satyrs.eu/linkroll
Welcome, weary traveller, to the illustrious Mx Tynehorne’s cabinet of hypertext curiosities! You can navigate the links on this page by clicking the provided tags below, or you can and visit a random entry.
1pixelmoon
A simultaneously tedious and engaging explanation of just how big outer space is.
underunderstood
Every so often, a photo of a smiling little boy, totally oblivious to 9/11 happening in the background, does the rounds on Reddit. But is it real? One brave podcast crew tries to find out.
abaroths
“An eclectic mixture of my interests including models, optical illusions, historic buildings, roleplaying games, heraldry, puzzles and gardening.” In a similar vein to Rivendell further down the list, i’d say.
adamcadre
The website of one Adam Cadre, interactive fiction pioneer and creator of the Lyttle Lytton contest, honouring the worst possible opening lines to a novel one could ever come up with.
Also featured are film critiques, restaurant reviews, and an annotated list of favourite songs.
adelfaure
A French collection of ascii art — with its own custom font and everything! I have a special fondness for the medium, due to some personal connections i shan’t be bringing over the cyber-curtain.
afterthetone
Archived answerphone messages, found somewhere between the dumpster and the donations box.
alltooflat
One of the first documented pranks on the oft-tomfooled Astor Place Cube in Manhattan.
This site hasn’t been updated in almost a decade now — things like that always make me think, who’s paying to keep the lights on? Feels like it might not be long for this world.
anthology
A history of art made for the internet, from the ’80s up to the modern day.
aporee
Field recordings from every corner of the globe, from Poland to Polynesia. (Don’t let the mess of tags scare you; there’s a more conventional map interface just around the corner.)
apple
Apple lore. The knowledge that there exists a cursed apple, an apple more disgusting than the Red Delicious, will forever keep me up at night.
arkmsworld
A sprawling personal directory packed into the vague shape of a house — but, like, one of those Hogwarts houses where the rooms keep changing behind you and you’re not quite sure how it all manages to fit inside the exterior.
artybollocks
“My work explores the relationship between Bauhausian sensibilities and counter-terrorism. With influences as diverse as Rousseau and Roy Lichtenstein, new insights are manufactured from both constructed and discovered textures.”
astronaut
You are an astronaut floating over the Earth, observing Her people’s everyday lives. These clips have been uploaded to Youtube fresh off of the camera with file names like IMG 1923, never meant to be seen… but now, they are.
below
The stories told by a variety of interesting things found in a canal in Amsterdam during excavation of a metro line.
beneathvt
“Do not enter the steam tunnels.” These are the adventures of a rag-tag group of explorers at one Virginian university.
billwurtz
Bill Wurtz’s home page is wonderfully bare-bones, and filled with all sorts of hidden nooks and crannies; the anagrams page is a personal favourite.
→ Also by Bill Wurtz: La de da de da de da de day oh
bridges
The surprisingly interesting history of the bridges that span the Tyne gorge — and a bunch of other rivers throughout the North East, just for good measure.
brienne
An online exhibition about a 17th-century trunk of letters sent to a museum in the Hague.
ccru
??? “Warwick University maintains that the CCRU was never a sanctioned academic project, with some faculty going so far as to assert that the CCRU ‘has never existed’.”
colornames
A collaborative effort to name every colour. 2½ million and counting!
the
Procedurally generated music based on your location.
confluence
I’ll let this “organised sampling of the world” speak for itself:
“The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures, and stories about the visits, will then be posted here.”
corru
Someone on Neocities linked me to this, telling me to check out “[their] friend’s personal site”.
Dear reader, it is emphatically not just a personal site: it is, without hyperbole, one of the best damned things i’ve ever seen on the internet. It’s a game… website… comic… well, i don’t know, TV Tropes would call it a “web original” — it’s a thing where you play as, uh, an undercover archeologist hacking into memories stored in an alien computer recovered from the bottom of the sea?
