Hacker News

140 points by robin_reala 3 hours ago | 39 comments

Didn't expect to see something I made on HN while my wife is trying to find something to watch on TV.

So about the site in case anyone is interested. I made it with a friend who was studying multimedia. He helped with the data and I did the coding. Took about a week or two.

The site was originally Flash (remember that). But I ported it to HTML5 a few years ago. It still has those Flash vibes I think. Posted the code to GitHub when I ported it. I did this mostly to keep it alive for old times sake.

So about the mobile support. I planned to do it but got sidetracked building a custom WebGL map renderer because phone performance was poor. However I never finished, life finds a way to get in the way and all that... I have some mobile designs lying around.

The other issue was when I first built the site YouTube didn't really play ads much at all, just those little text ads, and you could embed the player really tiny. So it worked better. In the original flash version I actually hid the video player. But that got the site blacklisted from YouTube, I asked a Google engineer on a dev forum to put a word in and they removed the block, very different times, this was back when Google was a different beast, and you could chat to real people online and the dev communities were much smaller.

I have a illustration of a much bigger map in my sketchbook. It has a lot more subgenres and interconnected things like historical events and so on. But it's huge unfolded, like 2x1.5m or something ridiculous.

I miss those days when the web was full of weird and experimental stuff. I grew up with Newgrounds and Geocities, I'm sure it's all still out there buried under a giant pile of SEO optimised refuse.

goykasi 47 seconds ago

I see you chose the superior version of 43% Burnt by Dillinger. It blows my mind that he never became the new vocalist.

bfeist 2 hours ago

Thanks so much for this write up. It’s not often thought of that when you put something weird and experimental online just for fun that you’re signing up for years of careing and feeding. But that’s also kind of nice, it makes you go engage with your cool thing long after your impulse drove you to make it.

This is a cool thing. I hope you enjoyed remembering about it again today.

networked 15 minutes ago

> It still has those Flash vibes I think.

Can confirm. Repository: https://github.com/patrickgalbraith/mapofmetal.

Semaphor 32 minutes ago

Any chance to get a high resolution photo of the sketchbook version? Would love to also have a look at that :)

marapuru 50 minutes ago

Very awesome. Thanks for sharing and for making this. Reminds me of the Metal Evolution documentary by BangerTV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmiqVYZHTIQ&list=PLgzW3ulw6T...

owlninja 2 hours ago

Very nice! As soon as I saw the landing page and the loading/start button I immediately thought of Flash.

glenstein 2 hours ago

Absolutely fantastic project! I completely understand you've got other things going on, but for me on Firefox mobile, I'm seeing a YouTube pop-up window for Black Sabbath and I don't see any obvious way to close it.

pjgalbraith 2 hours ago

Sorry about that. Its definitely a desktop kinda experience anyway.

dot_treo 2 hours ago

Reminds me very much of https://music.ishkur.com/ which is the same kind of thing but for electronic music.

TwoNineA 2 hours ago

Great map. There might be some categories missing, couldn't find any Katatonia, Agalloch, Alcest nor Tiamat. Alcest and some Deftones are considered blackgaze and Agalloch, Wolves in the Throne Room fall more into grey metal.

yawgmoth 32 minutes ago

It's interesting because some of these bands are older than these terms. Alcest wasn't considered blackgaze until albums inspired by their own sound became popular, for example.

Metal also has history where a genre is aesthetically defined as well as sonically, which complicates things.

kubanczyk 10 minutes ago

I see Tiamat at Goth Metal.

deppep 8 minutes ago

i also made something like this. it cover 17M entities across tracks albums artists and labels. posted on show hn a few times but it went unnoticed (hate u :()

https://toposonico.com/#lon=14.4313&lat=-1.0200&z=9.10&entit...

broken-kebab 11 minutes ago

Looks great! However I'm not sure how it is supposed to work. Like, should it play doom when I click doom? For me it started with Black Sabbath, and it doesn't change

kgarten 16 minutes ago

Reminded me a bit on the design space of Metal logos: https://renecutura.eu/metalvis/

lashull 14 minutes ago

This website has instantly more relevance than 50% of the online news outlets out there.

ethical 12 minutes ago

There is no need for anything else, on the Internet.

Thaxll 30 minutes ago

Not sure why there is Swedish death metal when Melodic Death exists.

BoggleOhYeah 25 minutes ago

Swedish death is a specific sound like Entombed, which is fairly different than melo-death bands like In Flames.

Wiles_7 54 minutes ago

Reminds me of the works of Ward Shelley. Especially his History of Science Fiction.

https://www.artsy.net/artwork/ward-shelley-history-of-scienc...

leopoldj 16 minutes ago

Most awesome site ever created.

meerita 2 hours ago

The song "Ten Ton Hammer" from Machine Head is not right: it's showing another song. Besides that, fun experience!

gegtik 55 minutes ago

Took awhile to figure out clicking the skull is the interactive element, I kept clicking the text label and nothing was happening

dwa3592 42 minutes ago

Love it. gonna be listening yardbirds all day today. The map also feels like a jeans.

scrumper 2 hours ago

Very nice work of art. (I don't really like the bullets though, they don't seem very metal-y to me. Scythes maybe, or flensing knives.)

It might be fun to have a sort of gazetteer for the map so we can find bands.

where-group-by 7 minutes ago

It's common enough that they are sold as an accessory. Search for "metal bullet belt".

Kelteseth 16 minutes ago

Nu Metal not having any Linkin Park songs is a crime.

dajonker 14 minutes ago

Mike Shinoda is fine with not being classified as Nu Metal https://blabbermouth.net/news/linkin-parks-mike-shinoda-says...

ltsSmitty 9 minutes ago

beautifully done!

busfahrer 2 hours ago

Seeing as this is HN, I was expecting something on chemical properties of iron etc, but was pleasantly surprised

dude250711 43 minutes ago

Grateful it's not an agentic start-up.

a3w 2 hours ago

To be excapt: This is a Mäp of Metäl, no hair was cut in making the map.

mr_mitm 2 hours ago

As a German, metal umlauts look so confusing

voidUpdate 43 minutes ago

m̈ëẗäl̈ üm̈l̈äüẗs̈ (awww, you can't put an umlaut on a space) (oh wow the HM font does not like what I just did. It looks fine in the monospace font)

Lapalux 45 minutes ago

Where would Mastodon be on this?

dandare 2 hours ago

This is amazing! But I need SEARCH feature :)

Btw, the map interface is very well implemented, what is it based on?

keraf 2 hours ago

Looking at the source, it seems to be using OpenSeadragon[0].

[0] https://openseadragon.github.io/

pjmlp 2 hours ago

Now that is a great map!