All sorts of sites, all ones I personally enjoy and recommend, with comments.  This page is updated regularly, most recently on November 12, 2002.

 • Humor Sites
 • Blog Sites
 • News and Information Sites
 • Movie Sites
 • Online Gaming
 • Music Sites
 • Eye Candy Sites
 • One Shot Goodies
 • Link Requests

All of these are sites that I visit myself, most of them regularly. If you know of a site you think I'd like, and that I might want to post about on this page, let me know.

Humor Sites

• Online Comics -- The link goes to my online comics review, which has links to lots of funny online comics, which is why there aren't any mentions of Sluggy or PA on this links page.

• British Conservative Catholics -- This brilliant parody site pretends to be a real website by a fanatically conservative group of British Catholics.  Just like the name says.  There is a ton of content including great fake merchandise and books.  The humor is very black and tongue in cheek, and I'm sure they get people all the time who read one page, take it seriously, and are filled with an intense burning rage.

• The Onion -- If you're not already a regular reader of it, what's wrong with you?  It's only (by far) the funniest page on the internet, guaranteed LOL articles every week.  Definitely requires a certain mindset; my grandparents for example would probably not get any of the jokes, as older people often have no appreciation of sarcasm, or the black-as-pitch irony The Onion specializes in.  My only complaint is the frequent 2 and 3 week hiatuses (hiatii?) they take, and the many months it's been since a real editorial, by T. Herman Zweibel!  Return him, you thrice-boiled chinamen!  ModernHumorist and the SatireWire are but pale shadows beside The Onion, but they can get you through in a pinch.

• Lileks.com -- In addition to a weekdaily blog, this site has a tremendous amount of excellent humor features, several of which have been turned into successful books.  The blog has not been funny since 9/11; if you want humor read his Backfence column in the local paper. The Jasper photos almost make dogs seem tolerable, though I'm afraid the same can't be said for babies, even given Lileks' heroic efforts with his Gnat.  That's more about me than her though.

• Snopes -- An urban legend site, in the simplest description.  It's so much more than that though; rather than just listing various legends and myths, Snopes evaluates them, debunks the bullshit, details the genesis of them, and has hundreds of pages with info, jokes, lists, history lessons, etc.  It can eat up hours and hours of your surfing time, with big laughs on at least every other page, along with frequent "Well I'll be damned!?" moments of enlightenment.

• The Funny Times -- My dad has subscribed to this monthly publication for years, and every issue is great.  Their online presence isn't huge, but they do have some very good stuff like this bad dates retrospective.  I highly recommend a subscription.

• Dooce.com -- Initially listed as a Blog site, but that was never quite accurate.  The updates were 3 a week at most, and they weren't ever news-oriented.  They were almost always funny though, and the other features on the site are humorous. Tragically Dooce has closed as of late April 2002, though the archives remain.

• Molly Ivins -- The best columnist writing today.  Good luck finding her damn column though, the Dallas Star Telegram seems to redo their site weekly, and breaks all the links every time. This link goes to Creators.com, hopefully it'll stay live for the immediate future.

• Brunching Shuttlecocks -- Excellent humor section, especially the Ratings, and I love Good or Bad votes.  Not updated as often as it used to be, but worth a look.

• What's Better -- Vote on two randomly-selected items, by a simple "which is better" score.  It's addictive and amusing and occasionally profound, but mostly it's funny just to see the weird and wacky crap people submit to it. Megafucks, Hello Cthulhu, Domo Kun, Bunny Love, and JFKFC, for instance.  Site discussed at more length in the daily update for May 19, 2002.

• Retro Crush -- Tons of funny and interesting stuff from the past, as well as new features, cartoons, funny photos, and more.  This site can easily swallow several hours of your day.  They've even got a daily journal going now.  Does anyone not have a blog at this point? *cough*

Blog Sites

AKA Sites with Blogs, but more specifically, sites whose main function is a Blog. (As opposed to sites like this one, that have a blog that began as a small part of the site, but has expanded to demand more time than everything else put together.) I haven't been reading Blogs for long, really just Lileks for longer than I've been doing this site.  Since I've been doing my own blog, I've been reading more of others, out of curiosity, interest in seeing how others do it, and jealously of established blogs that have 5000x my readership.

Ones I visit more often are listed towards the top, but you may want to factor that with the "steak once a week, spam every day" truism.

