Welcome to the ninth issue of ELPiS. June 2025.
This time, a little late. This issue will be a little unusual - more nostalgia, more tears, more humor, I missed a little with the theoretical part, and the historical one, but I hope this will be compensated in future. Issues will be published less frequently now: it all depends on how many materials are sent. Sometimes articles come by themselves, and sometimes you have to correspond with authors for a long time, edit, explain - not because the texts are bad, but because it is not immediately possible to "get the style". But it's simple: read a couple of issues - and you will understand what voice this magazine speaks in.
I want more of your articles and stories than mine
I want the magazine to be common property
I wrote quite often on social networks, advertised ELPiS, posted quotes, shared links. But, to tell the truth, I did not find any readers or interest there. Likes are not important to me. Your personal opinion is important to me - a letter, a message, feedback. After all, you are the one who is nostalgic for that old Internet: for cozy websites, for horizontal scrolling, for stars in the background, for “about me” pages and guest books. You say that this Internet has been taken away by corporations. But… what are you doing to bring it back?
Very often I read something like this on social networks: “I created a website on Neocities, but no one visits it. It seemed pointless to me.” But a website is not an artifact. It is a process. In order for people to visit it, you need to talk about it. You need to be persistent. You need to appear on forums, in chats, leave links, participate in conversations. You can’t just “make a website” and leave, hoping that someone will find it by chance. It’s work. It’s responsibility. And, frankly, very few are ready for it.
The problem is not the lack of interest, but the lack of action. Most people just complain. But you can’t just whine. You need to do. At least something. Modern society has forgotten how to see something real in websites. A website is not a post on Facebook, not a story that will disappear. It is your trace. Your exhalation. Your thought, formatted in HTML. You came up with it. You drew it. You laid it out and filled it. And only you can tell the world about it. Not search engines (they don’t benefit from knowing about you). Not algorithms. But you.
The small web is not nostalgia. It is a choice. It is a position. It is resistance to noise. When you are your own editor, designer, censor, publisher. When you make a website that no one asked for, and you made it anyway — because there is no other way.
This issue — like all the previous ones — was made on the fly. But with soul. Without an editorial plan, without a theme. Simply because otherwise these texts would not have been written. There are reflections, memories, silence and a little confusion. But all this is real.
Thanks to those who continue to make websites. To those who write letters and articles (unfortunately, there are no articles from other authors in this issue, I hope this will change). To those who place a link to us on their pages. To those who understand that the word "alternative" is not a fashionable term, but a conscious decision. Thank you.
I will once again comment in the guest about the latest issue, I am curious about your opinion on how the magazine is developing, do you like its development?
Welcome to June! Welcome to ELPiS!
— ELPiS Magazine, June 2025.
Table of contents:
- Gnutella, or a network without a center
- Splash Pages: How the Internet Tried to Be Beautiful, but Went A Bit Overboard
- About computer game rooms.
- A dream doomed to a bug report (or why the Great RetroProject will never happen)
- Carpet-tv
Epilogue
Gnutella, or a network without a center
When I think back to the early 2000s, I remember the special atmosphere of discovery that the Internet provided. It was a time when digital freedom seemed limitless, and every new software or protocol opened doors to the unknown. That was when I first encountered Gnutella, a network that changed my understanding of how information exchange could work.
I learned about it on one of the tech forums I used to visit via modem. Someone mentioned "a new thing, like Napster, only without a center." I was hooked right away. I had already used Napster, exchanged MP3s, felt this spirit of digital brotherhood, until one day, as if by a click, Napster was closed. A void appeared - and in it, out of nowhere, Gnutella was born.
The idea was both simple and revolutionary. There was no main server, no control center. Everyone who connected became an equal participant in the network. It was like an anthill, where millions of users simultaneously searched, sent, and received files. Requests flew across the network like waves, and somewhere on the other side of the world there was a person who had the file I needed.
We didn’t know each other, we had never communicated directly, but at that moment we were connected.
My first Gnutella client was BearShare. The interface was simple, even rough, but this only enhanced the feeling that you were working with something real. I typed in the search: “Massive Attack”, “Rage Against the Machine”, “Nightwish”. A few seconds later, lists of files appeared with the user’s nickname, connection speed, number of slots. I chose — and waited. Sometimes the download was interrupted, sometimes everything went smoothly. This also had its own romance.
