WEEKLY LINK EMPORIUM.
[note: links open in new tab]
o5/3O/2o25
'A Collection of the Weirdest and Wackiest Japanese Bands We Have Come to Know' Fecking Bahamas - lotsa stuff in here to pass the next hour exploring
David Lynch's studio auction - Not only are they auctioning several of his coffee makers -ranging from a basic keurig to imported italian expresso machines- you'll find GORGEOUS midcentury modern furniture, unfinished works, his books, sculptures, and, more to my liking, items filled random bits and bobs, like this wall of tool trays from his woodworking studio or LOT #371 Lunchbox with Trinkets
TJ Maxx and the Illusion of Choice - send this one to your moms and aunties, TJ Maxx is a whole scam. Kind of. Takes a minute to get going but by the end you'll be able to recognize when a garment at Marshalls is made from lower quality materials using a brand license rather than actual stock. Meaning half the brands you recognize at Tj Maxx and Marshalls are sending stuff that was never part of their stock, made for the sole purpose of being sold at a discount store. You'll also learn why private equity firms behind up your favorite brand is bad but immediately forget.
I cam across the above image and had to find the original commercial. Thing is, the article it came from featured dead youtube embeds. This leads to me falling down the rabbit hole of McDonald's Japan Moon Viewing Burger, which appears to be like their version of the McRib in that it is only available for a limited time each year. Obv the burger has an egg because the egg looks like a moon. Im not going to get into all the cultural aspects of the moon view or tsukimi (月見) festival, but what I can tell you is I didn't find any precedent for why the McDonalds Moonview Burger commercials started trending towards stories about resolving conflict between adult daughters and their elderly fathers. all set to the same recurring sad sounding soundtrack. Yes I made a McMoonview Playlist for all the McDonalds Moonview Burgers I was able to find. While most are short and there aren't that many what's there spans 3 decades and multiple styles.
ok that was a little crazy. i get it. its not for everyone. but you know what might be? some of these cool tools i found in the past month. I'll be adding these to the resources in the static link page (i consider this list fleeting)
- Fancy Text Generator - for all your fancy needs
- OSINT4ALL - Open Source Intelligence resource database, expansive, with partially terrifying implications when you think about it for too long.
- Yes, You Can See the Milky Way - From viewing the moon to the whole galaxy, the answer to the question "Can you see the Milky Way?" with how and where. neat.
- CSS Grid Generator - you might not know what this is really doing, but if you do, you'll recognize it as your lord & savior.
02/27/2O25
It's been awhile since we had one of these things -remember when I thought these were going to be weekly lol- so here's 3 sets of 3 random picks of the many blips staining the inside of my brain.
Articles
Artists
Videos
10/29/2o24
illustration by Rui Pu
Masala Noir - fellow graphics hoarder publishing organized collections niche enough to be of little general consequence to most and a downright necessity to a few. (See:
8-bit porn games;
Cheese labels)
(Copy) V-N - i forgot how i found this but the lore u need to know is its a weird Russian scarf shop with a fun UI and products that feel like buying a slice of the internet.
Collage by John Bingley Garland
The Blood Book - modern art history would have you believe that the Dadaists were among the first to create collages as artwork but John Bingley "Bingo" Garland's pieces from the mid-1800s prove otherwise in a time where the art books he was ripping up and reappropriating were mad expensive. Good on him. Stumbled across this gem while
mining the public domain for training data which means its up for grabs. Supercollage?
Puppy Pregnancy Syndrome - further proof for the argument that we can't tell a person's affliction by looking at them
Site of Sites - nothing like a repository of well designed websites, amiright?
WebSim - Probably the exact antinthesis to neocities, a procedurally generated website creator. Enter an AI powered web browser that will generate a site for any url you enter, whether or not it currently exists.
Cool Tools
ExcaliDraw - if you've ever tried to drum up a mindmap you'll either find yourself facing a bunch of paid apps or resorting to using powerpoint. ExcaliDraw offers a free in-browser solution
Pixel-Stitch - convert images to cross stitch patterns
Dith - simple img ditherer from the maker of Decker
unconsenting media - more "cool?" than "cool", a database for searching whether the content youre about to watch contains SA and what kind. Im thinking the Flowers in the Attic/VC Andrews adaptations represent a large chunk of the incest category. spoilers.
