While debugging Qirina, I rediscovered a joy I'd forgotten since 1997 - the joy of surfing around the web at random and discovering quirky, cool, or awesome sites. You can't really surf around anymore because people tend to hoard their links, sites are over-SEO'd money-making machines, and links from blog posts are paid posts. StumbleUpon tries to address the situation but I've always hated the way they force everything into narrow categories and mix extremely old pages with fresher stuff. I never intended it, but, surprisingly, by randomly clicking around Qirina I came across quite a few fascinating sites. Qirina finds websites adjacent to other websites in the keyspace, and displays only the domain name. These are amongst the dozens that caught my eye:
girlswithhairyarms.net
illustrationserved.com
eboizi.com
I had a minor shock at girlswithhairyarms.net. I confess that I, too, could scarcely conceal my distaste for women with hirsute forearms. It never occurred to me that the girls were going through so much suffering. It completely changed my outlook, and I have gone from a discriminatory bigot to someone who is no longer put off by arm hair. Thank you to the website for bringing about a mindshift!
illustrationserved.com is an offshoot from behance.net and much better. There is some amazingly good artwork on that site.
Lastly, eboizi.com is fascinating to a web developer like me. It's a high-street men's fashion boutique that will dispatch staff to deliver items to you, with extra items in case the sizes are wrong. What's so amazing about that? Well, nothing, except that it's located in Lagos, Nigeria. The website is refined, and crafted to extremely high standards. And the concept is bold and creative. It probably won't take off because people go shopping at high street clothiers for the ambience, the brightly lit interiors, and the fawning staff - i.e. to get out of the house - but the fact that someone was willing to try shows how dynamic Lagos has become.
I would never have found any of these sites via Google or any other conventional means. Try surf around on Qirina, pay attention to the domain names, and drop me a line if you find something that blew your mind.
