I am always on the lookout for cool sites out on the web, in order to keep the internet a vibrant place we must make sure there are sites other then the big social media giants that have become nearly the only option now a days. My part in doing that is trying to show you as many cool sites as possible, you can't rely on the first page of Google to be your only source of the internet. That all being said, I must put a disclaimer here, this is simply a collection of websites that I think are cool, I do not have the time to investigate the owner of every site to make sure they are a cool and rad person. A site being linked here is not an endorsement of the person or peoples behind the site.
With that out of the way lets get to the links!
Pages on the Web
Art, Music, and other creation based sites
Sites that help with making things!
Beepbox.co
an open source website that lets you make and share chiptune music, all in the broswer. The song data is recorded in the URL so it allows you to share the file easily to other people or devices. The open source nature of the site means there are multiple derivative sites that increse it's capabilities. This is where I first learned how to make music and I think it's a great place to start, or for experienced musicians to mess around with when you want to shake things up.
This site was the savior of my Video a Day 2021 project (Read more about that here)
krita.org
Free and open source art software. I haven't played around with this software too much, but I have no doubts about it being a fully featured art program. Art should be free for all to make, digital or otherwise.
blender.org
Free and open source 3D jack of all trades. It does modeling, sculpting, 3D animation, simulation, 2D animation, theres even a video editor shoved in. Don't let Blender's free nature confuse you, Blender is absoultly a high quality 3D tool, it can go blow for blow with the top dogs in the industry, and it's getting better all the time. To top it all off Blender is suprisingly light weight, it can run on yesteryear computers pretty well. There is a massive community of people who can teach you how to use Blender, do I even have to mention the doughnut tutorial?
lmms.io
Free and open source Digital Audio Workstation. Like Krita I haven't touched this very much, but also like Krita I am convinced it is a fully featured DAW. If you want to try producing music I would reccomend you try this software.
Human Anatomy for Artist Unofficial Helper
WARNING ARTISTIC NUDITY AHEAD! A easy to use tool for searching human-anatomy-for-artist.com, which as the name might suggest, is a collection of anatomical refrence images of the human body. The helper allows you to pose a 3D model of a skeleton, and it brings up images of models in similar poses. There are two additional pages linked on the helper page, one for female anatomy, and one for clothed poses.
film-grab.com
A site with a large collection of movie shots. A great site for finding material to study. Currently it has a garish ad at the top for some AI nonsense, other then that it's a pretty good site
drawingfornothing.com
An Ebook of drawings made for animated works that were either cancelled, or didn't do very well, it is occasionally updated with new material, it is free to own and you can do with it whatever you want, I want a copy for my coffee table one day.
little-details.dreamwidth.org
A forum where writers can ask others about specific details about anything, cultural details, day to day struggles of a person with a certain disability, these kinds of questions come up when writing and often you don't have access to someone locally who you could ask about it. From what I've seen its a very open and welcoming, no one here is judmental or rude.
Entertainment related sites
Sites about various media I care about
An Iconic website about an Iconic artist, Bowie Wonderworld is filled with everything you could ever want to know about David Bowie, and I mean FILLED. This site is definitely one of my greatest inspirations as far as websites go, its a masterpiece. Being an old site is one thing, but an old site that is still activly updated, without modernizing the look, its almost unheard of. Give this one a look even if you don't care for Bowie, its incredible.
labyrnth.tripod.com/labyrinth/index2.html
On the topic of old Bowie related sites, here is a rather large site about the movie Labyrnth, This site would not have survived the geocities purge, if not for the fact that the Webmaster made a mirror of it on Tripod as well. I haven't seen this movie (yet) but I can tell theres a lot of content on this site
www.angelfire.com/la2/withinyourheart
Last Bowie site I swear, I actually found this before the site above, and found that one through a link on this site, while it's not as pollished or detailed as the one above, it felt weird not including it here, so here it is.
plus.nasa.gov
Nasa's free streaming service with a varitiy of space related documentarys (never thought Id link a .gov site on my funny link collection lol)
widrfm.org
The website of student ran radio station 89.1 WIDR FM that brodcasts out of Western Michigan University. It's known for playing underground music and thus is a great place to hear new music, and you can listen on the site. The site also contains a running list of the music they broadcast, so if you hear something you like you can find it later, support small musicians!
tane.us/ac
Page that plays Animal Crossing music that corresponds to the time on your system clock, you can change what game's music is playing with the menu at the bottom of the page
greenday.fm
Fan run website for the American rock band Green Day that has been online in some form for a very long time. This site has all you could want about the band, even really obscure things like unreleased recordings, and phone messeges from the band members. Proof positive that fan sites are NOT dead.