At that time, there was no cloud, no convenient Spotify. If you needed a rare recording, a strange video, a hack of an old game or an archive of computer magazine scans - you went to Gnutella. And almost always found it.
One of my first really big finds was a rare bootleg of a 1997 Radiohead concert in Rome. 320 megabytes, which I downloaded for three days. The connection often dropped, and I started over. But when I finally heard this atmospheric, live, fragile sound - I realized that it was worth it. I then dumped this file on a CD-R and, like many other finds.
What especially fascinated me was the network architecture itself. I began to understand the protocols, read the specifications. Gnutella used the so-called flood request: your request is sent out over the network, like light in a foggy room, reflecting and dying after a certain number of hops. It was inefficient, but simple and worked. Then there were improvements: Gnutella2, proxy nodes, caching. But the basic idea remained — no center, no authority, just equal nodes sharing what they had.
Of course, there were problems. The network was overloaded, viruses and malicious files appeared. But even this seemed natural: like in any living organism, there was a struggle, and every vulnerability was solved. The community lived: discussed, argued, suggested patches. I watched these discussions, it was interesting to watch the development. This was one of the first experiences of real network democracy.
Over time, I began to notice how Gnutella affected my perception of the Internet. It ceased to be a shop window or a library. It became a street, a market, an anarchic bazaar, where everyone could be both a seller and a buyer. I later saw this principle in other projects — BitTorrent, Freenet, Tor. But for me, it all started with Gnutella. Now the Internet is like a huge rural village with gossips, it was different before.
In 2005, I was still using Gnutella, although its popularity was declining. Faster and more convenient solutions were appearing. But that's when I realized: it wasn't about speed. It was about principle. In this network, no one could turn off the switch. No one could say: "This file shouldn't be here." It was a digital version of free speech. And it worked.
Sometimes it seemed to me that Gnutella was like a guerrilla network, an elusive structure that lived in defiance of the rules. People exchanged files. Someone had an old TV series, someone had a documentary, someone had a set of scans of old radio circuits. All this circulated. And even if one node disappeared, the network continued to live.
Of course, there were funny cases. Once I was looking for a rare track of a group. I found it, started downloading it - and got a whole album of some pop diva from Brazil. Apparently, someone made a mistake with the tags. Or was deliberately joking.
Over the years, I switched to other technologies. Torrents appeared, online libraries, then streaming. But the spirit of Gnutella remained with me. Sometimes I meet people who remember it. We exchange nostalgic phrases: "Do you remember LimeWire?", "Have you downloaded via Shareaza?" (LimeWire in this case was more like a fishing rod that was thrown out to ask if you were a Linux user). It's like the cry of old scouts: you instantly understand what's in front of you. Person from the same era.
Today, in the era of centralized platforms, we face new challenges: censorship, manipulation, data leakage. And in this context, the idea of Gnutella sounds relevant again. We need to remember that the Internet can be different. Not under the control of corporations, but under the control of the users themselves.
Perhaps one day someone will create a new Gnutella - faster, safer, more energy efficient. But the principle must remain: each participant is a part of the whole, and no one is more important than the other. We are all nodes in a large network connected not only by cables, but also by an idea.
And when I again hear the music from “that concert”, downloaded many years ago via BearShare, I feel more than just nostalgia. I feel proud to have been part of this movement. For the fact that once, albeit briefly, we were all equal. And exchanged not only files, but also faith in a better digital future.
This was Gnutella. This is how it remains in my memory.
With the development of the Internet and the emergence of streaming services like Spotify and Netflix, Gnutella's popularity has waned. However, its legacy lives on in modern decentralized systems like BitTorrent and IPFS. The idea of freely exchanging information without centralized control remains relevant today.
Although Gnutella has long since fallen out of favor, it left a significant mark on the history of the Internet, showing that it is possible to create a network where every participant is equal and information circulates freely without centralized control.
I don't know if the network itself will survive. Maybe it will disappear into code, like many other artifacts of the early Internet. But I do know - it changed many. It taught us to trust networks, not servers. People, not corporations.
Now, when everything is moving again towards centralization, towards algorithms, towards control - I remember Gnutella as an island of light. A reminder that things can be different.