You think it’s going to be a horror thing at first, but then it suddenly shifts gears entirely and instead becomes uber-charming and makes you realise why people liked Homestuck so much despite the janky presentation. I’m converting to whatever religion this is. Praise Corru!!
cuberule
A delightful and 100% objective categorisation of carbohydrate-based foods. We can finally be sure that a hot dog is, in fact, a sandwich, although this also requires accepting that pork pies are a calzone.
curious
I always get a bit lost trying to navigate around here; there’s no real central index, so one winds up clicking around a lot and seeing what’s there. Maybe that’s a good thing.
curlie
Formerly known as Dmoz, Curlie is the original diectory for surfing the ’web. It’s getting on a bit now — many of the listed sites are absolutely ancient — but i don’t think that’s a bad thing. It’s internet history at your fingertips, this!
davidrumsey
A collection of mainly old and antique maps. I could spend hours here; beautiful cartography is my greatest weakness.
dedalvs
David J. Peterson is probably the closest thing the field of conlanging has to a celebrity, having done things as high-profile as Game of Thrones’ Dothraki. This makes it all the more surprising that he has a wonderful little hand-coded website for his other conlanging projects. Those aren’t even my favourite part, though: that honour goes to the Smiley Awards, an annual award given to a language that “makes [him] smile”.
Inspiration: Mr. Peterson’s site was the thing that inspired me to have an HTML presence to begin with; the earliest design of this very site was copied from his. (I’ll link an image when i get around to finding one…)
diamondgeezer
Life as viewed from London E3, by someone with an ever-more-accurate nom de plume. There’s 20 years’ worth of material to dig through; a real treasure trove if you’re interested in attractions or transit in the area.
diamonds
A personal rant about why diamonds aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and why you should consider buying the more vibrant moissanite instead.
hermetic
A directory of links in honour of Dionysos. Be advised, though, that it hasn’t been updated in eighteen years, and thus many of the links sadly no longer point to their intended destinations.
drawing
Remember when you were a little kid and you’d make art by gluing leaves and sticks you’d found onto paper? Welcome to the metaverse, buddy.
dreamwiki
The “DREAMWIKI” is a surreal wiki of twisty little interlinked nocturnal ramblings.
Don’t miss the main site, which includes a
subterranean tunnel system buried deep beneath the
surface.
earth
What’s the weather like out there? Strangely mesmerising.
etymonline
“A map of the wheel-ruts of modern English” — the definitive online compendium of the origins of English words, as compiled by one Douglas Harper of Pennsylvania.
→ See also: Jeff from Florida’s resource of word-nerdery
everynoise
You may be disappointed that it doesn’t literally play every noise at once. But it’s a fascinating data-driven look at how music is categorised, and incidentally a pretty good tool for discovering new artists!
Maybe you could argue this doesn’t belong in the “Directories” category. I think it counts, though — not a directory of websites, but definitely an equivalent format for music.
exitmundi
One day, the world will end — but how? This crumbling collection of possibilities (seriously, like a third of the images are broken) lays out the options.
mango
“For security reasons, we try to change our Prime Minister every six months, and to never use the same Prime Minister on multiple websites.”
florilegium
A collection of resources on mediæval life, collected for the benefit of the live-action role-play community.
fraidyc
Alright, maybe this is just a glorified RSS reader with a few extra bits tacked on. But i love the way it organises content: just because someone posts more frequently doesn’t mean i want to see more of them!
future
What might the world be like in ten years? A hundred? A thousand, or a million? This site puts forward an answer.
gefrin
“An eclectic look at some of the archaeology and heritage in and around Northumberland”.
hryanjones
Warm. Warm. Cold. Colder. Wa—freezing cold. Words change daily.
hanovfond
This 3D tour lets you wander about Kazan’s hypersyncretic Temple of All Religions — it almost comes off as normal, and then you get to the Egyptian room.
50watts
Along the same lines, here’s a horrifying Dutch firework PSA.
horg
Horg.
href
oh shit things just got meta
A directory of links that were my main inspiration in creating this page. There’s so much cool stuff here, and i still haven’t reached the bottom.
I think it’s interesting that we have different methods of approaching the intertwingularity of things: href.cool has a hierarchical structure with a few sites repeated in different categories, while this linkroll has a flat tag structure.
lileks
A recovering journalist’s archive of twentieth-century pop culture and advertising Americana. Includes a “gallery of regrettable foods”.
lindisfarne
Though the official(?) website of the Holy Island of Lindisfarne looks like it hasn’t been changed in a decade, it’s still regularly updated to this day — they put a fabric texture on their GDPR nag, for foxache! I love it so much
lu
Another fellow sailor out here in these dusk days of the free web.
