Useful & Interesting Links

WEB LINKS USED to be de rigeur for any site owner during the web 1.0 years. Many sites, in fact, were just given over to lists of links to other sites and pages, usually grouped by theme. As search engines became more powerful, the usefulness of such pages waned, and when people started abandoning self-created websites in favor of social media profiles, the practice all but disappeared from the Web.

If that were the end of the story, I'd have posted this to some social media profile, but as you probably already know, "Search got great and now we all hang out together in a social media Garden of Eden like one big happy family" was not the next chapter in this particular tale. "Search got kneecapped for improved ad revenue, and now it's being outright murdered by slopbots because investment money rolls in like waves when you shoehorn LLMs into your products and services" is closer to what's happened.

Does that make silly little lists like mine broadly useful again? Hardly. But it does make the idea of them quite a bit more interesting to people like me. There are lots of bits and corners of the World Wide Web that will basically never get surfaced by any mainstream search engine, and plenty of other places that are out there, but not in the collective consciousness of the internet at large. These apps, sites, and/or pages are often fun, sometimes useful, and never predatory, and I believe they deserve a slightly wider audience, so I've done my part. I hope you find at least a few of these entertaining or helpful in some way. I will add more links here and there, so check back once in a while to see what's new!

Webcomics

Some of my favorite online comic strip series, from long narratives to single-panel zingers. Web cartooning is a rather difficult way to pay the bills, so if you end liking any of these, too, please consider paying their creators (through merchandise or directly)!

• BACK: A long, continuous-narrative comic about a weird little iconoclast who pops out of a grave one day and sets off on a mysterious journey. Humorous and exciting, with a silly art style inspired by classic comics and cartoons. The series is finished; the complete tale can be read for free here (though I strongly recommend buying the collected print editions, as I did, if you enjoy it). By KC Green and Anthony Clark.
• War and Peas: One-off humorous comics, usually in 4-panel form, mixed into a long reverse-chronological feed with blog posts, memes, and the occasional product (such as greeting cards) for sale. This comic is ongoing; you can expect a new strip every several days. By Elizabeth Pich and Jonathan Kunz.
• Brian McFadden is a progressive political cartoonist who writes satirical multi-panel comics exploring the grotesqueries of wealthy American fascists and their enablers. If you get a kick out of The Onion, you'll probably enjoy his work, too. Note that you can't view any full comics on his site; he provides links to where they're hosted on larger, monetized platforms instead, including GoComics, Daily Kos, and Patreon. Some are only available on Patreon with a subscription, but most can be read without any signups on the other two sites.
• False Knees: "Silly nonsense" comics drawn with colored pens or pencils, often featuring birds getting up to various sorts of gently funny hijinks. Generally sweet and pleasant. Normally updated weekly to monthly; as of August 17th, 2026, there have been no new strips posted to the site since February, but the series may pick up again at any time. By Joshua Barkman.
• Tom Gauld is a well-regarded professional cartoonist and illustrator who has produced work for such publications as The New Yorker, The Guardian, and New Scientist magazine. His clever, often understated comics particularly cater to lovers of science and books. This link goes to a Tumblr account featuring most of his freely-available work; his main site (which does not feature an easily-browsable archive of comic strips) is TomGauld.com.
• Grickle: One-off, usually single-panel comics that often use stock fantasy or horror characters (wizards, vampires, etc.) in pursuit of gently absurd humor. As above, this is a link to the Grickle Tumblr page; the main Grickle site, which does not feature a full archive of comics, is Grickle.com. By Graham Annable.

Toys & Diversions

Goof around online for a few seconds to a few hours, no sign-ups or downloads required.

• Waves & Particles - A browser-based fidget that makes wave patterns from a sea of dots.
• gradient.horse - Draw a horse and watch it run with other people's horse drawings.
• Hacker Typer - Simulates a fast-moving "movie hacker"-style command line interface while you mash your keyboard.
• VHS Slipcover Designer - Easy, fun tools for designing custom VHS covers and cases.
• Super Mario Bros. Super Show! Title Card Generator - Plus tons of other popular media title card generators.
• Living Worlds In HTML5 - Recreates the gorgeous "Living Worlds" animated art from the '90s day planner application Seize The Day, in an ordinary web page. You can change the month and the time of day by using the controls at the top of the page.