• Cal Pundit -- Lots of discussion of California and national politics, from an intelligent point of view. One I read daily, with at least 90% of the posts being good to excellent.

• Eschaton -- Liberal blogger who covers a ton of news and has some decent opinion to go with it.

• The Talking Dog -- The actual blog on this site is just so so, but the links page is excellent, with capsule summaries of hundreds of blogs, as well as inexplicable dog type assignments that mean absolutely nothing to me.  But then I'm not a dog person.  The site is hamped by the webmaster's Internet illiteracy, shown by his unfortunate attachment to center justification and putting spaces in the name of a webpage, but the content is solid, and if you're looking for some new blogs to read and want a quick run down before you begin reading, this is a great place to start.

• Lileks -- This links to the blog, which is updated week-daily. See a description of the site in the humor links on this page for more of an overview. The entertainment value of the blogs (or "bleats" as Lileks calls them) has dropped off since 9/11, due to an obsession with revenge and excessive patriotism, both of which are acceptable features, when balanced by some objectivity.  Which they are seldom on Lileks, of late.

• This Modern World -- Also listed in the comics section, this site has a semi-daily updated blog.  Tom, the AKA used by the artist of the strip, is quite progressive and left wing, but in an intelligent and generally objective way, which provides a nice balance to the vast majority of knee-jerk, easily-dismissed, right wing war bloggers out there.

• The Agonist -- Tons of news stories are covered on this blog, which was the best source for raw information during the Iraq Attack.  Unfortunately, it turned out that a lot of that info was being stolen verbatim from other news wire services, but hey, it was good information.  Just a bit lacking in journalistic integrity. 

• Politics, Law, and Autism -- Blog by a lawyer who writes like one, and uses the "royal we" with disturbing frequency.  That aside, his sporadic posts are always long and thoughtful, and downright scholarly at times, as he eviscerates some bullshit political stance being taken by Bush, or someone just like him.

• Max Speak -- Liberal blogger who talks politics and society pretty well.  Beware the sporadic economist posts, which last longer and make less sense than your grand dad's golf stories.

• The Poor Man -- Blogs and humorous writings of which the humor is usually a lot more entertaining, if rather hit and miss.  One of my favorites to date is this mock PBS daily listing.  I mentioned and elaborated on it in this update.

• Museum of Hoaxes -- The live journal of a great website, this sporadically-updated blog records hoaxes and delusions as they occur, with usually-interesting expert commentary.

• Ryouga's Corner -- A blog by Ryouga, a friend of mine. He's like 17, but he looks 12, and has some interesting observations.  Even though like half the links on his blogs now are things I ICQ'ed him.  The quote log is good.

• Terra Pyrrosia -- Scorch's blog has an interesting mixture of random blog comments and features, if you can tolerate the traffic-cone colored background long enough to read them.

• Asia Carrera -- A live journal run by a porn star, oddly enough.  She seldom talks about the industry on it, and more often goes on about her cats or her computer building or her amazingly-regular Hawaiian vacations.  Plus there are sporadic boobie pictures.

• Blogger.com -- Not a blog, but a blog directory site, with links to hundreds of them.  Thousands, if you count the "last updated" ones that are automated.  I've yet to have the patience/inclination to plunge into their vast, churning sea of unfiltered navel-gazing (naval?), not when I've got my own navel to root about in, but you're sure to find something worth reading if you swim about in it long enough.

• AndrewSullivan -- A talented and well-known writer with his own blog site, and reposts of his articles from famous and little-read magazines such as The Atlantic, as well as original essays.  His ideology is a dog's dinner; he's an openly gay, barebacking, HIV-positive, Catholic, arch-conservative.  I made some theoretically-amusing comments on his blog in a daily update on this site March 2, 2002.  I've since removed him from my bookmarks, since his politics have skewed so far right, and his objectivity vanished as surely as his sense of humor.  Post after post sucking Bush's dick (gay joke not intended) and apologizing for Bush's every comment and action bored me away.

News and Info Sites

• Rotten.com -- Repository of thousands of horrific photos and other perverted content, but it has it's bad side as well.  Don't look around there if you can't take it, but the News is great, almost always interesting links, and This Day in Rotten History is invariably fascinating, and hardly ever has any mutant fetus or decapitation car crash photos to be seen. I get a lot of the news items for this site from the Rotten News links.

