Cool Links a list of all kinds of interesting sites I like.

I miss when people shared curated lists of the sites they enjoy. I mean, search engines are cool and all, but nothing beats a "word of mouth" recommendation. Not to mention search engines lean heavily towards corporate, SEO optimized sites that exist only to get you to spend money or look at ads. While a curated list of links is just someone wanting to share stuff they found and lets you discover new, unexpected things... and that's just cool in my book!

Anyway, here's my curated lists of stuff I like:

Games #

• Museum of Computer Adventure Game History is an awesome repository of early adventure games artifacts. Organized and navigated like a museum (with wings and rooms), it let's you browse hi-res media scans (especially pdf manuals!) and provides links to places where you can find out more. There's also a separate wing dedicated to gamebooks! Well worth a visit!

• The CRPG addict is a one man's quest to play through over 40 years of computer role-playing games! It's a great resource to find description of some very niche games AND is just plain fun to read through. I hope it will eventually be turned into a (series of?) book(s).

• analogjoy.club translates and archives vintage Japanese board games so you can download, print & play them yourself. It offers a look into a world of games not really known in the west.

• boardgamegeek.com think of it like wikipedia for boardgames. It's a huge open repository of knowledge created by its users and the go-to site for everything boardgaming related. Their sister sites rpggeek.com & videogamegeek.com are also worth a visit.

Home Pages #

• merveilles webring collects some great personal sites.

• StumblingOn gives you a random private site from a curated list with every click!

Art #

• skrekkogle.com is an ex design studio. I love their work, especially the industrial design, with Plugg being my favorite product they created.

Knowledge #

• The Internet Archive is my favorite place on the internet - an online library with terabytes upon terabytes of cool stuff! Tons of media of all kinds + the Wayback Machine means you can always something interesting to sink your teeth (eyes?) into.

• simplifier.neocities.org is a no-nonsense website cataloging "technology that is reliable, understandable, and practical for an individual to build for themselves." If you ever wanted to make your own ink, pigment or just expand your DIY skillset you should definitely give it a read!

Tools #

• lvllvl.com is a really robust petscii drawing web tool. It lets you draw your own art cell by cell or convert any image to petscii both with and without c64 restrictions.

• ditherit.com is a site that let's you easily dithering using a variety of algorithms.

• image optimizer is a web tool that lets you quickly optimize images for web. Really handy when you don't have a raster editor or have to get a pic quick.