Loreline (loreline.live) is a collaborative story platform where anyone can upload footage, photos, and clips and assemble them into a "loreline", a living visual story that plays back in chronological order, with scenes ordered by the real date they happened.

How does Loreline work?

Each loreline is a timeline of scenes (photos, video clips, or embedded media such as YouTube). Scenes are placed by their real capture date, so the finished loreline plays back as a chronological story. Multiple people can contribute to the same public loreline, so the story grows and evolves over time.

What can you do on Loreline?

You can create your own story from scratch, browse and watch public lorelines on topics like history, music, sports, film, and culture, contribute footage to open community stories, and embed any public loreline into a blog or article.

Is Loreline the same as the open-source interactive-fiction language?

No. loreline.live is a collaborative story platform for building chronological visual stories. It is unrelated to any same-named programming or interactive-fiction language.

Culture

224 public collections on Loreline.

Documentaries

TogiShane Stoffer streams as Togi, the degenerate gambler. The archive follows the uploads: full sessions run start to finish, slot and table play, casino floors, the vlogs and the gym footage that sit between them. Kick is where most of it happens live, so what survives on YouTube is the mirror rather than the whole career, and roughly four fifths of what is kept here comes from clip channels rather than his own uploads. One thing the record states about itself is carried into the captions: his main channel labels the gambling material entertainment and calls the items in it props, so the sums in the titles are recorded as the videos frame them rather than as verified results.
PepeHow a stoner frog from a small-press comic became the most contested drawing on the internet, from Matt Furie's Boy's Club and the Paper Rad art scene, through 4chan, the 2016 election and the ADL listing, to Hong Kong's protest walls, the blockchain, and one artist's long attempt to take his character back.
LSDOne molecule, from a Basel laboratory bench in 1938 to an FDA advisory panel in 2024. LSD was a legal Sandoz pharmaceutical for twenty years, a CIA weapons programme, a religion, a counterculture, a felony, and is now a Phase II anxiety drug, frequently several of those at the same time. Built partly from our Psychedelics archive, extended with the chemistry, the CIA files, the clandestine labs and the clinical revival.
Alan WattsAn archive of Alan Watts, born in Chislehurst in 1915 and dead at Druid Heights in 1973, who wrote on Zen before he was twenty, took Episcopal orders in 1945 and resigned them in 1950, taught at the American Academy of Asian Studies, broadcast weekly and unpaid on KPFA from 1953, recorded two seasons of Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life for public television, and spent the rest of his life interpreting Asian thought for Western readers from a converted ferry moored at Sausalito. It holds his lectures, seminars, broadcasts and interviews, the films made about him, and the work of his that other people have adapted. It also holds the parts that are usually left out: that he was never ordained a Zen monk and held no Zen transmission, that scholars and practising teachers disputed his readings, and that friends described heavy drinking in his final years. His claims about Zen and Vedanta are recorded here as his positions rather than as facts about those traditions. Two things are worth knowing before you start. Where a recording can be dated, it carries that date: the 1959 and 1960 television seasons, the 1971 conversation filmed aboard the ferry, the Dallas interview of March 1970. His estate publishes most of the tape library without any recording date at all, and those scenes carry the day the recording was published instead, which is the one date that can be verified. And because his lectures are still licensed by his estate, everything here is embedded from its source.
Car AdvertisingA century and a bit of selling cars, told through the advertisements rather than the cars. It starts with specifications and horsepower, turns romantic in 1923 when a Jordan Playboy ad set somewhere west of Laramie sold a feeling instead of a machine, and turns again in 1959 when a New York agency put a small German car in a lot of white space and called one of them a lemon. Then colour television, then a sixty-second film with a Rube Goldberg machine of car parts, then eight short films with real directors, then thirty seconds at the Super Bowl for the price of a house. The archive is honest about a gap: brands post this year's campaign and almost none of them keep their own famous work, so several of the most celebrated ads in the business exist online only as strangers' uploads and are not here at all.
