Ye Olde List of Links

Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute

"an online community dedicated to developing a visual lexicon of consumer ephemera from the 1970s until now." For instance:

• Airbrush Surrealism
• Wacky Pomo
• Y2K Aesthetic

Neal.fun

Charming collection of "creative coding projects". I found who was alive to be particularly interesting. The author also maintains a link directory of his own.

Matthew Rayfield

Fun coding experiments that play with and subvert expectations about how HTML works

Sliderland

A "minimalist coding playground". Put in math equations and watch them render on the page using HTML sliders.

SEPHORA Ratings and Reviews

SEPHORA reviews that mention crying

Paper Models of Polyhedra

Tutorials and templates for building some crazy DnD dice shapes outta paper. Rad.

Game of Life 3D

Sandbox 3D version of Conway's Game of Life.

Clue Suspects Through The Years

Depictions of the six main Clue characters from various editions of the board game and related media. I wish these images were a little larger but you can still get a sense of how the character's interpretations have changed through the years. (Or not changed, in the case of Mrs. White, who is almost perpetually cast as a "kindly old house maid" stereotype.) This is part of The Art of Murder, a detailed fan site dedicated to Clue, or Cluedo is it's mysteriously called overseas. Lots of info and pictures on each edition of the game.

Apollo 13 Transcripts

Radio transcripts from the entire Apollo 13 mission. Before the flight went awry, here's mission control giving the crew an update on the latest news headlines:

Okay, let's see. The Beatles have announced they will no longer perform as a group. The quartet is reported to have made in excess of a half billion dollars during their short musical career. However, rumors that they will use this money to start their own space program are false.

024:17:24 CDR
Maybe we could borrow some.

Simone's Computer

Very cool personal website that is styled like a retro operating system and full of surprises.

YTCH

What if you surfed around YouTube was like it was cable TV?

Random Mosaic – Detecting unauthorized physical access with beans, lentils and colored rice

You send a physical item (say, a laptop) through the mail, or leave it in a hotel room for awhile. When it comes back into your possession, how can you be sure nobody has tampered with it?

Big Box Collection

3D scans of computer game boxes from the "big box" era (mid 1980's through mid 2000's). John Romero has written about the fall of the big box.

Apple II Demakes

"Demakes are modern games re-written so that they run on much older hardware, in this case the Apple II (introduced in 1977)."

The Cutting Room Floor

Wiki "dedicated to unearthing and researching unused and cut content from video games"

Tranquility Base Arcade

A cozy home arcade modeled after the late 70's, early 80's golden age of arcade games. Check out the repair station section for some interesting looks at what goes into rehabilitating broken arcade machines.

RGB Classic Games

A portal of DOS, 16 bit Windows, and early Windows 95 games. Of particular note is the site content section, which includes interviews with some important figures from the era, such as:

• Ken Silverman - developer of the Build engine, which was used for Duke Nukem 3D, among other early FPS games
• Adam Pedersen - creator of Jetpack, a shareware favorite

Software Library: Windows 3.x Games

Internet Archive collection of Windows 3.x games, made playable online.

The Most Officialest SkiFree Home Page!

Information about SkiFree's origins from the game's original developer. Plus downloads for the game itself.

Orb Farm

Simulation of a self-contained ecosystem in falling-sand form.

cstrike maps

An open directory of vintage counter-strike maps

Kaboom

A version of minesweeper where you're never punished for guessing. Minesweeper was always famous for being one of the games included with Windows, as far back as Windows 3.1, and was probably a lot of people's first introduction to computer games. It's great that people today are still into it.

via Pure Skill Minesweeper

See also: Adversarial Minesweeper

Obspogon's Ultimate Curation List

A homemade directory of interesting links and resources for classic FPS games, and many other categories! There is a lot of great stuff to check out here, like the Ultimate Freeware List of Excellence .

Why Adventure Games Suck

Ron Gilbert, creator of Monkey Island, published this in The Journal of Computer Game Design in 1989

dvd3000's computer stuff

Grab bag of guides, downloads, and etcetera. Some highlights:

• Original Classic Windows Wallpaper
• A Complete Guide To Windows 3.1 In DOSBox
• PROGMAN.EXE Icons

Cameron's World

"Cameron's World is a web-collage of text and images excavated from the buried neighbourhoods of archived GeoCities pages (1994–2009)."

Steve's Old Computer Museum

Site that showcases a great collection of old computers, with pictures and specs! I grew up using an Apple II Plus with a monochrome screen and two disk drives, just like in the picture.

1995 Was The Most Important Year For The Web

Long-form deep dive into the history and design of the world wide web. There's some cool stuff in here:

• rise of the hypertext fad in the 80s, how the hyperlink was invented
• some of Tim Berners-Lee's inspirations when designing the World Wide Web

VETUSWARE.COM

A large abandonware collection. Most of these kinds of sites focus solely on games, but vetusware seems to give equal billing to operating systems, office productivity software, and other bygone ephemera

Nathan's Toasty Technology page - GUI Gallery

Screenshots from various GUI interfaces over the years

'90s Dad Thrillers: a List

Comprehensive theorizing and dissection of the Dad Thriller, a proposed category of 90's Hollywood action movie. This makes total sense to me and helps lay out a broad progression of popular action movie styles:

• 80s: blockbuster action hero flicks. Guns and muscles. The Schwarzenegger heydey.
• 90s: dad thrillers
• 00s: Jason Bourne-alikes.

VHS Tape Logos and Openers

An internet archive collection of VHS tape openers (like the mix of copyright messages, studio logos, advertisements, previews, etc. that would appear before the "feature presentation" began). This digitization & and preservation effort seems to be the labor one one dedicated user.

Drew's Script-O-Rama

Incredible trove of movie scripts. For example:

Super Mario Brothers - The Movie Archive

Fan site for the (imo underrated) 1993 film adaption of the Super Mario Brothers franchise, with tons of production notes and great behind the scenes pictures. The team behind this site obtained an early version of the SMB movie that included ~20 minutes of previously unseen footage, which they've re-edited into an unofficial extended edition: The Morton Jankel Cut

Movie Censorship

A site that tracks the differences between various releases of the same movie (special editions, directors cuts, international versions, TV cuts, etc). My entry point to this site was this extremely detailed writeup of the differences between the original theatrical version and the special edition of Star Wars.

Horrible edge cases to consider when dealing with music

Strange artist names, album names, and the like.

Creative Writings of Andy Weir

Andy Weir, author of The Martian has a personal site that includes some of his other work. If you're looking for a place to start, I would check out his short story The Egg.

The Heat Death of Nostalgia

Musing on nostalgia, meta-nostaliga, and finding a balance.

Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution

"Subcultures are dead.", so the author argues. Let's explore why.

We asked an art historian to review 8 fighter cockpits

98.css

"98.css is a CSS library for building interfaces that look like Windows 98"