Linkroll

My own web directory. I try to link to top-level sites where I think the whole website is worth taking the time to look through — ‘evergreen’ rather than ‘deciduous’ content. A few of the sites haven’t been updated in years, but the stuff that’s on them means they’re still worth reading. Not sure what to do about ‘deciduous’ articles and web pages as of yet. Maybe I’ll get Pinboard.

Around the WWW

Anything that doesn’t fit neatly into another category.

• Songs and Lyrics by Tom Lehrer. Mathematician, satirist, singer-songwriter, spy? quite possibly, and inventor of the jelly shot Tom Lehrer has put all his songs on his website and into the public domain. That’s sheet music, lyrics, and his albums in MP3 and RAR format. Not to be missed!
• Wikipedia:Terminal Event Management Policy. Wikipedia apocalypse policy.
• England Have My Bones — The T.H. White Homepage. Do people still read T.H. White? His version of The Sword in the Stone is one of the first books I remember reading by myself, and I still go back to it every Christmas. This fan page is a wonderful labour of love.
• The Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute. Dedicated to defining and cataloguing what they call “consumer aesthetics” — shared visual tropes used in advertising — from the late ’70s through to today. It’s remarkable how many of these you find yourself recognising once you see them pointed out.
• The L-Space Web. Terry Pratchett fan site which grew out of the alt.fan.pratchett Usenet group. The host computer was signed by Pratchett himself in 1996.
• Kate Bush Encyclopedia. Essential reading, obviously.
• entrances2hell. “A constantly updated catalogue of entrances to Hell in and around the UK”.
• The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group. Taxonomy of occlupanids, that is, little plastic bread ties. Started out as a little parody website and has since grown to a dizzying scale and level of complexity. Shades of Tlön.
• design manifestos. Also includes a nice linkrolls of artists’ manifestos.
• angels. Game/puzzle based off Conway’s Game of Life, by weepingwitch on tumblr. Find and click on the invisible 3x3 ‘angel’ moving steadily across the board. At each step, the angel toggles the alive/dead state of the tiles she covers, “acting as an external influence on the regular Conway’s life simulation.” Surprisingly riveting.
• Lost Art Press. Traditional woodworking, based in a philosophy of “American anarchism.” Blog highlights woodworkers from around the world. Interviews and lots of good pictures.
• Low-Tech Magazine. “Low-tech Magazine questions the belief in technological progress, and highlights the potential of past knowledge and technologies for designing a sustainable society.” This link leads to the solar-powered version of the sight; try this link if it’s offline.
• Skillet. Claire Lower writes about food.

Personal websites

Homepages, blogs, small directories, and digital gardens / note systems.

• Kicks Condor. The blog that launched a thousand indie websites.
  • Href.cool. Kicks’ link directory. Unusual category system means you’ll find yourself surprised where you end up.
• Maya.Land. Such a cool website; this is what inspired me to set up my own. I shamelessly stole Maya’s “Permanent pages / Blog updates” structure.
• The Allyverse. My friend Ally!
• Web Curios. “Digital arts, online culture, webdesign and creativity, philosophy, economics, sex, art, death, drugs, music, animation, literary fiction, comedy, nihilism, advertising, marketing, pornography, rights, AI, identity, PR, and the crippling horror of being made of meat.” I read this like the newspaper.
• Roberto Greco. Personal blog of “feral teacher” Roberto Greco.
• Barnsworthburning. The online commonplace book / digital garden / Zettelkasten of software designer Nick Trombley. Toss-up whether to put this here or under “Other directories” because almost every entry is a link to somewhere else, linked to other entries and annotated with tags. Spend a few minutes learning to navigate the site and then get stuck in.
• Arkm’s World. Personal website and link directory in the structure of a text adventure game.
• arcana dot computer. Weblog of Justin Duke, who runs the newsletter platform Buttondown (also the name of my favourite kind of shirt). His site is actually built off of Buttondown, and it blurs the line between newsletter and blog. It also has living ‘evergreen’ pages which you can subscribe to (by RSS) to follow updates.
• {feuilleton}. Artist John Coulthart’s has this knack for turning up interesting bits of design and illustration on his blog. Worth checking out for the ‘Weekend Links’ feature.

Fashion

Surprisingly hard these days to find websites which talk intelligently about clothes without trying to sell anything. A lot of these sites aren’t only about fashion; they’re also about the authors’ hobbies and interests. Peoples’ clothes reflect their lives.

• Die, Workwear. Derek Guy’s menswear blog. Updates like clockwork and always worth reading.
• Outfit Dissecting. Interviews, short personal essays, vintage finds from around the web. Check it out.
• The Grange. Chase H. Winfrey’s new blog.
  • The Popinjay. Chase’s old blog.
• Put This On. Regular updates and lots of contributing writers, including a couple cartoonists.
• The Contender on Substack. David Coggins’ newsletter. Clothes, travel, fishing, a lot of other things besides. Included as part of Central Division, below.
  • Coggins’ website is also worth following. No subscription needed and sometimes there are updates not on the newsletter.
• A Continuous Lean on Substack. Michael Williams’ site was one of the fist wave of menswear blogs. Emphasis on American-made clothes that last forever. Now he’s migrated mostly to Substack.
  • The old ACL site is still worth reading for the great archive.
  • Subscribe to Central Division (under ‘podcasts’, below) to get access to the archives for ACL and The Contender (above) as well as Williams’ and Coggins’ podcast.
• Permanent Style. Simon Crompton. Concentrates on the absolute upper end of luxury menswear.
• Words for Young Men. Chris Black’s website. No commentary, just pictures.
• Five in Blue. Essays about clothes. Lots of pictures.
• The Sartorialist. Street fashion photography by Scott Schumann.
• Blackbird Spyplane. Pretty much written in Nadsat, Jonah Weiner and Erin Wylie’s newsletter is worth the time you spend learning the language. Reading it makes you feel like you’re in some kind of secret club/cult, which is all part of the fun.

