2025 Digital Advent #12: UGHBEES

Wearing socks? Put them on if you're not, come on, man, it's winter and it's cold! Okay? Okay. Now get ready to get them to be rocked off. To mark the half-way point of this here advent I bring you an absolute masterpiece of Javascript shenanigans, cut-out style animation, colour extravaganza, media abundance, and insane creativity, or perahps, creative insanity! It's Bee (or Maggie) of UGHBEES at ughbees.neocities.org!

How did I find this website?

I've sadly forgotten when exactly we crossed paths with Bee on Neocities but I remember their site looking quite different then (you can see it in their crazy and original take on a webpage archive). Sometime this year they switched a lot of things up to make an incredibly cool new thing with a navigation that is so satisfying. I also follow Bee on Letterboxd because they have seen every movie ever, I think. Every time I log something I assume Bee's already there and I'll be checking out their review.

Check this website out if you like...

It's gonna be hard to narrow this down, but let's give it a shot. Movies (and everything about movies), video games, fish facts, vampires, Kylo Ren, hilarious animation and graphics, big time readin', a dream diary, and all things interactive. Really, I think if one asks Bee how much interactivity a site needs they may respond with 'yes'. And it fucking kicks ass! There's so much to click to see it move about, drag and drop, squish and squash, take you on a whole adventure, and so on. Bee must be really smart because they have figured out so many cool Javascript scripts to feature on their site I can't even begin understanding half of them. I mean, the dress up game is insanely cool and something I've been looking into myself but I'm not in a place to recreate it yet because I'm a dummy. Basically, there's a lot the screenshots can't translate so you should go and check it all out yourself.

My favourite page on the website is...

So, every page is totally unique and kind of crazy but none so like my favourite, the Movie's page and the DVD page! Yes, I too am a cinephile and so just the content is already very interesting to me, because Bee has a preference for the classic apocalyptic genre that I may not personally have as a favourite but appreciate anyway. Also, there's a whole page dedicated to some very niche and overlooked works. So outside of that, the page also looks amazing, I love pages that look like places... say, the lobby of an aged film theater or a nearly out of commission video store. It's perfect! I would say my second favourite is the dress-up because I can never resist a dress-up game.

 ☆ Finny ★