gamejolt.com
If you came to my site because of FNAF you probably already know about Gamejolt but just in case, Gamejolt is a website/social media for hosting indie games, and letting fans follow the development of in progress games. It has one of the neatest ways I've seen for allowing fans to directly monetarily support their favorite creators, without having to spend any money. The site is most well known for hosting a large number of FNAF and Undertale/Deltarune fan games, but there is a huge number of other fan games, and original games on the site as well.
www.freddysfanzone.com
Retro styled site made to promote the Five Nights at Freddy's movie. I don't know how much longer this site will be up, considering the movie is no longer in theaters, maybe they will update it to promote FNAF 2?
www.securitybreachtv.com
Site set up by Steel Wool Studios to tease Five Nights at Freddy's Secruity Breach, and later it's free DLC RUIN. As it did not get updated with teasers for the game after Secruity Breach, Help Wanted 2, I assume this site is dormant, they might use it again for a potential Secruity Breach 2?
www.nintendo.co.jp/n02/shvc/index.html
A portion of Nintendo of Japan's website that has been preserved through some miracle, advertising games for the Super Famicom, I can't believe this is still up but it is so cool
world-of-nintendo.com
An unoffical Nintendo themed website that, as far as I can tell, hasn't been updated sense 01'. This is a BEEFY website, with a lot of time capsule content from 2001 and earlier. What really does it for me is the banner at the top of every page advertising a free ipad or Macbook air, I would not recommend clicking that btw.
A massive fan site about the kirby series, everything you could want to know about everyone's favorite god like entity
suppermariobroth.com
Blog that covers unique/obscure Mario facts
noclip.website
Explore various video game world right in the broswer! Also a great resource if you want to draw any of these places.
meleemajors.com
This site keeps track of when major Smash Bros Melee tournaments are, and other information such as location, number of attendees, and a list of notable players going to the event. This is very useful if you are like me and want to watch some Melee but you are also really bad at dates. If Melee isn't your flavor of competitive Smash, usually the tournaments featured here also have Ultimate and sometimes *cough* *cough* less offical games.
sudomemo.net
A replacement service for the Hatena network for Flipnote Studio on DSi. The main purpose of the service is to allow flipnotes to be shared on DSi again like the good ole days, but you can also view them on in broswer, how convienent!
archive.sudomemo.net
Hosted by the people behind Sudomemo this is an archive of all Flipnotes uploaded to the "Flipnote Gallery: DSi Library" service while it was still running. The site has a series of curated flipnotes by the people who put the archive together but theres also a random button that shows you a series of random flipnotes. NOTE THE RANDOM BUTTON WILL SHOW YOU A RANDOM SAMPLE OF FLIPNOTES, THIS MAY POSSIBLY INCLUDE CONTENT THAT YOU MAY NOT WANT TO SEE, BROWSE WITH CARE
General useful sites
Sites that come in handy
mynoise.net
Website with a large variety of background noise generators, all of which were recorded by the site owner themselves. From standard white noise, to ocean waves, and spaceship soundscapes, this site almost certainly has any kind of noise you could want. Each soundscape has in-depth sliders you can use to modify the sound, there is also an option to let the site animate them itself, so the sound is always changing. Defenitly recommend this site for help with sleeping, or drowning out the sound of a noisy roomate or construction.
mozilla.org
Home of Firefox and other broswer software. Firefox is a free and open source web broswer, and I've never regretted switching from Chrome. Owned by a non-profit with a focus on privacy, Firefox is the ideal broswer for people who are tired of giant tech companies. Being open source means there are countless add-ons that improve the broswer, cultivate your internet experience!
kill-the-newsletter.com
Convert a newsletter into an RSS feed, I've had a little trouble with this ceasing to send the newsletter, but that could be a millon unrelated problems, and it's only happened once
libreoffice.org
Free and open source alternative to Microsoft Word and Google Docs. I've been using this for awhile now, and not only is it a solid word proccesor, I'd actually say its better then either of the big boys, spellcheck isn't made useless by AI, and it is very lightweight.
findoldvideo.com
Did you know you can search Youtube by years uploaded just like you can on most broswers? Here is a site that types the year operators for you. happy digging!
wttr.in
ASCII Art weather website, looks cute, and useful!
