Link List

Links to cool websites I've found over the years.

Not all of these are necessarily very obscure, but they're certainly obscure enough that I think more people should know about them.

Games Image Databases Music Language Learning People Tea Wikis

Games

Big Ball Eats Little Ball - Simple little "big ball eats little ball" game, akin to a single-player agar.io.

Club Penguin Chapter Two - A fan-made recreation of Club Penguin.

CoolROM - The first site I ever used for downloading game roms all the way back in elementary school. It might not be the best site anymore, and it's not kept up to date, but I love the fact that it's still around and still has the same old internet charm.

Five Nights at Winstons - A well-made Five Nights at Freddy's fan game.

Flowers Vs. Zombies - A turn-based Plants Vs. Zombies-esque game that I found while exploring some Chinese websites. It's a fun little browser game to pass the time with. My high score is 201.

JStris - clean and free Tetris made in Javascript.

lichess - a free/libre open-source chess site that also has Stockfish engine evaluation available free while chess.com charges for it.

osu! - An arguably fun rhythm game that I've spent way too much time on. /affectionate

PhiCommunity - unique browser rhythm game.

Slow Roads - endless driving zen in your browser.

Vimm's Lair - A site dedicated to the preservation of video games/emulation.

Image Databases

The Ancient Graffiti Project - A database of ancient graffiti from Herculaneum and Pompeii.

The Condiment Packet Gallery - What it says on the packet. A gallery of pictures of over 1,000 unique condiment packets.

Music

BeepBox - A simple website for making instrumental music online.

Every Noise at Once - A website showing all music genres on Spotify represented in a cloud. It makes exploring different genres and finding new music easy and fun.

Rate Your Music - A database of all kinds of music, sorted by genre and rated by the community. Poke around for a while and you will find a cool new genre, artist, album, or song.

Language Learning

AllSet Learning's Chinese Grammar Wiki - My go-to site for Chinese grammar in an easily digestible format.

DaoDeJing.org - The Dao De Jing, the most famous Daoist text, in its original form and translated to modern Chinese. This site also includes margin notes/annotations.

Omniglot - An encyclopedia of languages natural and constructed, popular and obscure.

YellowBridge - A useful site focused on Chinese learning. It includes a dictionary, flashcards, cultural notes, current-events-related vocabulary, and more.

People

Emma Tebibyte - A cool person who helped me get started on this website.

leastfavorite - A music producer and member of webcage. Her album isomorph is one of my favorite albums of all time.

maia arson crimew - A tiny kitten (aka "that one catgirl who leaked the no-fly-list").

Tom Murphy VII. - A very talented programmer (among many other things) who I look up to a lot. Honestly you could describe my general life goal as "keep up with the amount of cool fun stuff that tom7 does" and you wouldn't be far off. I found his youtube channel years ago through his 30 Weird Chess Algorithms video, and I've been a fan ever since. He also made all of the fonts I used for my logo and website, so big thanks to him for that.

Tea

Amei Teahouse - The teahouse I went to in Taiwan that really got me as into tea as I am now. I had been interested in tea prior to this, and I knew a fair bit of information about it theory, but their Dong Ding Oolong was the first great tea that I ever had. It's also in a former mining town in Taiwan called Jiufen, and that city was rumored to be the inspiration for the movie Spirited Away. Miyazaki, the director, denies it, but the teahouse's website still has the phrase "get spirited away" on the front page, and I think that's really funny when you know that bit of background information. While it's not actually the inspiration for Spirited Away, Jiufen is one of the settings of the famous Taiwanese movie City of Sadness, which is a great movie that's also very important to the history of Taiwanese cinema.

West China Tea - The first site I ever ordered tea from. The site's owner also creates really good educational content about tea on his youtube channel.

Wikis