Because they should be different.
Splash Pages: How the Internet Tried to Be Beautiful, but Went A Bit Overboard
If you ever opened a website in the early 2000s and the first thing you got was not the main page, but something strange — with animation, a phrase like “Enter the void” and sometimes even music — congratulations: you’ve seen a splash page.
As an old web vagabond, I have mixed feelings about splash pages. It’s like a first date: a little nerve-wracking, often awkward, sometimes fun, but almost always useless. Let’s try to figure out where these welcome pages came from, why they were needed at all, who came up with them, and why almost no one remembers them anymore. And if they do, without any nostalgia or fanaticism.
When it all began
The mid-90s. The Internet is like the Wild West. Everyone makes websites as best they can, mostly with black text on a gray background, signs, gifs, and “Under Construction” banners with an animated man and a shovel.
A few years pass…
And then Flash comes into the picture. And that’s when designers go crazy. Now you can do more than just show text and a picture. You can make a logo rotate, make headlines appear with a lightning effect, and turn the cursor into a shiny circle. What if you make an entire introductory page with animation that tells the user: “You’ve reached our site, now enjoy the show!”?
This was the time when splash pages were trendy — a kind of virtual foyer before the main site hall. It was trendy, it was spectacular. And it was… mostly useless.
What is that anyway?
A splash page that appears before you get to the main content of the site. It can contain a logo, a greeting, a beautiful animation, a language option, an age warning, a "login" button, or just an ad insert.
Sometimes it was just a way to say: "Look, we are designers, and we know how to do cool things." And sometimes it was a technical solution: while the site is loading, let's show something so that the user doesn't leave. Especially when sites weighed 3 megabytes, and everyone had dial-up.
Examples you won't forget
One of the most famous examples is the site of the movie The Matrix. There you could get into a dark green world with moving lines of code and a button "enter the Matrix". The site was cool, yes. But when you saw it for the fifth time, you just wanted to quickly close the "splash" and find the information you needed.
Another example is the sites of music groups. Rammstein had a site where the fire was blazing, the guitars were thundering, and you were waiting for all this beauty to end and the usual menu to appear.
In the corporate world, such pages were often made with a phrase like: “You have entered the site of company X. Please select a language.” As if the language could not be selected later. Everything looked important, but it really slowed down the process.
Why did they die out?
Because the user became smarter. Because mobile Internet appeared. Because Google began to punish for everything that slows down loading. Because no one likes when they are prevented from getting to the information they need.
At some point, splash pages began to irritate. Users wanted: fast, simple, understandable. And designers began to say: “User experience is more important than tricks.” And it turned out that a splash page is like a threshold that half of the people simply do not want to cross.
Add SEO to this: search engines did not like pages with little text and a lot of Flash. Add adaptability - splash pages were almost always unsuitable for phones. And voila - such sites are history. They only remain in web design museums and in the memories of old-timers like me.
Where can you find them today?
Even though the era of splash pages seems to have passed, they haven't disappeared completely. Sometimes they still appear:
Porn sites. They ask: "Are you 18?" - as if someone would really answer "no."
Alcohol brands. Likewise - you need to enter your date of birth.
Some games and movies. When they want to create an atmosphere or hype.
Sites with a choice of languages. Although now this can be done more easily.
But most large sites, even the most glossy ones, have abandoned this. Go to the Apple, Nike, NASA website - there is no splash page anywhere. Everything starts with the content. People don't want to wait. Time is money, and attention is gold.
Can you still make a splash page?
Yes, you can. The Internet is still a place of freedom. But you need to remember that a splash is like a special effect. It should be appropriate. Not because it’s “so cool”, but because it’s “better”.
If you decide to do it, here are some tips:
Give the option to skip. The “Skip” button is a must. Don’t force anyone.
Do it quickly. Maximum 3 seconds to load. Otherwise, you’ll be forgotten.
Adaptability. It should work on a phone too.
Meaningfulness. You show value, and don’t distract.
Alternative. If the user has a weak internet connection, show a simple version.
Most importantly: remember that you’re not creating a “spectacular” page, but an experience. You’re being read, watched, you’re talking to a person – don’t show fireworks instead of a conversation.
