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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

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.

GuinansEyebrows 5mo ago
i haven't seen this since the flash days. so cool. glad you ported it so it's still accessible!
glenstein 5mo 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 5mo ago
  Sorry about that. Its definitely a desktop kinda experience anyway.
- kuerbel 5mo ago
  If you switch to the desktop version in the menu it works fine
bfeist 5mo 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.
owlninja 5mo ago
Very nice! As soon as I saw the landing page and the loading/start button I immediately thought of Flash.
marapuru 5mo 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=PLgzW3ulw6TMwCgFv37jFlBQUApUBXuHxT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmiqVYZHTIQ&list=PLgzW3ulw6T...
Semaphor 5mo ago
Any chance to get a high resolution photo of the sketchbook version? Would love to also have a look at that :)
networked 5mo ago
Source code repository: https://github.com/patrickgalbraith/mapofmetal https://github.com/patrickgalbraith/mapofmetal. > It still has those Flash vibes I think. I can say I noticed. I wondered if the site had been Flash.
goykasi 5mo ago
I see you chose the superior version of 43% Burnt by Dillinger. It blows my mind that he never became the new vocalist.
xtracto 5mo ago
Younger people would never understand how amazing the internet was back in the 90s. Particularly before ads and SEO became an industry. Also Flash, most people don't realize what we lost with Flash. The amount of non-professional multimedia content available was so great. It was a cooking ground for people to experiment with animation ideas. Very low hanging fruit. HTML5/Canvas/CSS just don't have that accessibility. Now the internet is a complete different beast. There are 10 main websites that everyone sees only, and everyone wants to monetize. All content is full of "antipatterns" to maximize monetization. It's very very sad. Aaaanyway, sorry for the rant. I love your website. I'm a Metalhead myself, and this year I'll go back to Wacken for a 2nd time after 15 years!!
- fsflover 5mo ago
  You can sort of get that old-internet vibe today from the I2P network.
- naravara 5mo ago
  > Younger people would never understand how amazing the internet was back in the 90s. Particularly before ads and SEO became an industry. I don’t even think they’d value it to be honest. The culture of putting stuff out online now is to view everything as a potential revenue stream. If you can’t monetize it, why do it?
- ravenstine 5mo ago
  Amen! The only things that made the early web bad by comparison were popup ads and the lack of tabbed browsing. Popup windows that didn't rely on user interaction were always a bad idea and should never have existed. But besides that, yeah, I miss those days. I miss the days when I was a kid and I could stick some HTML on a server and people would actually find it. No SEO, ads, or shameless self promotion required.
  - zx8080 5mo ago
    > popup ads Have you open any US news website in 5 years? Usually there are 2 or 3 layers of popups: subscribe!, cookies box, and news video stream playing on top of everything.
impjohn 5mo ago
Very cool. Explored a lot of nodes, rekindled some old bands. I was wondering how this was vibe coded, since it was done so well, art wise. Then I read your post. This has such a different feel for whatever is usually made today, I really enjoyed it. Cheers
tomgp 5mo ago
So glad you took the time to keep the site alive!
robjam 5mo ago
I was looking through this, seeing the years radius and having my expectations validated/refuted was really fun! Lots of yeah but no, or no way but yeah? The curation of it is really respectable no matter my own taste and that is something that is in real low stock. Thanks for making my day and I'll add a few respectful issues when I can
voxleone 5mo ago
Maps, a great way to present music. Congrats for the work, brought back fond memories.
ChuckMcM 5mo ago
This is an awesome visualization. I have always enjoyed 'structural taxonomies' as a way of visualizing data relationships. I appreciate you keeping it alive.
Starman_Jones 5mo ago
This was hugely influential on a younger me! I remember tracing forward and backwards from the bands I liked, finding and checking out new bands at every stop. Thank you!
Drup 5mo ago
Your map was very formative for me when I was exploring metal, thanks a lot ! I would love for this Map to be expanded to modern subgenres. There are lot's of subgenres that completely changed in the last decades (notably, the *cores and the tech* ...) And it's definitely missing Thall (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtV9pcHh8vM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtV9pcHh8vM). :D
hardbass 5mo ago
Do you disagree with hardcore punk influence as being one of the key disambiguation between thrash from speed metal? Personally at least that's what I feel. I do understand this means for example a lot of Metallica won't count as thrash but I like to say if you slow down Metallica it sounds more like Black Sabbath while slowed down Slayer or Anthrax sounds quite different, so I feel there may be a hard physical evidence for my theory. I found it a bit odd you didn't have this aspect written in the statements about differences between speed metal and thrash metal. I do like and agree that you put Slayer - Necrophiliac under the development of death metal. Though by those same accounts I'd have moved Kreator - Ripping Corpse from the thrash column to the death metal column, but that's just a personal line. I also feel your tech death is biased too much toward 2000s rather than stuff like Sadus, Demilich or Disciples of Power. Absolutely loved the inclusion of death n roll, one of my favorite substyles.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5mo ago
  Well, sped-up Cathedral sounds like Bathory so... I don't know what that's physical evidence of? But I accept your theory as a valid theory, just because there's a test for it, even though I don't understand what the test shows.
  - hardbass 5mo ago
