Behold, my bookshelf of spooy webbed sites. For best effect, read these in a candlelit chamber with a blanket and a warm drink.
I find these links through hours of link-hopping, crawling, scuttling, and being a bit of a Fraidycat. I'll also attest to a few rounds with Claude, who covers the contemporary SEO-hellscape side of the net while I hand-curate things from the underground. I give further credit to Lutzbug for taking some of the excess off my paws; as a policy we don't host the same links as to keep things extra interesting for you readers. So if some truly ancient stuff is on the agenda, please by all means check them out!
Besides what you heard on your way in, note that this is a personal collection, not an exhaustive list.
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| Before You Buy a Domain, Check if it's Haunted | "Before I bought it, the domain was used to host pirated music." |
| Blogs Rot. Wikis Wait. | "a wiki is an abyss" |
| A Guide to Web Curation | "In this guide, I hope to explain what makes the successful examples of web curation work." |
| Blog Microfeatures | "They need not be applied indiscriminately." |
| Building a Website Like It's 1999... in 2022 | "This is a written version of a talk I gave at State of the Browser 2022." |
| Dan Luu on SEO Spam | "Since it's fairly easy to try out straightforward, naive, queries, let's try some queries." |
| Death of the Old Web | "The things you link out to can disappear, redirect, or change without you ever knowing." |
| Decentralisation Begins at Decentring Yourself | A video of a talk given by Aral Balkan. |
| Defensive Computing Checklist | Keeping yourself secure online. |
| Design Tenets of my Website | If I had to summarise why a lot of old sites feel that way, it would be this article. |
| Digitizing Paper | Likes doing a new form of alchemy. |
| Discord, or the Death of Lore | "The only part of the fog of the future that's guaranteed is the moment it switches from theory to a wall of iron and then darkness." |
| My Floppy Disk Archiving Process | "In fact, I'm going to do everything in my power to prevent the expert archivist from cringing at this post." |
| Herman: Messing with Bots | "scrapers are, inadvertently, DDoSing public websites." |
| IndieWeb Does Not Need to Take Off | Suggests the Indieweb does not need mainstream approval to thrive. |
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| IRC is the Only Viable Chat Protocol | "OK, OK, I'll pull myself away from the terminal and finally finish writing this piece." |
| Just Put It on Your Blog | "Why not just put it on your blog?" |
| Living in the Terminal | "There are a lot of things that a terminal can do, keeping in mind most of it is text." |
| Managing Digital Photographs | Keeping your data-hoarding tagged and sorted. |
| The Awesomeness of Lists | "Lists are a universal tool for productivity." |
| Personal Websites Aren't Dead | "Personal websites aren't dead. They're just not fashionable." |
| Reclaiming Territory in Cyberspace | "We can all build a human-centric cyberspace instead of one used to dominate and control us." |
| Snark, Ironic Detachment, Authenticity | "The cure is acceptance, sincerity, and enthusiasm." |
| Solar Hosting with a Raspberry Pi | Local webmaster chronicles solar-powered hosting with his Pi. |
| The Death of DeviantArt | "They describe a store. A store that is allowed to sell pornography also." |
| The Net: User Guidelines and Netiquette | A decades-old guide on Internet manners. |
| The Public Domain | "At this point you may be wondering: am I crazy?" |
| The Slow Web | "Timely not real-time. Rhythm not random. Moderation not excess." |
| The Website Obesity Crisis | "It's about mostly-text sites that, for unfathomable reasons, are growing bigger every year." |
| This Page is Designed to Last | "The problem is multi-faceted. First, content takes effort to maintain." |
| You Are Not Late | "It is the best time EVER in human history to begin." |
| YOU are the Dead Internet | "You are becoming algorithmically generated content." |
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| Blog: More Pull | You're more interesting than you think you are. |
| Gwern: Cat Horror | "We still remember when they ate us." |
| Gwern: On Improvement | "A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s." |
| Gwern: On Search | "A description of advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research." |
| Gwern: Socks | "Personal experience and surveys on running out of socks; discussion of socks as small example of human procrastination." |