Games

In-browser games you can play for days, plus related tools. I will probably add more entries here later. Note that the more in-depth web games often require an anonymous account, to save your game data between play sessions.

• Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup - A well-balanced and extensive roguelike with depth and plenty of features.
• Nethack - One of the most popular classic roguelikes, still running and accessible from the web here.
• DOS Zone - Thousands of classic MS-DOS games, from Zork to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, playable right in your browser. Works surprisingly well.
• Harlowe instruction manual - Build your own on-site text adventure games with this free, fairly easy-to-learn tool.

The Public Commons

Access mountains of legally free content and explore it all you like.

Note that public domain laws vary widely between countries; to stay in full compliance with your own country's laws, be sure to only access content that is legally considered to be in the public domain where you live.

• Duke University's Public Domain Day page - Arguably the best primer on the American public domain, what it means for you as a citizen of the world, and what to look forward to as new content enters it. Updated yearly.
• Project Gutenberg - The original, and largest, repository of public domain books on the internet. Follows US public domain law. Contains over 75,000 free ebooks and audiobooks to read online or download.
• Project Gutenberg Australia - An offshoot of Project Gutenberg that caters to Australia and specializes in public domain books by Aussie authors.
• Distributed Proofreaders Canads - Canada's own public domain ebooks project, with over 8,800 books at last count. Specializes in public domain books by Canadian authors, but not exclusively.
• US National Gallery of Art Online Artworks - Over 160,000 high-definition scans of fine art, spanning thousands of years and creators from across the world.
• The Met's Open Access Collection - Nearly half a million high-definition scans of public domain art from The Met's collection.
• The Paris Museum Collections - Over 400,000 high quality CC0 photos of artworks housed in Paris's many city museums, including the Louvre.
• The Rijksmuseum Collection - Over 800,000 CC1* images of art, sculpture, and historical currency from the national art and history museum of the Netherlands.
• The Library of Congress National Jukebox - Some 17,500+ early audio recordings, now in the public domain and preserved online.
• WikiFlix - A curated collection of movies (both feature-length and short) known to be in the U.S. public domain, including classics like Nosferatu, It's A Wonderful Life, and Kansas City Confidential, along with thousands of others.
• SciOp - An ongoing project to share public U.S. government data by torrenting it, to prevent the current regime from deleting it forever. A worthy and noble use of some of your bandwidth, and a great, legal way to learn about torrenting.

Web Utilities

A junk drawer of online tools I find interesting and/or useful. Some are fairly specific, so your mileage may vary.

• Neocities, in case you couldn't guess, is a great place to build your own little hobby website. I pay $5 a month to support them; that comes with extra server space, but I don't use it - I just like supporting them. You can just as easily do it all for free, if you prefer!
• Mailfence is my current webmail provider. They're not exactly on the bleeding edge of the webmail design space, but their service is secure and private enough for safe everyday use. There is a free tier, but it's only good for doing a test run; a few dollars a month (currently around $4 and change - they are European and charge in Euros) gets you much much more, including alias email addresses, incoming message redirection to subfolders, powerful spam and whitelist controls, cloud storage space, and more. Mailfence doesn't spy on you or scrape your data to sell to ad exchanges.
• Wormhole.app - Quick, encrypted file transfers (up to 10 GB) with no sign-up and no cost.
• Textise - Converts most web pages to plain text. A good way to read without distractions. Gets around some (but not all) paywalls. Also useful for articles you want to read on sites you don't want to visit.
• The "Worse On Purpose" Brand Ledger - Over 300 consumer brands rated by whether or not they still own their brand names and production facilities. A useful shorthand for estimating brand quality.
• Restorativland - Aside from its name being a reference to storied experimental band Negativland, Restorativland is a site that displays archived and restored sites from the web 1.0 years (such as GeoCities pages) in a human-friendly interface.
• Posty - Lets Mastodon users upload their feed archive and view it, or download a static webpage HTML file of it to host anywhere.
• Chris Burnell's HTML Can Do That page is full of fascinating, simple-to-understand examples of how modern HTML can do a lot of things that web developers used to rely on JavaScript for, like dialog pop-ups and color pickers. I haven't used these on my site yet, but I'd like to try some of them someday!
• PGE Power Outages - For Portland, Oregon-area electricity customers. Loads realtime outage data from PGE in a very lightweight, fast-loading interface, without the horrible wait times of the bloated, often overloaded official PGE outages site.

