Pearlnight's Lair

Bookmarks

Behold, my bookshelf of webbed sites. For best effect, read these in a candlelit chamber with a blanket and a warm drink. This is a personal collection, and not an exhaustive list. These are things I consistently use. This is more a collection of hypertext curiosities, with an obligatory spooy lean.

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!

Bookmarks \ The Magazine Rack

Computing

Title Summary
A Guide to Web Curation A guide on how to sort your link pages for maximum efficiency.
Alex Schroeder: Keep Archives LOREM IPSUM
Alex Wilchan: Digital Decluttering LOREM IPSUM
Alex Wilchan: Social Media Scrapbook LOREM IPSUM
Blog Microfeatures LOREM IPSUM
Chris Hannah: Some Thoughts on Social Media LOREM IPSUM
Content is Dead. Long Live Filler. LOREM IPSUM
CrimethInc: Doxcare LOREM IPSUM
Dan Luu on SEO Spam A discussion on the deluge of SEO.
Death of the Old Web LOREM IPSUM
Defensive Computing Checklist LOREM IPSUM
Design Tenets of my Website If I had to summarise why a lot of old sites feel that way, it would be this article.
End Times: Why Your Website Should Work Without JavaScript LOREM IPSUM
Fire Exits Websites need easy means of exit when they fail.
Herman: Messing with Bots LOREM IPSUM
Herman: Slow Social Media LOREM IPSUM
How to Be a Good Critic (Agre) LOREM IPSUM
I'm Afraid to Die, So I Made a Website LOREM IPSUM
IndieWeb Does Not Need to Take Off The Indieweb does not need mainstream approval to thrive.
IndieWeb Principles LOREM IPSUM
Internet Corpse Management LOREM IPSUM
IRC is the Only Viable Chat Protocol IRC is still an incredible, versatile tool in the modern age.
Just Put It on Your Blog LOREM IPSUM
Karl Voit: Digitizing Paper LOREM IPSUM
Karl Voit: Managing Digital Photographs LOREM IPSUM
Linkrot, or Website Existentialism A very heartfelt essay on the mortality of websites, and how to make the most of their losses.
Not Incompressible LOREM IPSUM
On the Futility of Using Microsoft as an Email Provider LOREM IPSUM
Permacomputing (Viznut, archived) The original text for longterm computing.
Practical Betterments: Backup Your Vital Data LOREM IPSUM
Sanding off Friction from Indie Web Connection LOREM IPSUM
Smallweb Survival LOREM IPSUM
The Death of DeviantArt A post-mortem on deviantART and the dearth of a successor.
The Net: User Guidelines and Netiquette A decades' old guide on Internet manners.
The Public Domain The Public Domain is inevitable, and not that scary.
The Slow Web A call for a slower, more intentional internet experience.
The Small Way LOREM IPSUM
The Website Obesity Crisis Contemporary websites are bloated and inefficient.
This Page is Designed to Last How to make your webpages last for years at a time.
Unsung Heroes: Flickr's URL Scheme LOREM IPSUM
We Can Have a Different Web LOREM IPSUM
Why I Release Things into the Public Domain One webmaster's list of reasons to forfeit copyright.
Why We're Helping More Wikis Move Away from Fandom LOREM IPSUM
Word Rot LOREM IPSUM
You Are Not Late You're just in time to do things online.
YOU are the Dead Internet If it's not the robots, it's us making the internet so dull in places.

Good Living

Title Summary
Blog: More Pull You're more interesting than you think you are.
His Virus Ness: Long Live the Interwebz Things don't die if you put effort into them.
How to Stop Being Boring LOREM IPSUM
In Good Hands LOREM IPSUM
Julia Evans: Tactics for Writing in Public LOREM IPSUM
Make Art for You, Not Likes LOREM IPSUM
Daniele63: Terrariums LOREM IPSUM
Making a Terrarium in a Demijohn LOREM IPSUM
Oliver Burkeman: The River Learn to move more leisurely through your To-Read list.
Passive Suicidality Scale LOREM IPSUM
Re: Re: Go Fail at Some Hobbies LOREM IPSUM
Real Life Mag: The Great Offline "The Wilderness" and "The Offline" are similar concepts with similar logical fallacies.
Taming the Mammoth Don't worry about what people think of you.
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.

Newsletters

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.

Bookmarks \ Webbed Sites

Archives

General

Title Description
16colors An archive of early ASCII and ANSI art.
Bibliotheca Anonoma: 4chan History LOREM IPSUM
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 LOREM IPSUM
Do History: Graveyard Toolkit LOREM IPSUM
DOSBox LOREM IPSUM
Goodbye Domains Eulogies for dead domains, overly ambitious projects and other cyberghosts.
Hallowdaze LOREM IPSUM
Halloween Collector A collector of vintage Halloween decorations discusses his decades-long journey through the hobby.
Halloween Monster List LOREM IPSUM
Halloween Retrospect A 600+ and still-growing collection of vintage Halloween ephemera.
Haunting Grounds LOREM IPSUM
Hello World Collection A compilation of "Hello World" programs in over 600 programming languages.
Horror.net LOREM IPSUM
Killed by Google A cemetery of failed Google products.
Komar Halloween LOREM IPSUM
LP Archive: Dwarf Fortress — Boatmurdered LOREM IPSUM
OldUse.net LOREM IPSUM
OldVersion.com LOREM IPSUM
Ravensblight LOREM IPSUM
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.
U.S. National Archives LOREM IPSUM

Wikis

Title Description
Ardalambion Text-heavy guides on J.R.R. Tolkien's conlangs, which specialises in his Elvish 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 LOREM IPSUM
Tolkien Gateway A wiki for J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy epic and the rest of its world.