Black humor and irony
Sometimes it seems like a splash-pages were something like dinosaurs: huge, beautiful, noisy - and absolutely not adapted to reality. It's funny that now the same people who made a rotating logo in Flash in 2005, today give lectures on UX and say: "The main thing is not to distract the user from the goal."
In one studio, I once saw a layout of a splash page, where there was only the inscription: "We respect your time. That's why we don't load anything." This was already postmodern.
Nostalgia for the useless
But you know, sometimes I miss those times. Not the brakes, not the stupid buttons, but the spirit. Then everything was for the first time. People experimented, played, made mistakes. Then splash pages were part of the study: what could the Internet look like?
These were not the best solutions, but they were sincere. Like children who build a tower of blocks - crookedly, but with soul.
Now the web has become sleek, polished, professional. And that's good. But sometimes you want to go to a site and see it again: the hourglass loading screen, the "enter paradise" button, and the blinking "Welcome" text. Just to smile and remember how it all began.
Conclusion
Splash pages were a beautiful, loud, but fleeting phenomenon. They appeared out of a desire to make impressive sites, but disappeared because of the desire for efficiency. Today, they are a rare and cautious choice. But they remind us: the web is not only code and design. It is also history, emotion, and a little bit of madness.
So if you suddenly decide to make a splash page, make it so that people do not close the tab, but smile. And then - still get to your wonderful site.
About computer game rooms.
In 1989, I saw a game room for the first time. Those were the days when computers seemed magical, and every screen was a window into another world. The first point opened in the basement of one of the houses - back then they weren't called coworking spaces or cyberzones, just "game rooms". There were clones of "Spectrum", AIDA. Tape recorders with an audio cassette spinning while loading the next game, and strange interference on the screen. Back then, all this wasn't perceived as technology, but as if you were getting into the cockpit of a spaceship.
Then came "Syubors" (NES clones), a little later - "SEGA", and then it was a real treat: PS1, all sorts of "Racing", "Tomb Raider", "Tekken", and guys who lined up to play "Gran Turismo" for at least fifteen minutes.
The game library wasn't just a place where you played. It was an atmosphere. Noisy, tube-like, slightly smoky air. Boys with shining eyes, girls who seemed to come in by chance, but then sat on the sofas and watched. Sometimes they played tanks or "Mortal Kombat", if the mood was right.
Then, of course, computers appeared. And it went on as usual: Counter-Strike 1.6, Quake 3 Arena. These games brought people together. But not everyone. There were regulars - the same faces. Guys who didn't just "play CS", but lived it. Team shouts, clans, tournaments in the neighborhood. It was no longer a game library, but a cyber-polygon.
But there were others. Those who didn't come for the shooters. They came to sit on the Internet. Back then, it was expensive. They opened some forums, wrote long texts, downloaded files, searched for something. They didn't play - they "worked". Although sometimes they played - but not like everyone else. Not in "CS", but in some browser games: MUDs, "Combats", where your character just stood in armor, and you just waited for the next move. These people sat for hours, usually at the same computer, and seemed almost part of the interior.
And here in the middle of all this - me. I always liked the atmosphere itself. I often came after work.
I was not a gamer - I was not inspired by online games, and now somehow I don't. But I liked to come. Hang out, talk to the admin. We sat in the corner, watched a movie, sometimes TV series - it was then that I realized that TV series can be by seasons, and not just an eternal stream of episodes, like on TV.
If you came early - you could eat. There was a cafe upstairs. They took orders until 22:00. Order a couple of pizzas - and you are like a person. If I didn't have time, I would go for the standard evening meal: dried stinky fish, croutons, chips. All these healthy foods that go well with warm beer and a screen where someone is yelling into a microphone: "The banana is clean! I'm in!"
So the years went by. I worked, left, came back. When I was home, I always went back there. It was like a party. My place. My time.
And then December came. The one when the "Christmas trees" began. A break between business trips, a little free time. I decided to moonlight. One friend - a networker, you know, one of those who are always in some kind of scheme - offered me a part-time job. He was Father Frost. And I was the "sound engineer". I sat at the control panel, turned on the music, created a "magical atmosphere".
We went to restaurants where corporate events were taking place. We were given two hours to perform, and then we went on. One evening - three, sometimes four establishments. Father Frost, and I, sitting pretending to be a DJ with tired eyes. And it all seemed to be fun, but it was already felt - it was not my thing.
