My trip through the Starmaze: a world in the 9th dimension

There are times when I get tired of all of the major sites and apps that make up a lot of the seen Internet. Sadly, I was born too late to experience the wonder of Geocities and intricate handmade websites run by just a single person. But, on some evenings, I still search for those smaller websites that no one else normally sees. I find the wonder of coming across hidden blogs and pages really fun.

It was a night like this when I stumbled across John Cartans writing about the Starmaze last year, and I quickly became fascinated. Unlike every other corner of the web, Cartans website wasnt trying to sell me a useless product or tell me about news Ive already heard a dozen times. It was instead a series of journal-like recordings about some strange discovery that he called the Starmaze.

It started with a game he had come across on a computer years ago that involved a square divided into nine sections where each section could be turned on or off. The game began with the middle section of the grid turned on, and the outer eight sections turned off. Clicking one of the sections would turn on/off other parts of the grid in a predictable way, but you could only click the sections that were already turned on. The goal was to click the sections in a way to end up with the outer eight squares turned on, and the innermost square turned off.

Being interested in games myself, this sounded familiar to me immediately. Read the rest