Humor Tree

1999–2000

The original Humor Tree was a turn-of-the century internet art project developed at the tail end of my high school career for entry in the annual senior-year art competition hosted by the Longview Museum of Fine Arts in Longview, Texas.

Despite the enthusiastic support of an art teacher* at the school, the director* of the museum itself, and the generous sponsorship of the local Best Buy, this project was barred from that competition first by the administrators of Longview High School and then by the assistant superintendent of the school district, all because I refused to remove a mild swear and a handful of disembodied (and almost entirely male) nipples.

All of the code was written very badly by a novice programmer for very old web browsers, using what were then cutting-edge Web programming techniques which are now mostly outdated and/or broken.

In the intervening decades (!!!) I have made minimal updates to try to keep things working in modern browsers while retaining the (awful) character of the original code, but there is undoubtedly still some brokenness throughout.

(Oh, and expect approximately none of this to work on your phone. Best viewed in a good old fashioned desktop browser, the way God intended.)

Anyway, here it is. Start at the beginning and try to navigate all the way to the end, or jump to individual pages in order below:

  1. ht 👈 start here
  2. squares
  3. circles
  4. drugs
  5. nipples
  6. will
  7. no
  8. liberty
  9. this_is
  10. kid *
  11. colors
  12. bricks
  13. swear
  14. fotograf
  15. smalltype
  16. herman
  17. reminder *
  18. grid
  19. voyeur
  20. frames
  21. ill-fated
  22. stripes
  23. dim_the_lights
  24. will2
  25. end

2000–2007 or so?

After high school, I kept pushing small bits of art and web programming experimentation up from time to time.

  1. colorfade01
  2. image
  3. math
  4. organic01
  5. colorfade02
  6. lines01
  7. gradients
  8. raindrops
  9. texture
  10. physics01
  11. physics02
  12. physics03
  13. organic04
  14. lines02
  15. cruthers
  16. peinter
  17. flock02
  18. lines03
  19. flock03

Old home pages

As with any good side project, I wasted a lot of time redesigning the home page every few months/years.

  1. Version 1 ~ 1999
  2. Version 2 ~ 2000
  3. Version 3 ~ 2000
  4. Version 4 ~ 2001
  5. Version 5 ~ April 2001
  6. Version 6 ???
  7. Version 7 ~ February 2002
  8. Version 8 ~ June 2002
  9. Version 9 ~ April 2003
  10. Version 10 December 18, 2009
  11. Version 11 (you're looking at it)June 20, 2022

See Also

Miscellaneous related projects, offshoots, etc.

  1. Public Service Announcements
  2. The Humor Tree Design Coalition
  3. Sketches, a kind of spiritual successor to Humor Tree, I guess?