And then one day, after another hard evening, I felt like going to the game room. Just to relax. Night, frost, somewhere around December 29 or 30. I remember that it was not New Year's yet, but it already smelled of tangerines and fatigue.
I go in. And there is a table. A big one. Lots of people. They are sitting, celebrating. I thought - they will not have time for me. I just wanted to get a beer and sit in the corner. But they called me, said: "Sit down!" They poured me, gave me snacks. We sit, chat. But it is felt - they are not having fun. Something in the air. Some kind of melancholy. Later I found out: it was the last night of this arcade. The place was closing. Forever. The pizzeria upstairs was still open, even changed its name, and the arcade space was rented out.
A year or two later, the man who started it all died. The founder and soul of this place. It was as if they put a period at the end of a sentence.
Then I realized: an era was over. These places were more than just rooms with computers. It was a culture. A lifestyle. Especially for students who didn’t have enough money for home Internet, but always had the time and desire to hang out at night with friends.
There are no such places anymore. Everything has gone online. Everyone has several devices at home, and the arcade is no longer needed. But I still remember those nights. The smell of pizza, the noise of fans, the screams from "Dust2", TV series in the corner on the admin computer and how time seemed to stand still there.
And yes, if I could go back - even for one night - I would. Not to play. Just to sit. With a beer. To talk. To be where it was warm and real.
That's the story.
A dream doomed to a bug report
(or why the Great RetroProject will never happen)
Sometimes I catch myself dreaming a naive, almost childish dream: what if we take and unite all retro lovers into one huge, powerful, tube project? You know, a downgrade stream with a full-fledged echo of the 90s, modem noise, tracker music, faded pastel VGA graphics and texts that smell of dusty BASIC. Everyone would gather together - old-timers, kids, artists, coders, hardware guys, writers, demo makers, soldering experts, forum shamans, Windows 3.1 lovers, those who install MS-DOS on i9 for fun... Everyone, young and old, in one collective farm.
Sounds good, right?
But it's impossible.
At all.
Under no circumstances.
Not because there are few of us.
On the contrary, there are a lot of us. There are more of us than people think.
There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of us.
But uniting us all is like gathering people with completely different allergies and locking them in one kitchen. While some are frying DOSBox in olive oil, others are foaming at the mouth demanding a native BeOS kernel on a cascade transformer, and others are just trying to shove their speaker into a COM port. And yes, someone in the corner has already started setting Athlon on fire because “the temperature is stable, only 117 degrees.”
To explain the hopelessness of this wonderful idea, let's see who is part of this crazy retro-zoo brotherhood.
Forum Alchemists
These are the ones who soldered "Agate" from lamps and Soviet radio components, reflashed the ROM with an iron and are now writing articles in the spirit of “My path to the UKNC: 25 years of loneliness and fumes.” They sit on their tube forums, discuss radio interference and post schemes that can only be opened in some murky DOS-drawing program from 1992.
It's difficult with them. Not because they are bad - they are, in fact, cool. But we simply live in different layers of reality. They are interested in computers for their own sake - wires, schemes, old monitors. I am interested in machines that can access the Internet. Let it be Amiga, Win98, even NT4.0 - the main thing is that they can access the network. We just don't go our way. I want the world of the retronet, they want resistors.
Museum Dust Priests
These are hardware enthusiasts born in the 70-80-90s, whose every corner is filled with hardware. They don't work on these machines, don't do anything on them - they just... store them. Every now and then they turn one of them on to take a picture of the BIOS, post it on Telegram with the caption “my beautiful 486SX, launched today,” and then turn it off again for a year.
They are like shift supervisors at a warehouse. Everything is beautifully laid out for them, everything is “in the collection.” But there is zero real use. Their retro exists only for photography. There are few work projects. We are not on the same path with them either. Because I want a living retro world, not a glossy catalog of junk.
Benchmark pyromaniacs
Ah, these wonderful guys.
They take old hardware… and burn it.
Literally.
Why? For the sake of points in the benchmark. Overclocking up to 800% with freon, liquid nitrogen, acid, electric shock, Cthulhu prayers and God knows what else. Video on the Internet: the motherboard starts smoking, the author happily shouts "well, almost passed 3DMark!" and puts out the motherboard with a fire extinguisher. Stylish. Fashionable. Youthful. Useless.