• Fark -- Basically a very short blog, Fark displays about 30 reader-submitted links a day, pointing to all sorts of weird news items, sexy pictures, geek articles, and more. You'll invariably find at least a dozen things you want to click to read more about every day.  I read a couple of days a week there, but don't get much news since it's almost all such irrelevant and trivial stuff. You will see links to interesting websites though; they'd probably link to several features on this site, if I ever mailed them to try and get a link.  I'm afraid of their near-Slash dot effect eating up all of my monthly bandwidth in three hours though. The point being, if you like the Band Names and Hot or Not pages here, you'll probably like Fark's link sensibilities.

• Yahoo Most Popular -- I get much of the news I talk about right here.  It's nothing magical, just an automated listing of the top news wire stories and images of the last hour, or six hours, or 12 hours, depending on how you sort it.  A good way to see what people are most interested in reading about, and you catch virtually all the top news stories here, as well as quirky oddball stuff.

• ESPN.com -- The best sports site on the internet, all the info, columnists, features, etc.  Be sure you check out Rob Neyer's columns on Baseball, he's by far the most insightful sports writer I know of, and even if you don't much care for baseball (like me) it's interesting to see it analyzed so well, and to see him point out how stupid most people in charge of the game today are.  Rob's got his own eponymous website, but it's mostly dead the past 6+ months, since he gave up writing regularly about his home town favorite team, the KC Royals, due to the total incompetence of their owner, GM, and manager.

• CNN.com -- I've not been there much lately, but the best of the general purpose news sites, in my experience.  Generally they have a good space and science news section.  Yahoo.com is easy to navigate for the headlines and they often have good photo archives to slide show flip through.

• Smirking Chimp -- Progressive (liberal) news site with a variety of interesting articles, some of which I tend to agree with from time to time.  Mostly interesting to not see the typical non-questioning, believe-all-the-government-says type articles most news sites regurgitate.

• Darwin Awards -- Idiots killing themselves in amusing ways.  See also the Fortean Times, which has a weekdaily updated news ticker, with often very interesting news stories.  I get some news items for my blog discussion from there on a regular basis.

• Skeptical Sites -- A listing of various free thought resources, such as CSICOP, Skeptic Magazine, the Amazing Randi's Page, and more.  I try to be a rationalist as much as possible, and if your beliefs can't survive harsh critical analysis, then they weren't worth having in the first place.  Adding knowledge, information and the ability to analyze and think critically to your intellect is about the best possible thing you can do to improve yourself.

A great site with a huge listing of quotes by the "Founding Fathers", mostly about how much they didn't want religion in government is here. The debate seems quite settled to me, if there ever was a debate, but we still get Christians running around the fringes of government trying to erode our separation of church and state, and claiming the US was founded as a Christian Nation, when that's so obviously not the case it's sort of laughable.

• Maps of the World -- This site, part of the University of Texas, has a tremendously-useful collection of world maps.  Every continent, every country, every area, in a variety of projections.  Very useful reference tool, and fun to just look through at times, seeing how large or small various countries are, which are actually near others, etc.

• Anomalies Unlimited -- Perhaps more of a humor site than an info one, but it's a lot of both. The site does what the URL says; collects weird things and displays them to the world.  Their Odd Pictures section is probably the best, with the history of Michael Jackson's face the classic example.  The site on the whole is burdened with disastrously bad HTML, possibly on purpose.  Lots of text overlaps, as do images, making some things impossible to click on, and that's rather a pain, or a very dubious design decision, if it's not an accident, but you'll still enjoy the site's sights.  There is tons of wacky conspiracy stuff also, some of which is disturbingly-plausible, as presented.  Kurt Cobain's death and Chemtrails, for instance.  Some is laughably absurd, unless you take Men in Black as a documentary, but it's all around quite interesting.

• Museum of Hoaxes -- A nifty site with hundreds of hoaxes listed and described in detail.  Fascinating info source, as well as very funny.  Their coverage of April Fool's Hoaxes over the years (basically for all of recorded history) is great, and lots of them are brilliantly funny, especially for the outraged reactions of the gullible types who fell for them.

