Vi Hart

YouTube, second channel, vimeo, website (no longer online)

"Mathemusician and Virtual Reality Philosopher."

Science is love and wonder for the world and trying to understand it better. Poetry is trying to put that love and wonder in words. This stays my favorite channel ever. It's wonderful, and I love it.

Nicky Case

"Hi, I'm Nicky! I make shtuff for curious & playful folks."

Website, Blog, Youtube

I'm a curious and playful fellow and I looove her shtuff! :D

AI Safety for Fleshy Humans, Explorable Explanations, Adventures with Anxiety, "How do I learn...", :Nutshell

Saint Andrewism

YouTube, Patreon, carrd

A channel about people, communities, better ways to live. Anarchism, imagining utopias via ideas like "solarpunk" and then finding real ways to harness the desire for something better in tangible action.

He takes a measured, realist, yet positive and constructive approach to how we can imagine and act for a better, different future.

I have so, so much more still to learn - and even more to put in practice - but Andrewism has been my first stepping stone in this process, and I'm not even over it yet. Thank you so much, Andrew!

Atomic Shrimp

YouTube, website

He creates a wide variety of videos - cooking, foraging, trying weird or novel food, tinkering with electronics, woodworking, making clay, cooking challenges on a budget, scambaiting - and many other such things.
Being a fellow curious human who wants to do a bit of everything, this channel is a treasure of inspiration and serotonin. I guess it's lovely to see there's people like you out there, and who actually managed to start dabbling in a bit of everything, following their own curiosity.

Before switching over to youtube, he recorded his miscellaneous projects over a website. There's a quote on that website that I think distilled well the essence of his channel, and that stuck with me over the years:

"This website is really just about the things I do in my spare time. My interests include wild food, experimental cooking, assorted crafts, multimedia work and the deliberate, but benign and mild-mannered pursuit of the absurd.

Founded a short time after my 40th birthday, the site has been described by some as documentary of my mid-life crisis. Maybe that's not entirely untrue - looking back, it does mark a bit of a turning point, when I stopped just formulating lists of things I might find interesting to do, and started doing them.

My lists of future projects don't ever seem to get any shorter and most of the items on them are quite trivial, but it means I seldom experience boredom."

catadromously

Tumblr, Carrd

My favorite tumblr blog and one of my favorite artists. Her blog is a wonderfully crafted collection of inspiring posts and images, diligently tagged by what I can only describe as "deep vibe". A trip down the right tags usually leaves me in tears, deeply inspired, filled with a newfound zest for life and love for humans or, most commonly, all of the above.
Also, her art is amazing. Here's a sample if you wish (with links to the original post.)

Featured Artwork

Click on the first page of each comic to be redirected to the tumblr page!

headspace-hotel

Tumblr + Wikipedia Poems

Though I adore to no end her blogging about plants, creatures, and being curious and appreciating the natural world surrounding you - what really keeps coming back to this blog over and over is her Wikipedia Poems - a form of found poetry, created by stringing together pieces of wikipedia articles rather than, say, words from a magazine.

I am pretty sure I discovered at least 3 new emotions just by reading her poetry - and a couple more by reading other people's own wikipedia poems, that she reblogs under the tag "wikipedia poetry". I love this art medium so much.

Favorite wikipoetry:

• "Disaster Taxon" by headspace-hotel
• "the ginko stays" by oopsey
• "Dragon" by headspace-hotel
• "about love" by eughty
• untitled by isolatedphenomenon

Nicky Case

"Hi, I'm Nicky! I make shtuff for curious & playful folks."

Website, Blog, Youtube

I'm a curious and playful fellow and I looove her shtuff! :D

AI Safety for Fleshy Humans, Explorable Explanations, Adventures with Anxiety, "How do I learn...", :Nutshell

"A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language."

