This genre was called ‘desktop toys’ 30 years ago.
Here is an example from 1995. https://archive.org/details/desktoptoys_201911
Yes, I remember a cute cat living on my desktop, chasing my cursor. Somebody on mastodon also linked to https://kickassapp.com/ - an asteroid game where you destroy DOM elements on websites, a project from 2011.
Somehow the web got very serious lately..
Most probably it was Neko toy.
I've definitely been enjoying the sort of mini-comeback desktop toys have had in recent years as little JavaScript scripts on tech people's personal blogs (like oneko.js: https://github.com/adryd325/oneko.js/). If I was a little more cold-hearted I might find it annoying and distracting, but I just love when folks do silly stuff on personal websites to make them feel more "personal" like they did in the early-mid 2000s.
This is implemented with just the right amount of delay/speed to be cute and not annoying. If it was flying around faster and closer to my mouse cursor, I would hate it.
Further nice early examples are xroach and xeyes.
More directly, I recall there used to be a website that allowed you to unit another website and then destroy/deface it with multiple tools. Lasers, bombs, things like that. Disappointingly I can't seem to find a trace of it.
Reminds me of "The Langoliers"
My first exposure to a toy app like this was called face.com (.com was the file extension for an executable, not a domain name). It was a DOS program that made these face text characters (Code-Page-437) walk around on your text console, while you could still interact with your console. This was the late 1980s before Windows.
The were two controls (besides add/remove faces) that I can remember, one made the faces all gather together in a big clump. One made them dance in a circle wherever they were currently on the screen.
Loved this, it’s silly fun on the surface but there’s something satisfying about reclaiming agency. Those cursors tearing away dark text areas feel symbolic, like pushing back on pages that are overwhelming or tedious.
It’s a playful twist on UI customization, not about automating or filtering content but about physically “eating” it. Makes me rethink how subtle interactions can change our feeling toward the web we spend hours staring at.
Absolutely, I feel like there is a lack of expressivity on the web – sure, I can upvote, comment, block/report or go away, but that's basically it. I can't frown, toss thing off the table, spit, grunt, roll eyes, look away, listen intently, nervously touch my face or fidget with my keys. At least not in any socially significant way. And as we spend so much time online, our expressiveness also kind of gets filtered down to the tools that are available. Not bodily expression but a few very limited gestures. So maybe we can imagine and create new gestures?
My other project was about a similar question - what if our emotional life gets reduced to the emojis provided to us by facebook? This was from 2018 so AI images were very new then :) https://rybakov.com/blog/zuckerberg_emojis/
And another, more productive approach was to look at gestures available in the physical library of Sitterwerk St.Gallen and translate it to the digital world. This was before tab groups landed in the main browsers (and tbh. the implementation is still not great): https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/
Pixel Piranhas looks interesting—love the name! Is this open source or still in early access?
There's something poetic about MrBeast being consumed by digital piranhas.
less expensive than punching your screen
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