links to other websites

low resolution hand, with pointer finger extended upward. in the hand is a painting of a small sailboat on a tranquil sea

I occasionally find myself visiting websites. I appreciate a website that doesn't waste my time, provides the info I need and doesn't hide behind layers of scripting and other nonsense. My interests are fairly diverse, and as such, so are the links below - all the more chance that some of them may be of interest to you.

Please feel free to link to this site from wherever you are - here's a 88×31 button, if you're into that sort of thing.

a small line drawing showing a self portrait of the author smoking his pipe; beside him is the text BACCYFLAP.COM

There are two sections and the first begins right under this text; click here to go to the deep links.

surface links

sandspiel

A digital sand game like in the olden times, with some nice mechanics. Build, destroy, regrow, relax.
added 2026-03-07

Roomcarnage

A riveting blow-by-blow description of a long-running game of Dwarf Fortress, from the cold and desolate beginnings to the hardship of daily life and many brushes with the void.
added 2025-08-31

Asian Food Dictionary

Ever follow a recipe with some Asian ingredients and you run into an ingredient you've never heard of? The Asian Food Dictionary has you covered!
added 2025-08-25

Sheere Ng

Sheere Ng is a Singaporean food writer and researcher with an interest in the intersections of food, immigration, and identity. Sporadically updated but many thoughtful, well-written articles.
added 2025-07-11

New Session

A queer zine published over telnet. Just execute telnet issue3.anewsession.com and enjoy the art - or access the zine through their own online telnet client.
added 2025-06-25

Unicode For

Look up any unicode character by keyword or by paging through the tables. It can be a real hassle to find what you're looking for - too many websites requiring JavaScript to let you see things, using cute little scripts to let you copy things... this one's straightforward, fast and helpful.
added 2025-06-14

The Creole Melting Pot

I was looking for a recipe for cassava cake and came across this website run by Jean-Paul and Marie-Celice - it's a treasure trove of knowledge about life in the Seychelles that gets frequent updates.
added 2025-06-08

dwitter

Dwitter was named after Twitter, where users are able to post, so long as their posts does not exceed 140 characters. Dwitter is similar, except that it's 140 characters of JavaScript and it has to do something... and dwitter's community makes beautiful things.
added 2025-06-08

The Salmon of Capistrano

Majestic are they as they flock, I mean school, toward their mysterious destination. Make sure to have autoplay audio on.
added 2025-05-30

Deleted City

An interactive map that leads you to the disappeared world of Geocities - the deleted cities of yesteryear. Click the sites and links to be taken to archived versions of the sites.
added 2025-05-28

Past Web Yellow Pages

Richard Lewei Huang's massive digitisation project. Tens of thousands of entries containing links to late nineties websites, neatly catalogued and searchable.
added 2025-05-28

Silk

Weave digital silk - just draw on the page, anything you like, and watch ethereal shapes appear.
added 2025-05-19

Singapore Film Locations

Mr Toh Hun Ping maintains this archive of historic Singapore film locations, including an interactive map. The site has some domain issues; if a link leads to sgfilmlocations.com/foo, just change it to sgfilmlocations.wordpress.com/foo.
added 2025-05-19

Radical Anthropology

A group started by anthropology students in London in 1984 in response to an anthropology course being shut down. All events are freely accessible online or in real life, and they are always thought-provoking - and radical, in the good way.
added 2025-05-19

Boekwinkeltjes.nl

Dutch site for booksellers - the best way to get cheap secondhand books if you're in the Netherlands.
added 2025-05-18

Internet Phone Book

The Internet Phone Book is a project by Kristoffer Tjalve and Elliott Cost - a phone book for the Internet, as the name implies. It contains over 700 "personal & poetic" sites, along with essays and illustrations. If you don't want to buy the book, you can go to the homepage and dial a site - 405, for instance.
added 2025-05-14

Below the Surface

During the building of a tramline right across the old town of Amsterdam archaeologists unearthed troves of interesting things from Amsterdam's long history, from a few years ago all the way to over a hundred thousand years ago. The project site displays these objects -all of them- in an admirably straightforward, easy-to-browse way.

Cooked Wiki

When I look for a new recipe, I trawl the Web for what sounds like it'd be good and then go through a process of selection from suitable recipes to land at exactly what I'm looking for - and the corporate recipe websites are terrible for this. They're all selling something, they all have those infamously interminable nonsense stories attached to them, they are borderline unusable. So Cooked boils any recipe from anywhere down into a usable, copyable, printable recipe card!

Let's Speak English

Mary Cagle's delightful autobiographical webcomic chronicling her time as an elementary school English teacher in Kurihara, Japan. It's packed with wit and charm and I come back to it every now and again - I even own the book.

