Defunct blog (2009-2014) full of the loveliest sorts of animal illustrations.

Randy Ludacer’s box blog. Since 2007. Elucidates the finer points of any kind of packaging or branding, citing mathematical and geometric precedents. Feels very personal and whimsical. This blog is so focused that it can be read out of order and feel very cohesive. (Related: Songs About Packaging, also by Ludacer.)

Another downtempo design blog, full of subtle oddities that I would overlook. Categories like: sticks, online trickery and dead flies.

This blog covers the dark web, various online scams as well as… vaporwave? I love the look. The guilty pleasure is all mine.

While generally these folks focus on reviews of board and card games, it is the discussion about board game history and mechanics that I really enjoy. Some favorite posts: 2012: The Year of Perfect Information, Designer Intent.

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

Blog of assorted shapes, real and imagined, by a math prof.

Writings within an approachable, modern kind of philosophy.

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

A materialistic view of the 20th Century. Often revisits lost corners of history or lost villages. Always eye-opening.

A survey of photo clichés from the Instagram world.

For the years of 2009-2011, this blog posted a short story each week, some classic, some modern. I’m interested in this type of directory-blog hybrid. And I like to find new short stories. (Also, there is an out-of-print collection The Stories of Denton Welch that is probably my very favorite collection.)

From my very good friend Nathan—you’d love him: “Very experimental stuff from Calamari Press (Gary Lutz, David Ohle [remember that little book, Motorman?]). Lots of brutalist ASCII found-poem objects, ephemera, and visual bleeps.” This could go in Visuals/Zines or Stories/Poems, too.

The whole world’s only source for Fafblog.

Reviews of Marie NDiaye novels, Robert Walser, César Aira. I haven’t read Alice Munro, but I really admire the detailed reviews here of her short story collections. Maybe I’m wrong, but I also sense that this blog doesn’t destroy books with criticism—it always feels constructive. I’m generally against reviews unless the critic is very careful.

If you’re into Marie NDaiye, I like this interview with translator Jordan Stump and I like this group discussion about her work—the format and the length are generous. Wish I had interviews with NDiaye to link to. (See also: Dr Tony Shaw, thoughts on NDiaye and many other French writers.)

Dissolved AI patterns and progressive dolls in a room. Similar: /e/ADA387.

Imagery from children’s science-fiction literature.

“Aries: You’ve got some frog skeletons AND a matchbook. You are fuckin set aries. You’re good, nothing can stop you.”

(Also, by Dane Asmund: DOGS the gaem.)

This surrealist group from Atlanta records the results of their experimental games and nocturnal visions. This is the scientific vanguard for the perceptible fictional world. I would defend this blog with guns and I am afraid of guns. (Related: Peculiar Mormyrid, a surrealist zine. Mariusze Figle. Icecrawler/Heelwalker.)

Mysteries and apparitions of a certain English county.

Hey, alright! Focused on Ethiopian music specifically—and instruments, too: heard of the krar or the washint? (Count me as another who has found themselves lost in the musical tunnels of Mulatu Astatke.) Some good mixes on here, if you want to feel your way around.

This might be better off in Visuals/Images—or maybe in Real/Society—however, there is a lot of pop culture juxtaposition on this blog by @madamjujujive, @quonsar and other “mefites”. Respect here as well: this particular hypertext has been spawning weekly for two decades.

I just like the look of it.

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

A non-verbal tour of obscure, muted imagery through time.

Highbrow? Perhaps for the Internet. A window into the art scene.

I don’t get photography, like, at all—there is just so much of it now and I have a hard time telling what’s special. I think Simon has a lot of great pictures—but, again, it’s hard for me to tell if it’s the black-and-white or if some postprocessing is done. Whatever—not my territory. But I am blown away by the volume of tags here. It’s odd: I feel like this extreme number of tags actually makes them each more interesting. I wonder how one keeps track of this level of categorization.

Ten years of dank and hairy 1970’s lost photographs.

A webzine of nonsense, arcane notebooks, txt-style vernacular (trading ‘lols’ for ‘bedder-½’), beat-up cassettes by (mostly?) Derek White. It feels Irish to me, all the best things in life do. I’m new to this, but it’s been around since 2003! The new project for 2018 is to walk all of Rome.

An international comics anthology—count on a wide variety of surprising styles. Even more in the zine vein is their buddy Popper.

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.

Combination blog and timeline of the World Wide Web’s history. Not only a good dose of nostalgia, but a formidable use of hypertext itself.

This blog trundles the Geocities archive, often grouping screenshots into thematic boulders. (One of the authors of this blog is the artist behind My Boyfriend Came Back From the War in the Stories/Hypertext display case. More about the two authors at Contemporary Home Computing. See also: Geocities Forever.)

Gotta give props to a blog that goes back to the '90s. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seemed like this blog was a major force in steering Web technology. Exactly the kind of force needed in the Indieweb.

Feelings of reverence must be conjoured for this simple—and exhaustive—personal blog that has made its way here from 1998. Still fresh. (Nod to Boing Boing as well for surviving with dignity, those I miss it’s earlier, denser design.) Kottke is a specific kind of personal blog: the individual gazing upon the world with awe.

Introduced me to such wonders as King Gizzard’s In Your Mind Fuzz, Veronica Falls, The Fresh & Onlys. But, actually, I think this blog was a large inspiration for this directory. The writing, the selections and the variety of feature segments on RSTB all aspire to a high quality. And, even though music blogs get easily caught up in recency, RSTB covers a lot of reissues and revisiting of old gems, bygone stories. The Internet can be so damned frantic that it forgets to settle down and be timeless.