That was a bit wank-y, sorry — this is a pretty neat collage-style personal website full of random tchotchkes and knick-knacks. Check it out!
macpaint
A gallery of art created in the namesake antique computer programme.
search
Filling the same slot the dearly departed Million Short took in the earlier days of this page, Marginalia Search searches just the smaller, more personal parts of the web — it’s more useful as a tool for spelunking for interesting sites than general queries, i find.
→ See also: Exa, née Metaphor, which leverages machine learning to let you write your queries in reverse — say, “Here’s a cool website about Northumbrian history” (which is how i found the aforelinked Gefrin).
neglected
“Where forgotten books are remembered.” Filed under Americana, because really, is there anything more American than the thought that some plucky author had already written the Great American Novel all those years ago and noöne had noticed?
neilcic
The annoying thing about the Mouth tetralogy is that you’ll never be able to hear the normal versions of these songs the same way again.
→ Also by Neil Cicierega: The entirety of 21st century internet culture
parallel
There are ten million buildings in the Netherlands, and this fuck-off great map shows how old they all are.
→ See also: Topotijdreis and the National Library of Scotland’s viewer for exploring old maps of the Netherlands and UK
noclip
Noclip.website lets you fly through the abandoned worlds of old video games, set free from their cartridges, devoid of any players or characters. It’s like wandering around after the Rapture.
no
The official website of the All About Roundabouts Society, and what quality roundabouts they are! This is what the internet was made for, really. Exudes very British energies, but seems to be based in the suburban town of Carmel, Indiana.
iceberg
None of the usual iceberg fodder — this is the real shit. A clamshell that fills schoolchildren with the urge to say “God died in there”. The surrealist movement being founded after someone heard a ghostly voice proclaim “there is a man cut in half by the stairs”. Hairy angelic ancestors. Directly into my veins!
eev
This is a whirlwind tour of the chaotic history of CSS, one of the three founding pillars of the web, peppered with just the right amount of jokes and fucks to be engaging but not irritating. As a bonus, the last part doubles as a pretty solid recap of all the neat things modern CSS can do!
omfgdogs
The song playing in the background is a chiptune version of ”Fångad av en stormvind”. You’re welcome.
openverse
Absolutely indispensible if you’re running a CC0 website like myself — search the web for images that you’re actually allowed to use.
orbis
Like Google Maps for the Roman world. You can plot out a course from Britannia to Carthage and see how long it would take and how many bags of grain you’d have to fork over.
orions
The year is 12,569 CE. Terragen civilisation — to say “human” would be gauche when there’s robots, artificial intelligences, artificial life, uplifted animals, and genetically engineered creatures of all types — has spread across a comparatively small pocket of the galaxy, but it’s made friends, enemies, and horrors beyond anyone’s comprehension. Welcome to Orion’s Arm.
orkneyjar
A repository for the history and culture of the Orkney islands, up in the far north of Scotland.
paratheatrical
I, uh… i don’t really know what this is. I don’t remember how i found it. I get the sense that if i don’t share it a ghost will kill me in seven days.
→ See also: Vertical Pool Productions, from the same webmaster
peelopaalu
Another big directory of links. This one has a more image-board-y, vintage tilt to it — musty old websites full of anarchic nerd stuffs.
theodore
A literal periodic table of elements, with tons of samples and stories of how it was made.
persepolis
A gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous recreation of the ancient city of Persepolis in all its glory. Technically runs on a phone, but i wouldn’t want to try it!
phrontistery
I wish i’d known about this horde of words and word-related paraphernalia before starting the Compendium. It can be a bit impenetrable to browse, though…
pike
See? You don’t need fancy styles (or any styles) to have a site worth visiting.
world
Dozens of potential planets, from variations upon our home’s geography to completely new worlds. Contains an odd amount of naked furries, so, um, maybe don’t click through at work?
pluto
Pluto was beautiful. Pluto was there when you needed it. And then one day, it wasn’t anymore. I’m linking to an archived version here, but the original will never be forgotten.