Movie Sites

I see very few films, since I lack anyone I want to go see a movie with, but mostly since there aren't many movies I want to see.  Even if a film looks like it might be good and gets great reviews, unless there is something of interest to me in it, I seldom go.  I don't feel like watching people talk or joke or fall in love for 2 hours, and pay $8 to do it.  That's too much like real life.  It's the same reason I don't often read non-fiction and would never play a game like The Sims.  I tend to want escapism in in my escapism, and there should be fantasy or sci fi or something other than just people talking to other people, no matter how interestingly they do it.  Catch them on cable a year later, and no loss from the big screen to the small screen.  Despite my disinterest in most films, I do semi-obsessively track which are making the most money, and like to read a variety of reviews about movies, that way I know about them, without having to actually leave the house to sit through them. 

• Roger Ebert's Movie Reviews -- I enjoy reading movie reviews far more than actually seeing the movies in most cases, and Ebert writes the best reviews I've read anywhere.  He didn't win a Pulitzer for nothing, right? He has his lapses in objectivity (any movie by a black director or with positive black characters gets at least 3 stars.  Ebert is married to a black woman.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, but his reviews have a definite personal slant in some cases.) but overall they are quite entertaining.  I have no real idea if his reviews match up with my own preferences, since I see so few movies, but I enjoy reading them.  His bi-weekly Movie Answer Man columns are good also.

• RottenTomatoes.com -- Best site at collecting a variety of movie reviews with easy one click access to read them.  Not at all sorted, and they only let you know if the review is positive or negative (and often I think mediocre reviews are different than how Tomatoes classifies them), but you get a lot of reviews linked to check out yourself.  Tomatoes also covers home video releases and many other things.  Critics.com does a better job with picking full size movie reviews, and lets you know their score before you click (which is helpful since raves and pans are the most fun to read, 2 or 3 star scores tend to be boring reviews) but they have a much smaller selection of reviews, and tend to not be updated as quickly as Tomatoes, and their scripting is crap.

• Cap Alerts -- The funniest and most disturbing movie reviews on the net.  Written by an extremely conservative Christian, they focus only on the aspects of the movie that are offensive to his very weird interpretation of the Bible (and not one that 99% of Christians in America would agree with, but of course they are all deluded fools, in the CAP Alerts guy's PoV).  In the Cap Alerts guy's world, a child who is disobedient to a parent, or basically any adult, is a wicked and spiteful child, and that sort of insolence gets points deducted.  It doesn't matter if the parent is homicidally insane or possessed by demons or a robot from Planet X, the child must obey.  If the child didn't, and by disobeying they saved the world from destruction, the movie would lose points for disobedience to adult, and for showing an adult doing something evil.  There's no winning with any fare above the level of Little House on the Prairie.

Some of the classic comments can be found in the Jurassic Pack review, (Where he recommends letting the girl be eaten by a Raptor rather than grabbing her thigh to pull her to safety.  Now given how annoying the kids were in Jurassic Park, I can't really argue with that, but it's amazing the things that no sensible person would even notice, that this guy obsesses over.) The South Park review single-handedly drove me to see the film, since he made it sound so hilarious, as well as giving it the worst score he's ever given any movie. The best of all is probably the fascinating Satan-directed conspiracy theory he hints at in the LotR:FotR review, along with the Harry Potter review.  A quote from the LotR review:

There are inevitable comparisons being drawn between Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by the secular worldview and the Christian faith. Comparisons are not being drawn between the two movies under any other "religion" I am aware of, not the Muslim or Tao or Jewish faiths or any other faith, just the Christian faith which is under more attack than any other faith. Maybe the Christian faith is under more attack [by the adversary through the unbelievers] than any other faith because it is the "right one": the one faith that poses the greatest and maybe the only real threat to the adversary."

Read that last sentence a couple of times, and digest his paranoia.  He sees the Harry Potter and FotR movies as attacks, by misguided Atheists, directed by Satan, on Christianity.  I'm not sure this is grounds for committal, but I certainly wouldn't want to be alone in a room with this guy and any sharp knives.

But that doesn't mean reading his ravings-filled movie reviews isn't entertaining!  It's a bit depressing, to think there are really such screwed up people in America.  This guy is really just the Taliban, with less power.  If he were in charge imagine the life we'd all lead?  Thank God for separation of church and state.  *he said ironically*

• BoxOfficeGuru and Box Office Mojo -- Two very nice sites, with tons of stats and figures about box office earnings of films. I've been visiting Guru for years, and they do nice recaps of film earnings and generally very accurate predictions of opening weekends.  Mojo isn't much on articles, but they have very extensive stats, daily grosses, averages, and much more. 