| Gwern: Wood Pillow | "China & Egypt used wooden pillows; my recreations fail." |
| His Virus Ness: Long Live the Interwebz | Things don't die if you put effort into them. |
| How to Stop Being Boring | "The most interesting people I know aren't trying to be interesting." |
| In Good Hands | "There is a feeling I search for: being in good hands." |
| Julia Evans: Tactics for Writing in Public | "How do you deal with writing in public? People on the internet are such assholes!" |
| Looking Stupid | "Looking foolish is underrated." |
| Make Art for You, Not Likes | "The benefits of social media can quickly dissolve and give way to its darker side." |
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| Daniele63: Terrariums | Local webmaster gives simple, easy guide on terrariums. |
| Making a Terrarium in a Demijohn | Local webmaster makes a terrarium in a demijohn. |
| Oliver Burkeman: The River | Learn to move more leisurely through your To-Read list. |
| Passive Suicidality Scale | "It's exhausting to go alone. Take this!" |
| Re: Re: Go Fail at Some Hobbies | "Asking people what their hobbies are is one of my favourite questions." |
| Real Life Mag: The Great Offline | "The Wilderness" and "The Offline" are similar concepts with similar logical fallacies. |
| Stuffed Animals and Aging | "Meeko gets preferential seating, Pikachu gets choked by my father." |
| Taming the Mammoth | Don't worry about what people think of you. |
| The Cosy Web | "Home computers were — and are — cosy, often in a very tangible way." |
| The Sage and the Weasel | Holy fucking based. |
| The Trouble with Wilderness | Nature is not separate from humanity, and treating it this way causes problems. |
| William James's Advice | A general list of life advice. |
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| More Replies About Wikimedia and the Fallout of My Report to the FBI | The aftermath of co-founder Larry Sanger's report over CSAM on Wikimedia. |
| On Genuine Neutrality Versus Enforced Consensus | Sanger's thoughts on the meaning of consensus. |
| On the Moral Bankruptcy of Wikipedia's Anonymous Administration | Sanger's plea to identify Wikipedia's administrators. |
| Wikipedia Is Badly Biased | Sanger's most famous post, pertaining to Wikipedia's wide-scale bias. |
| Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism | Sanger's first public critique of Wikipedia and the anti-intellectual behaviour of its users. |
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| Good Internet Magazine | A newsletter on homelabs and independent webmastery. |
| Shellsharks Scroll | A newsletter of discoveries from the Small web. |
| TorrentFreak | An online publication on torrenting and piracy. |
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (Clay Shirky, 2005) | An early web text on the pitfalls of combining software with human socialisation. |
| Copyright and the Commons (Erickson, 2018) | A study that analyses the prevalence of Wikimedia's images across the net. |
| Illusion of Explanatory Depth (Sourati, 2026) | A study on the linguistic implications of widespread LLM use. |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| 16colors | An archive of early ASCII and ANSI art. |
| Anarchivism | A wiki for data-hoarders. |
| Anxiety Aid Tools | Practical methods for stress management. |
| Classic Horror | The remains of an old horror-movie review website, kindly kept online as an archive. |
| Contemporary Home Computing | The dormant remains of a web archeologist. |
| Dark Realms: USENET | A thirty-year old bulletin board, and one of the last of its kind. |
| DOSBox | The premier in DOS emulation. |
| Dream Wiki | An artsy database of dreams. |
| Halloween Collector | A collector of vintage Halloween decorations discusses his decades-long journey. |
| Halloween Monster List | A compilation of halloween crafts. |
| Halloween Retrospect | A 600+ and still-growing collection of vintage Halloween ephemera. |
| Hello World Collection | A compilation of "Hello World" programs in over 600 programming languages. |
| LP Archive: Dwarf Fortress — Boatmurdered | The epic in its entirety. |
| Ravensblight | A halloween artist from the HTTP times. |
| Scooby Museum | A collection of Scooby-Doo things, from the expected to the oddly specific. |
| The Gallery of Monster Toys | A 90s-style site for midcentury monster toys. |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Ardalambion | Text-heavy guides on J.R.R. Tolkien's conlangs, specialising in Quenya. |