Tabletop role-playing games

A few years ago most of these guys would have been called “old-school revival” bloggers, but that label isn’t really popular any more. Some of the best of the OSR (like Mothership and Mausritter) isn’t actually “old-school” at all. Let’s say OSR here means “open-source roleplaying” and leave it at that.

• I Don’t Remember That Move. Brothers Dunkey and Matt Halton. Tremendous stuff. A single one of their tables is enough to build a campaign of off.
• Straits of Anián. Hasn’t been updated since 2014, but well worth reading through old posts. Anthony Picaro writes incredibly evocative, often unsettling material based on a mythical version of the Pacific Northwest in the early-to-mid 1800s.
• Against the Wicked City. “Romantic clockpunk fantasy gaming in a vaguely Central Asian setting”. Also worth reading are his notes on “Aesthetics of Ruin” and especially “Romantic fantasy.”
• Signs in the Wilderness. “A 1700s post-apocalyptic hopeful frontier fantasy setting for roleplaying games.”
• The Glatisant. From Ben Milton of youtube channel Questing Beast. Monthly updates on old-school RPG stuff. Ben has a nose for great stuff flying just under the radar.
• Goblin Punch. Arnold’s style of grotty low-fantasy is often imitated and rarely equalled. One of the classic RPG blogspot blogs and still at it. Don’t miss the False Hydra.
• Failure Tolerated. Blog of Sean McCoy, designer of Mothership. Lots of good stuff.
  • Also check out Sean’s collection of links.
• Archons March On. The majority of posts here are random tables for generating different kinds of monsters / NPCs, which are very good, but make sure you stay to see the really crazy stuff.
• Throne of Salt. Dan covers a lot of ground; his sci-fi stuff in particular is really good.
• Traaash. Material for Mothership. Houserules and regular play reports from Quadra’s campaign Warped.
• The Bottomless Sarcophagus. Rowan mostly blogs about horror-adjacent dark sci-fi and fantasy. Excellent illustrations.
• Hex Culture. Infrequent updates but worth the wait.
• Terminal Velocity. Sci-fi, mostly stuff for Mothership. Great worldbuilding.
• Luke Gearing. Thinking adventures. High game-to-words ratio.
• Rise Up Comus. Josh is currently working on his own fantasy RPG, His Majesty the Worm.
• What Would Conan Do?. Daniel Sell wrote the very fun game Troika. This is his blog. Lots of good advice on self-publishing RPG books.
• The Hotline. Mothership houserules.

Newsletters

I get enough e-mails. All the newsletters I read have RSS feeds — Substack and some other platforms generate them automatically and Notifier can take care of the rest.

• The Convivial Society. Weekly-ish updates examining our relationship with technology. The backlog is daunting but strongly recommended reading. No hot takes, guaranteed.
• The Melt. Updates from Jason Diamond.
• Garbage Day. Updates on the state of the internet a few times each week. Good for people like me who don’t use much social media.
• The Imperfectionist. The only “productivity” newsletter worth reading, largely because it isn’t about doing more things in a given day (which is pretty much impossible) but about knowing your limits.
• Why is this interesting?. Something for everyone.
• Humane Ingenuity. Dan Cohen writes about “technology that helps rather than hurts human understanding, and human understanding that helps us create better technology”.
• A Small and Simple Thing. Brooks Reitz talks about food and drink and a lot of other things. Food writing tends to be about what he’s cooking at home, so recipes are nice and sensible.
• Metafoundry. Technology, systems, design, language, social justice, and geography.
• [The Honest Broker]. Ted Giola talks about music and the music industry.
• The Boil Up. NZ news site The Spinoff’s food newsletter.

Podcasts & videos

I find it hard to listen to podcasts; I’m always doing something else while they play in the background and then I find I need to rewind the last 30 minutes because I haven’t taken anything in. Open to suggestions on this.

• Central Division. Subscription-only, but subscribing also gives you access to all the archives for both hosts’ newsletters (see The Contender and A Continuous Lean under ‘fashion’, above).
• Internet Shaquille. Food and cooking mostly. Good stuff.
• James Hoffmann. I don’t think I care about anything as much as James Hoffmann cares about coffee. The good thing about his videos is you get the feeling that even if you don’t go as far as he does with each technique (making tonic water from scratch with bark; adjusting the concentration of minerals in his espresso water) you can still take a few tips on board and end up with a better cup of coffee at the end of it.

Window shopping

Most of the shops listed here sell clothes, because that’s what I spend my money on.

• All Blues Co. A lot of high-end South Korean clothes otherwise hard to get, among other things. Mostly Americana-style casualwear.
• Oi Polloi. Good clobber from Manchester.
• Dick’s of Edinburgh. One of surprisingly few places to buy Scottish knitwear in Scotland (most of it’s made for export). Even if you don’t live in Scotland, there’s a lot of stuff here that’s hard to find other places.
• Bronson Mfg. Co. Sturdy workwear from China. Affordable, so you don’t feel bad about knocking the clothes about a bit.