• Aint it Cool -- The archetypal geek sneak news site, run by the famously semi-literate Harry Knowles.  The reviews are often unreadable, especially Harry's raving-filled diary-style entries, but the passion in the site is great, and it's full of sneak news galore.  Other sites with good upcoming movie info are CountingDown.com and DarkHorizons.

• Movie Mistakes -- A site with lists of continuity errors, plot errors, and other such foul ups in movies, mostly reader-submitted.  There are also lots of inside things listed, jokes made by the crew or cameos or tricks directors do in every film.  Virtually every film you can think of it listed, especially recent ones. As of May 16, 2002, the all time leaders are:

• 145 -- The Matrix
• 135 -- Titanic
• 125 -- Spider-Man
• 109 -- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
• 95 -- Jurassic Park
• 93 -- Gladiator
• 89 -- Terminator 2: Judgment Day
• 78 -- Pearl Harbor
• 78 -- Star Wars
• 76 -- Independence Day

Online Gaming

I don't play many games.  The games I like I tend to play a lot of, too much of, but I don't dabble that widely, so I don't often check out the main gaming sites like Gamespot or Gamespy (pity so many of the others have vanished in recent years). When I like a game I look at fansites and the official site for that game, and only look at general gaming sites (ones with "game" in their names) when there's a link to them from a fansite, for some new features or preview or article or screenshots or developer interview, etc.

• Diabloii.net -- The best single game site I've ever seen, and no I'm not biased or anything.  Yes, there are many things I'd change (and improve, IMHO) about it, but I don't own it, I just work on the content, and it's pretty damn good anyway.

• Desslock's RPG News -- Desslock is a writer on Gamespot, one of their better reviewers, and his own RPG site has excellent news in essay form.  Unfortunately it's updated about once every six weeks months, either due to technical difficulties or just bad karma.

• Seven Seas -- My favorite game for several months in mid-late 2002, this online pirate game has a very simple "smear the queer" concept, but plays with a lot of strategy, and enough randomness due to the motion of the evil red boss ships that it doesn't get predictable or boring.  The biggest problem is the buggy code; it will crash when you have the sea serpent (Difficult 2 past lvl 15, Difficulty 3 all the time), sooner or later, which means that you can only count on a full game on normal, and any time you have a really good game going on diff 2 or 3 you are almost sure to lock up.  I discussed Seven Seas in the update on August 11, 2002, and several times after that when the mood moved me, but I play a game or two almost every day.

• Hexxagon -- A cheap hexagon-board version of Attaxx, but I love the basic game concept so much that it's still playable, despite the poor AI and slow game speed.  The hexagon board layout is vastly inferior to the classic checkerboard style of Attaxx.

• Colony -- A version of Attaxx that's a lot of fun.  I enjoyed the demo enough to buy the full game, so you might want to check it out if you like the game style.  The multi-player maps are all crap, with not one just open square board for the pure skill match up, much less a custom map where you could specify the obstacles, board size, and starting positions, but most of the 60 single player maps are a lot of fun.  I've never beaten level 50, but it's one of the cheesy all diagonal ones I generally skip anyway.

• Bejeweled -- A fun game to play.  I was briefly addicted, but once I realized it was virtually impossible to score higher than 10,000, or get the multiplier higher than 5x, or play longer than about 11 minutes (in all these cases the game accelerates to a pace that only multiple chain breaks virtually every move will keep you alive) the thrill faded away, and I only play it every now and then.  There are well over 400,000 people with average scores in the 20k and up range, which is literally impossible as far as I can see, and as far as anyone I know who plays it can see.  My main interest is in how someone gets that high of a score consistently, and I wonder if they are all cheating on uploading their scores, or if they have found some sort of bug, or if it actually is possible to get more than 12k other than happening to hit some enormous chain reaction at about the 10,000 death mark and then dying instantly to the impossibly fast count down that comes afterwards.  I've gotten 12,500 once, that way, and over 10,500 about 5x ever in probably 200 games.

• Wickywoo -- A very fun little action game programmed in Java.  It's reminiscent of Lode Runner, but instead of enemies chasing you there are little moving, levitating mines moving all around in fixed patterns, and you must leap onto and break little green slimes, which give you points for popping them.  This game had me addicted for a week or so, until I finally passed level 20.  And was upset to see that there were only 20 levels, and once past it you started over again on level 1, which had no changes at all to it.  Clearing all 20 levels takes about 20 minutes if you go fast, and running them on as few men as possible is a nice diversion now and then. 