PokémonThe full story of the biggest media franchise on Earth, from Satoshi Tajiri's bug-collecting dream and the 1996 Game Boy originals through the Pokémania that swept the planet, the trading-card crazes, twenty-five years of games and anime, the summer the whole world played Pokémon GO, Ash Ketchum finally becoming World Champion, and the card-collecting mania of today, told through the real commercials, news reports, trailers, tournament finals and photographs of each moment.
MexicoA country told through the things it makes and keeps. Agave fields on a volcanic slope in Jalisco that took a plant seven to fourteen years to fill, and the men who cut them with a blade on a pole. Pyramids whose builders left no name and no language, a city founded on a date chosen in 1925, painted books that survived the burning, and a wall in Mexico City that is legal to photograph because the law says so. Also the parts people argue about: whether the Day of the Dead is ancient or a modern arrangement of something European, whether the parade in the capital is a tradition or something invented for a Bond film in 2015, and whether a black clay pot has been black for centuries or since a potter changed her firing in the 1950s. The archive is in Spanish where Spanish is the right language, because the English version of this story is thinner and more touristic.
Cigarette AdvertisingFor most of the twentieth century cigarettes were sold the way anything else was sold, only better. Doctors recommended brands in magazine spreads, cartoon characters lit up in prime time, a cowboy sold more tobacco than any campaign in history, and Formula One cars ran as billboards at two hundred miles an hour. This archive collects the advertising itself rather than the argument about it: what the ads said, who made them, and when they ran. Claims are recorded as the advertiser's words, never as the archive's, because that is the only way to keep a collection like this from becoming what it documents. The regulation, the litigation and the counter-advertising are here too, as their own material.
Shi Heng YiTien Sy Vuong was born in Kaiserslautern in 1983 and now runs a monastery forty minutes up the road. As Shi Heng Yi he founded the Shaolin Temple Europe at Otterberg in 2011, teaches its novices and disciples, and in 2020 gave a TEDx talk on the five hindrances to self-mastery that has been watched some eighteen million times. This archive is built almost entirely from his own cameras and those of the people who interview him: the forms and the conditioning, the question and answer sessions, the qi gong, the long conversations. What he says about practice is recorded here as his account rather than as settled fact. One point of precision the record insists on: the Otterberg temple is not an officially recognised branch of the Songshan monastery in Henan, and has not been since a dispute in 2008.
PranksIn 1810 a man sent a thousand tradesmen to the same London address for a bet. In 1835 a New York paper reported bat-winged people living on the moon and sold out for a week. In 1957 the BBC filmed Swiss peasants harvesting spaghetti from trees and viewers rang in asking where to buy the plants. The prank is one of the few things humans have done continuously and identically for three hundred years: build a plausible world, invite someone in, and see how far they will walk. This archive follows it from newspaper hoaxes and campus capers through the television age to the point where pranking became a job, and then, in the 2010s, ran into the question of who was paying for the joke.
BrainrotThe AI-slop meme era, from a phrase Thoreau used in 1854 to Oxford's word of the year, from Skibidi Toilet to a roster of Italian-sounding creatures that took over the internet in 2025, and on into Roblox economies, Fortnite skins and an unresolved argument about who owns a drawing nobody drew.
Underground ComicsThe weird strand of comics, from the 1960s head-shop underground to the risograph small press. Zap and the American underground and what the 1973 obscenity ruling did to its distribution; Wimmen's Comix and the women who were shut out of the first wave; Arcade, RAW and Weirdo; Fantagraphics and the argument that comics could be criticised seriously. In Japan, Garo from 1964, the alt-gekiga of Tsuge and Tatsumi, heta-uma, and the ero-guro of Maruo and Hanawa. In Europe, L'Association and Fremok. Then PictureBox, Fort Thunder, and the small press that prints on a risograph and sells across a table. The work here includes material that is scatological, violent and sexually explicit; it is described for what it is, and where it has been criticised the criticism is attributed to whoever made it.
