Href.cool is my personal directory to the Web. It contains one hidden directory inside of it—and I’m working on two more (one on ‘antimisanthropy’ and another on ‘fake computers’.) In the meantime, I have some casual updates.

Added to Games/Dialogue:

• The Missing Quests Blog 5m
  Plumbing the depths of itch.io. Like try the write-up on Golf: Become Human—a golf/adventure game where you play a human turned golfball on a vaporwave course.

• All the Meeples of the Rainbow Blog 5m
  Lavish pics of board game pieces. Full, detailed feelings on new games. I tend to agree with her. Her being Steph Hodge.

• Stately Play Blog 5m
  This blog sprung from the Pocket Tactics blog—covers mostly mobile board games. (I’m a huge fan of Race for the Galaxy—and the mobile version came from Keldon’s homebrew AI. This blog is on the lookout for games in that vein.)

To Web/Wiki, I added an essential link—that of chameleon’s wiki. (Who today has introduced me to a sick term: birdsite.hell in reference to Twitter.)

Removed link to Susan Engel (susan-engel.com) in Real/Learning—DNS doesn’t resolve.

New category Real/Thoughts:

• Meaningness Wiki ∞
  David Chapman (who also brought us Buddhism for Vampires)—to simply call Meaningness a ‘book’ or a ‘metablog’ or a Buddhist resource is to discount that this is a formidable work that seems to both tackle the question “What is life?” and to catalog its author’s every thought. It also sets a precedent for drafting in public that I’ve begun to see on the other links in Web/Wiki.

• Visakan Veerasamy Page ∞
  This site goes real deep—you have no idea. But you might get an idea if you survey the bookmarks page (which is an impressive collection—feels similar to href.cool) or the @1000wordvomits page (dump of interesting, meandering essays) or his master list of his own Twitter threads, which is just much better than it sounds. Generous work.

• Nadia Eghbal Blog 1h
  Started with the brilliant ‘The tyranny of ideas’. Stayed for ‘Reclaiming public life’ and ‘The independent researcher’. Essays to snack on. (See also: The Modern Essay by Virginia Woolf. That’s what Nadia does.)

• Ribbonfarm Blog ∞
  Venkatesh Rao and friends write long articles, some of which form ‘blogchains’—a continuous riff on a subject. (Via Nadia E.)

The link for ‘Sleepingfish’ in Stories/Brief has changed to http://www.calamaripress.com/SF/.

The link to ‘HIGH END CUSTOMIZABLE SAUNA EXPERIENCE’ in Stories/Hypertext has changed to http://slimedaughter.com/games/twine/sauna/.

An addition to Tapes/Classic:

• Radio Soulwax Mixtape 1h
  These are pretty popular—but whatever, credit to these Belgians for keeping such an ambitious project on a sheet of matte black hypertext.

An addition to Tapes/Infinite:

• Every Noise at Once Directory 1m
  ‘…an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 3,295 genres by Spotify as of 2019-08-03. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.’

And an addition to Tapes/Vaporwave:

• Poolside FM Page 1m
  Vaporware, too, actually. (See also: foreignrap.)

Bunch of new links under Visuals/Motion:

• Uno Moralez Page 1m
  The danky monochrome GIFs of Uno—who is actually Russian. (See also: the LiveJournal, maybe the best Tumblr ever. Oh wait—there’s that too.)

• A new way of spinning up spontaneous YouTube vids: Incognitube; or, Forgotify for Spotify tracks that have never been listened to.

New link in Web/Meta to: WWWTXT—quotes from Usenet, CompuServe and such. Cool design.

Removed link to Typegram (tgr.am) in Web/Participate—DNS won’t resolve.

Just as things had a big effect on me last month, such is the discovery of Imperica—particularly its ‘web curios’ posts, which are MASSIVE link roundups like you’ve never seen before. These are exhaustive and tremendously exciting. So, having now read back through the last several months of Imperica, let’s look at the effect on href.cool…

Added to Bodies/Inanimate:

• Duracell on Instagram Blog 1m
  Some artsy design firm is doing their best with brown-and-gold batteries. (Via Imperica.) (Imperica has a finger on the pulse of Instagram—there is some cool shit happening there.)

