Links

Here are some things on the Internet that I like. Naturally, all of the ususal "I don't control this content", "I don't necessarily endorse these views", "any of these motherfuckers could go milkshake duck without my knowledge", "you might see a penis or something" disclaimers apply.

Audio

I'm always listening to something while working or reading, so I've amassed a strange number of ambient noise links.

Ambient-mixer.com — A pretty deep custom soundscape maker. There is a lot going on here, with loads of possibilities for, say, background noise while you're reading or working, or even creating scene-specific audio for TTRPG sessions.
Bandcamp — Spotify is a blight. Check out Bandcamp instead.
Freesound — A vast and ever-growing library of free audio samples. Extremely useful for all sorts of projects.
Horror Theatre — Just an endless audio stream of horror, suspense, and mystery radio shows from the early/mid-20th century!
Loskop Radio — A strange experiment in algorithmically generated audio. This site takes sound effects from Freesound and assembles them into an endless, strangely coherent soundscape. Feels kinda like going on a mysterious, dreamlike journey.
myNoise — A really cool ambient noise generator with loads of sounds, features, and options. There's also a mobile app version which I use all the time.
A Soft Murmur — A pretty simple ambient noise generator. Fewer options than myNoise, but might be a better choice if you just wanna hear some rain sounds and not fuck around with a lot of options.
Song Fight! — One of the coolest projects on the Internet, for real. Every week or so, they announce a song title, and then people make songs to fit that title. The site shares the resulting tracks, and the audience votes on the winner. This has been going on since the year goddamned 2000, and all of the thousands of songs are still up there for you to hear. It rules.
Tabletop Audio — A huge collection of pre-composed soundscapes and soundtracks specifically created for tabletop RPG background noise.
WebSDR — So this is a weird, cool thing: a web-based software frontend that gives you access to loads of radio antennas all around the world. You can tune into all kinds of broadcasts from German air traffic control to English-language Chinese propaganda shows to American ham operators just checking in and reporting their local weather. It's . . . not always easy to really catch clean audio. Or it ain't easy for me, anyway, since I don't know what I'm doing. But the ghostly, distorted sounds and voices can be interesting, and the whole process of trying to find something cool and clear away the static is kinda fun.
WhoSampled — An amazing database that lets you search a song, find the source of any audio samples it uses, or where it has been sampled! Also tells you about cover versions! And naturally it's all got links so that you can listen to this stuff, too!

Comics

Comics are so rad! Maybe go read some webcomics.

3rd Voice by Evan Dahm

Aphelion by Gloria Reynolds

Blikada by C. Spike Trotman

The City Between by Kel McDonald

Delvers by Skullboy

Dolmistaska by AngusBurgers

Dust n' Dread by Kieu

Kill Six Billion Demons by Abbadon

Lackadaisy by Tracy J. Butler

Love Me Nice by Amanda Lafrenais

The Non-Adventures of Wonderella by Justin Pierce

Owl People by Letty

Rook in Sketchy Magic by Michael J Patrick

Runaway to the Stars by Jay Eaton

Sever & Pierce by Natasha Tara Petrovic and Ben Fleuter

Softies by smeallie

Ten Earth Shattering Blows by Tommaso Devitofrancesco

worm-in-a-rock god by Pseudonym Jones

RPG blogs

I'm just going to make a big list without trying to describe everybody, because I don't need somebody coming for me because I described them as "OSR" instead of "New School Revolution" or "DIY elfgames" or whatever.

RPG resources

There are so many great creators and tools and archives and stuff out there for TTRPGs!