They rarely even join discussions - they don't have time for it, at that moment they are drilling an IBM case for water cooling. You can't do a common project with them - they want competition and glory, not a community.
Children with dead PCs and vivid fantasies
This is a pain.
They find some video about Win95 on YouTube and come to IRC with questions like "how can I make everything on my 2009 laptop be like in 1998?", "I installed DOS, what next?", "what if I install Windows 1.0 on my Ryzen - will it take off?"
You can't stop them. They flood. They copy your projects, insert shit into them, ruin everything and shout again “why doesn’t it work???” They don’t know how to read documentation. They pollute archives with crap that no one can parse later.
But there are golden shots among them. One and a half to two dozen people who, after tears, anger, a ban, and tears again, suddenly start making websites, projects, art. Few, but they exist. Honor and respect to them. The rest - in Minecraft. Quickly and with a song.
Grandfathers with grumbling and old pain
“It used to be better”, “I wrote programs in Pascal that you couldn’t even dream of”, “The forums were more fun”. There are many of them. A lot.
They live in the past, like in a mattress with bedbugs. They do nothing, but they will definitely tell you that you are doing everything wrong. Ask for help - you'll get a three-page lecture on how to compile with ASM under TR-DOS, and why you're a dud. Ask about modern-retro - they'll start telling you that it's not real, but a "hipster parody".
And try to object to them. They'll immediately remind you how old they are. Sometimes even in bytes.
Young, smart, and absolutely useless
It seems like they have everything: knowledge, ideas, and a desire to do. But what do they do? Fork their sites. Make chats "for their own". Everyone wants to be an admin. Everyone sits alone in their retro-discord, waiting for... I don't know what. The Messiah? Commodore 128 with RTX?
You put them together - they disappear. They go to social media, post "I'm tired of toxics", and forget about their "cool retro project", which died a week later. Too much personal pathos, too little cooperation.
Light at the end of the tube
Yes, there are such people. Real cool guys. They write articles. Make websites. Create music in trackers. Draw pixel art. Make engines. Test the modern on the old. Collect and maintain archives. Provide live retro services.
It is on them that everything rests. They are as rare as a whole set of 5.25" floppy disks without fungus. With them - anywhere. But even they often can't stand the general chaos and just go to their cozy corners. Because it is impossible to gather everyone.
Why is all this doomed?
Because everyone has different goals. Different eras. Different interests. Someone in old hardware. Someone in networks. Someone just wants to poke a floppy disk in the nose and post it on TikTok. The age gap is from 10 to 60+. Worldviews - from “everything should be according to GOST” to “what if you put MacOS on a refrigerator from 1997?”
Try to unite all these people - you'll get a forum that will fall apart in a week. Or a chat where first there will be a 200-message holy war about whether Windows XP can be considered "retro", and then everyone will just leave and no one will come back.
But in theory - yes, it's a beautiful dream.
Make a portal. Make a forum. Make a network. Hubs. Channels. Art. Mods. Magazines. Fanzines. IRC. Protocols. Restoring BBS. A common server where everyone can do something, and not just "be a participant".
I would like to. Really.
I would even start something. But every time it seems that we can unite - someone pops up with the phrase "why are you the only one in charge here?", "this is not true", "I don't agree", "ban him, he installed Windows ME!" - and everything goes to hell.
Result:
It all looks like an attempt to make a brass band out of a bag of cats.
Chaos. Woof. Meow. A burning power supply.
But still... somewhere deep inside, I continue to dream.
That one day, even for a couple of hours, we will all gather in one tube stream.
Until someone starts arguing about CP/M vs. DOS again.
If you want - copy, repost, add.
And for now I'll sit and watch how another retro forum dies after the fifth "fight" about Windows 2000.
And again - alone, but with love - I open my browser under Netscape 3.04.
In peace. Or at least with FTP.
Carpet-tv
When Kilor Assk was kicked out of a food market for selling bootleg moonshine, no one could have imagined that ten years later he would become the most eccentric startup on the planet. His latest venture, Carpet TV, plunged the entire world into culture shock and technological hysteria. Even Clark Honeybark wrote in Tuittar: "I don’t get this... I just paid $9.99 to stare at a virtual lion rug for 3 hours. Is this art or terrorism?"