A new category, Bodies/Primitive:

• 507 Movements Page 1m
  Illustrations of five-hundred-and-seven different mechanical pulleys, gears, cogs combos. (Via Imperica.)

In Games/Dialogue:

• Warp Door Blog 5m
  Not much commentary—just the very indiest of games. Homemade stuff everyday. (I’m REALLY getting into itch.io lately. It’s a “silo” type site but is cultivating a nice place I think.)

In Games/Imagined:

• Eigengrau’s Generator Page 5m
  Generates random encounters and random persons, complete with backstories and pedigree. Written in Twine, surprisingly.

In Real/Alphanumerics:

• from here to there Blog 1h
  See, a link like this is what makes the Alphanumerics category the best! I doubt many will visit this topic, because it’s quite modest. But Ian Paul Wright’s blog, lavish in its diagrams and munificent in its prose, is about as good as it gets when it comes to Marxist blogs—fun theories crossing math with philosophy. (Via h0p3.)

A new one for Real/Paced:

• my mechanics Directory 1m
  Methodical videos of old machinery being oiled, cleaned and repainted. (Via Imperica.)

I’ve expanded the Web/Wiki page, by adding a note on h0p3’s Wiki, listing the various wikis branching out from his family.

• h0p3 calls his work public self-modeling. In 2019, this is a growing subculture—see also: Sphygmus, Jack Baty, Phil N, casual bedlam (Catherine), Joe Jenett, humdrum.life, Andrew Canion, Frank Mcpherson and Josh Sullivan.

To Stories/Paneled, an obvious link I neglected to add:

• POKEY THE PENGUIN!! Page 1m
  One of the first comics I remeber seeing on the Web—back in the 90’s. Clearly made in MS Paint. Completing it is not a problem—there is a random generator that mashes unrelated frames together.

To Stories/Folkmeme:

• ’important videos’ Page 1m
  This is it—the playlist of the 300 most important videos on YouTube! (See also: a condensed version.)

An obvious omission from Stories/Poems:

• "Ain’t Got No, I’ve Got Life" Video 5m
  Everything Nina Simone wrote just cuts right to the human that’s under our fucking layers of shellac. (If you like this, I think you’ll also like the first song off Tank & The Bangas’ set on Tiny Desk Concerts. It’s those root lyrics like: I’ve got a mouth and You are like a loop.)

Brilliant addition to Tapes/Classic:

• The K-Mart Tapes Directory 5m
  A large collection of monthly cassettes: elevator music and hits that powered the K-Mart speakers through the 80’s and 90’s. This could be in Tapes/Vaporwave as source material. (Via Imperica.)

AND OF COURSE (to Visuals/Zines):

• Nathalie Lawhead’s Electric Zine Maker (Beta) Page 5m
  Ok, THIS is what you need to make your own zine. This frantic, zany tool will draw you into making a paper zine. If you don’t have an idea—you will. Just crack it open and play. (By perennial favorite Nathalie Lawhead—she’s a huge influence on EVERYTHING I do.)

Forgot this one in Web/Participate:

• Twine Page 5m
  Build interactive stories visually. Truly one of the best ways to teach an elementary-age child to write computer programs.

Also add a link to spoon.nagoya under the Real/Person topic. And a link to Neave.TV, alongside the unlisted YouTube video links.

My recent re-discovery of Things Magazine (probably from one of you, don’t recall now) and my own readings on crime-related topics have yielded some links that need to be permanently hung onto.

A new category, Bodies/Food:

• The Cube Rule Page 1m
  A simple explanation of cuisine geometry. (Via John Philpin.)

Added to Crimes/Simple:

• Photo Requests from Solitary Page 5m
  This goes here until I have a Favors/Simple category. Even when a request hasn’t been filled, the form is fun to read and stirs up such compassion. (Via Things.)

Added to Crimes/Impossible:

• Spring-heeled Jack Article 5m
  The impossible leaping skill of this urban legend (ripped from the penny dreadfuls of the Victorian age) had such a technological flare. Ah, the idea that an inventor-cobbler with a gas-powered dental retainer could inspire demonic fear. His attacks lasted a century! (Also at Wikipedia.)

