Stuff to do Online

How to have fun without engaging in what I feel are the more harmful aspects of the modern internet; from least to most obscure. Note this is largely colored by my philosophy of ‘intentional’ internet use and interaction. Personally, I find using the internet this way took some getting used to - 'resistance training', even. There was such a strong urge to scroll endlessly! Oh, and this is designed to link my non-neocities friends to, so some of it may be painfully obvious to any given websurfer.

Oh, and everything's better with a good adblocker! But it shouldn't be necessary.

Communities

tumblr - everyone knows about tumblr, but it got a mostly unfair rap in its heyday (I’ll leave out why…). All you need to do are follow tags relevant to your interests, and it’s a great place to participate in and celebrate hobbies, creations, and fandoms! Not to mention your waifus and husbandos.

Gaia Online - Weeby forums that have been around since the early 2000s. Famous for the adorable avatars you can make. Post in the forums, play the games, draw people’s avatars, make avatars of your OCs in the avatar builder. This place is great!

Steam - obviously primarily a resource for games, but if you’re really loving something (or want to branch out, there’s non game focused ones too), check out the community tab! I’ve seen some of the most beautiful fan art that google never found on there.

Zelda Universe Forums - Great and old forums for the entire franchise, along with normal social topics to post about. My favorite subforum is the Theorizing one.

Neocities - spiritual successor to Geocities; it takes some work to make your own but it’s so worth it. And if you don’t feel like it, there’s endless sites to surf. Many are gorgeous, and while lots are personal pages it’s fun to get a deeper look at people’s niche interests. There’s a similar service called Neko Web that I’m not as familiar with, but looks fun too.

ChatChat - Instead of starting whole new group chats to exclude someone, why don’t you invite the friends you wanna talk to into ChatChat? Not only can you talk smack (but you probably won’t even want to when you see how cute this place is), you get to be a cat and explore a cute little sandbox playground.

fsh zone - very cute chat client.

MelonLand Forums - If you like Neocities, there’s a whole little movement that it’s a part of called the Web Revival. There’s various ways to engage, but this is the most classic and the most fun. Melon also has wonderful sites of their own. This also serves as a great directory for your own site building.

Agora Macintosh - People are pretty unfiltered here, but you’ll find a wealth of interesting articles, obscure knowledge and files, nostalgic images, great recommendations of all kinds, and relatable personal anecdotes – all wrapped up in a sweet (and customizable) aesthetic! I use the Tokyo Night Shift for a neon/synth/vaporwave look.

MLP Arena - a site for collectors of largely classic MLP; I don’t even have any but I love seeing women of all ages wax nostalgic about the 80s-2010s.

Browsing

TvTropes – if you find Wikipedia browsing fun, you’ll probably like this. Same concept, but for fictional devices. It has a community too but I've never engaged with it. Start by searching you favorite game, show, movie, or even anime and see if you can find themes throughout.

The Old Net - A retro search engine for retro websites. Try seraching fandoms, characters, or site building resources.

Wiby - A search engine for older style pages. I like to hit the random button.

Cyberpunk-Life - awesome resource and beautiful too.

Vintage Littlest Pet Shop Collector - I was and am obsessed with the original lies; they were so much cuter. I wish they'd re-release them so badly; I love looking at these archives and finding the ones I had and wanted.

WikiParfum - great reference for perfumes and finding fragrances you like by their notes (and yes, there's also Fragrantica but the owner of that website is weirdly conservative in a way that bleeds through into the unrelated topic of the site - sadly, it's still very useful, but only check it out at your own discretion). I use WikiParfum's pictures for most of my Fragrance articles under Interests because of how consistant they are.

Ham Ham Paradise - Gorgeous. Stunning. Simply the best.

The Mushroom Kingdom - a very cool, old school style Mario fan site that's still updated.

Future Blues - similarly old school, very stylish Cowboy Bebop site.

Toy Archive - a cool catalogue of 80s toys.

Google Answers - archive of the now-defunct Google Answers.

Media

Free Movie Streaming - Watch movies you always meant to! I know we all have a ton of cinema blind spots, and there’s legit free services like Tubi, Pluto, Freevee, Roku, Crackle, Redbox, Fandango, Hoopla, and more that can cover a lot of them – especially if they’re a little older. Make a list of things you missed out on and search each title, and see what free service streams them.

Newgrounds - This may belong in games, but Newgrounds also offers animated shorts and some more fandom-centered games.

Itch - a treasure trove of free games and books, and others that are paid but support indie creators of all kinds.

Paper CD Case - make a printable slip cover for a CD case; great for restoring lost parts of collections or decorating CDs you burned yourself.

Gnoosic - a music recommendation system.

(SEIZURE WARNING SRSLY) 0x40 - anime girls synced to music; absolutely mesmerizing for a weeb. Reminds me of old Microsoft equalizers. I've even seen Yume Nikki fanart in the mix, so it's not all standard moeblob.

Musgle - google for music .

Plaza - vaporwave music on tap.

KHinsider - great resource fo video game music.

Nipponsei - similarly great resource for anime music; requires a torrenting client.

Alice Madness Returns Artbook

Illustrated Guide of Lovecraftian Monsters

Games

Kongregate - with the death of flash, a lot of people forgot about these game sites. However! Most of them now use a built in browser emulator called Ruffle, and you can play the games like normal. There’s other options, but Kongregate is the one I know the best.

Pony Town - adorable MMO game, can be played on a SFW server which I recommend.

Pokemon Quiz - this is so fun and thorough!

VG Person - some of my absolute favorite games, old and new, and pretty much all free (though some have purchasable remasters)

My Abandon Ware - incredible resource of games that have been abandoned by their creators like poor little orphans.