From moonshiner to visionary
Let's start with the fact that Kilor Assk is not quite an ordinary person. He was born in a garage near Neuezzhaysk, the son of a plastic basin seller and an illegal cable radio broadcaster. Even as a child, he dreamed of "broadcasting", but his voice on the radio was described as "a mixture of coughing, swearing, and a dying modem." So he took a different path - he decided to show carpets.
"I realized: people don't need television. They need a carpet," he said in an interview with Toxic Business magazine. "I remember looking at a carpet with a lion as a child and seeing the meaning of life in it. And then I found enlightenment on the neighboring carpet with a deer. Well, I didn't find it, but I had a bad trip from my grandfather's pills - but I almost found it."
Otter, Vaccination of Mantoux and the Awakening of a Genius
Many believe that Kilor Aska's true genius did not manifest itself immediately. Yes, he was strange since childhood, yes, but the real insight came on the day when an otter bit him on the mantoux.
This happened in 2017 in the Green Bobr sanatorium, where he was sent to be treated for chronic shortness of breath and toxic ambitions. He decided to pet an otter that local children had taken in by the pond, but the animal, smelling the Soviet vaccine, bit straight into the scar tissue of the Mantoux test with a cry of a wild animal greedy for flesh.
“It was a moment of enlightenment,” recalled Kilor. “I was lying in my own puddle, the otter was running away into the forest, and I suddenly realized that I had to make television without television. Television in which nothing happens. Only a carpet. Only peace. Only pain in the shoulder.”
Since then, he has said that the otter is his spirit animal and that the bite activated his carpet imagination center. He even tried to get a patent for “cognitive activation through faunistic penetration into the BCG zone,” but received only an official letter with the wording: “We have transferred your case to veterinary psychiatry.”
A brilliant idea is born from schizophrenia and a shortage of fabric
It all started with a post on a forum for startups with a pronounced childhood in the USSR. The post was called: "Carpet-TV - a new super startup." In it, Kilor outlined the idea:
- Make a website called carpet-tv.project.
- The whole point is that you look at the screen, and there is a carpet.
- Programs are on schedule: from 11:30 to 13:00, for example, a carpet with a lion.
- Children's program - "Grandma's carpet", it has stains and the aroma of baking in 4K.
- From midnight to six in the morning - a "settings table", like in the USSR. The carpet is black and white. Sometimes it moves.
The rest is technical genius: HTML, CSS, JS and a little schizophrenia.
Carpets as content
At the start, Kilor uploaded 500 carpets. They were filmed in old apartments, hallways, basements, flea markets. Sometimes the carpets were dirty. Sometimes they were cursed. One carpet with a rooster, uploaded at night, caused collective epilepsy among viewers in Moldova.
"It was a bug in the codec. Or in the curse. I don't remember anymore," Kilor explained.
Each carpet was shown as a separate TV show. There were genres:
- Drama: a carpet with a stain in the shape of the Mona Lisa.
- Thriller: a carpet with something moving on it (possibly alive).
- Erotica: a carpet that Kilor actually had as a child. Judging by the photos, it is covered in cigarette ash and masturbation stains.
A special place in the broadcast schedule is occupied by Sunday morning shows called "Children's Blanket". This is a block of the softest, coziest and most morally stable blankets, collected from different countries and cities where Kilor has been. There are no alarming patterns or heavy Soviet geometries here - only pastel bunnies, cats and non-threatening giraffes. Before the start, the host says in a whisper: "Welcome to the safe textile zone..." - and the viewers are immersed in a hypnotic trance. Some of the subscribers claimed that they cried with happiness while watching the Sunday blanket. One man admitted on air: "Since I've been watching the blanket, I've stopped yelling at the microwave."
Interview with Kilor: blood, carpets and clickbait
We contacted Kilor via video link. He was wearing a robe and was clearly drinking from a bottle labeled "antiseptic".
- Kilor, why carpets?
- Because it's better than watching TV. The carpet has no advertising. The carpet has no politics. The carpet doesn't lie. It just hangs there and looks at you, like your mother when you've disappointed your family again (tears are visible on his face).
