Fun Friday Resources, fossils edition 1

The other day I went looking for a website that I vaguely remembered as being helpful for whatever thing I was trying to do, and I realized that I had decades of bookmarks stored and sorted in my bookmarks bar, more than a few of which were absolutely dead despite our defiant cry that the Internet Is Forever!

It did occur to me that I should clean these bookmarks up, much as I have reorganized my cocktail salts/sugars/infusions or the bitters in the bar. So for the foreseeable future our Fun Friday Resources will be the Fossil Edition, whatever the internet in its wisdom has seen fit to allow to survive. [Fossils didn’t survive, did they? Never mind, ONWARD!]

Since all these bookmarks are “organized” in topical folders, let’s explore them like that, shall we?

First up, READING. These are essentially the websites I used to check for news and opinions, before Twitter or even Facebook even existed. I expect to find a lot of deadwood.

MetaFilter and MetaFilter Projects, of course, are still going strong, and they’re both gigantic rabbit holes. From Metafilter, I found How Old Hollywood Made Cocktails Look Cool, which was fun given my own interests in cocktails and because David Niven is sipping what appears to be a martini from a cocktail glass that I own.

From Projects, be advised that VTV is addictive, which is bad since it’s the world’s worst novelty songs, with annotations a la the old MTV. There is no pause button. Don’t forget to scroll down.

Slacktivist is the nom de blog of Fred Clark, who came to my attention when he started dissecting — nay, eviscerating — the god-awful (!) Left Behind novels. He’s still writing, and he’s still a great read.

Archie Out of Context was a Tumblr with a really simple gimmick: Extract a single frame from an Archie comic that, when taken out of context, allowed the viewer to construct a very different context from their own filthy minds. It seems to have last been active in 2023, and there’s a recent incursion about some Flintstones revamp, but keep scrolling down till you hit the appalling stuff.

The Oatmeal! Still going strong, thank goodness, and if you don’t already know his work, what even are you doing with your life even?

The Internet Archive is thankfully still with us. (I’m in there here and here.)

RIP: NotCot.com, had lovely artsy things; Random Wodehouse Quotes, which served up deliciousness from The Master, P. G. Wodehouse…

This may be a multi-year project…