postbox
An image board with a lovely gimmick: you have to submit your post as a physical letter to the webmistress. Slow, but always wonderful.
qntm
Sci-fi stories, analyses of time travel, and assorted others by author Sam Hughes.
radical
I probably can’t justify adding this on its own merits — but man, i remember browsing this as a wee bairn, thinking “radical” was just meant in the nineties sense; no thoughts, just taking in the pretty maps.
random
Imagine you’re aboard the ISS, gazing down at the earth below. This is about what you’d see — randomly chosen serendipitous spots from around the globe.
rddnickel
An absolutely astonishing amount of effort went into this, which seems to have gone entirely unappreciated — i seem to remember happening upon this entirely on accident! Go check it out; Mr Nickel deserves the hits.
huh
Watching paint dry has never been so entertaining.
retronator
A beautifully composed online magazine about beautiful pixel art. How they got Tumblr to coöperate with that design, i have no idea.
rivendell
A site belonging to an elven-inclined engineer and conlanger who has, in his own words, “been a musician, a linguist, a gamer, a mystic, an actor, a DJ, a runner, a raver, a philosopher, an artist, a writer, and probably a few other things that are escaping my mind at the moment.”
sacred
An archive of religious and spiritual writings in the public domain from every corner of the globe.
saint
The first illuminated Bible manuscript commissioned since the invention of the printing press.
andymatuschak
This pen predicts what you’re drawing. Let it guide your hand.
fieggen
Reader, i’m going to confess an embarrassing secret: i was terrible at tying my shoes until well into my teenage years. That was until i found the Ian Knot — just the tip of the iceberg of one Australian’s terrifyingly large collection of shoelaceicana.
skyscraper
"Xanthe, I fail to see why" — *click* — "a site just about skyscrapers" — *click* — "merits inclusion on thi... oh no i’ve got twenty tabs of this open help"
slowroads
Forza Horizon is so last year. Today’s kids are driving aimlessly and peacefully through virtual forests. In electric vehicles, no less!
slowways
Collaboratively-sourced quiet walking paths between every town in Britain. I can vouch for their accuracy, so give your local routes a try, why don’t you?
soul
The goal is simple: there is exactly one alignment where, were you to place a cube within the womb of broad-bosomed Earth, all six of its corners would poke out over land. It is time to build that cube.
And, uh, unrelatedly… i think this site might be haunted? I first found it from a now-deleted Reddit comment, where someone told the story of how they found an ominous black pyramid on their tropical vacation. So i stash the link away for later, and then, when i come back — it’s gone! Wiped off the face of the internet. And so i look on the Internet Archive, and what do you know, there’s all this stuff about Goddess-worship, sacred geometry… is… i… what? What??
spirit
“A non-religious Mystical-Science New Age Order” that makes mead via alchemy. I think i may need glasses now.
steen
The personal website of conlanger Jan van Steenbergen. He’s a major contributor to the sprawling online alternate history setting Ill Bethisad, the international Slavic language Interslavic, and devised a neat system to classify conlangs in the absence of any natural language families in which they can be grouped. His website was one of the things that inspired me to make this little site in the first place!
superbad
Don’t click on me. It upsets the bees. Now you’ve done it. The bees have left.
superpixelquest
You expect me to sit here and explain “Super Pixel Quest” to you? Dang thing doesn’t even have any words except the ones telling you how to click through it. Go take a look yourself. It’s cute.
surf
22 channels about various topics... lean back and relax.
tenochtitlan
I am, admittedly, a big sop, but i teared up a little the first time i saw this 3D recreation of the ancient city of Tenochtitlan. All the things we’ve lost! And for what, rum?
99percent
The ways we’ve come up with to communicate the danger posed by radioactive waste to future generations fascinate me to no end. Land art and green cats are just some of the interesting ones!
galactanet
You were on your way home when you died. And that’s when you met me.
→ See also: Kurzgesagt’s animated version
theoi
Bountiful information on the Gods of ancient Hellas: mythoi, Their domains, epithets, and ancient worship.
timecube
No matter how weird you think the Time Cube story is, it always seems to get weirder.
tixy
A “creative coding environment” of 16 by 16 bicoloured circles.
