A travelogue culled from the ephemeral photos and tagged notes. Check out the NYT article on which the layout is based. (This notion of combining ephemeral things into more substantial texts is the aim of my hypertexting effort.)

How to live in a mall. (See also: Roofman.)

Incidentally, 99pi—along with The Pudding—is a rare publication that seems worth keeping an eye on.

Read from top to bottom aloud in mixed company. I love the term “clowder”. If you need, I have a fuller glossary of cat terms. (See also: Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild.)

Somewhere between Shopkins, Garbage Pail Kids and pornography—films and artworks that are grotesque and beautiful, a hellscape and a paradise, a beauty tip and a courageous quip just prior to an apocalypse. There is wax on the camera.

“Once liberation reached a point of adequate success, however, sex was unconscionably easy to liberate further, as commerce discovered it had a new means of entry into private life and threw its weight behind the new values. What in fact was occurring was liberalization by forces of commercial transaction, as they entered to expand and coordinate the new field of exchange. Left-wing ideas of free love, the nonsinfulness of the body, womens equality of dignity, intelligence, and capability, had been hard-pressed to find adequate standing before—and they are still in trouble, constantly worn away. Whereas incitement to sex, ubiquitous sexual display, sinfulness redefined as the unconditioned, unexercised, and unaroused body, and a new shamefulness for anyone who manifests a nonsexuality or, worst of all, willful sexlessness—that was easy.”

While this isn’t a ‘simple’ crime—along the lines of stealing a basketball—I think the author makes a compelling case that this was a case of mere fantasy that snowballed into disaster. This is possibly the most salacious link in this directory, almost a piece with the New Yorker article “The Voyeur’s Motel”, which became an entire scene of drama following its publication—both exposés dive headlong into two opposing sides of male sexuality. (However, both of these men are the same: both are stealthy and rapacious pursuants.)

Oh and wouldn’t you say the interrogators of these cases—the police and journalist figures in these articles—are far more complex and devilish than their subjects??

‘The absolute best way to teach your child about fractions.’

Prompts and tips for a gamemaster, to quest in an evening. Related: Battle royale rules for Pathfinder.

I like that this is so prescriptive. You may not use the shorthand here, but I’ve found the overall advice sound. This is a terrible admission, but I do this for novels. I haven’t read it till I’ve read it twice.

She’s done excellent studies on curiosity and storytelling in education.

A very active, detailed stream of quotes on education and the Web. I enjoy looking through this.

Not funny and no maps. Just a kid reviewing Mountain Dew and every ball game he watches. I don’t know what to say about this. I occasionally check in to see if he’s still going.

The extreme encounters of a lesbian cable tech. I like this diary because, despite the pulpy tone and the moments of horror, I don’t sense any misanthropy from the writer. This is just how people are. (Similar: Naming the Unspoken Thing, a window into SF’s underground clambakes.)

“Friend every poet you can on Facebook, goodreads.com, porn sites—” Jim Behrle’s gentle rant on self-promotion, from a poet’s view. A realization that Jewel is the all-eclipsing poet of the now. Reminiscent of Bill Hicks’ New Kids bit. (A different perspective, but related: “How Do We Write Now?” by Patricia Lockwood.)

I love this—maybe we’re all anarchists! (By way of ‘direct action’.) Well, I’ll take any window I can get into the underground, into transformative and/or fruitless movements—I have no clue what’s going to happen next, but I am glad I found about the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army. It’s like free v-bucks for me. (See also: The Anarchist Library.)

The blog of Pinboard’s creator Maciej Cegłowski. Thought-provoking articles and slides. If you read blogs, well, read this. (Maybe try: this talk.)

Right, okay—a link to The New Yorker? What can I say—if a story gets to me, then what can I do? This has a strong scent of this society of ours. I felt a similar ding! ding! reading George Saunders’ “Sea Oak”. I’m not looking down on society here—I absolutely revel in it. I think I get to be part of this, too.

An online literary journal that I really enjoy. (A related quality print journal is Conjuctions—who republishes some bits online.)

A comic from yesteryears that still continues to this day. Just letting you know.

After finding an SD card of 227 images, the writer of this 2004 blog made up stories for the pictures. Until the owner was discovered and the blog was closed.

If you can find your way to the trunk, it’s all there.