Wayback Machine

Art

ASCII

Title Description
Alan W. Smith's ASCII Art LOREM IPSUM
ASCII Art Website LOREM IPSUM
ASCII Artist LOREM IPSUM
ASCII.co.uk LOREM IPSUM
FUNGI A gallery of user-submitted ASCII fungi and other such whimsical things.
Joan Stark ASCII Art Archive LOREM IPSUM
Roy's ASCII Corner LOREM IPSUM
Stone Story ASCII Tutorial Tutorials from the creator of Stone Story.
Unicorn and Butterfly A webcomic made entirely from ASCII.
Xero's ASCII Gist LOREM IPSUM

Art Resources

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.
Pomodoro An in-browser version of the famous timer.
Smolghost: Zine Resources LOREM IPSUM
Wikimedia Commons Wikipedia's image galleries and a viable source of artistic reference. Just mind all the oddly-specific sections.

Games

Browser

Title Description
Colossal Cave Adventure A seminal work of the Interactive Fiction genre, and direct inspiration to Roberta Williams, the creator 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 of its most famous guests.
PETSCII Fireplace A screensaver that's a virtual fireplace, 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.

Downloadable

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, because you can decide!
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 to make grisly hybrid things.
Space Funeral The famous horror-surrealist game where you, a man in pyjamas, set off with your horse made of legs to save the world.

Novelty Sites

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.
Sounds of the Forest Soundmap An interactive sound map of the world's forests.
TombZone Make your own ASCII tombstones.

Other Netizens

Collectives

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", a sign 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.

Individuals

Title Description
2bit A site dedicated to 2-bit media.
Bogleech A site that celebrates all things monstrous, grotesque and halloween-ish, complete with its very own monster bestiary.
Catstuff LOREM IPSUM
Dinosaur Dracula A site that reviews 80s to 90s media with a playful style and a spooky lean.
Ritual Dust A site for folklore and fantasy.
The Hermitary A website about hermitdom.

Technology

Datahoarding

Title Description
Archive Team A long-running Archival project that always needs a helping hand.
Beautiful Soup LOREM IPSUM
Beautiful Soup 4 (Docs) LOREM IPSUM
EasyOCR LOREM IPSUM
ExifTool LOREM IPSUM
FFmpeg LOREM IPSUM
gallery-dl LOREM IPSUM
Ghost Archive A wayback-machine styled website.
ImageMagick LOREM IPSUM
Qbittorrent My torrent client of choice.
Wget LOREM IPSUM
yt-dlp LOREM IPSUM

IRC (For Users)

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.
Don't Ask to Ask LOREM IPSUM
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.

IRC (For Operators)

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 LOREM IPSUM
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.

Linux (General)

Title Description
ArchWiki A wiki for Arch Linux and its derivatives.
Awesome Linux A part of Github's "awesome" series, for all things Linux.
CommandLineFu LOREM IPSUM
Debian Wiki A wiki for Debian.
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.

Linux (Raspberry Pi and Raspbian)

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.
Scott: Solar Hosting with a Raspberry Pi LOREM IPSUM
Waveshare Wiki A wiki for Raspberry Pi hardware, most notably the UPS HAT.

Website Building

Title Description
13th Track: Add Music Player LOREM IPSUM
98.css A stylesheet modelled off Windows 98's UI.
Before You Buy a Domain, Check if it's Haunted LOREM IPSUM
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 used in many a program, and also the inspiration behind this site's colour scheme.
Esoteric Codes Various articles on unusual programming languages.
File Garden A file hosting tool for your browser.
Fraidycat A browser extension and software that lets you follow people from afar. It's like social media without the pain and suffering.
John Doe Layout My favourite one-page website layout, all on one HTML file.
Just Fucking Use HTML LOREM IPSUM
Kalechips Layouts A variety of accessible, mobile-friendly layouts with a web 2.0 touch. I'm currently using its Fun with Flexbox layout.
Limegreen Wikitable A wiki layout for your character listing needs. I use this for Dancing with the Dead's wiki pages.
Petrapixel's Layout Generator A layout generator with lots of things to customise. I used this on a previous version of my Dungeon Keeper 2 Shrine.
Rarebit A JavaScript display for webcomics. Word of advice though, use it for small, completed webcomics.
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 Guides

Title Description
Neurodiversity Design System A site for neurodivergent-friendly web design.
The A11Y Project A site for accessible design.
W3schools The premier site for code tutorials for HTML, CSS, Javascript and more.

Web Portals

Title Description
AllChans A directory of imageboards, from the classics to the disturbing.
Diagram Website A diagram of different cultural regions of the small web.
Petz Site Directory v2 A directory of websites in the Petz modding scene.