Steve-o's Extensive Hotlist
This link list might really be the quickest way of learning what
my interests and likes are. Pretty much everything I can think of
is here, organized by topics. The drawback is that some interests I
would like to represent on my hotlist aren't well-represented
on the web, leaving me without any good sites to link to.
Clearly from the shear volume, I don't use all of these links
regularly. If you find one that is out of date, plese drop me a
line.
People I Know
- Transformers fans - People I met through the TF fandom.
- David
"Walky" Willis - A fellow Transformers fan and my current
roommate, David has two
webcomics.
- Jameel al
Khafiz - Also known in the Transformers fandom as
"Megabee", Jameel is a very hoopy frood living in
Pittsburgh.
- Jenni "Trixter" Ulm -
Another Columbus TF fan! Jenni has a lot of Go-Bots.
- Ron "Robowang" Bedra - Yet
another Columbus resident, Ron's
pretty goofy and has great taste in music (except for Poison).
He also has a
LiveJournal, like everybody else on Earth.
-
Me - I started keeping a LiveJournal, too.
- Mundanes - Actually, just people from elsewhere in my life. Some
of them are big geeks, too.
- Brock
Burkett - Brock and I met in 7th grade, and have been
friends pretty much ever since.
- Marissa Lingen - M'ris and
I met in 1997 at a summer
physics program at the University of Toledo. Now she's a
published SF and fantasy author.
- Seth
Rosenblatt - I know Seth from my Boston days. He's just came
back to the States after living in Japan for a few years and
going on a huge tour of Eastern Asia.
- Brendan
Britton - We met while attending Boston University's graduate
program in astronomy. These days Brendan is making crazy,
ironically cheesy music. He used to be known as "Pepé
le Gangstair", a French gangsta rapper. ("I will lecture you
on fine art / you can be my little French tart".)
Comic Books
- Publishers I Like
- Marvel Comics - Spider-Man,
X-Men, and the Avengers.
- DC Comics - Superman,
Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern.
- Wildstorm - A DC imprint with it's own identity. WS
puts out great stuff like "Astro City", "The Authority", and
(a favorite of mine) "Out There". DC/Wildstorm is also home
to Alan Moore's "America's Best Comics" sub-imprint which does
"League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", "Tom Strong", and
"Promethea".
- Titan Books - A
British publisher who mostly do collected volumes. They are
reprinting the old Marvel "Transformers" comics, including the
stories that were previously only available in the UK.
- Creators Who Have Official Pages
- Brian Michael
Bendis - Writer of several series I love, including
"Powers" and "Ultimate Spider-Man".
- Priest -
Formerly known as Jim Owsley, Priest wrote the
critically-acclaimed and fan-favorite "Black Panther" series
for Marvel. Sadly, Priest's BP was cancelled.
- Neil Gaiman - The
creator of Sandman, among many, many other accomplishments.
- Jess Nevins' Comic Annotations - My main interest here is the
outstanding annotations for "League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen" that Jess has put together. If his Geocities site
isn't responding, try the
LoEG annotations mirror.
- Watchmen, by Alan Moore
- Sandman / Death fanpages
- The Wake - A well
organized site with various info about the series, including
annotations for a few issues.
- Neil Gaiman's Sandman - Background and summaries of the
entire series.
- Astro City - With a cute
.us domain name like a real-world city, this is the official
homepage for Kurt Busiek's "Astro City" series.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles - Official site for the franchise. TMNT is making a
comback, with new cartoons and toys as well as a new b&w comic
series from Turtle co-creator Peter Laird.
- Marvel fanpages
- X-Fan - An
extensive X-Men fansite with reviews, message boards, news,
etc..
- Thunderbolts: The Complete History - Devoted to one of my
all-time favorite series.
- Avengers
Assemble - Lots of background information on my favorite
superteam, especially in the "secret files" section.
- Avengers
Forever - This site is very pretty, and has loads of
fun info and articles.
- The
Wakandan Embassy - A great Black Panther fansite. Priest's
own site, listed above, has a lot of BP info, too, but this
is a good one.