• Mummy Maze -- A diversion, a sort of action puzzle slide game on the MSN Zone, but one that can be fun for a few minutes here and there. It's not hard once you figure how the pursuing mummy(ies) move, and how the mazes are set up, though usually one maze per tomb is quite a stumper.

• LumtheMad.net/SlowNewsDay.net -- Pointless now, as both are closed forever.  In the day, Lum's was the best gaming site I've known, with info on every MMORPG around, and good articles with personality and bite.  Lum's closed and was semi-reborn as SND.net, which lasted about 2 months before it closed due to various controversies, and promised a return several times, but never made one.  The RIP notice was posted just recently, I saw it on Feb 1, 2002.  *sheds a tear*  There aren't any other MMORPG news sites that even come close to replacing it's overall coverage.  An interesting post-mortem article about the death of LtM/SND can be seen here. It's way too heavy on IRC/ICQ logs and "I know/you don't" secrecy about certain key events, but if you've been wondering what happened for months, like me, it's worth a look.  If you never read LtM in the first place, you won't give a damn.

Music Sites

• XLNC1.org -- I listen to this all classical, commercial-free station often 12+ hours a day when I'm working, and it's available streaming over the internet, I think.  God knows what the sound quality is, since it's on FM here in San Diego, I just use the radio.  I love classical for background noise, but only get excited by the occasional crazed violin solo.

• Kerrang -- This UK (I didn't know either) Metal magazine has an unremarkable site, but for this one resource, a relatively comprehensive and well-written run down of several dozen of the best known hard rock bands.  Includes an overview of the band, as well as quick reviews and ratings of every album they've released.  I wouldn't recommend buying anything there though, the prices are horrendous.

• Seems Like Salvation -- News on Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and other like bands, and as those are generally my favorite bands/music, I check it out from time to time.  I've looked maybe every other month for the past two years or so, but it seems to be going as strong as it was pre-Fragile, when I was last checking daily.

• 91X and Rock 105.3 -- These are the two local rock stations in San Diego.  91X has more alternative/college, and 105.3 has more nü metal and classic rock.  Neither of them are any good, they are both Clear Channel stations, which means they are relentlessly play-listed and inoffensive, and are mere insignificant cogs in their enormous parent company.  They also have at least 75% overlap in their puny play lists, and suck, for a variety of reasons, most of which I detail here.

Eye Candy Sites

Sites with pretty pictures or artistic stuffs.  May include the human nude.  (If you know what I mean.)

• Babe Zone -- Much as you'd expect from the name, this is a site with thousands of sexy pictures of top female models and celebrities.  It has the most extensive image gallery I've seen on any site, and no annoying pop ups or membership-protected pages.  I have absolutely no idea how they afford the bandwidth, but I suspect it can't last forever. 

• Bromart.com -- Great illustrations, fantasy book cover types, with enough weird, dark elements to satisfy even my deviant tastes.  Giger.com for much the same reason.  He's the guy that invented the Aliens look, as well as Species and numerous other cool things.  Look through a book of his in Barnes and Noble sometime, it beats the limited selection and crappy navigation on his expensive poster sales-intensive site. Happy Pencil.com is another of the weird artist sites, and by far the most interesting site, though it's a bit of a pain to navigate the overly-artsy, all-Flash set up.  Great stuff though, he did some art for recent Tool albums, but that's far from the best stuff on his site.

• Vincent van Gogh Sites -- There are a bunch in my bookmarks, as I look, but it's been a long time since I checked any, so don't remember which have the best/biggest images.  I love his art, as you can probably tell by this site, with an image per page. I have dozens of his shots on my HD, and when I'm in the mood I'll open some up in Photoshop and view at 200% or so, scrolling around to check out the actual brush strokes, etc.  But if you don't have shots on your HD to view, check out these sites, or just do a google.com search on the man.

• Asia Carrera's Site -- Yes, a site by a porn star, but it's worth looking at for the updates.  There is a pic of the week and a pay section, but it's mostly interesting to her her talk about being in pornos from the inside perspective.  And she does it herself, all the HTML and everything, and has for years.  Apparently most of the other porn stars have ripped off her style and have lame personal sites, where they do first person updates and pretend to have a thought in their heads.  Asia's was the original and best, as far as I know, and she's remarkably free of vanity, judging by her many pics with no make up or sexy clothing, and her pre-implant and big/ugly hair teen age shots.  It's basically a weekly (or so) blog by a relatively famous and gorgeous (when motivated) porn star.

