Time Cube’s simultaneous four-corner times have run out. Since various people have noticed, the site’s domain seems to have died; it today returns a dab page of advertisements and a notice that its enrollment lapsed on August 24th. Unless it’s revived, Time Cube will exist only as a set of snapshots on the Internet Archive, which was — intentionally or not — created in preparation for this precise moment.
For anyone unfamiliar with Time Cube, it’s arguably among the most notorious web pages on the internet: an endless wall of text about the conspiracy to curb an version of time. It has been, having lived almost two years since its 1997 launch. While RationalWiki does a good job of describing the context and topics, the website itself is so valuable in part because it’s almost impossible to translate the full impression of Time Cube into mere plaintext:
There’s been some dispute about how seriously Time Cube’s creator, Gene Ray, chooses the theory, but indications point to it being a genuine attempt at coming up with a theory of time, albeit a very perplexing one peppered with racism and homophobia. (Ray’s other sites have also gone offline, a procedure that seems to have begun in July.) Much like lots of the net’s strangest placesentails a certain amount of ambiguity — without possibly mocking illness, just how can you enjoy its surreality? No matter the response, a bit of history has just vanished.