- Marvel Universe References
- Marvel Directory
- Several of the sites above have character profiles, but this
site is entirely dedicated to them. Nearly all mainstram
characters are here, even the relatively minor ones.
- Appendix to the Marvel
Universe - Bios for thousands of Marvel characters, but
only obscure, strange ones. Makes really entertaining reading,
as a lot of these characters are ridiculous. The staff of
this site are so highly-regarded by the Marvel editorial
staff that they've been tapped to write the recent Official
Handbook comics Marvel has been publishing.
- Marvel Chronology
Project - This is not a MU timeline, sadly, but it does
list essentially every appearance of every MU character ever,
which is no small feat.
- The
Villains of Marvel Comics - Dedicated to the bad guys.
- Comic Collecting Resources
- The Unh! Project
- A collection of guttural moans from comics.
- Ka-BOOM! - A dictionary of comic book sound effects and
grunts. Follow the link at the bottom to BZZURKK!, Ka-BOOM!'s
companion thesaurus.
Television
- Channels / Networks I'm Fond Of
- Beloved Programs
- Educational
- Joss Whedon stuff
- Babylon 5
- The
Lurker's Guide - Undoubtedly the primary B5 resource
on the web.
- B5 Encyclopedia
- No pictures, but quite complete. Anything you could
think to look up is here, even "spoo".
- B5 Timeline
- A history of the B5 universe, plus lots of other info.
- The Wonder Years - An episode guide, a
bunch of links, and an online (authorized) version of
the book, "The Wonder Years - Growing up in the
Sixties".
- Gilmore Girls --
Yes, I am a straight man and I LOVE GILMORE GIRLS.
- My Ode to Spot - A website devoted to Commander Data's
cat from "Star Trek: The Next Generation".
- Ally McBeal -
Once known as "Dana's" Ally site, this is a great resource
with episode summeries and a big FAQ.
- My So-Called Life - TV doesn't get much better than
this.
- Adventures of Pete and Pete
Animation
- Animation Insider
News from the world of animation.
- Animated News - Another
animation news site.
- Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli
- Nausicaa.net - An enormous
fansite devoted to Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.
- "Natural Wonders" - Transcripts of some outstanding
lectures about the history of manga, Miyazaki's body of work,
and the Nausicaa manga and anime in
particular.
- Giant Robo -
Awesomeest anime OVA series of all time.
- Big O - "Cast in the
name of God, ye not worthy". Brought to you by the same people
as Giant Robo, this is a mysterious giant robot show with a
retro look.
- Tenchi Muyo -
Very lengthy character profiles here. Explains a lot of the
confusing stuff!
- Cartoon Network programming blocks
- Cartoon Planet - I miss Cartoon Planet so much... it was a
thousand times funnier than "Space Ghost: Coast to Coast" or "The
Brak Show". This page has transcripts of every Cartoon Planet
sketch, lists of which sketches appeared in which episodes, and
lyrics for all of Brak's songs!
- Samurai Jack
- DC Animated Universe (ie. DC comics cartoons)
- Justice League Animated -
One of my absolute favorites! More so than the comic version,
this series is grand and epic, almost to the levels of
comic book The Authority. And the occasional non-epic
episode is always great too, like when the League get age-regressed
into tweens, or Wildcat gets stuck in an illegal prize-fighting
ring.
- Teen Titans Animated
- ::cue the groovy music:: When there's trouble you know who to
call! From their tower they can see it all!
- The Animated Batman -
The show that started it all, "Batman: The Animated Series" was
a groundbreaking program in almost every respect.
- Other cartoons from my childhood...
- Futurama - Don't miss
the "episode capsules" which provide more info than you could
possibly want. (The Simpsons newsgroup has been doing similar
reviews for Simpsons for ages.)
- The Last Unicorn - A nice, very personal page telling the
history of this book, and how it became an animated movie produced
by the same studio that did Miyazaki's "Nausicaa" film.
- General Cartoon Resources
- BCDB - The Big Cartoon Database.
Basically a specialized IMDB-like site with production info
and episode guides.
- Voice Chasers - A voice
actor database.
Movies
- Writers / Directors
- Star Wars
- Official Site
- TheForce.net - Probably
the best general-purpose SW website with tons of news and a
big selection of information, such as the next site on my list
which happens to be hosted here. Also, don't miss the "fan
films" section which includes the "Cops" parody, "Troops".