• The Keeper's -- A nude hot chick a day and a generally amusing joke is more than enough to offset the stupid "Corvettes rule!" news updates.

• Voyeurweb -- I'm sure at least 1/3 of the shots on this site are illegal, being as they're peeping-tom style, which is why I've never actually looked at them myself, and certainly wouldn't admit it publicly if I had.

• CelebrityBabes.com -- New nude celeb shots every day, with pretty substantial (if never updated) archives.  Naked-Celebs.com is similar, but less-consistent on their updates, and more annoying with their constant efforts to trick you into signing up for their pay section.  Both frequently push the envelope on the definition of "celebrity", with DVD vid caps of unknown foreign or 80's movie actresses, but you take the good with the bad.

• Dirty Anime -- Daily mixture of anime sex/nude shots, vastly varying quality, and more ads than a minor league outfield fence.  H-Manga Archives must be illegal, since it has scans of (apparently) thousands of adult comics.  I've looked at very very few of them, and the quality varies wildly, but if you are looking for this sort of thing, this is the place to look.

• The Hun -- If you wanted actual pr0n, for some reason, you could check out The Hun.  Hundreds of free samples a day, of wildly varying quality and server speed.  That's what I heard, anyway. 

One Shot Goodies

These are single pages or features that are a lot of fun, on sites where the rest isn't necessarily my cup of tea. (There, that was diplomatic, eh?)

• Viking Kittens -- Yes, viking kittens.  They've got axes and helmets to prove it.  Set to the tune of Immigrant Song by Led Zepplin.  You sort of have to see it to believe it.  Yes, it's 98% concept, 2% execution, but it's funny the first time.

• Celebs Sans Makeup -- A decent site, but this page is just brilliant.  It's called Celebs Without Makeup, and just as the title would indicate, it's photos of famous people with and without their faces on.  Mostly females, and some of them are downright frightening.  Pamela Anderson, Farrah Faucett, Catherine Zeta Jones, and more.  Shows what an amazing job make up artists do, if nothing else.

• Anthrax Investigation -- Much as the site title and domain name would indicate, this site is devoted to investigating the anthrax letters sent to various media organizations, shortly after the 9/11 events in 2001.  There is an unbelievable level of research and detail present, and one can only hope that the FBI has done so much investigation of the issue.

• Niagara Falls Daredevils --  A comprehensive listing of the names, dates, actions, and survival (or not) of virtually everyone who has ever attempted to tight rope walk or barrel jump or swim the rapids around Niagara Falls.  Fascinating and very long page.

• Online Forum Warriors -- A great listing of various personality types you'll encounter in online forums.  Hugely-extensive, well-written, illustrated, and often hilarious, it's very hard to not read half the long list at a go whenever you click to the site.  Real people seldom correspond to any of their definitions as neatly as they'd like, but that hardly lessens the entertainment value of the site.

• RPG Cliches --  The rules of RPGs, an amusing list.  Mostly derived from various video games, rather than computer games, but I got the picture despite having played none of them.

• Gargoyles Leather -- I got some cool t-shirts at this place when I was in Naw'lyns a few years ago at a friend's wedding, and they had tons more great stuff I would have gotten if I could afford it.  I came to realize afterwards that it was chock full of weird gay fetish stuff, and run by weird gay fetish guys, but that sort of went over my head at the time.  I don't hold that against them though, gays have much better and more interesting taste in fashion than straight guys, after all, though the very friendly and helpful service I received while there now seems to have been possibly fueled by ulterior motives.

• Harvey the Mouse Must Die -- A gloriously funny page, detailing an ongoing struggle with filthy rodent invaders.  Warning, it's got pictures of cute furry dead rodents.  Anyone who has sympathy for mice has seen too many cartoons, and not been in enough pet stores.  I used to get mice to feed to my Ball Python when he was smaller, and they are awful little shits.  Biters, they smell horrible, very vinegar-y pee, and they are anti-social, often fighting.

