Cool Links and Stuff I Like
Games
- Squaredle: A great word search game with two new puzzles available for free each day. There is also an archive of special puzzles, all of which can be played for free as well. Accessing the archive of daily puzzles requires a paid subscription.
- Waffle: A fun Wordle spinoff that works a bit like a mix between Wordle and a crossword. The site includes a free archive of both the Daily and Deluxe Waffles. Accessing the Royale puzzles requires an Amazon Prime subscription.
Neocities
: This is an excellent site dedicated to one of my favorite games of all time, Final Fantasy Tactics. It's easily one of the best sites I've found on Neocities since I joined. The fanfiction archive and the translation comparisons are two of my favorite sections.-
: A site dedicated to the classic Jet Moto games for the original Playstation. The site is still under construction, but check it out and consider joining its forum and Discord server!
Old Web
- The Anime Web Turnpike, AKA Anipike (Internet Archive link): A classic directory of anime, manga, and video game fan sites. This link captures it as it appeared on July 27, 2000. If you want to explore the fan sites of the Old Web, this is a fantastic place to start! A version of the directory featuring active sites exists on Neocities and can be found here.
- Homestar Runner: This was one of my go-to sites in the early/mid-2000s and still hosts some of the funniest cartoons ever made. The Strong Bad E-mails and the Teen Girl Squad cartoons are some of my favorite videos on the site. (ARROW'D!) Most of the site's videos have now been uploaded to YouTube with the interactive elements contained in some of them removed.
: A classic site dedicated to JRPGs. I used to visit this site a lot back in the early/mid-2000s, mostly to read fanfiction. I also lurked on the forums and even posted there a little. The site is still up as of February 2024 (with a few broken links here and there), but if it's no longer online when you're reading this, here's an Internet Archive link to the site as it appeared in mid-2004.- RPGamer (Internet Archive link): The long-running RPG site as it appeared in October 2000, around the time I started visiting it on a regular basis.
Podcasts
- Retronauts: As the name suggests, this is a retro gaming podcast. This was the first podcast I ever got into way back in early 2009, and it's one of my favorites. Unfortunately, the podcast has declined in overall quality since Bob Mackey initially got involved in running it back in 2011 during the first revival of the series. Anyway, I'm trying to stay mostly positive here, so I won't focus on that too much. I still suggest listening to the later episodes of the podcast not hosted by Mackey as many of them are still quite good. You can find the original 2006-2010 run of the podcast here. The Retronauts Live (later Retronauts Prime) run from 2011-2013 can be found here. The episodes from 2013 to the present day can be found via the podcast's current RSS feed at this link (which, even after clicking "Show All Episodes," doesn't display the first several episodes from 2013 for some reason) or this one (contains the complete list of episodes).
YouTube
My interest in new videos on YouTube is just about at its nadir. Between the clickbait video titles, the absurd thumbnails, the proliferation of derivative content, the shortage of genuine creativity on display, and the influence of The Algorithm, I feel like the platform has little to offer. That said, there are still creators out there making and uploading interesting, unique, and educational content. Here are some of them:
- Camping With Steve: Steve Wallis documents his many camping trips, including some bold stealth camping outings and many overnight camps in extremely cold weather. Some of my favorite videos are Stealth Camping in Roundabout, Freeway Interchange Stealth Camping, and Welcome Sign Stealth Camping.
- Jackson Crawford: An expert on the Old Norse language talks about Vikings, Norse mythology, historical linguistics, archaeological finds, and occasionally other subjects, sometimes with other experts, and often with beautiful scenery in the background.
- Simon Roper: Videos about historical linguistics, accents, and wildlife, along with some independent films made by Roper and his friends. Jackson Crawford has appeared as a guest on the channel several times.
- Townsends: A YouTube channel focusing on various aspects of daily life in the 1700s, including cooking, food preservation/storage, crafts, survival skills, and so on.
- Voyageurs Wolf Project: A collection of wildlife videos, most of them featuring wolves, recorded by trail cameras in Voyageurs National Park and uploaded by researchers. Content warning: Some videos on this channel show wolves (and sometimes other animals) hunting and killing other creatures. If you find such content or even the very idea of it to be disturbing, do not visit this channel.