I want to see if I can get a spark of the “old internet” back by making a starting page for myself with all kinds of cool websites. But not sure where to start because Google obviously will not work for this.
So… what are some of your favourite websites?
Archive.org has many facets:
Wayback Machine
Internet Arcade
Feature Films
NASA Images
Multiple Image collections
Live Music Archive
Free Audiobook Collection
Open Library
American LibrariesHow stuff works is amazing.
Wikipedia should not need to be mentioned.
All great and valuable links. Thanks! Archive has so many usecases. I recently used it to get some design inspiration for old 50’s and 60’s catalogs and magazines. Plenty of retro and vintage stuff to find! GifCities from the Archive.org team is also great :)
Used to be thefuckinghomepage but they recently stopped updating
It is far from lesser known, but my favorite standalone site is still Atlas Obscura.
So that’s how 27/100 performance feels like…
Are these effective load times? I’m not exactly sure what this is.
Edit to add: Am I misreading this, or is your connection throttled? I have 0 issues loading the site with Firefox + uBlock Origin, either desktop or mobile.
I also had 0 issues. Worked fine with Firefox mobile/ublock, and with the built in Voyager browser. Didn’t seem particularly slow at all.
Here’s one of my long time favorites:
What a treasure trove! At first glance I love all the ASCII art. But some of the texts feel like you’re browsing some old Reddit/4chan posts. Will take me a while to get through all the gems!
I am really happy that you appreciate it. There is so much to explore there, be careful because it’s easy to lose a lot of time browsing the files. Lol
I love reading about all the old school hacking and shit. There’s some genuine ‘anarchist cookbook’ type of stuff in there. Probably don’t try any of that shit, but it’s fun to read about none the less.
Probably don’t try any of that shit,
Now you tell me, I just spent the last couple hours trying to get free CompuServe access.
🤣
I couldn’t think of many less visited sites I usually go to often, but coalregion(dot)com is an interesting site I found using this Wiby search engine a long time ago. It’s a site about a region in Pennsylvania. They have a section for recipes supposedly from that region along with a section for words/slang from that regions past. They got other things, but the dictionary and recipes interest me more than the other parts.
Got a few:
https://everynoise.com/ You can find A LOT of music genres here. Genres next to eachother resemble one another. Figure out what you like, and what genres are close to it. Clicking on the >> will take you to artists in this genre, or search for artists in the upper right corner and see what genre they fall under.
https://clickclickclick.click This one is about privacy, see what a browser can track. If you don’t know much about pixeltracking, this one is a fun way to learn (and a little creepy hehe)
https://suno.com/create Create your own songs with an AI, just throw in lyrics, a genre, and you are done. A fun way to troll a friend by throwing in an old conversation
https://darknetdiaries.com/ Haven’t looked into this one myself, but these are true stories on the darknet, recommended by a friend of mine.
Clickclickclick is such a great eye opener. And I’ll definately will spend some time searching artists I like on Everynoise. Other two also added to my bookmarks for later viewing. Great links!
Enjoy!
Darknet Diaries is a podcast, rather than just a website. It’s not all about the darknet, he does tons of stories about internet security and penetration testing.
I have listened to every single episode. It’s EXCELLENT.
Thanks for the links, they’re interesting.
Came here to post EveryNoise. Absolutely incredible site that just fucking WORKS. Can’t believe I went as long as I did without knowing about it.
It’s interesting. Some seriously fragmented genre names. Not sure I agree with many of them, but I always like new music discovery tools.
Wiby, particularly the “surprise me” option is great for old school sites and that StumbleUpon feeling!
Ooh, that’s some old school stuff!
neal.fun definitely deserves a mention.
These games also have a similar feel:
Paper Trader
Guess The YearWelp, already spent way too much time on neal.fun! Great stuff!
This text-based game is fun:
https://pmotschmann.github.io/Evolve/Oh goodness… Why did you have to introduce me to a clicker game?. Welp, I guess I’ll cancel all my appointments for the next few days.
In the same vibe, the excellent arcanum: https://mathiashjelm.gitlab.io/arcanum/
I don’t know if it’s “lesser known” but I discovered boardgamearena.com last year and I’ve been addicted ever since.
It’s free, but there is a premium membership that gives some extra perks.
Hundreds of boardgames that you can play with others online, from rummy and checkers to Wingspan and Catan.
They offer casual matchmaking and ranked competitive modes and tournaments.
Set up an account and invite me to your favorite game! I would love to learn it! You can figure out my username on there.
Boardgame Arena is a great site indeed!
BGA is fantastic. Free game selection is always growing. Membership, if you want to pay for the premium games, is a fantastic deal. Only one person in your playgroup needs a membership for everyone to play. The interface for most games is WAY better than actually playing in person and games are so much faster too. It’s not as good as hanging out in person with friends, but it’s damn close.
I miss the old Yahoo games site where during night shift you could play Canasta with probably some retired folks from the other side of the world
I just checked. BGA doesn’t have canasta. Sorry.
How do you feel about Hearts, cribbage or Kings in the corner?
Don’t know those, also, stopped doing night shifts (mostly) :)
Vimm’s Lair
Z2
A bunch of webcomics
Whoa, Vimm’s lair is amazing! I especially like that they also have scans of manuals from old games. I’m still missing some in my collection.
Z2 is kind of hard to find with Google. Do you mean z2comics?
Thought it was z2.org but it’s actually http://zzt.org
https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/
When I discovered this website, I started obsessively relacing all my shoes.
I feel insecure about my current shoelaces now.
That secure shoelace knot was an actual game changer. Shit just works.
Someone else already mentioned wiby.me, so here’s something else:
I have no fucking clue what this site is. I feel like it’s a catalog for some Eldritch business, and that I could order literally anything I wanted from it if I could just figure out how to use it.
I don’t know what I’m looking at and I’m loving it.
It’s like if the Craigslist guy was like “You know what, I think I’m going to open my own outdoor store”. I like the little link to the page about his car. No bragging, no showing off… just a “Hey, this is my car. These are it’s specifications. Check it out.”
Could probably buy something from the site, and request the owner sell it to you only after going out for a beer together, and it’d probably work.
It’s a pretty simple concept with a lot of references, but Floor796 is fun to browse around when I’m bored. There’s a few interactive bits too, if you can find them.
What do you call these? Feel like I’ve seen this animated and printed a bunch of times in my life.
As far as art style goes, I’m not sure to be honest. Based on the artist’s YouTube page of their drawing process, it seems akin to making something in Paint.
In general, I guess you could call it slice of life? iirc the “floor” is supposed to be on a spaceship, just showing the day to day activities.The still image variety are wimmelbilder.
Frontend link to the sub on the old site.
Time for a rabbit hole. Thanks!
EDIT: Another term I found now is “isometric illustration”