True story: I had 4 of them in an aquarium at one point, years ago.  One was hyper, kept leaping around and making noise, very annoying.  One day I came back and only three were left, all curled up in the papers, sleeping, same as always.  Fearing an escape, I couldn't see any way possible, cage was secured as always, so I poked around in the papers in it, thinking maybe one was dead.  Couldn't find anything, just a few mouse pellets, but there were odd wet things here and there.  With dawning horror, I realized they were mouse chunks.  Just bits and pieces, bone, flesh, fur, some blood.  I'm grimacing typing this, and I was totally freaked out at the time, much like a character in a real life, but very low budget, horror film.

Note that these mice had plenty to eat and drink, and there was not a mark on any of the others, so there wasn't any protracted fight, it was a total mugging.  I couldn't question them about it, but it seemed clear that at least two, and probably all three of them had set upon the hyper one and not only killed him, but ripped him to pieces, and probably eaten some of the choicer bits.  As I recall, I fed all of them to the snake later that day, well ahead of schedule, just out of revulsion.

Link Requests

These are pages run by people who actually mailed me at some point and asked for a link.  If they turn out to be sites I really enjoy and visit more than once, I add them to the other sections on this page, with maybe a short mention of how they came to my attention.

This has never happened yet.

What we're left with are sites that are good or bad or indifferent, or at least ones that didn't grab me passionately.  You might like them, you might want to see sites that are run by people who would actually come here to ask for a link, you might be bored if you've actually scrolled down the entire Links page and read this paragraph.

• Ebench -- Link requested June 15, 2002.  The first site to ever request a link, so it forever has sentimental value.  The site is a blog, a fact that the URL should have tipped you off to.  I don't quite know what to make of it though.  There are a lot of pictures included, mostly of various relatives and vacations, and short stream of consciousness bits of text here and there.  Also the site layout seems to be fueled by the "more colors is better" school of design, so you've been warned.  There's no content other than the journal entries, and there is a links page that must be seen to be believed.  I just saw it and I'm not sure I believe it, actually.

• Probeersel -- The second link request, this one was actually sent to the Online Comics Review page.  Not by accident, if you look at the site you'll see that it's an online comic, appropriately enough. The current cartoon going is about two roommates and their evil adopted cat, named Satan, appropriately enough.  At this time I don't really have enough of an opinion on the cartoon (it's an accurate portrayal of feline mannerisms, and is drawn well enough, but I can't say that it struck me as funny) to include it on the comics review page, but you can click it from here if you are curious. 

• OutDoorsHost.com -- This site mailed me asking for a plug, not for business.  Their mail doesn't look like spam, but it's addressed to them, with all other recipients (like me) BCC'ed, which is a sure sign of spam.  So I guess it is, but it's an odd form of it, which is why I listed it here, rather than just deleting it.  As bonus points, take a look at the site, and their logo, with the three studly guys grinning.  That, along with the "out" in their URL sets my rudimentary Gaydar to tingling, but it might be a false alarm.  I don't see anything on their site about gay stuff, anyway, and there's some guy with a woman in the graphics on most every page, for no particular reason.  Perhaps she's a beard though, so they can specialize in gay clients, while not being so overt as to scare off any homophobes who might stumble in?  In any event, their hosting is more expensive and offers less bandwidth than mine now, so I'm not interesting in switching. ("Switching" web hosts, I mean.  Not switching something else...)

• Fishy Comics -- The author mailed the online comics review page to request a link, or a review or something.  His mail was short and not entirely to the point. 

www.ausfish.com/fishy
Regards,
Richard Jones.

That's it. The comic is pretty-quickly sized up; puns and one-liners and other such jokes with colorful cartoon crabs and fish and such.  I don't think there's really enough of it to fit on the online comics review page, but here's the link if you want to check it out for yourself.

• Tragic Falls -- An online comic updated every week day.  It's not a comic as in "funny", but is sort of a morbid fairy tale with supernatural elements, presented in four-panel strips.  Of course every comic has weird magical stuff now, but this one is really based on it.  The art and layout is pretty bad, unfortunately, and reminds me why I don't do a comic. (Since I can't draw.)  The art is servicable, just not very attractive.  The thing that annoys me most about the site is that everything is inexplicably done with multi-piece images (including all the text captions) and the page and folder names aren't named properly (lower case, no spaces, no punctuation) so you get URLs that look like:

http://www.tragicfalls.com/June%20comic%
20arc/June%202002/June%203,%202002.htm

In the address bar, and that upsets my web-designer asthetic.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.