- SW Tehnical
Commentaries - One of the greatest masterpieces of geekdom
I have ever seen. Bow before dozens of insanely long
discussions of Star Wars spaceship design and technology,
complete with many excellent illustrative photos.
- Star Wars
ASCIImation - Making steady progress since 1997, this is
a project to recreate the entirity of "A New Hope" using
animated ASCII art.
- Contact
- Edward Scissorhands
- I can't find any Edward fanpages! What
is wrong with people?
- DVD
Screencaps - I did, at least, find this page with lots of
still images from the film. Don't worry that they aren't
widescreen; the full-screen DVD was done open matte, not pan
and scan, so there's actually more to see than in the wide
version (although it looks less dramatic).
- Legend
- Last of the Mohicans
- The Terminator vs. The English Patient: Which Is A Better
Love Story? - A surprisingly strong argument. (Note that
I'm linking to an archived copy in the Wayback Machine, as the
original site seems to have disappeared.)
Books
- Tolkien
- Dinotopia - Official site.
Lots of good stuff. Everything ordered from their online store
comes autographed by creator James Gurney.
- Frankenstein -
Info about Mary Shelly, a complete e-text of the book, and
analysis.
Games
- The Nintendo Homepage
- Sony PlayStation
- Game FAQs
- RPGamer - Devoted to RPG
video games for all platforms, with news, reviews, media,
walkthroughs, etc..
- Insert Credit - Quite
possibly the most intellectually stimulating video game site on
the entire internet. Their review of Wind Waker uses
the word "epistomological".
- Square Enix
- Square Enix -
One of my favorite game developers, responsible for Final
Fantasy and Dragon Warrior among many others.
- Final Fantasy
Classic - A lovely site entirely devoted to just the first
FF game.
- Xenogears: God and Mind - A Xeno
series fansite, focusing on Xenogears (episode 5, the first game
released) and its philosophical side. The site has essays,
reference materials, and even an in-progress novelization of
the game.
- Mega Man Homepage -
Mandi Paugh's extensive MM site.
- Video Game Music
- Overclocked
Remix - Lots of remixes of great VG tunes.
- VG Mix - Similar to
Overclocked, but with more of a focus on forming a community
for the musicians to help them improve their work.
- RPGamer - Don't forget
there's a regular music column linked to from the front page,
and that there are music files (remixes and straight comps)
for practically every game in the "games" sections.
- KFSS Studios -
Home of "Project Majestic Mix", a series of fully authorized
CDs of remixed video game music. The first album was a tribute
to composer Nobuo Uematsu, most famous for the Final Fantasy
series.
- One-Up Studios -
Another group releasing licensed CDs of remixed game music.
They have a tribute to Yasunori Mitsuda!
- Emulation - Emulation is illegal. Don't let anybody tell you
otherwise with crap about "delete the ROM in 24 hours".
Distributing ROMs is illegal, and any emulator which wasn't
backwards engineered is also illegal (i.e. all of them). I don't
support the emulation of commercially viable consoles, but I
think it is a wonderful way to preserve the experience of old,
"lost" systems. The emulator sites tend to stay online, though,
while the ROM sites come and go. So, I can link to emulators,
but to find ROMs you'll have to do searches (try filesharing, too).
- Zophar's Domain - Everything
you need to get started in game emulation, plus lots of news.
- ZSNES - My favorite Super
Nintendo emulator.
- MAME - Multiple Arcade
Machine Emulator. MAME emulates arcade games. Thousands of
them. If you ever want to get nostalgic and play Truxton,
Dig Dug, or Gyruss, this is the emulator for you.
- Non-Video Games
- Wizards of the Coast -
They make "Magic: The Gathering" and "Dungeons and Dragons",
both of which I am fond of.
- Jolly Games -
Tom Jolly has created a lot of fun games, including the
outstanding Wiz-War.
- Wiz-War - An extensive
site dedicated to Jolly's Wiz-War.
Music
- Movie Trailer Music
- Movie trailers almost never use music from the movie they are
advertising. They use music from other sources, usually other
movies. This site will help you track down the song you're looking
for.