o8/2O/2o24
newmaterialwant.com - I don't know what this is but i love it. Like the name suggests it generates new materials for you to want, or at least want to stick around a little longer before they disappear. Digital hoarders and archivists beware, you may find yourself screenshotting in panic. Discovered while watching this video on net.art from a small channel. Click the box to begin
zero-editions.org/ - Admonished for subverting SEO in this It's Nice That write up, zero-editions creates a digital hellscape that all web1.0 enthusiasts love, and seems like it would have a prominent feature in the video i mentioned, if the video was made in the future or the website existed in the past, but it actually produces content that is very distinctly today. Once you uncross your eyes to put together what is going on, ypu'll find a lot of work cataloguing the progress of AI generation, exploring the sweetspot of what it still gets wrong, a gap that is rapidly closing. Separate domain (https://the-iconomist.net/) for their publication, includes 
pdf download of issues past.
florianerousselot.com - another website that ought to be arrested for aggravated assault of your eyeballs. I had actually wanted to link a project of Floriane's, typelab.fr, but it seems to be under password protection for the time being. maybe by the time you (if anyone) reads this it will be back up, worth giving a click if you're into pristine typography
Speaking of typography, i have a couple more typographic thrills. The first I found while searching up the logo for archive.org, when i came across the logo for Letterpress Archive and fancied it enough to investigate. There's some neat stuff on there and apparently its a real place you can visit if youre in the bay area
The second one I've had bookmarked forever, and I can't believe it never sunk in how sick this site was. fontstruct.com is a site with dual purpose. On the one side you have FREE, intuitive, in-browser font creation software, and on the other you have a massive forum of user generated, and most of the time FREE, to download fonts. You can discover new fonts via curated lists, or sort them by various parameters like newest uploads, best rated, etc. My favorite is 'Most Glyphs', which shouldn't make sense as they require arguably the most work, but maybe that just speaks to the dedication of their creators. There's a whole ass community in there too of people pitching in with feedback and rooting people on under their WIP posts. I was gonna say it's like if futurefonts.xyz was less sleek and open source, but that's kind of an oxymoron. :P
Shit, all this font talk reminds me ive been meaning to join the safonts webring. Posting here for other folks who might be so inclined. xo.
06/18/2O24
Las Zinerías
∙
TXTbooks ∙ i don't remember what originally brought me to the site, but I remember it was sold out. Nonetheless i've been having fun browsing their archive, which i wish more zine purveyor sites would include
∙
Cult Pump ∙ I remember exactly what brought me here, a book by graphic savant
Lale Westvind, who I had to search for after seeing her segment in this rad video on
Painted Comics. Alas, it,
GRIP, is coming soon.
Even then,, it is in a currency I can't comprehend and since i dont live in and hate to drive to LA ill likely never be able to buy it in person.
Plundering the Public Domain
Th other day I watched
this video [yes ive been watching more youtube than normal] about an old Web1.0 site cataloguing a woman (of contested existence)'s journey to turn herself into a double amputee for the sake of the prosthetics she would be bestowed with, and it unlocked a batch of memories in me, a dozen fucked up memory cookies of my own teenage fixations on prosthesis. I'm in the process of collecting media to give the topic its own dedicated page, but I wanted to share this illustrated book I found published in 1899:
A Treatise on Artificial Limbs
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/treatise-on-artificial-limbs/
Its hosted on the
Public Domain Review, a site curating all things odd, remarkable and
haunting that can be found in the Public Domain, including what is
arguably the world's first zine.
Chinese Maximalism
Any person of chinese descent will probably tell you they have an irrational fondness for the garish
grocery fliers from the corners of their childhood. There's something about the loud and louder colors that duke it out for attention in a way that lacks thought, taste, or any semblance of "design". Or maybe nobody else considers this shit fondly, but seeing it elevated rubs a nice part of my brain. It pops up in other places outside of grocery fliers but they're probably the most accessible, quintessential iteration of it. The closest thing I can point to for Occidentals is
conspiracy posting. Its this default font, primary color, aggressively emphasize everything until nothing stands out, type of magic.
Despite just using the word quintessential im not pretentious enough to use a phrase like "what I like to call...", but prove me wrong that "
Chinese Maximalism" isn't the perfect name for my bookmarks sub-folder.
Here's a quick list of recent finds, with the crucial caveat that no artist necessarily needs to be chinese to embody the spirit of this style:
Notable mentions from previous dumps:
- Kazuki Umezawa (1,2)
- Lu Yang (1,2)
o4/17/2O24
**鬼は外福は内** Demon is out, Happiness is in. img src: 2024 AI Landscape “MAD” Map
Last month I posted this interview in my monthly update that kind of goes over my new gig. Half of the interview is with a Mr. Sam Bowman, a lead researcher at Anthropic. After reading the interview I came across this pretty keen paper he wrote titled 8 Things to Know About LLMs, which 9,000% of y'all aren't going to be interested in but I'm still going to post it because its my hot website and i do what i want.