    I think Cathedral is closer to death metal structure in my personal view compared to classic Black Sabbath, so that should not be too surprising. My test is simple, the history of thrash itself shows a lot of it coming from combining hardcore punk influence directly to metal, a lot of old thrash feels to me having mild to overt hardcore sections or riffs at points. And I think that's the aspect that gives thrash its political themes and more direct lyrics compared to the more fantasy or generic bragging style of older metal.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 5mo ago
      That's the theory I know, too, but there are counter-examples. Quorthon for one always maintained that his influences were rock and glam. He may well have been taking the piss, but while most people insist he ripped-off Venom, his early stuff (Bathory, The Return, Under the Sign Of the Black mark) sounds nothing like Venom, it's just the titles, and the lyrics that are clearly ripped off. But Bathory is Black, so a bit by-the-by. Venom (whom I count as an early thrash band; they have nothing to do with Black Metal except for that one song title), seem to have been more influenced by Motörhead, Motörhead, Motörhead, and Judas Priest. I believe Venom were a major influence for all European Thrash bands. Speaking of Motörhead, they were also a major influence to at least Sodom and possibly other early Thrash bands too. So I personally think Motörhead are a more likely Thrash influence than hardcore. Then again Metallica do have their Garage Days Revisited album which is probably a good catalogue of their influences. Maybe. Tbh I don't hear Sabbath in Metallica. And I've listened to oodles of both religiously as a teenager. Back to European Thrash, Kreator and Destruction that I also listened to as a teenager, don't sound very hardcore-influenced at all. They are just harder, dirtier, Speed Metal bands with more violent lyrics. Come to think of it, maybe there is an American vs. European Thrash divide. American bands more influenced by hardcore, and/like Metallica; European bands more influenced by Speed Metal. And Motörhead. Honestly. A lot of European Thrash sounds to me like Motörhead. For example: https://youtu.be/-qmbiw38o2I?si=z35EZG1X07p4uUe5 https://youtu.be/-qmbiw38o2I?si=z35EZG1X07p4uUe5 But, well, that's a bit on the nose.
msm_ 5mo ago
Wow! I didn't expect to see mapofmetal on HN, and I *definitely* didn't expect to see the author's response. I just wanted to say thank you for making it, it was really important for me when exploring music back in 2010s. It was also great to see the "big picture" of metal genres, and start the long journey down the rabbit hole. In a fun turn of events, I showed this to my wife just a few days ago, to show what I was up to when I was younger. And now less than a week later this is submitted to HN. Fun coincidence.
ew6082 5mo ago
I love it! Was the inability to turn down the volume on the mini player intentional? This had me laughing. I'm at work, but that's metal AF.
abrookewood 5mo ago
Mate, this is really cool. Definitely a throw back to a different time.
cholantesh 5mo ago
Incredible work and yes, it really captures a Flash vibe. My only note would be that I'm surprised that Order from Chaos isn't featured anywhere; I feel like they are kind of a Rosetta stone for so much of what happened in the 90s/00s with black and death metal converging on each other.
nunez 5mo ago
This is absolutely incredible. I've gotten much more into metal this year; unfortunately this only further enables that! One disagreement: punk rock island should be a lot bigger in my opinion! Garage and heavy metal definitely inspired the OG British punk rock scene, but they also inspired NY Dolls and Ramones (who formed specifically in response to the rising popularity of heavy metal, if memory serves), two massively influential bands that progenated several subgenres (pop-punk, which created Descendents, Green Day, Blink 182, etc; Ramones-core; melodic punk). DOA and Black Flag, both of whom are mentioned on the map, also helped inspire the whole Nardcore/West Coast thrash scene (RKL, DI, etc), which was happening, almost rebelliously, at the same time in the East Coast (Gang Green/Jerry's Kids, Proletariat, basically everyone on the "This is Boston, Not LA" album, which is fantastic and still holds up IMO). I'm going to stop there because if I go any deeper, I'll have to start talking about emo, and that will for sure crash your map. Anyway, metal is helping cleanse that part of my life; going to spend a lot of time going through the playlists in this map. :) Thank you for making it!
- tremon 5mo ago
  I interpret each of those outlying islands as representing an external influence to metal that is not elaborated further. Of course that island needs to be bigger, but so should the hard rock and psychedelic rock islands -- and they should extend into the 70s and 80s as well. But this is a map of metal, not a map of music. If one were to draw a map of punk, metal would also just feature as a few small islands I gather, along with islands not mentioned here such as surf, reggae and hip hop.
  - nunez 5mo ago
    Fair enough! I guess you'd just recreate the universe if each genre were expanded upon further.
dddw 5mo ago
Ah man, thanks so much for making this. Metal is not my main favourite genre, but this site definitely helped grew my understanding and admiration for it a lot. I come back to this site every now and then for years since the flash version. So cool that you ported it! Was it a big task?
bingoMen 5mo ago
I am very sad to see NSBM and bands with problematic members being promoted here. We have so many problems with right-wing structures and people (mostly male band members) who think they can do whatever they want in this world. Giving them a platform and advertising them will show that metal communities are more exclusive than they are promoting. This is especially concerning given that the metal community seems to be very tolerant, but I think 'ignorant' is a more accurate description of accepting murderers, racist and molester. Yes, a significant proportion of the metal history is problematic persons and bands, but I cannot find any warnings, FAQs or contextualisations. It's a shame. As a result, the metal community will remain old, white and male.

