Websites and Tools
lichess
free alternative to chess.com. A lot of people even prefer it over chess.com, too.
PetPet
Tool for creating those petting gifs memes.
KidPix
A port of KidPix to browser
Microsoft Paint
A javascript remake of Microsoft Paint to browser
Nostalgic Kids’ Sites
An archival project managed by Rare Noggin Stuff that’s dedicated to hosting 00’s and 10’s websites aimed at pre-school children. Hosts snapshots of Nick Jr., Nick Jr. Playtime, PBS Kids, and PBS Sprout at the time of writing.
Neal.fun
Cool little distractions by a guy named Neal.
Spellcheck, a word game
spelling bee browser game, its neat
Topsters
create those nice looking favorite album graphics (or games, books, movies, shows, anything really)
Bingosync
lets you create collaborative bingo-boards with others. The primary usecase for this is videogame challenges, particularly using the lockout mode.
3DMM Forever
Microsoft made 3DMM open source, this is a fork of that for running on modern hardware. The fork 3DMM Plus will include heavier enhancements once porting work to mac and linux is done. You may know of 3DMM from Jerma’s Rat Movie Duology or Vinesauce Joel’s Blue Shell Incident
Radio Garden
Shows you a map of the world, where pins on the world are local radio stations you can listen to.
Minecraft Heads
Minecraft has a feature that lets you load in player heads as a block, this is a database of player heads that make for good decorative blocks. On each head’s page, a command is provided to add the head to your in-game inventory without mods, which will work so long as you have op permissions on a cheats enabled world.
24/7 Programming
OldTimeyComputerShow
curated showcase of video tapes and films on computers and videogames from the 20th century, including history, promotional material, competitions, tutorials, computer art, and other ephemera.
SaltyBet
a 24/7 livestream that lets you place bets on live competitive events, though is usually running randomized CPUvCPU matches in MUGEN. During MUGEN, characters are moved into brackets that roughly reflect their strength, so its never clear exactly who will win. You can only gamble fictional currency associated with saltybet, so its all just for fun :)
TwitchPlaysPokemon
Always running something. Sometimes its a mainline game, sometimes its chat playing 2p battle revolution with bets, sometimes romhacks. Nothing will be as iconic as the first TPP, but its still a cool novelty nonetheless.
RadioGarden
(UK stations restrict access. unblock, 2, or use a VPN) explore live radio from around the world online. I recommend checking out their tabs in the sidebar, they highlight some interesting stuff. Here’s some highlights i like: datafruits.fm in seattle. a cooperatively owned and operated free-form net radio station reated by and for fans of internet radio and netlabels, with little to no curation. crowdfunded and ad-free. Their website is also pawsome aNONradio.net in seattle. Literally “a non radio”, since they’re a non-commercial, non-profit net ‘radio’ station. Note that the radio is an open-mic for all members of the SDF Public Access UNIX System Community vintageobscura.net in new york. Highlights “forgotten” music. Everything featured has less than 30k views on youtube at the time of discovery and were released before 96’
Soma.fm
a commercial free crowdfunded multi-stream internet radio station. They have a bunch of different genres and stuff to choose from, so just explore
LiveTV
not linking to any of them specifically because they often go down, just use any that are starred. i like boomerang :)
funcube
just a random stream of stuff running 24/7 with an irc chat to the side, clearly by a y2k nostalgia-head (based). Unfortunately kinda better than boomerang and the disgrace that is the modern nicktoons channel.
Misc
Transfeminine Science
is a site dedicated to sharing information relating to gender-affirming transfeminine hormone (replacement) therapy (HRT). The articles on this site are wiki-esque living documents, and hence may be updated, expanded, and improved over time, however it should be noted that not anyone can edit or add information to the site. It is never too late to transition. - diyhrt.wiki Do It Yourself Hormone Replacement Therapy. Especially useful if the system is failing you (underdosing, gatekeeping, waitlisting, potentially even banning if SCOTUS decides to be particularly evil soon), but even barring that it’s an alternative to be considered to give you more control over your transition and possibly even save you some dosh. Both feminizing and masculinizing hormone replacements are covered. Also just a good resource for learning about hrt and it’s effects in general (which you really ought to do. Most doctors do not have the time or need to research the ins and outs of transition, and are… safe but surprisingly very ignorant). - hrt.cafe a repository of reputable distributors to actually buy diy-hrt from
MonkeyType
best site to test keyboards and your WPM. If you want to battle people in real time, I recommend Typeracer though
🌟 TheraminTrees
a YouTube channel explores issues around abuse, manipulation, dogma, and systems of undue influence. Hosted by a licensed therapist. Life-changing stuff inside.
🌟 Catbox.moe
A nice, free, minimum bullshit image and file cloud. Also check out Litterbox for hosting files which are temporary in nature and can just be deleted whenever (this is a homegrown project ran at a loss most months, be nice and be reasonable).
12ft.io
put 12ft.io/ before any site’s domain (after http(s)://) and view that page without any popups, anti-adblock banners, paywalls, cookie popups, ads, and other annoying distractions.
Essentially loads the desired site inside of 12ft.io, which just disables javascript. Turns out most of the visual distractions on webpages are loaded after the page renders via javascript.
You can also achieve the results at 12ft by disabling javascript, but this is a nice, quick, sharable way to do it that doesn’t require you to switch the setting on and off.
Filmot
a tool to search for youtube videos by transcript, for when you have that one moment living rent free in your brain and youtube is failing you.
Replace any swears with
#FUCK#This is regardless of the word, its always
#FUCK#specifically, even if it’s actually “shit”, for example. This is due to transcript censorship on youtube’s end.
Quartz
is what i used to make this site! Its basically tool that generates static-sites from markdown text. If you want a front-end for writing markdown text in, check out obsidian.md in Hardware and Software
Erowid
A website dedicated to harm-reduction and education for a number of drugs. Includes sitable and non-sitable information (such as personal experiences, opinion pieces, media writings, etc., etc.)
MyTime.io
great for creating one link that a bunch of people in different timezones can use to coordinate. Basically, you format the url as something like mytime.io/13:00/PT or mytime.io/1pm/PT to have 1pm PT converted into your timezone automatically. It’ll give the correct time for anyone connecting. Be sure to turn off your VPN and tell everyone else to as well for it to work!
Just The Recipe
Paste in a recipe from a recipe site and remove all of their bullshit life stories and clutter
A website you’re probably using wrong. It’s invaluable for finding information within or about a given hobby, product, or niche. Tired of shitty listicles you get from your search engine when you just want to know what a good xyz is? Or how to fix a problem? or— Reddit. Literally just add site:reddit.com to your searches (or whatever the format is in your favorite search engine is) and you’ll get better results. Edit: this only works with google for recent information due to an exclusivity deal. what the fuck. (startpage, searx, and kagi should still work since they all index from google, but jesus)