- You have a "viewers write to us" feature on your site. What do they write?
- One wrote: "The carpet with the lion is my new god." Another admitted that he married the carpet. We conducted a survey: 73% of users would like to die looking at the carpet with deer. We respect everyone's choice, which means there will be more deer in the future.
- Are there any plans to expand?
- Of course. We opened a premium access. There are carpets with a smell. Well, as a smell - a screenshot and a caption: "Smells like grandpa's fumes at the dacha." There is OnlyPants with carpets. There are particularly provocative carpets - with gilding, with white tigers. One carpet was even painted on a naked body (a fragment of the drawing is visible under Kilor's pulled-up T-shirt). It was banned in 14 countries.
Carpet TV in numbers
A year after launch:
- 3 million users in Asia. Mostly pensioners and psychotherapists.
- 1.2 million subscribers to the YouTube channel with carpets in 4K.
- 8,000 subscribers on Patreon, where you can watch the carpets of the next week in advance.
- 47 lawsuits for "mental trauma from watching a carpet with geometry." - One divorce with the reason indicated in the column: "my wife left because I spent the whole night looking at the carpet "Boy with Pears"".
Night mode and carpet horror
From 00:00 to 6:00, the site turns on the Soviet tuning table mode. This is not just a black and white carpet. This is a special effect, in which the inscription "Carpet tuning in progress" appears from time to time. Sometimes - "we are watching you".
A subproject CreepCarpet appeared on Reddot, where users share hallucinations from carpets. One claimed to have seen the face of Ernesto Che Guevara in the carpet. Another - a neighbor's naked granny. The third - himself.
Scandals, intrigues, carpets
Not everything was smooth. In 2024, the broadcast of "Carpet with a Wolf" was banned on Tbitch because he "looks aggressively". In Texas, a man filed a lawsuit, claiming that a carpet "made him eat plaster."
Kilor responded simply:
"It's not my fault that people have weak psyches. Carpets are like mushrooms. You either become enlightened or die."
Financial success and spiritual decline
Currently, the capitalization of Carpet TV is estimated at 4.3 billion dollars. The startup was bought by the Chinese corporation "Gentle Path", but Kilor remained the creative director and an honorable prophet.
He recently opened a chain of offline stores where you can look at the carpet for money. The line has been standing since six in the morning. In Venice, at the Biennale, a carpet was presented on which all the carpets in history were projected. People fainted from the feeling of the meaninglessness of existence.
Final Interview: Kilor Assk in a Psychiatric Clinic
In 2025, Kilor voluntarily checked himself into a clinic after the carpet began "talking to him" live on air. We interviewed him again.
- Kilor, are you okay?
- I'm in the carpet. This is order. Everything is in its place.
- What's next?
- Carpet 2.0. A carpet with feedback. When you look at it, it looks at you. And sometimes it winks. And then it calls you to itself.
- Last question. Why did you do all this?
- So that you all stop pretending that you understand what's going on. Because life is a carpet, brother. It hangs, you look, then you die.
And maybe he was right.
While the world chases metaverses and crypto, millions of people continue to sit in front of their screens, looking at a virtual carpet. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't move. He just is. Like eternity. Or mold.
And that brings more peace than all of Deathflix.
Epilogue
So, here it is — the June issue. A little chaotic, a little disjointed, but alive. The way it should be. Without verified wording, without a publication schedule, without the desire to please. Just a collection of thoughts, impressions and quiet observations, collected in one place — not because it is necessary, but because it is impossible not to collect.
If you have read this far — thank you. Thank you for your attention, for your silence between the lines, for not closing the tab after twenty seconds. In a world where everything is fighting for instant attention, we have chosen to be slow. Here you can reread, you can disagree, you can just pass by — and all this will be right.
Perhaps this issue was came out later than you expected. Perhaps the next one will be even later. It all depends on you. Send texts, letters, thoughts. Share your little web. Not for hype, not for statistics — but simply because there is no other way. Because if we are silent, not only the network becomes empty, but also something inside.
And finally, a wish. Don't run away from the Internet, which is dear to you. Don't give up. Even if no one reads you. Even if it seems that no one needs all this. Because one day someone will open your site and see in it a reflection of their own thoughts. And the world will become a little warmer.
Until the next issue.