Distance Calculator

This website allows you to type in two locations on Earth and it'll tell you the distance between them, in a straight line - an actual straight line, so taking in account the shape of the planet. This one took a bit of doing to find, as other methods all just draw a line on a map and as such give faulty results. Kudos to the maker of this site.

SubSource

For all your subtitle needs - subtitles for any production you're likely to run into, in any language you're likely to speak.

rotatingsandwiches.com

Your destination for perfectly looped videos of rotating sandwiches, representing someone's quest to meticulously light, rotate and document a broad and inclusive selection of topped bread. Bandwidth warning: all rotating sandwiches are right on the landing page, and as of last measurement they add up to a whopping 460 MB.

MuseumNext

MuseumNext is an organisation that organises conferences for museum workers and does a lot of thinking about the role of museums past, present and future. Their website has lots of interesting and remarkably well-considered articles about things like decolonisation, accessibility, education and an array of other topics.

endtimes.dev

Never a dull update on this website about websites, specifically about doing things simply without unnecessary scripting and tips for minimising code. Also some links to some of the author's various projects, including a repository of simple, no-nonsense tools for webmasters.

Cheapskate's Guide

A website about acquiring the necessary things to get computing online at a low cost, no frills, along with articles about the way we use the Internet and the way it uses us; I tend to stay away from articles about free speech and politics, they're a bit too right-wing and terminally online at times.

The History of the Web

Jay Hoffmann's ongoing history website, setting out the history of the Internet from the eighties to today. He adds an article to the giant timeline every week and so once a week, the picture becomes a little bit more complete.

Molly White

Molly white is a software engineer who has chronicled the baffling rise and long, pathetic fall of cryptocurrency. She writes regular updates for her web3 is going just great project and sends out regular newsletters; the latter can be read on her website. It's a good way to stay up to date on the cryptosphere from an unapologetically critical perspective.

TorrentFreak

Filesharing news, with a focus on anti-piracy legislation. A good source of information for anyone with an interest in filesharing - how are sites surviving, which are going under, what should pirates be looking out for, that sort of thing.

WHIL WHEATON dot NET

Wil Wheaton has had his blog since 2001, and it's one of those ones where you finally decide to check it out on a whim and you just... stay. Wil is a great writer, veering into the nerdy and nostalgic, into things that can be a bit twee for some - into lots of things, because he's been writing there for decades.

Ray's Miscellany

Ray is a Brit who moved to America and his site goes back to 1999. It's chock full of stuff - miscellany, as advertised. Unusual postcards, essays about technology, history - there's something for everyone.

Savetz Publishing

A website of websites - Savetz creates useful little websites. Letter templates, calculators, printable puzzles - all have their own little websites that offer their products free and easy. What more could you want?

Tape Tardis

An invaluable resource for compact cassette tape reviews (old and new, used and unused), for comparisons of different brands and ages of cassettes, and ideas and instructions for projects involving compact cassette tapes.

Penseel van Wind

This Dutch blog is maintained by Ivo Smits, professor of Arts and Cultures at Leiden University, the Netherlands. It features his own translations of Japanese poetry. It updates regularly and the author always has thoughtful and interesting things to say about the poetry, the translation process and whatever else may come to mind.

3 Cup blog

Your one-stop page for (mostly vintage) cocktail recipes. Good cocktail recipes are hard to come by but the proprietor of this site has amassed a collection of rare, interesting and well-considered recipes. Try the penicillin.

Clay Pipes

A website to identify old clay smoking pipe fragments of the kind found in the ground all over the Netherlands. The author is an authority when it comes to these pipes and provides guides to dating them based on bowl size and stem thickness, as well as a comprehensive identifcation key based on makers' marks. This website is in Dutch but as you'll mostly be going through images and dates, it's fairly universal.

Pluralistic

Cory Doctorow's longform updates on the intersection of technology, politics, the economy and culture. Through his background of expertise and activism, the author often manages to sum up or explain some current-day phenomenon in ways few others can. The term enshittification alone deserves some sort of award.

Pharyngula

Another one of those early critical thinkers that were formative to me - development biologist PZ Myers has never stopped writing thoughtful, critical blog posts. His unrelenting criticisms of irrationality and his patience and compassion toward his fellow human beings have always been an inspiration to me. Biology, secularism, humanism, humour: Pharyngula has it all.

Bad Astronomy

Phil Plait has preserved his old Bad Astronomy site for posterity - this is a page that I spent a lot of time browsing back in the day. By analysing and discussing false claims, movie mistakes and other Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait participated in a new framework for scepticism and critical thought that helped lead to a whole era of online discourse - some of it good, some of it bad. I'm glad to say that Phil himself has always been one of the good ones and his site is still a delight to read.