Cool Things
digital toys, games, and other things that are entertaining
lichess.org
Free and open source Chess website, you can play, you can watch others play, you can take lessons, theres fun game modes, customizable board and pieces, it is the best online chess, don't let anyone tell you otherwise
yourworldoftext.com
An infinite text document that scrolls in all directions and can be edited by anyone whos on the site. Wasted a lot of time as a kid scrolling in one direction to see how far out you could still find text. WARNING, as a unmoderated site where anyone can type, you should expect to see some nasty stuff written, be careful opening links as well
nitrotype.com
Online typing game where you race others to finish typing a short text string, I have not played it sense high school but I remember it being incredible, I'll try it out again sometime soon.
myretrotvs.com
A site that collects clips from tv shows from 50s to the 2000s and displays them on era appropriate tv, complete with working buttons!
wheresgeorge.com
A site that tracks individual U.S. Dollar Bills as they are passed from person to person, find a bill with a stamp on it? type in some information and find out where it's been! The site has plenty of other fun features, like a real time map of people logging their bills.
afterthetone.com
Listen to a random selection of answering machine messages found from machines found at thrift stores or garage sales, or donated to the site. Some of these messages may contain content you do not wish to hear, listen with care
websdr.org
Online HAM radio reciver that lets you listen to many diffrent signals around the world. Find number stations, find pirate radio stations, find amuatur HAM radio talk, mostly find truckers, it's fun!
radio.garden
listen to radio stations from around the world!
plaza.one
Online vaporwave and other adjacent genre radio station
webdesignmuseum.org
A collection of images and videos of websites from history
obsoletemedia.org
A museum of old media formats
buttonmuseum.org
collection of various buttons from across the years, as a fan of old things, and buttons, I love this.
arcade-history.com
database of arcade games and other related things
weepingwitch.github.io/za.html
Conway's Game of Life but there is an invisible angel that floats over the game. She brings dead cells to life and kills living cells. If you can track her down and click on her you win. Surprisingly additicive for how simple it is.
mit.edu/~rei/GAME/intro.html
"This is just an html game that I wrote up way back in 1994, before the days of Flash, Java, and the like. Since it requires no server support and involves no hairy perl scripts, it really isn't very sophisticated. And so far, none of the artwork was made specifically for this game, either. But what the heck, you might have fun with it anyway."
11foot8.com
A person in NC who records truckers and rental riders getting their trucks "modifed" by a clearance trestle they cannot fit under. Every time someone skims their vehicle on the trestle it is uploaded here.
horg.com
A site deticated to categorizing bread clips of various kinds as if they are animals or plants, very serious business
windows93.net
A fun web based parody of old Windows, with a lot of actual working programs, including a modded version of Beepbox.co
Artists, webmasters, and other intresting people
Sites that feel more personal then the rest, usually maintained by a single person
An artist who mainly focuses on FNAF and NieR content. My personal favorite page on this website is the FNAF themed parodys of historical paintings, makes the Art History nerd in me happy.
jeffleejohnson.com
An artist who is most well known for his horror artworks that get worse the longer you look at them. A huge inspiration for my own work.
A site about all things 2 bit, theres an absurd amount of stuff to do on this site, go take a look!
A cool page with a bunch of photos taken on old cameras, as well as other old tech, a site that I truly feel a kin with
Shopping
Sites that I've bought from or aspire to buy from, as well as tools for finding deals NONE OF THESE ARE SPONSORED, I WAS NOT PAID TO PUT ANY OF THESE HERE
cheapassgamer.com
A site that reports good deals on games and game related items
fangamer.com
Makers of high quality game merchandise, most well known for making Undertale/Deltarune merch but they make so much more.
sanshee.com
Makers of high quality merch like Fangamer, most well known for making high quality Five Nights at Freddy's merchandise
goodwillfinds.com
Goodwill's site, filled with all the stuff they think is too good to go in their brick and mortar stores. You can sometimes find fun things here, sometimes for a decent price.
reverb.com
It's my understanding that Reverb is the go to site for musicians to find gear, both used and new gear, I have not used the site myself (yet)
misc.
Things I can't find a box for!
mcspotlight.org
A site about the misdeeds of the McDonalds Corporation. Regardless of what you think about the fast food giant, this site is worth viewing for the authentic old web charm alone, but it also has a lot of good (if dated) information about the scummy side of the golden arches. I found this site by chance while going way too many pages deep into a Google search, and I love it.
thisisindiana.angelfire.com
An old site about that state that is under Michigan, I think it was last updated in '09 so don't rely on any information being current, but clearly a lot of love was put into this site back in the day. Personal favorite page is the one about Indiana Hauntings, can you believe they have ghosts down there? As if living in Indiana isn't haunting enough.
cybertruckownersclub.com/forum
A good page to read for a laugh, I try not to take too much joy in other's misfortune but I really do find it a bit hard to feel pity for the typical owner of a Cybertruck
Other link collections
Other people's collections!
curlie.org
A site that collects URLs on countless subjects and organizes them so you can easily find anything you might want to find.
