baffling internet discovery

(written 11.27.24)

hey guys!!

today i'm going to tell you about something weird i found online. before you read this, be careful if you decide to visit any of the websites i mention. i use ublock origin with lots of extra settings on, so if there are any malicious popups here, i can't see them.

as you may know, one of my favorite things to use the internet for is "look at pictures of favorite character on google images". and right now the character i'm obsessed with is midna from the legend of zelda. so i'm on google images and i find a nice picture of her and then i see that it's from a website called "animalia-life.club". huh??

here is the website's home page:

it claims to be a source for information about and pictures of animals, and an alternative to wikipedia and google images. that's dope as hell and something i can totally get behind. it's also pretty silly and strange? you see at the top that it has "golden retriever" and "dog" as two separate kinds of animal.

here is what's found at the bottom of the home page:

on the left we have a list of dog breeds. perhaps this website is pretty dog-focused. clicking on an animal (or a dog breed) shows you a gallery of pictures and a list of facts. (i have no idea how true they are, that isn't what i'm focused on here.) the strangest part is the faq. it changes every time the page is refreshed. only the bottom two questions are in english - the rest are in korean. i have no idea what the korean questions are, but the english ones are always about dogs, and they're sometimes strange questions like "are dogs allowed at twin lakes park?" or "what breed is nana in snow dogs?" but stranger still...clicking on any of these questions does not lead to an answer to the question! it just leads to a gallery of pictures. see?

speaking of galleries of pictures, back to how i got here. this website, dedicated to facts about and pictures of animals, for some reason has a huge gallery of photos of midna:

(not going to link to it because there is some nsfw. as well as...ai images. shudder side note...i can't stand ai images, not because of art theft or w/e but because they're just really creepy? like something about a picture that almost looks like a human made it but has no human thought or soul behind it is really disturbing? anyway) and if this isn't strange enough...when i open one of these pictures in a new tab, it takes me back to wherever the image is from (a fan wiki, or reddit, or wherever) BUT if i just click an image, it takes me to...indonesian-recipes.com!

...??????

when i go to the home page of this website, it's just questions about food. mostly about meat. not specifically about indonesian food. i don't see any recipes at all. it's kind of a...yahoo answers for food? questions include "How do u freeze zucchini?", "Can babies amaranth?", and "How are tuna killed?" (the answer to which begins with "PROLONGED AND PAINFUL DEATH"). i'm not sure if this is a real website or if all these questions and answers are pulled from elsewhere.

so...i know i won't find the answers to these questions, but i'll ask them anyway. why do these websites exist? are they run by the same person? why do they both have hidden pages that can be used to access pictures of midna from the legend of zelda? did a person make the choice to put them there, or are these websites operated by algorithms that for some reason think midna has to do with animals and indonesian food? if this was a real person...why keep links to pictures of midna in the back of your animal and food websites instead of saving them and putting them on, i don't know, google drive? why just link to the images instead of hosting them? i can see that some of them are no longer visible, presumably because they've been deleted from deviantart or wherever. my main takeaway is that i can now use "real earth animal" and "indonesian recipe" as fun nicknames for midna.

thanks for reading! i just wanted to share this with somebody. i love to go down baffling rabbit holes online. if you celebrate thanksgiving then happy thanksgiving and enjoy those baller side dishes :)