The programme showing on the screenshot is
sin(t - sqrt((x - 7.5) ** 4 + (y - 7) ** 4)), if you’d like to try it for yourself.
unmuseum
The charmingly retro “Museum of UnNatural Mystery” explores the fringes of scientific (and a little bit of pseudoscientific) knowledge. Try not to touch the iframes and musty 3D renderings; they’re very fragile…
geoffreylandis
What would actually happen if you dove into the inky black cosmic vacuum without a spacesuit? Less than you might think, explains a Nasa scientist.
vici
You, too, can find hot roman artefacts in your area with this archæological atlas of antiquity.
vole
Various fun games and jokes. My personal favourite is Can You Draw a Perfect Circle?— best i can do is 97.7%.
en
Wikipedia can be considered living proof that humans are, fundamentally, nice. The fact that we’ve managed to keep an online encyclopædia running (ad-free, even!) for twenty years without it completely burning to the ground is really one of our greatest achievements, right up there alongside fire, electricity, and “Leave Them All Behind” by Ride.
→ See also: Any list which includes Wikipedia would be incomplete without its cousin Wiktionary, my first port of call for any lexical needs.
windows93
A fantastical operating system with widgets galore.
wmw
Always happy to link to a fellow directory connoisseur. That’s short for “well made web”, if you couldn’t tell.
wolfman
A treasure trove of art, live streams, and other such multimedia. Very noticeably inspired by the Geocities era of web design, with weird branching paths stretching throughout; it’s like exploring an actual museum.
effect
These evolving, interactive scenes were pixel-painted by Mark Ferrari — of Monkey Island note — for an obscure daily planner app back in the ’90s… and now they’re back! Also available as a wallpaper for your phone.
yip
Sixteen by sixteen pixels for you to doodle on and share about.
Stats
- Total number of sites: 110
-
Most common domains:
- .com 💰️ (46)
- .org 😇️ (26)
- .net 🕸️ (7)
- .uk
(4) -
.edu 🎓️, .garden 🌿️, .io
, .nl
, .zone ☮️ (2 each)
-
.ac
, .amsterdam
![[loc.country.nl/amsterdam]](/flags/nl/amsterdam.png)
,
.art 🎨️, .at 
, .city 🌆️,
.cool 😎️, .earth 🌍️, .ee 
,
.es 
, .fr
, .info ℹ️, .land 🏜️, .nu
, .observer 👀️, .pe
, .ru
![[loc.country.ru/90s]](/flags/ru/90s.png)
, .website
🖥️, .wtf 🤯️ (1 each)
- Oldest site: aporee.org, or at least the project behind it, has been kicking about since 1995, and should thus be coming up on its thirtieth(!!!) year online shortly.
- Newest site: vici.org was put up in October of 2023.
- Taggedest tag: Thirty-five sites are old enough to be considered Classics; less arbitrarily, twenty-four fall under the category of Place.
- Seldomest tag: Only two lonely sites sit under Videos, a consequence of the format’s hefty file size and domination by Youtube.
Welcome to the brand-spanking-new comments section!! I was always a bit skittish about letting people leave whatever links they want, but eh, it’ll probably be fine.
(P.S. — Please note that anyone using the comments just to self-promote will be given the traditional satyr punishment of having their flesh rended limb from limb.)
Changelog, 2023 March 8
Changelog, 2023 April 4
Fixed a bug where changing the page language would land you in an infinite loop every time you reloaded the page. That was, as we say, not the bedoeling…
I'd just like to thank you so much for putting these together, I browse this site every once in a while and it's brought me some of my favorite experiences on the internet.
Changelog, 2024 February 7
Changelog, 2024 February 8
i love this lol
awesome!
I've recently mourned the death of the Old Internet (with rabbit holes and hobbyist sites), so this set of links is delightful. Thank you for sharing them!
Changelog, 2024 July 9
A smaller update this time, delisting three sites and adding three others — but among those three are the new oldest and newest sites on the whole linkroll!
And @197, i wouldn’t worry too much — the death of the free web, in my view, has been greatly exaggerated. Of all the sites on this linkroll, more were made in 2020 than any other year. People are still out there having fun on t’internet!
I love this website. Bookmarked.