Have you heard of thewoodcutter.com?:
14th December 2021
I don't really want to dedicate this whole page to just doom-and-gloom stuff, so I figured I might as well make this post that I've had on the back-burner for a little while now, involving something strange and obscure I came across a while back on the internet. So about two-to-three years ago (fuck, has it been that long already?), I was browsing this thread on 4chan where some guy asked people to get him something cool while he gets stoned. One example came from somebody who offered this website, with the domain of www.thewoodcutter.com. This was an interactive Flash-based point-and-click affair (I don’t know if you can call it a “game”, since there’s not much interactivity outside of clicking a few things, and there doesn’t seem to be any objective), which was created by an artist named Josh Kimberg in 1997, during the early days of the internet and it was probably one of the first examples of Flash being used online prior to its explosion in the 2000s. It’s also really weird. Like, super weird, and kinda creepy. I’ll try and explain it about as well as I can.

This “experience” (I guess you can call it) takes place on this island, and the main character appears to be this human/furry kind of creature with a log for one hand, and another hand that’s most often on fire. You can douse this hand in a lake of piss, but then it catches fire again once it comes into contact with the sun. This guy also has a few different forms, some are more simplified and stylised, while one of them is basically the character’s face super-imposed over a tracing of a human body. There’s also a bunch of other creatures that you can find around you, including the “Piss Poodle”, which pisses from its head when you pinch its tail, making the piss lake I mentioned before. There’s also the “Meat Angel”, who holds a bucket of chicken drumsticks, and hosts “The Wound”, who lives in a wound in her ass, and offers advice on what to do. But much of that advice doesn’t really seem that helpful in terms of progressing through the experience, since there’s no real beginning or end and all the pages loop back around to one another. So like I mentioned, it’s not really meant to function as a game, and is basically just meant to be a strange and unique art project, that was meant to be told through what was then a new method of communication. So, let’s just try and go over what this could all mean.

From what little I know about this whole thing, I believe that it has something to do with the idea of playing God, and attempting to accelerate the process of evolution. However, when attempting this, there appear to be situations where this rapid acceleration is prevented from taking place. This can be seen through the prior-mentioned multiple forms the main character takes, as well as his attempts at modifying his appearance, such as dousing his burning hand and chopping off the stump of his log arm, which are ultimately reversed either through later stages of the character’s “evolution”, or through outside events (e.g. The guy’s hand catching fire again from the sun). There’s also some imagery relating to Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, a particularly topical topic for the time this thing was created, with a picture of her appearing in the Meat Angel’s room, and what I assume is audio from a related news report playing after the guy chops his stump off. Maybe this is suggesting that potential future technologies relating to this experiment, such as human cloning, have shown little practical purpose outside of spectacle according to the artist, hence the whole “going round in circles thing”? Or maybe this theme is mostly related to the grotesque visuals, which could indicate how humans might potentially impact the world around them with this new-found scientific understanding?