When not spending my time raising robot children that will one day overthrow the government, i'm wasting away many hours scouring the internets for all things yokai*. This led me to a supremely decent collection at the international folk art museum, a website with many wonderful hidden corridors, like their Andean folk art collection, and a sick DIY page. Another collection im bonkers over is this collection of Kobe dolls at the Japan Toy Museum, which i became enamored with after watching this video on IG. btw. have yall ever seen an embed code from IG? swear, go click the share button from this vid and copy-paste the one they give, it is more bloated than a body rising up from the bayou. true crime code joke i guess.
Causes i felt compared to share:
*
only partially true, because I'll find ways to let the two interests bleed in to each other, I often play creative games with the models centered on Yokai, like developing a Yokai themed tarot deck (including minor arcana and reversals), or today's game, Yokai Highschool.
o1/1O/2o24
‣ TextFX - The collab absolutely NO ONE saw coming.. LUPE FIASCO X GOOGLE. I dont know whether to say "yes, that google" or "that lupe fiasco". You might remember Lupe Fiasco from his verse on that Bun B song, because that's certainly where I remember him from, and you might know google from their conquering of the planet and numerous security alerts whenever you look at another computer that doesnt belong to you. Anyway, this thing is actually pretty cool if you dont use it for it's intended purpose, which is generating bars. Its a stylistic writing tool that has some pretty unique features and if anything is worth exploring solely for its -blank- value.
‣ Playphrase.me - As soon as you start typing in a phrase the site will autoplay scenes from movies across the decades where characters spit out the same lines. This would be great for video essays or annoying your friends, though not both since people that make video essays probably dont have friends.
‣ adelfaure.net - I dont think I can link this site enough. First featured as a source for one of the free webfonts i posted awhile back, its chock full of ASCII resources, tools, and all around fun style
‣ nestflix.fun - As its top-level domain suggests, this site is super fun. its like a page from tvtropes.org got its own dedicated resource, specifically fictional shows and movies that are featured in actual shows or movies. think Jaws 19 in Back to the Future II or the Id Buy That for A Dollar game show in Robocop.
‣ The Cease and Desist Letter Jeanette "Janet" Braun sent to CaffinatedKitti - I can not tell you how much joy The Saga of Rogue Attorney Jeanette Braun has brought me, and seeing it carry into the new year makes my cup runneth over. if you have no idea what this is in reference to this video covers this portion of the story best (tw: british accent). I was going to write something separate detailing the many youtube dramas I was invested in past year, and while that remains to be seen, i wanted to enshrine this small piece as it really stands on its own even without the context. My favorite part, besides the intro, and besides all of it, are the questions on pg 4. Who are you? Who sent you? Who are your comrades? Give me their addresses. I guess one thing which isnt evident from the document itself, is that the recepient's mother and a random theater they never worked at were also CC'd, which, and i cant stress this enough, an actual attorney thought was appropriate.
‣ 施氏食獅史 - Lion Eating Poet in the Stone Den (ENG); or, Shī Shì shí shī shǐ
‣ Church of Maizono - Finally to round out this shrine/monument to words, a shrine/monument that leaves me with.. no words.
o7/17/2O23
Tunefind - This site has saved me from so many headaches. Pop in a movie title or television episode and get a full run down of every song that plays in the background, even if it isn't listed on the official soundtrack.
FutureTools.io Every day the amount of AI tools on offer doubles in size. Cataloguing them all is Matt Wolfe, who parses out the best of the best each week in his newsletter or on his youtube channel, and has kindly categorized over 600 of them on this website, with the ability to filter by 'free'. Whether you need to deepfake the president or automate your marketing strategy, its here.
Trace ever see a sick still of an anime and wonder where it came from? Drop it into trace.moe and pretend you're not a poser (Ps. it's evangelion. it's always evangelion)
FLiM unlike the previous search engine, i dont really know exactly how this would come in handy, but its still pretty neat that it exists. basically search a random word or a specific object (like "red telephone") and the site will return examples of where it has popped up in a movie.
GifCities from the fine folks behind archive.org and the internet wayback machine, gifcities allows you to search defunct websites of yesteryear for old school gifs. think under construction animations and welcome to my homepage wordart.