AnyDice — An invaluable tool for anybody doing TTRPG development (as long as that TTRPG involves dice). AnyDice calculates the probabilities the result from different diceroll operations, letting you see—for example—what rolling with advantage really does to your chances, or how different the curves from 2d10, 3d6, and 3d20-drop-the-highest-and-lowest actually look.
Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator — A map generator that not only visualizes and names whole worlds' worth of realms, but even connects with Watabou's city and village generators to map individual settlements!
donjon — A pretty huge collection of handy little random generators for stuff like planets, names, dungeons, adventures . . . just loads of stuff. It's also got a bunch of system reference material for several different versions of D&D.
Dungeon Scrawl — A very nice little dungeon-drawing tool. You can even import maps from the donjon and Watabou dungeon generators and customize them!
Dyson Logos Cartography — Dyson Logos is an absolute treasure of the TTRPG scene. He constantly creates extremely high-quality dungeon maps and just gives them away to the public. He's made . . . I think over a thousand of the things? And he makes a bunch of other cool stuff, too.
Game-icons.net — A huge collection of free, well-designed icons, available for use in game projects through a Creative Commons license. Useful for all kinds of stuff!
Hextml — A web-based hex map maker! Also does square grids, actually. Crazy flexible, with absolutely loads of features.
Kate Monk's Onomastikon — A huge, well-organized collection of names from cultures around the world and throughout history, sometimes including meanings. It's been around for decades, and it's still an unrivaled resource for games and fiction.
Nexi Random Word Generator — A simple, brilliant web tool that takes a text sample and generates a list of new words based on the letters and patterns used in the sample. Absolutely fantastic for generating character names and such.
RPGnet Forums — Good old RPGnet. I haven't posted there in a while (as of this writing), but I remember it having a cool community. Forums are rad, and we should probably all use 'em more.
Watabou's Procgen Arcana — A set of totally free, amazingly polished visual generators for cities, villages, dungeons, countries, and other stuff that's extremely useful in a fantasy RPG.

Web stuff

This is admittedly kind of a vague category.

CSS Zen Garden — A gallery of CSS styles, demonstrating the kind of huge and beautiful changes you can make to a web page through cascading style sheets. I think it's mostly kinda 2010s-style, either predating or avoiding a lot of the more recent CSS gimmicks.
DuckDuckGo — I know, we're all switching to DuckDuckGo these days, or at least meaning to. But for real, have you tried out the DDG image search feature and compared it to Google's? It's just objectively better. Like, it ain't even close. If you needed any more reason to change your default browser, that oughta do it.
Feedly — My current RSS/Atom feed aggregator of choice. It ain't perfect, but it seems like my best option at the moment, and I do recommend it.
Fuck It, Let's Make a Website! — A cool little guide and resource directory for escaping the platform trap and making your own damn website. I recommend it!
Golden Age of Web Design — A big gallery of cool website screenshots from the years 2000–2006. Truly an era where web design was allowed to be an art form in its own right, rather than existing only to present content.
The Quick ‘n’ Dirty Guide to Making a Website — The excellent Nero Villagallos O'Reilly shares some thoughts on why you should make a website, some real basic instructions on how absolutely anybody can do that, and a bunch of direct and sensible advice about your options in doing so.

Miscellaneous

Some of these things are perhaps more miscellaneous than others.

Aesthetics Wiki — Okay, so Fandom.com is a pretty miserable experience without at least some adblockers, or preferably with a specialist plugin. However, this little wiki is pretty cool. It attempts to catalog styles, aesthetics, and fashion trends from art movements to industrial design schools to niche internet terms that are basically just how a few people describe their Tumblr vibes.
Android Arts — A huge gallery of art and design work by Arne Niklas Jansson. Lots of really compelling redesigns of videogame settings and old console hardware. Amazing stuff.
The Cutting Room Floor — A wiki that collects and analyzes content cut from videogames! From concept art that never went anywhere to unused models and sprites datamined from released games.
Monster Brains — Aeron Alfrey's incredible blog of high-res monster and monster-adjacent images from a huge variety of different sources. My own website wouldn't be half so interesting to look at without Aeron's work.
Online Barcode Generator — I don't know if anybody else out there needs this, but man, if you do, this thing is perfect.
Rhett Hammersmith's animated GIFs — A great collection of animated GIFs, most of which are clips from old horror and sci-fi movies and TV shows, plus a bit of original animation as well. I got a whole bunch of my sidebar stickers from there.
Zombo.com — It still exists!