Captain's Log

A subset of my daily notes, of things I find online. Updates periodically.
(Dates represent when the links were recorded, not necessarily when brought to HTML and posted here.)

12/21/2020

Flash Player archived versions
- Possibly the last version without a timebomb if sources are right
Show HN: StumblingOn â€“ Randomly find indie websites â€“ recreating StumbleUpon | Hacker News (ycombinator.com)

I must say, looking at StumblingOn, the Somnolians and I turned up with very little of worth. Whether it's people going on about Vim and Linux with little personality aside from "Ooh! Privacy is cool!", complaining about politics, or sites everyone's already seen (like Project Gutenberg, which is great and all but really not "indie"), at least right now. This was kind of a blackpill for me, because it just seems that in 2020, people aren't interesting anymore. The past week I've been really wanting to be a proponent of personal sites, from how, as you may have noticed from these logs, I had been exploring a lot of the old, amateur web from MIT student pages to GeoCities.

I don't know. There are interesting things out there online. I swear there are still interesting sites. I don't know if I'm in denial, or what. The webring format doesn't seem to work anymore, because making a website at all now is a niche to the point where making ones for specific topics would be just futile.

That said, that got me wandering the XXIIVV webring again, which I would say has been the most successful of them, because it's not exactly entirely all up in the air what the sites are about and people do seem to deeply care about their craft. Either that or the GitHub pull request requirement filters out most of the boring stuff.

Personal sites are neat are when it's not just noise and more brimming of personality and cool stuff. There indeed are some really nice ones, and if I didn't see something good in them I wouldn't have went on the web garden ramble a bit ago. So, I'll be acknowledging some of those that I discovered today because if we're gonna make the web interesting again, it ought to be through hyperlinks, what it does best.

http://weakty.com
- I liked reading about this guy's Drawabox and experimenting with drawing, would like to see more. And coffee, and French slang. I also really like the setup, because the table of contents sidebar is elegant and reminds me of Encarta.
- He released his first ambient album recently; soundtrack of the night. Favorite track? "In which the player speaks their piece with great precision", even though for a moment it made me think my hard drive was clicking.
- From his about page, he uses this method: The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information - Forte Labs. If I were to fully embrace the web garden/personal wiki lifestyle, I'd totally be interested in looking into it.
Work Â· Tynan DeBold
- Portfolio of Tynan DeBold, a web, software dev. One thing that stuck out to me was Spanish flashcards, as I have a class next semester and need to brush up a bit. Photography projects, always interesting. Also disco.
estfyr.net
- Dragons! A MyPaint user, too, apparently. I'm impressed, this is very quality.
resevoir・writing drawings
- "'People should be drawing their drawings instead of writing them.'
  I caught my dad mumbling this sentence in the atelier after a full day of him teaching sketching. This piqued my interest. Here I was sitting and thinking that I had been drawing all day and now he was telling me that I might have been writing all along."
Chance (achance.at)
- Even if he doesn't have a very large amount of his own stuff up, this dude's got a metric ton of links. I wanna have a collection like that.

So yeah, this'll be the first time portions of the Captain's Log are up to the public too, so with any luck I will continue building up links, with or without comments. The reason why it hasn't been up already is finals, which are just about done now.

Ignore AMP Â· Jens Oliver Meiert
- AMP always struck me as yet another way for Google to control the internet as much as possible, so I'm glad its being tossed to the wayside more and more.
Shapecatcher: Draw the Unicode character you want!
famfamfam.com: Silk Icons
- The de facto 16x16 icons for a time.
commonmark.js demo
design inc.
- This show (2004-2011) plays on Dabl, a newer station in my area with a lineup consisting of largely older HGTV shows. It's the most 2000s thing ever--I like especially its score, and the iMac G3s in the backgrounds of some of the shots. Turns out its site is still up.
- Matthew's Kitchen
  - An example of its episode guide. Note the use of dropdowns!

12/17/2020

12/13/2020

keygenmusic.tk - tracker music player

KEYGENMUSiC

Rei's Home Page (mit.edu)

Art.Net (also known as "Art on the Net")

Gracious Network Hostess (mit.edu)

"They say that on the Web, everyone's an author, but no one's an editor. I am an editor, so I'm pretty regularly, yet randomly adding text and pointers to this page and the pages below it. These pages started as an attempt to organize my favorite Web sites, as well as a way to share info with networked friends and colleagues. If you find anything useful or entertaining here, enjoy! And I promise that other than one particular link, this is a relatively pun-free zone."

MesArt - Art Hosting, Sales, Fine Artist Websites and Online Portfolios