A lovely webcomic with some especially creative entries. This one strip is especially dear to me! Check out other awesome entries below. Also, thank you amagicmuffin for sending the two coolest ones my way! <3

"A playable post on the shape of society"

Created by Nicky Case and Vi Hart, two of my favourite creators! It's an "explorable explanation" that tries to explain how bias can lead to segregation, and offers a possible solution - all in an easy to understand and cute way. It's also public domain! What an all around lovely piece of art and education tool.

An OS that runs in your browser! Well, okay, it's just a website that mimicks an OS. But it's damn entertaining and extraordinarily well made.

It's filled to the brim with easter eggs, hidden jokes, weird content and even a few actual emulators and genuine software. An amazing time waster and a good website to explore in a boring afternoon!

"The digital home of press freedom."

From the website: "In many countries, websites, social media and blogs are controlled by oppressive leaders. Young people, in particular, are forced to grow up in systems where their opinion is heavily manipulated by governmental disinformation campaigns."

"But even where almost all media is blocked or controlled, the world's most successful computer game is still accessible. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) uses this loophole to bypass internet censorship to bring back the truth - within Minecraft."

From Wikipedia: "The Uncensored Library is a Minecraft server and map released by Reporters Without Borders and created by BlockWorks, DDB Berlin, and MediaMonks as an attempt to circumvent censorship in countries without freedom of the press. The library contains banned reporting from Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Belarus, Brazil, and Eritrea. An entire wing is given to each country, each containing several banned articles. The library was released on March 12, 2020, the World Day Against Cyber Censorship. The two ways to access the library are to download a map from the official website, or to connect to their Minecraft server."

Enter at least three games you like, and get recommended more videogames!

A massive collection of high quality Pokemon TGC Cards images. I've always loved the artwork on the cards, so this is a stunning project to see!

A blast to the past: relive the experience of opening a pack of one of the older series of cards and sifting through them to see what you get. There are actual probabilities at play, as well.

If you're on desktop, there's also a booster pack simulator for the Pokemon TGC on the Game Boy Color!

Alternative to Neocities! Recently found it and cannot say much about it - but it's good to have alternatives, and great to see more interest in this neat hobby!

From the website: "Discover a world of immersive and customizable soundscapes that can enhance focus, relaxation, and sleep. Choose from noise generators, nature sounds and ambient music to create your perfect audio environment. Explore our vast library of interactive sound generators and find your audio haven!"

The amazing project of a French sound designer. He carries this project out for passion and, apparently, because he's a madman. I owe this website a lot: it helped me mask unwanted noises before I had decent earbuds, helped me focus since late highschool, even managed to soothe a panic attack and induce a short lucid dream. If I bought some decent headphones and earbuds, and started to pay attention to how noise and music makes me feel, I owe it all to him.

Most of the generators are available for free - but even just one tiny donation unlocks everything else for life. I'm proud to be a patron of such an amazing project!

It's an image manipulation program almost on par with Photoshop - but for free, in your browser! It's pretty amazing what it can do.

It also has one of the best available tools to automatically remove a background from a photo that I've found so far - I find it to be on par with Photoshop's native one.

"Compress JPG and PNG images at light speed with Browser based Image compressor. Private, Works Offline, No Limits, Low carbon footprint."

A truly amazing image compression tool. It's completely browser based - images are never sent to any servers, which means it's super fast, private, completely free (creator isn't looking to profit from it), and works offline too.
Compressing images is super useful if you want your pages to load faster! (as you can see, I don't use it very often. :^) )

Online image cropping tool that, among other things, tries to calculate the "best" crop for the image you upload. Very handy!

Free storage for files up to 200MB. For personal/noncommercial use only. Free, simple, no fuss, requires no registration, but might be blocked in some regions.

Same base service - but offers, instead, temporary storage for files up to 1GB, but only for a maximum of 3 days!

I personally find the anime girls quite disturbing, but I guess it's a small price to pay for a good service.

From the website: "goblin.tools is a collection of small, simple, single-task tools, mostly designed to help neurodivergent people with tasks they find overwhelming or difficult."

"Most tools will use AI technologies in the back-end to achieve their goals. Currently this includes OpenAI's models. As the tools and backend improve, the intent is to move to an open source alternative."