| Blood Wiki | A wiki for the 1997 first-person shooter and its sequel. |
| Diablo Wiki | A wiki for the progenitor action-fantasy title and its first sequel. |
| Esolang | A wiki for unusual programming languages. |
| IFDB | A catalog for the Interactive Fiction genre of video games. |
| Interactive Fiction Wiki | A wiki for the Interactive Fiction genre, the "GET LAMP" sorts. |
| Petz Wiki | A wiki for the PFMagic Petz titles and their modding scenes. |
| Privacy Guides | The premier guide to online privacy. |
| Tolkien Gateway | A wiki for J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy epic and the rest of its world. |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| ASCII Art by Sebastian Stöcker | ASCII art since 2000. |
| ASCII Characters Are Not Pixels | A deep dive into ASCII rendering using shape vectors for sharp, high-quality results. |
| ASCII Art Website | Christopher Johnson's ASCII collection since 1994. |
| FUNGI | A gallery of user-submitted ASCII fungi and other whimsical things. |
| Joan Stark ASCII Art Archive | A Github mirror for the famed Joan "jgs" Stark. |
| Roy's ASCII Corner | Carsten Cumbrowski's ASCII portfolio since 2000. |
| Stone Story ASCII Tutorial | Tutorials from the creator of Stone Story. |
| Unicorn and Butterfly | A webcomic made entirely from ASCII. |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Calligraphr | A site that lets you create custom fonts from your own handwriting. |
| AdorkaStock | A deviantART pose-reference darling with a wide array of models. |
| Animal Photo Art References | A selection of posable animal skulls for artistic reference. |
| Animal Photo Reference Repository | A personal gallery of zoo animals, photographed for artistic reference. |
| Dwellings | A procedural generator of tiny homes and their floor-plans. |
| Free Nature Stock | Free-to-use pictures of nature scenes. |
| Procgen Mansion | A procedural generator of not-so-tiny homes and their floor-plans. |
| Smolghost: Zine Resources | Five free zine templates. |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Colossal Cave Adventure | A seminal work of Interactive Fiction, direct inspiration to Roberta Williams of Sierra-Online. |
| DiabloWeb | A port of Diablo 1 in your browser. |
| Monster Match | A Space-Invaders clone where you match monsters to blast them. |
| Party Cemetery | A Space Funeral-like game where you attend a monster party and collect autographs. |
| PETSCII Fireplace | A virtual fireplace screensaver, complete with toggles for particle effects and music. |
| Powder | A childhood favourite where you play with various chemicals, liquids, and powders. |
| WebGL Fluid Simulation | I love this one. |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| How to Raise a Dragon | Play as a captured dragon that breaks free and turns the tables on its humans — or doesn't. |
| KittyToy | Run a virtual cat shelter and give stray cats a loving home. |
| Monster Breeder | A choose-your-own-adventure where you capture and breed monsters into grisly hybrid things. |
| Space Funeral | A man in pyjamas sets off with his horse made of legs to save the world. |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Cats on Routers | A gallery of cats sitting on internet routers, simply because they can. |
| Creepy Link | Turns your links freaky. |
| Gwil's Internet Time | A website that tells you what swatch time it is. |
| Kitten War | A site for voting on the cutest kittens. |
| Purrli | A sound-machine of cat purrs. |
| SomaFM | My radio station of choice, especially its Dark Ambient one. |
| Sounds of the Forest Soundmap | An interactive sound map of the world's forests. |
| TombZone | Make your own ASCII tombstones. |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| 100 Rabbits | A pair of creatives operating from a tiny boat. |
| Anticopyright | A copyright abolishment website. |
| Copyfree | A website for the term "Copyfree", denoting the free distribution of media. |
| Cult of the Dead Cow | A decades-old hacker group with some really cool ASCII art. |
| Electronic Frontier Foundation | A nonprofit organisation for digital privacy. |
| Low Carbon Software | A collective dedicated to environmentally-friendly software. |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| 2bit | A site dedicated to 2-bit media. |
| Bogleech | A site celebrating all things monstrous, grotesque and halloween-ish, complete with its own monster bestiary. |
| Catstuff | A celebration of cats since 1998. |