The Pain

When will it end? Well, this webcomic by Tim Kreider stopped updating in 2009, though it remains a thoughtful, darkly funny but very earnest chronicle of the life and times of the author, in his inimitable artistic style. Sadly, Tim took the site down in August 2024, so the above link leads to the last available Internet Archive version.

Nielsen Norman Group

The Nielsen Norman Group is a research organisation that focuses on online user experience (UX) and Web design. A calm voice of reason and sensibility in a worldwide ocean of terrible, inaccessible, cluttered Web design, baccyflap.com would have looked very different without me absorbing a decade's worth of articles from the NNg.

WeelWeb

A long time ago, a Latin professor at my high school started this personal website to amuse himself and his students, and to provide some useful links and tools to study Latin. It's still up and gets the occasional update - it's all in Dutch but if you speak that language it's fun to take a little bit of time to have a look around, every now and again.

Homepagina t.amerongen

A Dutch web directory that has stood the test of time and is still going. This site is full of links to a wide variety of pages and includes a substantial section devoted to lending a digital hand to high school students that, looking at the guestbook, is still being used today.

deep links

The Anti-Dystopians’ Guide to Generative AI

Wim Vanderbauwhede's comprehensive slide presentation about generative AI. Pulls no punches and you can download it and just go through it at your place of work! Your colleagues will love it, guaranteed.
added 2026-04-07

Go Ahead and Use AI

A funny article by a writer encouraging his fellow authors to use AI, though not for the reasons you would think.
added 2026-04-02

The slow death of the power user

A rather good if pessimistic article about the disappearance of power users - of expertise, interest and capability in the realm of technology.
added 2026-03-05

Neocities article in Plaster magazine

An article in Plaster magazine about Neocities, with a short quote by your humble servant. The article is a nice short intro to some aspects of the independent Web, as seen from the perspective of the arts.
added 2026-03-01

Cassette Roulette

Bandcamp put this page together in 2017. It shows you a random cassette that's for sale and you can just keep clicking until you see something interesting and then click through to give it a listen - I've found a couple of wonderful artists through this page. Bandcamp didn't update the listings for years but as of 2025, it's being maintained again!
added 2025-06-15

Sounds of Network

Scan a QR code and make music on your phone, that is then played on your computer screen. Get some friends together and make some music, however far away you all are!
added 2025-06-01

E/N: what is it?

A big, long page about the concept of E/N sites, where E/N stands for Everything/Nothing. The concept comes from the nineties and refers to a site that can mean everything to its author but nothing to any given passerby - something a bit like baccyflap.com, though I do hope you're having a good time here. An interesting read either way.

Neocities - random sites

Neocities is the not-for-profit reincarnation of Geocities, which hosted thousands of personal websites until it was destroyed by capitalists during the bursting of the dotcom bubble. Neocities hosts thousands of websites of all different shapes and sizes and while I'm not so sure about the social-network structure they've built where you can follow sites and comment on stuff, it's great to just choose a site from their big list and have a look around.

The Website Obesity Crisis

This is a sort-of transcript of a talk that web developer Maciej Cegłowski gave in 2015 about the size, in bytes, of Web pages. He shows how websites require users to download megabyts of nonsense to read a snippet of text, comparing website sizes to the sizes of Russian works of literature to make the point that the Web has grown steadily fatter - it's a very funny read that I come back to every now and again.

Lesquereux' Coal Flora

A digitised copy of Leo Lesquereux' Description of the Coal Flora of Pennsylvania and of the Carboniferous Formation throughout the United States, published 1879. An important book to anyone researching Carboniferous floras anywhere in the world and inimitably digitised by George - including links for references and figures, as well as other features that are impossible to include on paper. A useful reference and a powerful example of how reference works such as this one can be digitised. Infinitely better and more usable than a plain PDF.

2001: A Space Odyssey analysis

A fascinating and thorough analysis of The World's Greatest Film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. This analysis takes plenty of detours and some theories are more far-fetched than others, but all in all it's is as good an introduction to thinking about movies as it is a detailed set of theories and hypotheses about Kubrick's masterpiece.

Atari 2600 Portable build

Ben Heck's Atari 2600 portable build. Posted in the year 2001, fully photographed and explained. It's an interesting read, particularly when keeping in mind the revolution of retro computing and gaming that would break out in the years that followed. I think that the gaming world would have looked rather different if Ben had never written about his VCSp.

Scale of the Universe

Scroll through the Cosmos, from Planck length to the size of the entire observable Universe! I may be a simpleton with a tiny brain, but I can play with that slider for ages and it can put things in perspective in some funny way.