- Composers - I actually listen to far more instrumental music
than vocal.
- Chess - Probably my favorite musical. There's also a pretty
good Wikipedia
article on it.
- Randy Newman
- Indigo Girls - My favorite band.
- Jewel Kilcher
- Pet Shop Boys
- Sting
- R.E.M.
- Video game music links above.
My Pantheon
Places I've Been And/Or Like
- Indiana, PA - My hometown!
- Pittsburgh, PA - As I grew up in Indiana, Pittsburgh was "the
city" for when we needed a city.
- Carnegie Museums
- Steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie gave a lot back to Pittsburgh
both during and after his life. One of his legacies is this
group of lovely museums.
- The O
- aka, "Original Hot Dog Shop". They're starting to branch out
with additional locations, but for the real O experience you must
go to their first in Oakland, right off Pitt campus, only a 10
minute walk from CMU. All of their food comes in enormous,
delicious portions for shockingly little money. Their official
homepage is a little bland, though, so check out
this
review to get a flavor for the place.
This review says it's worth taking a hundred mile road
trip to try the place out!
- Kennywood - A fantastic
old-time amusement park. Not as many coasters as at a newer,
more sterile place like a Six Flags, but they've got their
share, including three superb, widely-acclaimed old-style
wooden coasters. (The Thunderbolt is legendary!)
- A Kennywood tour - A coaster enthusiast's charming review
of the park. His excitement is contagious. I wanna go
back!
- Schools
- Indiana Public School District -
My elementary school was semi-private (at the University), but
I went to the Jr. and Sr. high schools portrayed here.
- Ohio Wesleyan - My undergraduate alma mater.
- Main site
- Physics and
Astronomy
- Astronomy
Club - This page has been updated in places, but
much of it is the same as when I built it in 1998.
It even still has a dead link to my old OWU homepage.
They took down the page where I explained what a disgrace
it is that the 100-year-old observatory is falling apart
because of a lack of attention and money from the
administration.
- Webcam located
at one end the "JAY Walk", the strip between the
residential and academic areas of campus. You can
even take control and point it wherever you want!
- University of Toledo - Did a summer program here.
- Boston University - Source of my Master's degree in
astronomy.
- Ohio State University - My current academic home.
- Parks and national landmarks
- Ireland
- The UK
- Italy
- Photo galleries of many Italian locations.
- Isle of Capri - One of the world's most beautiful
places.
- Pompei Ruins - A Roman city buried by a volcano in the
year 79 C.E..
- Florence - Home of the Renaissance.
- Venice
Yummy Food!
- Utz Quality Foods -
The most wonderful potato chips in the history of the world are
the old-fashioned "Grandma Utz". Kettle cooked in lard. Oh
yeah. They accept mail order, so get to it.
- Wise Snacks - My
second favorite snack company. Wise makes the second most
wonderful potato chips in the history of the world: Wise Onion
and Garlic flavored chips. They have also mastered the art of the
cheese doodle, blowing away all competition.
- Stewart's Fine
Beverages - A "designer" soda company which makes the best
cream soda I've ever had, a top-three level root beer, and my
beloved "Orange and Cream" flavor.
- Coca-Cola - It's very
sad, but after suffering through a kidney stone I've cut back
drastically on my Coke intake. I blame myself, though, for not
drinking enough water to offset it rather than feeling anger
towards this sweet nectar.
- McDonald's - I may be an
adult now, but it's still a special treat for me to have a
McDonald's lunch.
- Papa John's - Delivering
the perfect pizza.
- Hershey's Chocolate -
Regular old milk chocolate is my thing. No dark, no European.
Just plain Hershey's. Yum!
- Charley's Grilled
Subs - Cheesesteak, plus fries which rival McDonald's.
- Nissin Foods - Makers of
"Oodles of Noodles" instant ramen. Nissin made the world's first
instant ramen, and theirs is still the best! Maruchan ramen
can bite me!