404pagefound.com
A website after my own heart, dedicated to finding and chronicling old sites that are still on the open internet. One of the first sites you see when you start looking is mcspotlight.org which is a site that I've also featured here.
Youtube channels and videos
Art
Channels about art in many forms
Drawfee
A comedy art show where the four hosts take on a drawing prompt or challege, while making commentary/relentlessly bullying each other. One of my favorite channels on Youtube.
Drawfee Extra
Drawfee livestream VODS, mostly just longer form versions of their videos, but sometimes they do charity streams, or upload their drawclasses where they teach how to draw various things.
Jazza
Australian art youtuber who is on a misson to try (and make content about) every art medium ever. He also does various other challenges and experiments. In additon he also runs a studio that is host to several other Youtube channels he occasionally shows up on
Tabletop Time
Channel started by Jazza all about making wargaming boards,painting mini figures, and other related things
Sci/Tech/Engineering Tubers
Some take "Science" more seriously then others, but it's all here
Michael Reeves
Tech Youtuber who is so good at playing a bit it's hard to tell where the bit ends and the man begins. Innovator in computer aided violence
Mark Rober
Family Friendly engineer youtuber and ex Nasa employee, Rober does large scale experiments and other eye catching engineering related videos. Personal favorite videos are his series where he outfits packages with hidden cameras, sirens, glitter, and other implements and then intentionally lets them get stolen by porch pirates, much to their dismay when they open the boxes in their houses and get glitter all over everything.
Tested
Adam Savage of Mythbuster fame shares his many obsessions, whether he is building something, looking at a movie prop, being given a tour of the Jim Henson workshop, Adam's desire to understand, and his giddiness is infectious. Being a TV host clearly translates well to Youtube
Simone Giertz
She makes things like a chair with a second side for her dog, but also makes things like a piano out of chattering teeth, suprisignly relaxing videos
The Science Elf
Does interesting things with old and low powered devices, as well as covering the history of tech. My favorite videos are the ones about TI-84 calculators, specifically the one about making Minecraft for the Ti-84 Plus CE.
DankPods
Covering old, strange, and mostly bad tech
Garbage Time
Doing things to cars you probably should not. Has a series about building a "car" only from free pieces found from junkyards and the like
Gaming
Video Games, Table Top Games, it's all games
Game Theory
It's Game Theory, you probably already know the deal. Tom weaves a theory about a game, they can be science based or lore based, sometimes they are genius sometimes they are dumb, but it's all just a theory.
GTLive
The often forgotten 5th Theorist channel, Matpat on the couch playing games, providing commentary on various internet series, and other things. Ash and occasional guests provide banter and often keep Mat sane during the not infrequent moments of video game induced insanity. If you are missing Matpat post retirement there is an absurd number of old videos to go through.
Tabletop Time Roleplay
Offshoot of Tabletop Time where the gang goes through various roleplaying campaigns, this was what the original channel was about but the Youtube algoritm demands one topic a channel. I reccomend REBOOT.EXE excelent series
James Channel
Retro game console modifications that you could define as "angle grider forward" frequently these modifications are strange and memey, like taking the insides of a NES and fitting them inside a NES cartridge, so you can plug a NES cart into a NES cart. Also covers strange retro gaming history and other tech oddities.
Music tubers
Channels about music, making it, analyzing it and more
Andrew Huang
Music youtuber who covers a varity of music production topics. Also the home of Sonic Boom, a show ran by Andrew and Rob Scallon Where they take on a musical challenge in a studio environment.
Rob Scallon
Mainly a guitar player, Rob ends up playing almost any other instrument on his channel. He meets with people who play unusal instruments and attempts to play them himself, organs the size of buildings, mouth harps, giant harps he's tried it all. Also has a series where he makes musical instruments with no experience or materials more expensive then ply wood
Adam Neely
Very smart videos about music theory, usually applying it to big music news or memes, additionally vlogs his music gigs, sheading light on the realities of being a touring musician, my favorite videos on his channel
Mattias Krantz
Youtuber who does what I can only define as "crimes" to pianos. He also does similar "experiments" with other instruments as well
