List o' Links
Every cool person has a list of links to other things that are cool, and I too am a cool person.
Last Updated: December 28, 2024
Friends of Skep's Place
Sites made by people I actually talk to. No really, it's true, I'm not just shouting into the ether!
- No Happy Nonsense
Man, I wish I knew what was going on in Mike's head. I don't really know how to describe anything he does, so just go read his work.
- The Reading Project
An ambitious collection of book reviews by the kind of people who want to write thoughtful and detailed book reviews, plus a whole lot more.
- What Video Game Did I Play Yesterday?
Pretty much what it says on the tin. I've heard others describe the short, game-focused posts as "cozy", and I kinda get it. Despite the simplicity of it, this is one of those sites I'll check every day, just to see what Miela is up to.
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Cool Solo Projects
These folks are doing us a service by making the internet just a little more unique.
- Curate of Curiosities
Kinda like my shtick, except instead of media everyone's heard of, they cover media nobody's heard of. So in addition to being entertaining, it's also interesting!
- East Athenaeum
Bill seems like one of those people who knows a little bit about a lot of different things. Mostly really nerdy things. Things that make you re-evaluate what you know.
- Existential Comics
It should not be in the least bit surprising that taking the beliefs of the world's deepest thinkers and laughing at them is absolutely my jam.
- ghostscape
Somebody went "I'm going to make my website into a wizard tower." I don't need to say anything more about this.
- The Mane Quest
I've always played video games, which often featured horses, but I knew nothing about horses. Then I married an equestrian. I still know nothing about horses, but this person certainly does, and goddamn do I admire their dedication to fixing a genre that the industry has completely dismissed.
- McMansion Hell
For the uninitiated, a "McMansion" is an absurdly large house that looks incredibly pretentious but is actually a cheaply-built hovel meant to fool you into the thinking the owner can afford a lifestyle more lavish than they actually can. Anyway this blog is dedicated to making fun of people pretending to be rich, so it gets my approval. Bonus: learn some architecture words!
- Morningglory17
The reason I have to highlight this site is for its Music section, which contains the author's efforts to research a forgotten American composer and preserve his music in MIDI form. Amazing cause.
- New – Night Owl Cards
Baseball card collector and creator of a series of blogs, in which they pick a year and manufacturer and talk a little about each card that was released in that run. I do not watch baseball nor collect cards, but this is such a simple delight I had to include it.
- Unicursal Maze Research
I think it's easy to write off this site; for the average individual, plotting different paths through a grid might spark a mild but very fleeting interest. But I am incredibly, incredibly impressed by how dedicated Asterion is to the research. I couldn't do it, but I'm glad somebody can.
- Wild Bread
Speaking as an emotionless robot purpose-built to turn gin into sarcasm, I have no idea why on earth images of abandoned breadstuffs are the only thing that stirs the sub-processes constituting the closest thing I have to a "soul", but they do. Simultaneously amusing, tragic, and profound... those breads had hopes and dreams, damn it.
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YouTube Channels
A selection of mostly gaming-related channels I follow. All under 500k subs. Nothing cringey/clickbait-y.
- April Black
Somehow, The Sims 2 was the Sims generation I managed to skip. AND I haven't even played The Sims in a decade. So why did I decide to watch a 2-hour YouTube video about corrupted Sims 2 neighborhoods? I couldn't tell you, but I watched it anyway, and it was fascinating. Very satisfyingly techy; April does her homework.
- New – Marcel Vos
Again with deep dives into games I haven't touched in many years. Marcel has done videos detailing just about every little element of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2. Related, also check out OpenRCT2, keeping the game playable to this day.
- New – New Frame Plus
I sure know a lot more about the underappreciated art of animation in video games now, I'll tell you that much.
- New – NerdSlayer Studios
Their Death of a Game series investigates and analyzes the events leading up to and following the release of an online game to determine why it failed to sustain a playerbase. Like sorting out a train wreck but with mercifully lower stakes.
- New – Pop Arena
The big project I am most excited about is Nick Knacks, a mini-documentary and analysis of every show ever in the Nickelodeon lineup and how they influenced the evolution of the cable channel. It's slow-going—still in the early 90s—but very engrossing if you have any hint of Nickelodeon nostalgia.
- New – Redlyne
Redlyne has recorded multiple videos investigating old game servers that are still running despite having little or no active users. Some games you'll recognize, and some are really off-the-wall, but each represents a once-beloved community that is sadly no more.
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Puzzle Places
I'm a casual partaker of word puzzles and the like. Here are the ones I play regularly.
- New – AVCX
All right, heck with the New York Times, I'm done with their crosswords. This is where I get my fix now.
- New – Puzzmo
You open this up, you're going to get a dashboard full of various puzzly diversions, most of which are unique to Puzzmo, all of which are updated daily. A handful of word games, a Concentration & Sudoku mashup, Really Bad Chess, and more. There's also leaderboards if you're into that sort of thing; I'm not, but just the fact that they exist makes me play more thoughtfully in the event that, hey, maybe I'll be up there.
- Ridella
Solve a daily riddle! Feel like a clever little hobbit! Not the most challenging, but props to whoever has to put together new riddles every day.
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Other Amusements
An assortment of fun stuff that's not actively demanding your attention.
- 1001 Albums Generator
Takes all the albums from the book 1001 Albums to Listen to Before You Die and generates a new one for you every day. Granted the list is at least half rock albums from the 60s and 70s that feel soul-crushingly generic now, but you hit some gems on occasion. You can see my progress here.
- Flashpoint Archive
Not to date myself here, but my Internet dependency started in the early 2000s, right around the same time that Flash was really starting to take off as a dominant technology. Sure, it took half an hour to load a 5-minute cartoon back then, but we didn't care. It's amazing just how much was lost when Adobe stopped supporting the plugin. Not only is Flashpoint working to preserve as much of it as they can, but they even built a program where you can play Flash content again.
- NoLife-Radio
A 24/7 stream of random (and I mean RANDOM) video game music. A lot of stuff you'll never even have heard of. Great for background noise.
- New – Radio Garden
Use satellite imagery to find and stream live internet radio stations all over the world. Seriously, they got Pyongyang in this thing even.
- Sit
Sometimes, we as people are so concerned with getting stuff done that we forget to make time to do nothing. Now, I'm a big proponent of doing nothing, so I urge you to try this little tool, which will blank your screen for a few minutes so you can sit there and finally make peace with those little voices inside your head you've been trying to distract yourself from.
- Whichipedia
A simple game: you are presented with the titles of two random Wikipedia articles. You must guess which article contains more words. You will be wrong, and you will get angry.
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Consumerism Zone
It's not your fault the system is broken, so here are some things almost worth spending your money on.
- Dumb Cuneiform
Etching your pointless shit into rocks so that archeologists will decode it five thousand years from now is like peak levels of human nonsense. I like nonsense, so this gets the Skep seal of approval. And be on the lookout for the upcoming version of Skep's Place, where I inscribe this website onto stone tablets and seal it into the Ark of the Covenant.
- meh.
I've been checking Meh's daily deals on random items for a few months now. Most of the goods they're selling are, frankly, the kind of nonsense that can only exist thanks to flagrant consumerism, but they're fully in on the joke. And sometimes, you do find something you were considering eventually buying anyway for a really good price. Anyway whoever is writing their product descriptions is my personal idol.
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