Vampire! The Dark Alleyway - old as hell clicky multiplayer 'game' about being a vampire

Leopets - clone of classic neopets, more nostalgic than you might be expecting.

Doll Divine - source of online dress up games!

A Dark Room - text based adventure game.

Type Racer - 1v1 someone in...typing?

Drowning in Problems - not sure tbh.

Learning

W3Schools - another potential resource for your Neocities (or other boring html/css project, I guess) journey.

FSI Languages - huge collection of language resources.

Tools & Resources

Portable Freeware - So many cool and useful little programs, all for free! Best of all, they can be moved from device to device without reinstalling.

Hirens Boot CD - awesome curated list of windows tools, including some great data recovery software - my favorites are Recuva and PhotoREC.

Pixie - awesome little tool that lets you color pick from your screen and get the HEX code. Also available as a portable program. If you don't want a download even a portable little gadget like this one, you can use Image Color Picker online.

Remove BG - I use this all the time, a free background image remover. It works great.

Nirsoft - More random but useful things!

Pine Tools - More, more!

I Love PDF - free PDF tools with no real catch, I use this for work all the time.

Does the Dog Die? - very useful trigger advisory data base with more than just the title, for movies and shows and even more. It's helped me enjoy so many things worry-free.

Tiiny - host a tiny website

EmojiDb - impressive database for the silly topic. Includes emojis, sets of which (including kaomojis), and text symbols.

Make Word Art - graphic creator in the style of Word Art. For an easier, more pre-built alternative, try Cool Text.

GigaGlitter - very fun little tool for making glitter word art.

Glitterfy - I'm bad at using PicMix, so this is a good, albeit lighter, alternative.

BlogGif - a website that has a lot of these tools and more, though the specialized sites might be a better choice for the individual functions it helps to mix up styles sometimes.

MessLetters - great multitool resource for fonts, font effects (like Zalgo), and emojis.

EZgif - I'm actually pretty bad at using this, but it's great; I made the chatchat cat (chat) on the home page with this.

Graphics Cafe - cool blog hosting various graphiics, including neat PNGs.

Animated Glitter Graphics & More - great resource for the titular graphics, stamps, and others.

Waifu2x - double the size of a piece of artwork! Supposedly works for photos too, but I wouldn't know.

Entertainment/Stupid

Windows93 - a fun emulated faux-desktop full of strange games and easter eggs.

Camerons World - similar to above but a little more free-form.

Juggalos on OKCupid - an amusing archive of...well, Juggalos on OKCupid. Read enough and you'll see so many pillars of a Juggalo (or Juggalette!) dating profile that you could convincingly write your own. ;)

Mini Tokyo - this won't load...can't remember why i saved it, but keeping it here in case it comes back. Sounds promising.

No Clip - explore video game worlds in-browser.

Objection - turn any conversation into a Phoenix Wright sequence.

World Dream Bank - A dictionary of dream symbolism.

Garfield Minus Garfield - famous classic.

Desktop Ponies - Adorably animated MLP:FiM desktop buddies. There's more options than you'll ever need but look up the wiki for even more, including resources to make your own.

I Should Be Working - ancient cornball website.

Bewildering

Vampire Website - might be showing my strange colors here, but this was very nostalgic. "Real vampires" were having a very weird moment on the internet when I as a kid. For an extra shot of nostalgic, I tried to look at this at work and got a notification that it was a blocked website due to occult content. Just like at school!

I Love JarJar Binks - unhinged fan site for the notoriously unlikable Star Wars character.

Peter Pan - Someone is loving their LARP life!

??? - also not loading by the time I got around to posting it. Huh.

Matrix - seems some people took that movie a little too seriously!

The Seinfeld Hate Site - this is so funny.

*The do not buy from counter farms website is gone - Rebecca got him!*

Spooky

Screen Effects/Flashing Terminal 00 - this is so beautiful. It reminds me of Signalis.

Screen Effects/Flashing Fauux - beautiful. Writing/art exercise? Lain fan shrine? Who cares? I could get lost in it.

System Space - Similar to above but not as visually intense.

The Dionaea House - mesmerizing horror story from the 2000s, goes even deeper if you follow the bread crumbs. An absolute classic.

MORBID What's the Harm - a website sort of like old school snopes that details disasters - mostly deaths - caused by uninformed decision making sorted by subject.

MORBID X Family - a wiki dedicated to finding information about the infamous children of god cult.

Art

Photopea - basically photoshop online, I'm still figuring out all the features but it's great.

Canva - I have to retract my recommendation a little bit because of Canva's decision to implement AI, but it still has some uses that I haven't found an alt for.

Height Comparison - perfect for envisioning characters' heights in comparison to one another for writing and drawing.

Color Blend - a hex based color blender.

Name That Color - it tells you the name of a hex code, very fun; may also help with writing if you want to add some pizzaz to your descriptions.

Color Name Hue - similar to above but with colorblindness in mind.

Nippon Colors - select from a catalogue of beautiful colors and learn their Japanese names.

Figurosity - Generates poses for drawing.

More

Cryptidize's Link List - Amazing resource that I have no problem recommendinf!

G's Based Sites - A huge resource of sites, some of which might be overlapped here. However, some resources are dead, VERY NSFW or otherwise...questionable, haha. Still, I can't deny how useful it is.

Make Your Own List Like This! - no, that's not a pedantic "let's see you do better!". We all have blind spots and weird niche knowledge and I'm sure at least once while reading this list you thought of something I could have included. Please, make guides like these and help more people escape the chains of the new web.