Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega make software, games, books, music, tools, and other things while living aboard a sailboat and thinking seriously about technological resilience. Their line—“That which cannot be repaired is already broken”—has been lodged in my head since I found it.
Mandy Brown’s ongoing library of reading, work, technology, and thought. The site feels accumulated rather than produced. Books lead to notes, notes lead elsewhere, and the whole thing remains visibly in use.
Work in its unusually broad sense: tools, machinery, maintenance, competence, labor, curiosity, and the reasons people become interested in doing difficult things well.
A long-running investigation of older technologies, forgotten solutions, energy use, resilience, and the assumption that newer necessarily means better.
The solar-powered website is part of the argument, which I appreciate. A philosophy becomes more interesting when it has to pay its own electricity bill.
Writing about interactive fiction, narrative systems, games, AI, conversation, storytelling tools, and the mechanics hiding underneath all of them.
Andrew Plotkin’s home on the web: interactive fiction, programming, books, games, tools, experiments, archives, and decades of things that seemed worth keeping. I first arrived through his games more than twenty years ago and never really left.
A beautifully curated entrance into the enormous public-domain archive: art, literature, science, diagrams, mysticism, forgotten books, peculiar historical obsessions. A longtime favorite. I rarely leave by the same door I came in.
The Whole Earth publications, gathered into one enormous searchable archive. Tools, ecology, alternative technology, self-sufficiency, architecture, counterculture, computers, farming, education, the works. A gold mine, although “mine” implies someone has already separated the useful material from the rocks.
A magazine about unexpected examples of design and ingenuity, particularly outside the places where professional design culture normally goes looking for them.
Voluntary simplicity considered as something larger than decluttering: consumption, ecology, community, time, meaning, work, and the question of what “enough” means.
The Center for Land Use Interpretation
Infrastructure, industrial sites, strange boundaries, extraction, transportation, military landscapes, overlooked structures—the ordinary physical evidence of what a society actually does, rather than what it says it does.
An independent search engine built to surface the smaller, older, stranger, more text-heavy web. Finding this felt less like discovering another search engine than finding a side entrance that had accidentally been left unlocked.
A stream of writing from independent sites around the web. Addictive.
An annual celebration of small, handmade, independent websites. This can mean an extraordinarily thoughtful political visualization. It can also mean rotating sandwiches.
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This page owes its basic idea to 47nil’s links page.