- History and Legends of Hot Dogs - Is the hot dog not the
world's most perfect food? Especially when it's a
Nathan's
famous, which have limited grocery store availability in some
areas of the USA? For further reading, visit the
National Hot Dog and Sausage
Council, where they offer etiquitte tips in keeping with
"the unpretentious nature of hot dogs." (For example, paper
napkins GOOD, cloth napkins BAD.)
Physics and Astronomy
- Astronomy news
- Astronomy Now -
Basic astronomy news site.
- Spaceflight Now -
Focused on rocket and satellite related news.
- SpaceScience.com -
"Space science" is like "local" astronomy. It is primarily
concerned with things happening within our solar system,
especially related to solar activity.
- Space.com - A commercially
supported astronomy and space news site. This means the site
is both higher-budget than those above -- which is good --
and also significantly more bloated -- which is bad.
- NASA
- Space Telescope Science
Institute - Operators of the Hubble Space Telescope.
- Hubble Gallery
- Housed at the STScI, there's lots of gorgeous photos
here.
- Hubble Heritage
Project - A special Hubble telescope initiative to release
pretty pictures for public consumption.
- Planetary Society - A
non-profit astronomy and space exploration advocacy group.
- Perkins
Observatory - Located in central Ohio and founded by my
undergraduate alma mater.
- Lowell Observatory - Located
in Flagstaff, Lowell is the home of the original Perkins telescope.
- SETI Institute - Search
for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.
- Center for Natural Units -
A system of units which are far superior to metric for use in the
sciences, the Planck system defines new units based on the values
of fundamental natural constants (like the speed of light,
Boltzmann constant, etc.) so as to make as many constants as
possible turn into "1" or other powers of ten, thus simplifying
calculations and also making a lot more sense aesthetically.
- Insultingly
Bad Movie Physics - General principles like exploding cars
and visible laser beams, plus movie reviews with "physics ratings".
- Is glass liquid or solid? - It's commonly said that glass is
"actually" a liquid, but this statement is -- at best -- misleading.
What "liquid" means to most people is that it flows, which is
something that glass just doesn't do, so by any everyday definition
of liquid, it is not one. It can fit into some thermodynamic
definitions of liquid, but also some definitions of solid, and really
it's best classified as... a glass, also known as an
amorphous or noncrystalline solid. This link is written for a fairly
physically-literate reader. Discussions more suited to a layperson
can be found in my Urban Legends links.
Net Concerns
- Note that I have links to lots of good free software on
another page.
- World of Ends - What the
Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else.
- WWW Standards-Compliance
- World Wide Web Consortium - The
W3C is the organization responsible for coming up with the
rules of how the web works.
- W3 HTML Validator -
It's easy to make sure your web pages are WWW-compliant.
Just paste them or their URL into the Validator form and
it will find all the errors for you.
- Any Browser
Campaign - Ever visit a website which says "best viewed
with X" where X is a browser you don't have or don't like?
Such sites are in violation of the spirit in which the web
was created, which is for content to be equally accessible
on all platforms. It's especially frustrating since usually
the "preferred" browser is MSIE, which is notorious for not
being standards-complaint. In other words, sites which are
"optimized" for MSIE are usually written with incorrect
HTML.
- Spam
- Spam Gourmet - A
free service which provides disposable email addresses. If
you want to sign up something and need to receive a
confirmation message, but don't want to get spam later, this
is the site for you.
- Spam Delenda
Est - Resources for learning about how spammers operate,
and how to read the forged headers in the messages they
send.
- Public Domain and Intellectual Property
- Creative Commons -
Not everything you create has to have "all rights
reserved". You can go with "some rights reserved" instead,
allowing people more freedom with how to use your works.
Creative Commons can help.
- Xiph.org - Home of the Ogg
project, a suite of multimedia file formats which are open
and free to use, unlike MP3, Windows Media, MPEG, and so on,
all of which either cost money or keep secrets about how
they work.
- GNU.org - GNU is/was a
project to create a clone of the UNIX operating system for
free use. The operating system referred to as "Linux" is
the GNU operating system using Linus Torvalds' Linux
kernel. (GNU prefers you call it GNU/Linux, so as not to
give all the credit to Linus.)
- Philosophy of the GNU Project - Free software is free
as in free speech, not just free as in free beer.
