January 2024 on Glitch: Weird and Wonderful
By Jenn Turner

February 9, 2024

January 2024 on Glitch: Weird and Wonderful

If the first month of 2024 had anything to prove, it was definitely that weirdness, in all of its shapes and forms, is here to stay! Which is good because the web is weird, and we are here for it. So let’s celebrate all of that creativity and funk with a quick look back at January 2024 on Glitch.

Last Year on Glitch ✨ #

Each year we ask the community which projects truly elevated their Glitch experience, and the result of that celebration is called Last Year on Glitch. If you haven’t checked out the winners and honorable mentions yet, let them be your guide for creating a LYOG 2024 worthy app this year!

The Community is coding! 🍓 #

Also, late last year we rolled out our version of community hackathons, called Community Code Jams! Unlike a hackathon, we hold them every month, and encourage the community to participate in building something based on a new creative prompt. For fun. When was the last time you did something for fun?

In January, the community created their own stylesheets based on the prompt “Your Dream Default Stylesheet.” You can see the submissions on this Glitch app, but I had to include my favorite, a Golden Girls themed one created by @suesmith. If google.com looked like this, I wouldn’t mind scrolling through all of the worthless results because at least the Golden Girls theme song would be playing in my head.

Join us, most Fridays when Community Director Jenn Schiffer has been livestreaming, called Glitch Jams Live! And most of that time is spent highlighting creator projects, talking about beverages, and Jenn live coding her submissions for each month’s prompt. 2pm Eastern Time, Fridays, be there!!

💎 The Jewels of January 💎 #

~draw-her-a-drawer, created by @ShannonLin and @bwasti1, featured above. Not going to lie, I tried to write “glitch” and “cool” and “web” before settling on “lol” for this post’s header image. What words can you come up with?? (It’s harder than you think!)

~thing-internet, created by @lzmunch is the weird web browser you’ve been missing. My favorite is ~worm-internet.

~randomised-permutation-chart-curves, created by @christianp, is an experiment that asks how the curves joining points in a permutation chart are chosen.

~quincy-jelly, created by @24amesquir is a fun 2d softbody simulation with sticky blobs where YOU get to control gravity. Take that, Sir Ike!

This trippy music video, created by @n.hieda, uses Hydra and Choo, and was submitted to The Gallery, on our community forum – definitely a thing you should do if you have projects/apps you want us to share!

If you love Geoguessr, check out ~map-master-mp, created by @ctat684, which is a multi-player guessing game that comes with several modes (Street Mode anyone?) including single-player.

~literally-every-mountain-dew-flavor by @multiplegamesman is a—you guessed it—exhaustive list of every (non-diet) flavor of Mountain Dew known to humankind. Which one is the worst? If you think it’s Pitch Black, you’re wrong (it’s Flamin’ Hot).

~25cities, created by @mapsmania is a new map game where you name America’s 25 largest cities. I’ve played this three times while writing this and the most I got was 15 cities, where the heck is El Paso????

We all know that http stands for hypertext transfer protocol and www stands for world wide web (...or maybe we don’t, I grew up in a house with a techie dad. Ask me how my eighth grade presentation on search engines in 1996 was received when I had to follow the most popular girl in school’s preso on how to apply nail polish perfectly) but can you identify the parts of a URL address? The answer is yes you can, with ~url-parts, made by @samdutton and @tunetheweb. Impress your friends the next time they send you a link by telling them they can leave everything after the filename off, because friends don’t send friends long links with the search parameters still on…unless that info can be applied to a discount. 🤔 Don’t listen to me, I’m just an English major.

Finally, ~slime-or-goo, by @Rulesobeyer poses a very important question for these trying times. ✨ *together we will achieve the unthinkable *✨

Don’t sleep on these fun finds 👏 #

If you haven’t yet, follow us across the open social web 🌐

One last January thought ☺️ #

Finally, I leave you with ~k457, created by @Betx9, which is inspired by Nam June Paik’s K-456 Robot, one of the pioneers of generative and digital art. Using your camera, ~k457 detects a person’s body and projects it onto a digital canvas, showing the exact coordinates of various parts of their anatomy in a colorful, geometric composition, creating a surreal, dystopian atmosphere that I played with for way too long. Enjoy!