Did you therapist tell you that you need to break down your tasks into smaller tasks, too? No? Well okay. Give this one a go if you're overwhelmed anyways. It often helps.

"This is meant to be an interactive flow chart for people who struggle with self care, executive dysfunction, and/or who have trouble reading internal signals. It's designed to take as much of the weight off of you as possible, so each decision is very easy and doesn't require much judgment."

"Set aside some time--maybe an hour total- to allow yourself to work through each step. Don't rush or skip ahead--just follow the directions. Self care is important, and you deserve to devote some time to it."

Great for the times when everything sucks and you feel like shit and you don't know why.
I have it pinned to my bookmarks toolbar, so it's easy to access for when the executive dysfunction hits really hard.

"Cheap, no-nonsense email"

My email provider! I love it. My brainworms decide that I get a lot of serotonin for having an insane number of different email addresses, so I can have clean and neat inboxes used each for a specific purpose.

I own a couple of domain names, so the easiest way for me to do that would be to create multiple email addresses using my own domains. However, this ends up being crazy expensive on most email providers! Which is unfair, especially considering that I actually use few resources (I'm sending back and forth large file, or storing them for a long time).

For 10$/yr or less, you get basically unlimited users, and a fair amount of email space if you're just sending and receiving mail. I love this service so much.

The email clients I use are Thunderbird on Desktop and K-9 Mail on Android. Purelymail works flawlessly with both - however, as an heads up, K-9 has a common bug that causes sent emails to not be saved in the "Sent" folder, unless you specifically set it up to do so.

"No ads, fast and personalised results. The search engine you deserve."

At 10$/month for unlimited searches, it's definitely not an affordable service for everyone. However, if you're looking for a good alternative to Google and have some extra cash you can spend on it, or if navigating the internet is an important part of your day, do give it a try - it does have a trial period. (Hint: you could save that money by pirating streaming services instead?)

A decent search engine is really important for me - it helps me satiate my endless curiosity, troubleshoot esoteric yet extraordinarily trivial issues, and find actual pertinent information to whatever I'm searching for. I run a lot of searches and do it daily - and although I had tried switching to other, more private search engines in the past, I had always failed to adapt. They all felt worse than google to me in terms of how quickly I could find what I was looking for - and google itself was getting more and more exasperating.

It's really hard to go back to google once you try an actually good search engine, IMO. I love being able to search directly on the smallweb, in forums, or in academic research websites; I love the way they integrate generative AI in a manner that's actually useful (you can have it summarize the results of your search, or summarize each single page you find on your search); I love being able to blacklist certain sites altogether.

Kagi still falls victim to SEO optimization to a degree, so I still have to avoid the endless pits of "top 10 products to X!" while searching for some keywords, but it still manages to be a superior experience in the long run.

"Joplin is an open source note-taking app. Capture your thoughts and securely access them from any device."

Not Another PDF Scanner
NAPS2 is free and open source scanning software for Windows, Mac and Linux.

A very neat free & open source software for scanning. But the neat thing is - you can also import images or PDFs in there on your own. It then lets you crop, adjust your images, and save your result as PDF or as images. Very handy!

"Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone."

Who needs Photoshop these days? Go get Krita! It's now also available in Beta for Android.

"Bitwarden is a freemium open-source password management service that stores sensitive information, such as website credentials, in an encrypted vault."

All my passwords. Everywhere. On every device I own. They auto fill if you use the browser extension or mobile app. It asks if I want to save new login credentials. It has folders I can sort everything in.

All of this for free! For everyone! The "Premium" costs 10$/yr and gives some small perks I think - but it's really just the way it supports being free for everyone else. I personally am a supporter, because it's a service that's worth it and that I'm happy stays free.

"A Beautiful, Modern GUI for YT-DLP"

yt-dlp is a powerful command line utility that lets you download video or audio from any Youtube upload (as well as more than 1700 other websites!), in the quality and format you prefer.