GuinansEyebrows 5mo ago

i haven't seen this since the flash days. so cool. glad you ported it so it's still accessible!

glenstein 5mo 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 5mo ago
Sorry about that. Its definitely a desktop kinda experience anyway.
kuerbel 5mo ago
If you switch to the desktop version in the menu it works fine

bfeist 5mo 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.

owlninja 5mo ago

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

marapuru 5mo 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=PLgzW3ulw6TMwCgFv37jFlBQUApUBXuHxT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmiqVYZHTIQ&list=PLgzW3ulw6T...

Semaphor 5mo ago

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

networked 5mo ago

Source code repository: https://github.com/patrickgalbraith/mapofmetal https://github.com/patrickgalbraith/mapofmetal. > It still has those Flash vibes I think. I can say I noticed. I wondered if the site had been Flash.

goykasi 5mo ago

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

xtracto 5mo ago

Younger people would never understand how amazing the internet was back in the 90s. Particularly before ads and SEO became an industry. Also Flash, most people don't realize what we lost with Flash. The amount of non-professional multimedia content available was so great. It was a cooking ground for people to experiment with animation ideas. Very low hanging fruit. HTML5/Canvas/CSS just don't have that accessibility. Now the internet is a complete different beast. There are 10 main websites that everyone sees only, and everyone wants to monetize. All content is full of "antipatterns" to maximize monetization. It's very very sad. Aaaanyway, sorry for the rant. I love your website. I'm a Metalhead myself, and this year I'll go back to Wacken for a 2nd time after 15 years!!