AnimeJapanese animation from the surviving shorts of 1917 to the present: the pioneers who worked alone with cut paper and chalk, the wartime commissions, Toei's studio system, Tezuka's television economics and the per-episode price that shaped the industry for sixty years, giant robots, the direct-to-video boom and its collapse, Ghibli, the shift from cel to digital, and the streaming era. It carries the craft as well as the work: key animation, storyboards, background painting, voice recording and the scores. It also carries the industry as it is, including what animators are paid and what surveys of their working hours have found. Where a regulator, court or survey made a finding, the finding is cited and dated; where something is contested, it is attributed rather than asserted.
LuisaLuisa, surfer, environmentalist, filmmaker, and the Norwegian beach-cleaning crew she joined for two months in 2020 and never left. Built from her own Instagram and that of In The Same Boat, the NGO that has removed more than 1,700 tons of marine litter from the Arctic coastline since 2017. Her captions, in her own words.
Grand Theft AutoA driving game made in Dundee that nearly got cancelled, and the thirty years since. This archive follows the series through the cities it copied, the studios that built it, the courtrooms it ended up in, and the jokes it left behind. The real Miami of 1986 and the real Los Angeles of the early nineties are here, photographed at the time, because the games themselves are almost entirely unfree and the places they were traced from are not. It covers the Hot Coffee panic and what actually shipped on the disc, the Supreme Court case that ended the legal argument in 2011, the leak, the modders, the radio, and the loading screens that became a visual language of their own. The sixth game had not been released when this was assembled, so nothing here claims to know how it turned out.
GraffitiPeople have been writing on walls for as long as there have been walls. Roman scratchings at Pompeii, Norse runes cut into Hagia Sophia by bored guardsmen, medieval names in church plaster, Kilroy travelling with an army, and then the modern practice: Philadelphia in the late 1960s, the New York subway, and from there almost everywhere. The archive follows the surfaces and the tools as much as the names, and it keeps the parts that usually get left out, including the buff that removes the work and the galleries that sell it. Most of what is here was illegal when it was made. That is recorded rather than argued about, and writers appear by the tags they chose rather than by names they did not publish.
Triple TTriple T, properly Tung Tung Tung Sahur: an AI-generated wooden drum creature posted to TikTok one day before Ramadan began in Indonesia, which went past 135 million views and became the most recognisable character of the brainrot era. From the real pre-dawn wake-up rounds it parodies, through its creator's daily anomali feed, to Fortnite, a Roblox licensing fight and a Ramadan sequel a year later.
Spring BreakHow a college swim meet at Fort Lauderdale became a national ritual, an industry and finally a thing cities legislate against, from Where the Boys Are and the MTV years to Panama City Beach's alcohol ban, Miami Beach's curfews, and the March that ran into a pandemic.
DesignHow things were made to look, movement by movement. Morris and the reform of the decorative arts, Art Nouveau and the Vienna Secession, the Russian constructivists and De Stijl, the Bauhaus at Weimar and Dessau and the diaspora that carried it to Chicago and Ulm. Art Deco and streamlining, mid-century furniture and Scandinavian wood, Braun under Dieter Rams and Olivetti under Sottsass, the Swiss grid and the typefaces built on it, corporate identity manuals, Memphis and the Italian radicals, brutalism and the arguments it still provokes, then the Macintosh and the screen. Alongside them the movements the canon leaves out: Mingei folk craft and Metabolism in Japan, Brasilia and Lina Bo Bardi, Tropical Modernism across Ghana and Nigeria, VKhUTEMAS and the Polish poster school. Designers are named as the sources name them, and where authorship is disputed the archive says so.

Loreline, a collaborative story platform

What is Loreline?

How does Loreline work?

What can you do on Loreline?

Is Loreline the same as the open-source interactive-fiction language?

Culture

Documentaries

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