This site started pretty much for my own amusement after talking with an old friend about some of the odd stuff we had concocted as kids in the name of science. Things like crystal gardens, rubber eggs, and model volcanos. I realized a lot of this lore was being lost, so I determined to catalogue some of these projects. I originally planned for it to be simple projects in simple text linked by some sort of index for easy retrieval. I never really intended for anyone else other than a few friends to ever see it, but somehow that got out of hand...
There have been several versions of the site since it started in the early 90s, and I managed somehow to hold on to enough snippets of code and images to reconstruct the "Bizarre Stuff You Can Make in Your Kitchen" pages (as it was originally known) pretty much as they originally appeared (at least the start pages). Click on any of the screenshots to see them in their full glory. None of the links work except for "Back to History Page" which will take you back here.
The site started out pretty much like this - unformatted white text on a black background. I should have known better even then, but like I said I never intended for amny people to see it. I'm not sure if anyone ever did. Notice that there are only four projects listed. The first page completed was the Slime page.
At some point I decided that someone may actually be looking at this site one day, so maybe I should spiff it up a bit. This is when it officially became "Bizarre Stuff You Can Make in Your Kitchen". I liked the title at the time because it was ridiculously long. There were more projects now. That's the original "Bizarre Stuff" wallpaper. Not sure why, I just liked the fish. He has a nice evil glint in his eye. I had added some graphics by this point, but not much to support the projects themselves. The site was getting enough hits to merit a little more time and attention.
This was the homepage that a lot of folks saw the first time they visited "Bizarre Stuff". In some ways it is still my favorite, though not the easiest to navigate. The site was getting reviews and a lot more visits now, and by the time I retired this design it had well over one million visits.
This was the start page for the longest time. This version is slightly different actually - it says "Bizarre Labs" instead of "Bizarre Stuff You Can Make in Your Kitchen", which it said for almost twenty years. The man's face was from an old advertisement. I briefly considered using this page again for the relaunch of the site but opted for a cleaner, more scalable design. Within a few years of this start screen's appearance the site went into a period of neglect. Until...
By 2018 my son was old enough to take an interest in the site, and together we decided to relaunch it, adding more projects and more detail to the projects already there. We decided to work through all of them, slowly but surely, adding photos, tips, and an occasional video. The site was completely reformatted, making it as easy to view on a smartphone as a laptop screen. Enjoy!
This article was printed from the Bizarre Labs website at bizarrelabs.com