| Datagubbe | An old tech enthusiast and pixel artist. |
| Dinosaur Dracula | A site that reviews 80s to 90s media with a playful style and a spooky lean. |
| Dungeon Synth | A basic guide to Dungeon Synth. |
| Hallowdaze | A neocities site all about halloween. |
| Lilac Lynx | A Petz site that also taught me what a flexbox was. |
| Oodlecat | Another Petz fan, with a period-appropriate windows 95 theme. |
| Ritual Dust | A site for folklore and fantasy. |
| The Hermitary | A website about hermitdom. |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Archive Team | A long-running archival project that always needs a helping hand. |
| Beautiful Soup | My HTML python scraper of choice. |
| EasyOCR | My OCR transcriber of choice. |
| ExifTool | My Exif-cleaning software of choice. |
| FFmpeg | I had to get this for YT-DLP, but it can do some other cool things. |
| gallery-dl | A terminal-based downloader for galleries. I've downloaded almost a hundred gigabytes of pictures with this alone. |
| Ghost Archive | A Wayback Machine-styled website. |
| ImageMagick | The oldest in this section, editing your pictures from the terminal since the 80s. |
| Kill the Newsletter | A tool for reading newsletters with RSS instead of your e-mail. |
| Qbittorrent | My torrent client of choice. |
| Wget | My website scraper of choice. |
| yt-dlp | For downloading rare gems from that cesspool we know as YouTube. |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Aaron Swartz IRC Style Guide | A humourous guide on speaking in IRC. |
| Bash Archive | An extremely funny archive of IRC chatlogs. |
| Chat IRC Quote Database | Another funny archive of IRC chatlogs. |
| FreeBSD Wiki - IRC | FreeBSD's IRC documentation and community information. |
| Freenode | A 30 year old IRC network for the FOSS communities. |
| IRC History | An abridged version of IRC's origins. |
| IRC History (GitHub) | A Github repo that retells important events in IRC-istory. |
| IRC Newbies | Another vintage guide on the IRC protocol. |
| IRC.org | The official website of IRCnet, last updated in 2005. |
| IRCHelp.org | A classic IRC resource since 1996. |
| Libera.Chat | A newer IRC network for the FOSS communities. |
| Linux IRC Mini-HOWTO | A Linux-centric IRC guide from 2005. |
| Netsplit | A search-engine for IRC networks. |
| TFTB IRC Guide | A lighthearted anecdote on the various perverts of IRC. |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Ergo IRC Server | My daemon of choice, written in Go. |
| IRC Docs Hub | A large and precise guide on the state of IRC today. |
| irc3 | A pluggable IRC client library based on Python's asyncio. |
| IRCv3 Specifications | GitHub repository containing all IRCv3 draft and stable specifications. |
| IRCv3 Working Group | Official IRCv3 working group for standardizing IRC protocol extensions. |
| Kiwi IRC | A web-based client for IRC. |
| Modern IRC | A suggestion and guide rolled into one. |
| Ncat | A networking assistant for your homelab needs. |
| Python IRC Library | A full-featured IRC client framework for Python. |
| Sopel | A simple, easy-to-use, open-source IRC bot written in Python. |
| Wholok IRC Guide | An old and self-admittedly outdated guide on creating bots for IRC. |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| ArchWiki | A wiki for Arch Linux and its derivatives. |
| Awesome Linux | A part of Github's "awesome" series, for all things Linux. |
| Debian Wiki | A wiki for Debian. |
| Distrochooser | An interactive quiz that helps you choose a Linux OS. |
| DistroWatch | A catalog of over 900 Linux distributions and their resources. |
| Gentoo Wiki | A wiki for Gentoo. |
| Terminal Trove | A catalog of freeware for your terminal. |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Awesome Raspberry Pi | A part of Github's "awesome" series, this time for the Pi. |
| docs.pi-hole.net | The official documentation on network-wide ad-blocking with your Pi. |
| eLinux.org Pi Hub | The Embedded Linux Wiki's page on the Raspberry Pi. |
| Ozzmaker | Local man does insane things with Pis. |
| Pi Documentation | The official documentation for all Raspberry Pi hardware and software. |
| Pi Magazine | The Pi's very own magazine studded with tutorials, projects, and community efforts. |
| Pi Repository | Raspberry Pi's official Github repo. |
| Waveshare Wiki | A wiki for Raspberry Pi hardware, most notably the UPS HAT. |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Alt Texty | A robot that helps you generate alt text for your pictures. |
| Catppuccin | A pastel theme for your projects. |