- Copyleft and the GNU Public License - In contrast to
copyright, the GNU project allows and encourages people to
make derivitive works of GNU software; the only restriction
is that derivitive works must also allow further derivation.
The GNU Public License (GPL) is widely-used in the open
source programming community.
- Electronic Frontier Foundation -
The EFF is a non-profit group concerned with "digital rights"
and rights on the Internet. Specifically, they deal with such
issues as censorship, privacy, DRM, and patent law.
- The Anti-DMCA
Site - The Digital Millenium Copyright Act does a lot of
things, some good, most bad. For example, it outlaws any
attempt to circumvent copy-protection technologies, whether or
not you actually infringe on the copyright. This can
effectively outlaw "fair use" if the producer puts even a
half-assed protection scheme on their content. The DMCA can
also, in some cases, outlaw tinkering with electronic devices
which you own as well as telling people -- even in conversation
-- how to break copy-protection schemes.
- Chilling Effects
- This site is about the abuse of copyright, patent, and
trademark rights to squash all conceivable infringements,
no matter how innocent.
Causes, Philosophy, and Ideas
- Personality Typing
- Keirsey Temperment Sorter -
A personality-typing model with four main categories referred
to as "temperments". This work is based on Myers-Briggs
typing, and the site has an online temperment test (the
"sorter") with profiles of the different results. Note that
this is the "short test". To take it "for real" costs money
and takes a lot longer, but the short one is good enough.
- Myers-Briggs Homepage -
Home of the MBT. They don't offer an online test because
they don't want people to misunderstand what their results
mean, which is actually pretty easy to do if you haven't learned
anything about the system yet. You can learn about the system
here, though.
- A skeptical view of
Myers-Briggs and typing in general. This is good reading!
They make a lot of good points. Don't take typing to mean
more than it does. It can be intriguing, but if done sloppily
it's no better than astrology (ie. random) and it can lead to
a lot of misunderstandings. Even when done well, it's not
Gospel. It's just one attempt to categorize different human
behaviors in a way which can be practical.
- Human Metrics -
Has a slightly different online test.
- Type Logic - Another
MBT site.
- Enneagram
Institute - The Enneagram is a completely different typing
schema, so it's interesting to compare results between it and
the MBT. This site has a short-version of the Enneagram that
you can take online.
- 9 Types - Another
Enneagram site.
- An eerily accurate shape/color test - Look at the nine colored
shapes and pick the one you like best. That's the whole test.
When this link was posted to a mailing list for people of my MB type, 80% of us
chose the same shape, and the other 20% chose another. We
all liked the type description for our chosen shape better than
the other ones. Try it, and see how well it works for you.
There is a variant of the test by another group with different pictures.
- Philosophy
- Urban Legends
- Skepticism
- James Randi Educational
Foundation - Randi is one of the world's most famous
paranormal debunkers. After a brief career as a mentalist
(aka. shuckster) he decided to use his 'powers' for good
instead of profit. The Randi Foundations offers a million
dollar prize for anyone who can reliably demonstrate any
paranormal power or event.
- Skeptics Society
- Penn and Teller -
Aside from being funny and great magicians, these guys are also
avid skeptics.
- Overpopulation
- Population
Connection - This group used to be known as "Zero
Population Growth", and is one of the best-known groups which
oppose continued population growth. I imagine they changed
their name because they wanted to sound more sensitive. The
"ZPG" name has implied to a lot of people -- wrongly, I should
add -- that ZPG was opposed to the idea of having children.
- Voluntary Human Extinction
Movement - Advocating "negative growth" rather than
zero growth through the decision not to have children. This
group actually IS opposed to the idea of having kids.
I'm especially fond of the "Why Breed?" chart in the
"biology and breeding" section. It's a little too harsh,
I think, but there's a lot of truth in it. Overall, my view
is not this extreme, but I think it's worth reading their
stuff.
- Ishmael.com - Home of
the writings of Daniel Quinn, who among other things is
concerned with overpopulation.
- Civil Liberties
- Steve-o's Enemies / Pity List
- Pat Robertson
- Operation
Save America - Formerlly Operation Rescue, founded by
Randall Terry, until he decided he wanted to divorce his
wife and was kicked out of his own church and shunned by
his followers for it.