Thingiverse You know Blender is free right? With Thingiverse's vast library of free model files to download as a starting point, there's no excuse for you to not stay on your ass and learn how to make wonky 3d edits or go down to the public library and print out a random doo-hickey at the tech lab (for real, check if your local library has one of these)
Rule34.xxx last but not least, it's the classic, the infamous, the never not unsettling, Rule34. As Rule 34 states, and the Sonic the Hedgehog fandom sadly proves: If it exists, there's porn of it.
o5/15/2O23
The New Inquiry has been one of my favorite online publications for many years running. The site is littered with free thought-provoking articles, including excerpts from their monthly themed issues- which you can access, along with their entire back catalogue, for only two bucks a month! The also have loads of curated link round-ups which was actually the inspiration for this here page.
Frankenstein is an Italian language IRL publication centered on comic strips I cant read, but their site is still fun to go through, dont forget to check out their Stores section a link list of different cool shops across italy that would carry this kind of thing, and ReadingRoom.it -the Italian counterpart to BOUTIQUE MAGS- which will ship titles to your home
neural.it is another Italy based online space and another bookmark ive carried across browsers and new laptops. I first saw the irl version in Taiwan- unlike Frankenstein this one is actually in English. As a digital culture magazine, its a good site to go to when bored and looking for something dead center of the high-brow/crack-pot matrix, plus it doubles as yet another rabbithole of auxiliary links
PONYBOY has a ton of stuff going on but imma be real I mostly skip the articles and use their site mostly for references when im looking for something to sketch with a strong jawbone. Self described as an "underground vintage inspired fashion & music website". Think the kids that went on coke benders in fashion school if they never went on coke benders and shot editorials instead.
o3/03/2O23
Aint nothing ooey-gooey-er than a fake in-browser OS (see Windows 93) and Dayjob.work's site is no exception. It serves as a dual purpose landing page and portfolio for a design company, but if that doesnt suit your fancy, you can just play a round of DOOM. For more surprising places you might find the game, I give you r/itrunsdoom where the beautiful people of the internet have found ways to run Doom on a lawnmower, the photokiosk at CVS, and the viewfinder screen of a Canon EOS. and a price scanner.
If all this talk of DOOM has you jonesing for some fresh-faced killing sprees in space, artist Callum Diggle has inexplicable uploaded the entirety of his selfmade graphic novel "Humanity Lost onto imgur- a story where humans are the aliens invading worlds and unleashing terror across the universe. Though, 'Humanity Lost' is probably a title more apt for this guy's project turning dead pets into drones.
If you ever wanted to know what an editorial or website was using in its titles and text FontsInUse, but if youre anything like me you never wonder such things because you have over a thousand fonts on your computer and know the name of most of them on sight. But FontsInUse serves a greater purpose by acting as a really good source of inspiration for how to pair fonts together, and in the rare instance you dont already have a font in your library, download links are at the ready.
Finally, Monoskop is a contemporary art wiki that's actually pretty cool and boujee alternative to scrolling instagram when you got time to kill. or on the low end you can try this russian version of r/funny, kaifalog.ru.
If these links bring you joy, consider buying me this T-shirt in white, size medium, thanks.
o1/13/2O23
In honor of the first vewy scawy Friday the 13th of the new year, I present to you a psychedelic classic of Japanese dysfunction, 1977's HOUSE. If you haven't heard of this movie, you might have at least seen one of its many impeccable release posters. If youre still not convinced check out the trailer and tell me its not going to be good.
I've been spending even more time than i usually do going through the annals of archive.org, however this week I've gone and added a few items to the collection,
an old interview with Charlie Isoe, that isn't very good, but one of the very few I've ever come across. There was something about his style I always liked, a little like if Francis Bacon spent his youth at Upper Playground in San Francisco instead of sex clubs in Berlin.
Only slightly related, in that they both have a certain rawness, is this poem I read years ago in a magazine and never forgot about: What it Look Like by Terrance Hayes (PDF VERSION). I recently dropped the opening lines into this AI-Generated Content Detector on huggingface, which, I have to add, is one of the best website domains I've ever heard.
Last but not least, here is a friendly reminder for any artists out there that SUBMISSIONS ARE STILL OPEN for the annual juried American Photography and American Illustration prizes, until Feb. 3rd and March 3rd respectively. I used to pick up the published winners American Illustration put out in massive hardbound editions, and didnt even realize they had a photography iteration. These contents in particular are really a good place to submit, as the judges are editors from the upper echelons of the magazine industry, and the same people who hire artists to illustrate pieces in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair etc., so if you got the chops, please do this for yourself!