fsflover 5mo ago
You can sort of get that old-internet vibe today from the I2P network.
naravara 5mo ago
> Younger people would never understand how amazing the internet was back in the 90s. Particularly before ads and SEO became an industry. I don’t even think they’d value it to be honest. The culture of putting stuff out online now is to view everything as a potential revenue stream. If you can’t monetize it, why do it?
ravenstine 5mo ago
Amen! The only things that made the early web bad by comparison were popup ads and the lack of tabbed browsing. Popup windows that didn't rely on user interaction were always a bad idea and should never have existed. But besides that, yeah, I miss those days. I miss the days when I was a kid and I could stick some HTML on a server and people would actually find it. No SEO, ads, or shameless self promotion required.
- zx8080 5mo ago
  > popup ads Have you open any US news website in 5 years? Usually there are 2 or 3 layers of popups: subscribe!, cookies box, and news video stream playing on top of everything.

impjohn 5mo ago

Very cool. Explored a lot of nodes, rekindled some old bands. I was wondering how this was vibe coded, since it was done so well, art wise. Then I read your post. This has such a different feel for whatever is usually made today, I really enjoyed it. Cheers

tomgp 5mo ago

So glad you took the time to keep the site alive!

robjam 5mo ago

I was looking through this, seeing the years radius and having my expectations validated/refuted was really fun! Lots of yeah but no, or no way but yeah? The curation of it is really respectable no matter my own taste and that is something that is in real low stock. Thanks for making my day and I'll add a few respectful issues when I can

voxleone 5mo ago

Maps, a great way to present music. Congrats for the work, brought back fond memories.

ChuckMcM 5mo ago

This is an awesome visualization. I have always enjoyed 'structural taxonomies' as a way of visualizing data relationships. I appreciate you keeping it alive.

Starman_Jones 5mo ago

This was hugely influential on a younger me! I remember tracing forward and backwards from the bands I liked, finding and checking out new bands at every stop. Thank you!

Drup 5mo ago

Your map was very formative for me when I was exploring metal, thanks a lot ! I would love for this Map to be expanded to modern subgenres. There are lot's of subgenres that completely changed in the last decades (notably, the *cores and the tech* ...) And it's definitely missing Thall (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtV9pcHh8vM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtV9pcHh8vM). :D

hardbass 5mo ago

Do you disagree with hardcore punk influence as being one of the key disambiguation between thrash from speed metal? Personally at least that's what I feel. I do understand this means for example a lot of Metallica won't count as thrash but I like to say if you slow down Metallica it sounds more like Black Sabbath while slowed down Slayer or Anthrax sounds quite different, so I feel there may be a hard physical evidence for my theory. I found it a bit odd you didn't have this aspect written in the statements about differences between speed metal and thrash metal. I do like and agree that you put Slayer - Necrophiliac under the development of death metal. Though by those same accounts I'd have moved Kreator - Ripping Corpse from the thrash column to the death metal column, but that's just a personal line. I also feel your tech death is biased too much toward 2000s rather than stuff like Sadus, Demilich or Disciples of Power. Absolutely loved the inclusion of death n roll, one of my favorite substyles.

YeGoblynQueenne 5mo ago
Well, sped-up Cathedral sounds like Bathory so... I don't know what that's physical evidence of? But I accept your theory as a valid theory, just because there's a test for it, even though I don't understand what the test shows.
- hardbass 5mo ago
  I think Cathedral is closer to death metal structure in my personal view compared to classic Black Sabbath, so that should not be too surprising. My test is simple, the history of thrash itself shows a lot of it coming from combining hardcore punk influence directly to metal, a lot of old thrash feels to me having mild to overt hardcore sections or riffs at points. And I think that's the aspect that gives thrash its political themes and more direct lyrics compared to the more fantasy or generic bragging style of older metal.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 5mo ago
    That's the theory I know, too, but there are counter-examples. Quorthon for one always maintained that his influences were rock and glam. He may well have been taking the piss, but while most people insist he ripped-off Venom, his early stuff (Bathory, The Return, Under the Sign Of the Black mark) sounds nothing like Venom, it's just the titles, and the lyrics that are clearly ripped off. But Bathory is Black, so a bit by-the-by. Venom (whom I count as an early thrash band; they have nothing to do with Black Metal except for that one song title), seem to have been more influenced by Motörhead, Motörhead, Motörhead, and Judas Priest. I believe Venom were a major influence for all European Thrash bands. Speaking of Motörhead, they were also a major influence to at least Sodom and possibly other early Thrash bands too. So I personally think Motörhead are a more likely Thrash influence than hardcore. Then again Metallica do have their Garage Days Revisited album which is probably a good catalogue of their influences. Maybe. Tbh I don't hear Sabbath in Metallica. And I've listened to oodles of both religiously as a teenager. Back to European Thrash, Kreator and Destruction that I also listened to as a teenager, don't sound very hardcore-influenced at all. They are just harder, dirtier, Speed Metal bands with more violent lyrics. Come to think of it, maybe there is an American vs. European Thrash divide. American bands more influenced by hardcore, and/like Metallica; European bands more influenced by Speed Metal. And Motörhead. Honestly. A lot of European Thrash sounds to me like Motörhead. For example: https://youtu.be/-qmbiw38o2I?si=z35EZG1X07p4uUe5 https://youtu.be/-qmbiw38o2I?si=z35EZG1X07p4uUe5 But, well, that's a bit on the nose.