- Randall Terry -
Got his start by handing aborted fetuses to people. Now one
of Randall's main causes is making sure hatred and
discrimination against homosexuals doesn't decline.
- Discovery Institute -
Yet another group of people using arbitary faith-based dogma
to try to shape public policy. Their main thing is fighting
for "intelligent design" (ie. creationism) to be taught in
public schools, even though there isn't actually any content
in intelligent design to teach aside from the answer
"God did it".
- KKK.com - One of the many
KKK-splinter groups runs this website. They have an
amusing smear campaign against MLK (he supported
interracial marriage! GASP!) and a special message for
young people. There are tons of other sites devoted to the KKK
and other racist / supremicist groups. Just do a Google search
if you're looking for a good laugh.
- Extreme Teen Bible - The sad part is that the promotion
for this thing used to be even worse. Here's the evidence from
2000 and 2001, courtesy of the Internet Wayback machine:
archived promo. Don't forget to follow the link at the
top to the archived official page at nelsonbibles.com. Sadly
the Flash intro isn't archived, nor are the preview pages,
but you can still get a kick out of this. (All I remember of
the Flash movie was a snowboarder silhouette.) Anyway, the
current Nelson Bibles site is pretty funny all on its own,
especially their selection of youth bibles, of which the Extreme
Teen is just one variety.
Miscellaneous
- Sites Everybody Should Know About
- Wikipedia - You're
really living under a rock if you don't know this site yet.
- Internet Movie Database -
Amazingly, there are apparently still people who don't know
about the IMDB. It's a fully cross-referenced database of
the TV and movie industry. So, if you're watching a movie and
you could swear that one guy did a guest appearance on
"Friends", this is the place to go to. It knows all.
- Archive.org - Home of the
Internet Wayback Machine. Since 1996, archive.org has been
crawling the internet like a search engine and keeping copies
of most of what it finds. You can type in a URL and see copies
of the page that was there at many different points in time.
It's a great resource for re-finding sites which have fallen
off the web.
- National Weather
Service - I hate checking the weather at weather.com or
Wunderground because they're full of ads and load too slowly.
All they do is regurgitate information from the NWS anyway.
So, navigate the NWS site, find the forecasts for your area,
and bookmark that instead. It's faster and usually more
informative.
- OpenOffice.org - An
open-source, 100% free replacement for Microsoft
Office than runs on Windows, Mac, and Unix-based platforms.
And yes, it can read and write MS Office documents, so when
a dingleberry sends you a Word attachment instead of text or
HTML you can still read it.
- Babelfish -
It translates web pages from one language to another.
Automagically. (It's not perfect, but it's good enough.)
- Project Gutenberg - As
the copyrights on classic literature expire, they become part
of the "public domain", which means nobody owns them, and
anybody can use them. Project Gutenberg is a project to make
such literature available for free over the web. Want to
read Gulliver's Travels or Dracula?
Go for it. It's free.
- Public Radio - The only radio worth listening to.
- National Public Radio
(NPR)
- Public Radio International
(PRI)
- This American Life -
BEST SHOW EVER. Beautifully told stories about regular people.
My favorite episode is "Numbers", but there
are far too many wonderful stories on this show for me to
be able to recommend listening to just one. Every episode
they've ever done is online for listening. Get to it.
- Car Talk - A call-in
show about car trouble and car repair hosted by boisterous
Boston brothers. They're hilarious, and apparently brilliant.
- Wait, Wait,
Don't Tell Me - A weekly, light-hearted quiz show about
current events. Callers get to do things like complete
limericks and choose which of three bizarre news stories is
true.
- Whad'ya Know? - This one
is a little harder to describe; there are call-in and
studio-audience quiz show segments, which is where it got the
name, but they're not about current events as on "Wait, Wait".
You really need to give it a listen to get the feeling for it.
It's funny, though.
- Online Comic Strips / Webcomics
- Ongoing Strips - updated daily or weekly
- It's Walky! - By my
roommate David Willis, this strip does for toy collecting what
Penny Arcade does for video games.
