Paul Cooijmans’ website is difficult to summarize because Paul Cooijmans appears to have solved that problem by simply putting everything on it.
The site contains high-range intelligence tests, psychometric writing, IQ societies, music, prose, interviews, photography, philosophy, autobiographical notes, occult material, running advice and enough personal documentation to make most About pages look cowardly.
The central subject is high-range intelligence testing. Cooijmans says he began designing tests in the mid-1990s to explore measurement beyond the ceilings of ordinary psychological tests. He later founded several IQ societies and built a substantial body of test material, statistical writing and commentary around the subject.
Then It Keeps Going
Cooijmans studied classical guitar and composition at a conservatory from 1986 to 1993, and his site catalogs a large body of compositions. Some entries include instrumentation, dates, durations and links to performances or recordings.
There is also fiction, autobiography and photography. The photo archive reaches back to analog images from the late 1970s. Autobiographical essays cover everything from conservatory years to learning computers in the mid-1990s.
One particularly good detail: Cooijmans writes that his first computer course taught MS-DOS and WordPerfect 5.1 shortly after Windows 95 appeared, with the instructor insisting Windows was merely a shell and DOS was what really mattered. That is an extremely specific little fossil of how personal computing was taught at the time.
The Personal Web With the Safety Off
The site becomes stranger the further you go. There are pages about tarot, occult interpretation, philosophy and future information supposedly transmitted through “t-mail,” described as email that can cross time.
There is also an FAQ that manages to turn basic email etiquette into a miniature philosophical system, including instructions to ask one question at a time and a joking public-health warning before contacting the author.
You do not have to accept Cooijmans’ conclusions—or even know what to do with some of them—to appreciate the site as an Internet artifact.
It is almost aggressively personal.
Modern profiles reduce people to a short bio, a feed and whatever content performs well. This site does the opposite. It accumulates a person’s interests, arguments, creative work, opinions, photos and intellectual obsessions over decades and leaves the visitor to deal with the whole thing.
That is one of the old Web’s most important forms: not a brand, not a channel, not a creator funnel. A person with a domain.