msm_ 5mo ago

Wow! I didn't expect to see mapofmetal on HN, and I *definitely* didn't expect to see the author's response. I just wanted to say thank you for making it, it was really important for me when exploring music back in 2010s. It was also great to see the "big picture" of metal genres, and start the long journey down the rabbit hole. In a fun turn of events, I showed this to my wife just a few days ago, to show what I was up to when I was younger. And now less than a week later this is submitted to HN. Fun coincidence.

ew6082 5mo ago

I love it! Was the inability to turn down the volume on the mini player intentional? This had me laughing. I'm at work, but that's metal AF.

abrookewood 5mo ago

Mate, this is really cool. Definitely a throw back to a different time.

cholantesh 5mo ago

Incredible work and yes, it really captures a Flash vibe. My only note would be that I'm surprised that Order from Chaos isn't featured anywhere; I feel like they are kind of a Rosetta stone for so much of what happened in the 90s/00s with black and death metal converging on each other.

nunez 5mo ago

This is absolutely incredible. I've gotten much more into metal this year; unfortunately this only further enables that! One disagreement: punk rock island should be a lot bigger in my opinion! Garage and heavy metal definitely inspired the OG British punk rock scene, but they also inspired NY Dolls and Ramones (who formed specifically in response to the rising popularity of heavy metal, if memory serves), two massively influential bands that progenated several subgenres (pop-punk, which created Descendents, Green Day, Blink 182, etc; Ramones-core; melodic punk). DOA and Black Flag, both of whom are mentioned on the map, also helped inspire the whole Nardcore/West Coast thrash scene (RKL, DI, etc), which was happening, almost rebelliously, at the same time in the East Coast (Gang Green/Jerry's Kids, Proletariat, basically everyone on the "This is Boston, Not LA" album, which is fantastic and still holds up IMO). I'm going to stop there because if I go any deeper, I'll have to start talking about emo, and that will for sure crash your map. Anyway, metal is helping cleanse that part of my life; going to spend a lot of time going through the playlists in this map. :) Thank you for making it!

tremon 5mo ago
I interpret each of those outlying islands as representing an external influence to metal that is not elaborated further. Of course that island needs to be bigger, but so should the hard rock and psychedelic rock islands -- and they should extend into the 70s and 80s as well. But this is a map of metal, not a map of music. If one were to draw a map of punk, metal would also just feature as a few small islands I gather, along with islands not mentioned here such as surf, reggae and hip hop.
- nunez 5mo ago
  Fair enough! I guess you'd just recreate the universe if each genre were expanded upon further.

dddw 5mo ago

Ah man, thanks so much for making this. Metal is not my main favourite genre, but this site definitely helped grew my understanding and admiration for it a lot. I come back to this site every now and then for years since the flash version. So cool that you ported it! Was it a big task?

bingoMen 5mo ago

I am very sad to see NSBM and bands with problematic members being promoted here. We have so many problems with right-wing structures and people (mostly male band members) who think they can do whatever they want in this world. Giving them a platform and advertising them will show that metal communities are more exclusive than they are promoting. This is especially concerning given that the metal community seems to be very tolerant, but I think 'ignorant' is a more accurate description of accepting murderers, racist and molester. Yes, a significant proportion of the metal history is problematic persons and bands, but I cannot find any warnings, FAQs or contextualisations. It's a shame. As a result, the metal community will remain old, white and male.