• The Garfield Phones Beach Mystery Article 1m
  Who was sending plastic Garfield telephones up the Iroise coast for 35 years?

To Crimes/Lies:

• How Golf Explains Trump Article 1m
  

  Well, for a 72-year-old, he’d be a six. Six or seven. So he’s good. He’s a good player. He’s among our best presidents ever to play golf. But he wants the world to think he’s fantastic.

  I think the best lies are the ones we all get to be in on.

Added to Tapes/Classic:

• Broadcast Megaguide (by shadowplay) Directory 5m
  I love Broadcast. The first time I saw them/her, it was exactly like being in a vintage Star Trek episode, but with fantastic drums. I also love Stereolab—so this entire directory of offshoots and distant cousins is rich.

Added to Visuals/Film:

• "Please Help Me Find the Very Best Strange, Trippy Short Films and Videos" Directory 5m
  MeFi thread. Turns out to be a good intro to animated shorts and music vids. (Via Things.)

• IT CAME FROM… Blog 5m
  Interviews and fantasies re: sci-fi and horror films of yore. What can I say? It’s like candy floss. (Via Things.)

In Web/Meta:

• Internet Archaeology Directory 5m
  Flash, GIF, MIDI and porn collections from the early Web.

And a new one for Web/Participate:

• 1MB
  One megabyte (with only minor strings attached) to host anything you want, includes secure HTTP. If you want to go up to one gig, it’s a mere $100 for life. (See also: Neocities.)

Quite a few new links and poems added today:

• The Tragedy of GJ237b, an unusual role-playing game added to Games/Imagined.

• Bukowski’s “16-bit Intel 8088 chip” poem added to Stories/Poems. I’m not an enormous Bukowski fan, but this fits so well. I’d like to highlight it, for now. (Also, I really like the beginning of the Michael Longley poem quoted by @vasta today—although, at some point, I hope to rotate out popular poets for the more underground ones.)

• “Hope”, another poem. A section on just simple, uplifting kinds of poems.

• “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered”. A section on angry, tear-your-face-off poems.

• The House of Mysticum, a surrealist blog—I think this could become a major subgenre of blogging, if it isn’t already. Added to Supernatural/Texts.

• Smash TV—a vaporwave miniseries. Added to Tapes/Vaporwave.

• Eleven-Minute Painting. I’m not sure why I’m drawn to this—I also found a number of derivative works and listed them under Visuals/Motion.

• Reality Carnival. A long-running link log, along the lines of the links that Joe and Brad are collecting. Added to Web/Links.

I’ve also been improving the themes—trying to get them as nice as possible on all the various browsers and devices out there.

Okay, so I’ve added outgoing Webmentions to Href.cool. This means that sites will be notified if they are linked in any of my categories.

Incidentally, the directory itself has also has Webmentions. So, if you have an Indieweb blog and you want to recommend a link to the directory: make a post containing the link you want to submit and a link to the category page you think it belongs on and I will get the message. I may also choose to list submitted links at the bottom of the page. Or, yeah, you tell me if this is useful to you.

A few new links have been added:

• Carlos and Adrián’s Top Gear: Vietnam Special: I discovered this blog in one of my previous HrefHunt! and thought it was relevant to my Bodies/Adventure. The entire Bodies category needs a lot of work.

• “The Accidental Room” (2018): Also added to Bodies/Adventure. I felt I should definitely cover camping in strange areas.

• “Afternoon of the Sex Children” (2006): This essay was previously a smaller citation in the Bodies/Human area and, after revisiting it, I felt it warranted a quote.

• “I Was a Cable Guy” (2018): This recently published article is perfect for the Real/Society page. It’s astonishing and absorbing and helps flesh out an aspect of society that is not well-covered in that section: the private homes of people.

• Simon Griffee: Another one from the same HrefHunt!. Linked under Visuals/Images. I love that these links will bubble up as I continue to ponder them as time passes.

I also linked to notepin.co as a possible blogging option.