My Preferred Applications

These are the MS Windows tools I use for everyday computer things, like accessing and organizing information, browsing securely, and so on. I give each of them my full recommendation. They are reliable, ad- and AI-free, respectful of privacy, and generally no-nonsense. Most of them are free (and many are open source); those that cost money are noted.

• PDF reader: SumatraPDF, a no-frills reader that's lightweight and lightning fast. This tool doesn't edit PDFs, but when you just need a viewer that won't get in your way, it's a great choice.
• Simple image editor: Paint.NET is an ideal replacement for MS Paint. Though it's a tiny bit slower to load, the lack of invasive Copilot buttons and a stronger suite of layering and effects tools make it a great upgrade that's still pretty easy and intuitive to use.
• Office productivity suite: LibreOffice is a free and well-supported office suite that includes the same app types (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, etc.) as Microsoft Office. Unlike MS Office, it comes without any AI bloat, advertisements, locked features, or costs of any kind. Best of all, LibreOffice can read, open, edit, and save MS Office file formats such as Word (.docx) and Excel (.xlsx), along with many other common file types. It's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
• BitTorrent client: qBitTorrent is free, ad-free, and open source. It facilitates hassle-free torrent management for your SciOp and other torrents. Best of all, this client is available on most other major operating systems too, including Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, and even OS/2!
• Peer-to-peer file sharing: SoulSeek, a venerable and lightweight app that is also available for Mac and Linux machines. Though originally designed to share music files, other media objects, including video, image, and e-book files, are also available from its many users. It doesn't have a very friendly interface, but with a bit of practice, you'll be swapping files in no time.
• Offline information archiving: Kiwix Reader, the primary end-user application for Kiwix, which is a very cool project to provide bundled information from wikis (such as Wikipedia) for offline browsing. (The bundles are called ZIM files.) With a little setup, Kiwix Reader can help preserve information that's useful to you in an offline form, so that it's accessible without a connection and can't be degraded by negligence or malice in the future.
• VPN: I've been dismayed to find that the VPN I currently use, Mullvad, has a fascist knob at the top of its corporate structure, and that said knob has been funnelling millions of Swedish kronor from his personal accounts (fattened by Mullvad subscriptions) to fund ultra-xenophobic and authoritarian projects in Sweden. Mullvad retains almost no user info, just a randomly-assigned account name and passphrase. Given that I'm a privacy minded person who's prepaid already, I don't want to send my financial information to them again, even for a refund, so I'll be using them until my year is up in early 2027. By then, I hope to have settled on a decent replacement. (Despite what the article linked above suggests, Proton ain't it either.) It's also possible (though not likely) that Mullvad will have cut ties with their racist clown of a cofounder before then. In the meantime, suffice it to say that VPNs are more useful for privacy (and accessing region-gated content) than actual security; if you have to go without one, it's not completely the end of the world.
• Antivirus/Anti-malware: Emsisoft Anti-malware is not the only good choice out there; however, they have a sterling reputation for safety and reliability in their enterprise-level product, and the home user version I employ uses a lot of the same basic tech. Their jurisdiction (New Zealand) is also pretty politically moderate, lessening the risk of government spying on the back of the tech (as Norton AV was once caught doing). Note: This is a paid product.

Notes:

*this is the best info I could find, but CC1 is an old and mostly deprecated free-use license; the museum may be using a modernized version instead. The main difference between CC0 and CC1 licenses is that CC1 requires that you credit the original source of any assets you use (the Rijksmuseum, in this case), whereas attribution is not required under a CC0 license.