- Dinosaur Comics - My favorite
webcomic. It's written by a computational linguist! Hot stuff!!
- Scary Go Round - Incredibly
beautiful stylized art and funny stories about a strange English town
where ghosts and goblins and such run around.
- Overcompensating -
A diary comic of real things that actually happen to its author,
Jeffrey Rowland.
- Penny Arcade - One of
the web's most well-known comic strips. PA is mainly about video
games.
- Order
of the Stick - A comedic Dungeons and Dragons adventure.
- PhD
Comics - Exploring the graduate student experience.
- MNFTIU.cc -
Home of My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable, My New Filing
Technique Is Unstoppable, and Get Your War On. Also a couple others
that I don't really get. GYWO in particular is pretty striking,
I think, for the amount of political anger it manages to pack into
a strip made entirely with clip art.
- Static Works - complete (or rarely updated) works of fiction or
commentary; most of this stuff is serious works of art, not comedy
- Broken Saints -
Done in Flash, so there's an animated component, as well as
sound effects and music. It's a dark, occult-ish mystery story.
- electric sheep comix - Hosting
quite a few good pieces.
- Nowhere Girl - A story
about a lonely, depressed college girl. If you hate angst, don't
read this.
- Diversions
- WilWheaton.net - The weblog
of Trek actor turned Linux geek turned writer Wil Wheaton (aka.
Wesley Crusher). Even if you hated Wesley, you probably won't be
able to hate Wil after reading a few of his entries. He's just
too cool.
- Engrish - An archive of
hilariously badly-written English on various consumer products
from Asia.
- LILEKS (James) - A vast,
vast collection of really weird images scanned from print
(magazines, catalogs, etc.) with origins ranging from the 1920's
to the 1970's.
- Robot Frank - The
homepage of Robot Frank, with a photo album, online diary, etc..
Robot Frank is a robot, although he looks strangely like a human
wearing two cardboard boxes. He's also very cranky.
- Emotion Eric - A
collection of webcam photos in which Eric conveys various emotions
and attitudes. More than just "happy", "angry", etc.. Things like
"sarcastic respect for authority figures", "computer just ate my 20
page research paper", and "ice cream headache".
- Homestar Runner -
An astoundingly funny site full of whimsical cartoons. Home of
Strong Bad and Trogdor the Burninator. (Note: everything
here is done in Flash, so, older computers might not handle it
well.)
- The Official Ninja
Webpage: REAL Ultimate Power!!!! - A site all about ninjas,
how totally sweet they are, and how they flip out and kill people.
Especially pirates.
- Bonsai Kitten -
Dedicated to preserving the long lost art of body modification
in housepets. Feline Bonsai is the process of raising kittens
in sealed geometrically shaped vessels in order to allow them
to develop to adulthood in pleasing shapes such as cubes and
spheres. (Also, it's a JOKE. Tasteless, sure, but the site is
so funny. You've got to see how it's written.)
- The Brick
Testament - Violent and disturbing passages from the bible
illustrated with Lego.
- Britney Spears' Guide
to Semiconductor Physics - This is a legitimate primer for
several topics in advanced condensed matter physics, which happens
to have pictures of Britney Spears on every page.
- Niles
Monorail Tour - Some guy living in Niles, CA decided to
build a monorail that goes around his back yard. It totally
kicks ass.
- The Blue Flash - In a similar vein, here's a page about a
guy who built a roller coaster (a steel one, with a loop) on
his property.
- The Pop vs. Soda Page -
A study in social and linguistic geography.
- Fake Dr. Pepper -
It's a strange phenomenon in the marketing world that most
knockoffs of brand-name pop get either new, or completely
generic names but all Dr. Pepper knockoffs are signalled by
a name prefix. I still remember the night my friend Brock and
I were out wandering the town and found "Mr. Aahh!" in a Giant
Eagle vending machine...
- Web Exhibits - A
collection of "exhibits" about the confluence of
art and science. Their section on color and perception is
really cool.
Other Topics
- Don't miss my separate page of links to
great free software!
- All my Transformers links can be found within my TF sub-site:
TF Links
- All my love / romance links can be found within my Unrequited
Love sub-site:
Love links
Go to:
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