioned in some way, having massively unintended effects and consequences for the crew and the world. This device triggered some cascading event that revealed a new force to the world, "cerebral electricity". This cerebral electricity can be thought of in a few ways, as lifeforce, as a soul, but primarily, it is essentially the physical energy of consciousness. It is generated by living things, and released when they die. It is not known whether this event was local to the Earth, or perhaps a shift of a universal scale. As a result of the 1943 incident- The Philadelphia Experiment, most of the crew was fused with the ship and died. There were three survivors, Henryk Niebieski, Percy(Mischief), and Joseph Greetings. Percy technically died in his original human form and instance, but was able to "regain his physicality" and became a new form of entity composed of and emerging from cerebral electricity- Mischief. Mischief, however, was not the only one. These spectral cerebral entities began to manifest all over the earth, and the world was plagued by ghosts and monsters, and the skies and seas changed to alien colors. One of the survivors, Greetings, founded the Greetings robotics corporation, which studied cerebral electricity and analyzed its nature. With this, they created KAMI, a machine to hunt cerebral entities, harvest their cerebral electricity, and catalogue it. Its next task was to upload this data to a flying database called the mechanical saccorhytus (and presumably into the lighthouse, which might have come first). Humanity used technology to harness the new force, and drove back the specters, though some found ways to integrate and hide within the city(ies). Henryk was left in an odd state by the incident, trapped somewhere between life and death, and now immortal, lost in time. It is unknown whether his being mute is voluntary, or a result of this transformation. Many of these cerebral beings had various powers and properties, such as Mischief's shapeshifting, and more importantly, his ability to absorb cerebral electricity. These powers once taken into the Greetings Robotics database can be replicated, hence the mass-production, and utilization of ghost-hands that takes place in the series. The rest is how Henryk, Mischief, and Greetings' pasts and personal lives tie into the entire saga. Greetings has some vision of merging all cerebral electricity into a single form, perhaps to ascend or evolve to something like godhood, or perhaps to "save" all the minds that had been lost. Thus, he builds the vessel, KAMI collects, and eventually, Greetings dies and allows his own cerebral electricity to be absorbed as well. His creation is born, an amalgamation of a million minds, his homunculus god. The irony is, he purged the world of perceived monsters, only to create a greater one- it can be extrapolated that it would continue to seek out all sources of cerebral electricity, which may mean destroying the city, and even killing all life to absorb. Ultimately, Mischief sacrifices himself to sabotage it. The two gods collide, though the exact outcome is left ambiguous. As far we know, the world returns to some sort of normal, though it is still forever changed."

[close]

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/umamiyt/comments/q9pub9/an_explaination_of_interfaces_plot/


Looking forward to seeing what other projects people care to share....