| CSS Tabs with Default Open Tab | A javascript-less approach to tabs. |
| Dracula Theme | The beloved dark-theme and inspiration behind this site's colour scheme. |
| Electric Zine Maker | A miniature program for creating zines. |
| Esoteric Codes | Various articles on unusual programming languages. |
| Fraidycat | A browser extension that lets you follow people from afar — social media without the pain and suffering. |
| John Doe Layout | My favourite one-page website layout, all on one HTML file. |
| Kalechips Layouts | Accessible, mobile-friendly layouts with a web 2.0 touch. |
| Limegreen Wikitable | A wiki layout for your character listing needs. |
| Petrapixel's Layout Generator | A layout generator with lots of things to customise. |
| Rarebit | A JavaScript display for webcomics. Best for small, completed works. |
| Read Time | Gives you the time it takes to read any plaintext you show it. |
| Waterfox | A fork of Firefox and my main desktop browser. |
| Website Gallery Template | Galleries are the bane of my existence so thank you very much, miss Werewolf Girlfriend. |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Bring On the Tables — 456 Berea Street | LOREM IPSUM |
| Atkinson Hyperlegible Font — Braille Institute | LOREM IPSUM |
| Beginner's Accessibility Guide — Solaria | LOREM IPSUM |
| How to Write Alt Text and Image Descriptions — Veroniiiica | LOREM IPSUM |
| Intel One Mono — GitHub Releases | LOREM IPSUM |
| Neurodiversity Design System | A site for neurodivergent-friendly web design. |
| px to rem Converter — nekocalc | LOREM IPSUM |
| Readability Guide — Solaria | LOREM IPSUM |
| Sparrow's Guide to Accessible Webmastery | A guide for disability-friendly web design. |
| 5 Ways to Make Your Neocities Site More Accessible — sleepydev | LOREM IPSUM |
| The A11Y Project | A site for accessible design. |
| Web Accessibility Guide — Solaria | LOREM IPSUM |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| AllChans | A directory of imageboards, from the classics to the disturbing. |
| Bubbles.town | An aggregator of Small web blog posts. |
| Diagram Website | A diagram of different cultural regions of the small web. |
| Nightfall City | A stylish, immersive smallweb directory. |
| Petz Site Directory v2 | A directory of websites in the Petz modding scene. |
| slrpnk.net | An aggregator of environmental news. |
Here lie websites that openly acknowledge the reality of death on the net. These consist of graveyards for scrapped projects, failed corporate software, memorials for completed or dormant projects, and other candid acknowledgements of digital impermanence. Unlike other places, the links of this section are paradoxically enough, very much alive.
For the time being.
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Goodbye Domains | Eulogies for dead domains, overly ambitious projects and other cyberghosts. |
| Graveyard | GoblinCat's graveyard of dead projects. |
| Gwern: Design Graveyard | Gwern's graveyard of dead projects. |
| Haunting Grounds | The remains of three decades worth of elaborate halloween displays, kept as a loving tribute. Rest in peace, Gary. |
| Killed by Google | A cemetery of failed Google products. |
| Komar Halloween | The remains of a halloween decor blog, went peacefully in 2014. |
| Low Tech Webring Directory | A retired webring for simple, web 1.0 styled websites. |
| OldUse.net | The remains of a Usenet themed art project. |
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| AFN Collection (Archived) | TBA |
| ASCII Art Gallery — Andreas Freise | TBA |
| ASCII Tutorial: Hayley Wakenshaw (Archived) | TBA |
| ASCII Tutorial: Normand Veilleux (Archived) | TBA |
| ASCII Zoo (Archived) | TBA |
| ASCII Artist | TBA |
| Bob Allison's SAAA — Scarecrow's ASCII Art Archive | A mirror of the massive Scarecrow's ASCII Art Archive, collected from rec.arts.ascii. |
| Dark Links (Archived) | TBA |
| GeoCities SoHo 7373 (Archived) | TBA |
| Henry Segerman's ASCII Art | TBA |
| Lorraine's ASCII Art | TBA |
| Lorrie's ASCII Art (Archived) | TBA |
| Permacomputing (Viznut, archived) | The original text for longterm computing. |
| Tissue's ASCII Art | TBA |
| Typewritten.org | LOREM IPSUM |
| Unknown ASCII (Angelfire) | TBA |
| Valkyrie: My ASCII Page | TBA |
Sadly this is where the collection comes to a close. I always sigh when I get to the bottom of a link pile, which is why I open another link, to another pile. Then another, and another, and another! The fun never ends, really, you just have to think laterally.