11/o2/2O22
cargo.sites/in-use
Fuck it. I am here to hook you up. Last week i gave you a glimpse into one of the sites i like to scroll while looking for inspiration. Today I'll add a few more. Most of them come from those no-code site makers like cargo. Which is kind of sad when you think about it. A lot of these sites are amazing but they start to feel like thousands of dollars of student debt screaming their art into the void, razor-sharp aesthetics that at best will be dulled into a bland corporate nubs with parallax animations once they get hired. Please visit these portfolio sites. Find creators you enjoy, follow them on instagram. email them and say youre happy you found them. repost their shit. hire them if you can. make their efforts feel worth it, and applaud their time spent off of soul-templating monsters like wordpress and squarespace.
Made with ReadyMag
What a shit name for a superb collection of talent. ok i dont know why im hating on the sites im featuring right now. its not the platforms themselves, its the way the whole internet works right now that i think has me in a stink. but never mind that, theres a lot of cool artists with sites here from all around the world. I do want to put it on record that Readymag's email newsletter isnt half as good as cargo's though it's been recommended twice as much from the accounts i follow.
Printed Matter Virtual Book Fair Exhibitors List
This is actually a goldmine. One of the cool consequences of quarantine was this elite book fair finally being brought to the masses. Say what you will about the people behind printed matter (ive heard so many conflicting things that I have no right to believe or repeat), but their exhibitors tend to represent the best, the brainiest and bad assest in an industry that lives and dies on aesthetics. Very good place to waste hours and find inspiration.
1o/26/2O22
cargo.site is probably the polar opposite of neocities.org, the platform where i make the site you see before you today. It's almost another one of those run-of-the-mill no-code drag-n-drop site makers, but if the mill was chic as fuck. catering mostly to artist portfolio sites, exploring their use cases or sites in use section is a great place for those who love some good typography or just to digitally wander. AND their weekly newsletter is one of the very few I actually look forward to! if youre into that shit, definitely sign up.
It's where i came across the Craigslist:Now project (pictured below) from internet kook Matthew Bielak. glitched-out in-browser windows is an aesthetic i will never tire of. its a cyberpsychedelic good time, and he has some other fun stuff on his site so go check it out.
speaking of cool projects that spills out into the real world. Im reading a book right now called Rabbits, and it involves this massive game with clues hidden all over the world, a la (that find me game), kinda a la cicada, slightly a la ready player one, and very a la Jejune Institute. Jejune was a fantastic game that used all of san francisco as its board, and i was lucky enough to play a few rounds while living there. You would buy a specific postcard at a shop in China town, or seek out a radio transmission in a specific spot in Dolores park. it was magic and fun, and the inspiration for the AMC show Dispatches from Elsewhere.
wouldya take a look at this css??!
Thinking about Jejune, i looked up their website, which i had never bothered to do before. Jejune Institute ended a few years ago I believe, but it turns out the institute is just one project under the umbrella of an entity called Divine Nonchalance.
There is one project that I suppose could still be considered active, which i might spend some time spelunking in the coming weeks. Last thing I'll say about this is, I found their IG account, and the guy behind all of their projects flat-out roasted Meow Wolf, which i thought was fantastic, as I could see how people might unjustly draw similarities between their work and his own. I wonder what he thinks of MSCHF? What do you think of MSCHF?
I realize i have no way for people to leave comments, and i doubt i even should, as the silence would be deafening, if not defeating.
last but not leasterdly, i recently watched this docuseries my pal clark had kept recommending me on exploring all but abandoned virtual worlds. the series is free up on means.tv- the leftist worker-owned answer to streaming services like netflix. the first and last episodes are easily the best for those who don't have all the time in the world to invest, like i do.
i havent signed up for means.tv yet- there's just so much free content out there, im trying to make it through the rest of my years without a single streaming subscription. which reminds me, i was thinking of starting a search engine that scans titles on those streaming sites of ill-repute, typically hosted in countries youve never heard of or never want to visit, that involve mouse-click jiu-jitsu skills in order to get the player going: fmovies, c1ne, kisscartoons, watchcartoons and the like. which in turn reminds me i was supposed to start a project journal page for this site, to catalogue all the wee dumb DOA idears i keep collecting in my head.
Tl;DR ~~~~~~~
