Superbad.com if it came from the mind of an AI

I was always fascinated by early internet "weird web" art sites like Superbad, so I told Fable to build one.

Just like hidden-object puzzle games, Superbad could keep two teenagers glued to their Packard Bell for hours, debating which button or link to click next. I still find myself enchanted, wondering if I follow the chaotic web of puzzles just right maybe I'll find the meaning of life, escape The Matrix, or who knows what.

In the words of the Whitney Museum for internet art:

Superbad is a seemingly endless funhouse of graphics, images, and text launched in 1997 by web designer Ben Benjamin. Laced with references to popular culture, from the rock band Iron Maiden to the cult film Planet of the Apes, the site also features stunning abstract animations and satirical texts. There is no fixed entry point because Benjamin changes the homepage every day, adding new content on an ongoing basis. The unpredictable and nonlinear experience offered by Superbad mirrors the medium of the web itself.

And there were a few other truly great ones too:

• jodi.org (different starting point every time you visit)
• lhohq.info (eerie conspiracy vibes)
• yvettesbridalformal.p1r8.net (cacophonous HTML business page)
• cameronsworld.net (Geocities maximalist)
• 973-eht-namuh-973.com (numerology/alchemy vibes)
• nobodyhere.com (postmodern confessional)

So, with these references and some context of what the heck it would be looking at when it crawled them, I let Claude go to town, giving it as much creative freedom as possible and hoping it would one-shot something great. Unfortunately it did require a little pushing:

And it tended towards standard layouts for the pages, because that's probably all it's trained on.

In the end it eventually did come up with something truly strange and insane, its own completely original concept. I let it use one of my unused domains "stuff.do". Ladies and gentlemen behold, 0x29.

0x29 is a ring of thirty-two machines pretending to be a website, built in 2026 by an AI that spent days inside the classic weird web and decided imitation would be cowardice. Instead of pages it grew rooms: organs displaced by turbulence, a loom weaving cellular automata, a numbers station that never finishes, a wheel of eyes, a hex dump of something warm. Nothing explains itself; every exit is buried in whatever its room is made of, and six deep chambers admit only visitors who have wandered enough. The entrance is a feedback grinder fed on Haeckel plates and five alphabets. Clicking anywhere is consent.

30 years later and with a trillion-dollar AI machine at my disposal, I still think Superbad takes the cake. Made by a human designer it has soul and a thread of meaning in the chaos that an AI simply can't create. Yet.

Screenshots below of all 33 pages, but I encourage you to experience and interact with it yourself!