Hypertext stories and, yep, diagrams!! I like that links are red and not underlined. And some other things are red and not underlined. So I end up reading and passing my mouse over everything. It’s like I’m really touching the pages with my finger. Amateur braille experience. “WE VALUE the insides of things, vivisection, urgency, risk, elegance, flamboyance…” (Oh got this one from Nathan, my friend who you will need to like.)

Hack a cupcake factory, if you have to. (See also: slimedaughter.com.)

One of the earliest hypertext stories. Also: Agatha Appears.

This is such a fun, forgotten genre—I think of it as the spiritual ancestor to fanfic. Stacey Levine’s Frances Johnson was inspired by the literary style of these.

Yes, this poem is transcendent to me. If you want novelty, try i went fishing with my family when i was five and the performance of it.

I can’t explain it, but I want to make a little LEGO scene of this poetry reading. It’s like fashion and sexuality make us into archetypes.

Chunky shrapnel. I am vomit vomiting.

This whole blog is very interesting to me. It is mostly links and essays. But some things are not comprehensible—in a good way.

A boring, repetitive clip which somehow contains a kind of horror. To me, its not the screams—it’s what it does to your brain. Inanity, descent into madness, is somehow captured here. Another variant takes Mickey through gradual, subtle physical derangement. His walk never changes.

Trippy, late-90s Adobe Flash journey. Reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch; progenitor to diversions like Fly Guy, Samorost and Feed the Head.

Imagery from children’s science-fiction literature.

A ritual for you, your solarpunk friends and your computers and your ethernet cables too and some HTML written on looseleaf scattered around the floor. Yes, that’ll do it. Fine fine. Ok, coolguy.website.

‘My 6-year-old daughter sees things other people don’t. “Skitter scatters,” ghosts, auras. She just started school and there’s something in the lunchroom only she can see, and this one makes her nervous.’

Telephone recordings, party lines and such from the 90s. I do need to satisfy a voyeuristic urge sometimes.

And Hiroshima Hills. Both are Real/Paced, yeah?

Anyone who can slip some Haruomi Hosono in there is a very close, beloved friend of this family.

I just like the look of it.

A stehtic. And Geocities treasures. Like a little plastic chest of jewels.

There are many routes into this topic—however, I enjoy the Brain Pickings blog and wanted a reason to link to it somewhere in here. See also the footage of John Smith at his machine.

Lovely, subtle pixel art animations. Similar to cinemagraphs, but hand-painted. Also see: Canvas Cycle.

Now this is an impressive realization of a webzine. Every subtle touch—right down to the mouse cursor—draws you in. The author of this is also working on Pixel Art Academy, a game that teaches you how to make pixel art.

Not just pixel screencaps—if you scroll back, there are neat, compact pixel art animation tutorials. Kind of like zine pages.

(If you can’t get the Flash video working, see YouTube.) This link is quite elusive for me. I like the idea of a poem read by a computer. I like that the piece sits somewhere between Radiohead’s TTS experiments and Murder of the Universe. I like that this is almost 20 years old now. It’s also interesting that this has spawned a derivative: Ten Minute Painting. I wonder what else is on this thread.

Floating in a song. This artist also brought us staggeringbeauty.com, a staple of “useless web” tourism.

Make music simply by scrolling. Easyy! (By same: 2016.management. By Y & S.)

A small directory of minimalist web sites and things.

The most minimal and still very sweet way to participate in The Web. The child of watershed linksite Delicious, same conceit: post your bookmarks publicly, add a little note, a few tags. It’s like having your own href.cool! $11/year, but the real deal is $25/year and it’ll archive all the pages you link to.

The tilde.club was a 2014 resurgence of tilde-style user directories. You used to get these free at your university or with your home Internet connection in the '90s.

I bounce ideas back-and-forth with this fellow. He blogs about web directories and web search—but in an effort to understand how else we could be doing this. Our conversations led me to make this directory.

I don’t know Kathleen—she’s a professor and writer—but I’ve been enjoying her posts about The Web.

I mention Brad Enslen in Web/Blog—this is his directory. While href.cool is more about pointless and intriguing links, Indieseek is mostly rock-solid useful or prominent links. And a very good blog about linking and surfing.

It’s difficult to capture the spirit of innovative design that existed on the Old Web. This small directory certainly captures some of it.

Joe Jenett’s links—collected and pruned since the turn of this century. I like to look through the full list of months and the pointers page to catch up periodically.

Perhaps the second tumblelog ever? Innovated the format, in my mind. (I think of Gray Areas or slimetony as bearers of that torch.)