Small Web Finds

[Maypews]

This is where you can post interesting small websites that come across while surfing teh internetz. I'll include some link directories below for those looking to get a launchpad on searching.

My Link Directory
Amassment's Fanshrine Directory
Peelopaalu
LinkLane Web Directory
List-Me.com
Youtuube's Websites Page
Koshka's Dock

[Maypews]

A little tool that allows you to make a userbar containing the current weather conditions of your city.
https://www.reids4fun.com/weatherubar

It's really cool, still updated and working! Great for forum signatures.

[Maypews]

This is one which I'll probably unfortunately never be able to add to my site's link directory because it was very poorly preserved.

I can't even remember how I found this site, I think it was through gifcities and then going down a link clicking rabbithole until I ended up here. Anyway, this site is called Tagmonkey and it was a forum dedicated to graphic design. For those who aren't privy, the act of designing graphics such as forum signatures was called tagging back in the day. The term itself of course has a real life connotation, being used to refer to painting graffiti art.

LIke I said, almost nothing of this site was preserved but what was is so cool. Just a testament to 2000s web design. As someone who considers Jet Set Radio Future one of their favourite games ever, the fact that they incorporated that into the site's theme is just chef's kiss. Unfortunately it's basically unnavigable, so I had to access archive.org's sitemap in order to find the handful of pages that work.

[Maypews]

I was going to post one of the 40-something links I've had sitting around and have yet to add to my link directory; this is a link pertaining to the original postings of John Titor that are still available for reading on the website he posted them on. The site is still up but much to my horror they switched from Xenoforo to Discourse. That software is so disgusting oh my god. I'm not a huge fan of Xenforo but I don't hate it, it's like decent. But DISCOURSE??? Ugghhh. Whatever, I'll post it anyway.

Time Travel Institute, John Titor Thread

As someone who was mostly unfamiliar with the myth it's really interesting seeing how much S;G pulled from it. A few other nice links I found.

Dragon Ball GT Network - Old school Dragon Ball fansite that seems to have been recently remade in 2023 and even has a little roleplaying MMO game on it. Really cool.

Blogadr - Large directory of personal blogs.

1337.net - A little joke site dedicated to leetspeak. Fun read.

Thought Experiments Lain - Lain fansite with some pretty detailed analysis on it.

[Maypews]

Oh yeah, this is an obligatory one. Minitokyo.net is by far the best place to find authentic 2000s anime wallpapers but it also has really high quality scans on it too. I used this site a lot when finding stuff to add to the random banners for this forum in fact. Sadly it's kind of on it's last legs and sometimes things won't load, if that happens just wait and it should fix itself.

[Maypews]

So today I decided to try tinkering with Rainmeter. I hadn't actually realised just how long the program has been around until doing a bit of digging and finding a really cool old school skin for CC from Code Geass. This sort of sent me down a rabbithole after I found a link to a blogspot page in the text file giving credit to the original author.

Come to find that this dude had made an absolutely extraordinary collection of Winamp and Rainmeter skins for anime characters over the years. My eyes literally lit up when I first saw this page. I found one in particular for Arcueid from Tsukihime that I really liked, pictured below.



So I click the download link. It's an adfly link. I.. assume everything will go normally, but at first my UBlock freaks out. Weird, I don't remember that happening with Adfly in the past. After clicking past that, I get redirected to some site called... Linkvertise?

So yeah apparently Adfly got consumed at some point by another corporation called Linkvertise. Since August 1st of this year, according to Linkvertise itself. It gave me some generic "We couldn't find your download" and then linked me to some hellish infinite scroll social media platform. WTF is this shit? So many old download links are now broken for eternity. Yay!


It's like Tinypic 2.0, except arguably worse because this includes old game mods and skins and all kinds of other creative things. The worst part is that in the comments people were talking about the files being hosted on Mediafire which is really good about keeping download links up. So these damn skins are probably out there somewhere but there's no way of finding them, all because Adfly went belly up. I tried using some workarounds like Bypass.city but no dice.

Sorry I'm pissed and had to vent somewhere about this. Genuinely enraging. Oh well, at least I have the CC skin.

[Maypews]

So today I decided to try tinkering with Rainmeter. I hadn't actually realised just how long the program has been around until doing a bit of digging and finding a really cool old school skin for CC from Code Geass. This sort of sent me down a rabbithole after I found a link to a blogspot page in the text file giving credit to the original author.

Come to find that this dude had made an absolutely extraordinary collection of Winamp and Rainmeter skins for anime characters over the years. My eyes literally lit up when I first saw this page. I found one in particular for Arcueid from Tsukihime that I really liked, pictured below.



So I click the download link. It's an adfly link. I.. assume everything will go normally, but at first my UBlock freaks out. Weird, I don't remember that happening with Adfly in the past. After clicking past that, I get redirected to some site called... Linkvertise?

So yeah apparently Adfly got consumed at some point by another corporation called Linkvertise. Since August 1st of this year, according to Linkvertise itself. It gave me some generic "We couldn't find your download" and then linked me to some hellish infinite scroll social media platform. WTF is this shit? So many old download links are now broken for eternity. Yay!


It's like Tinypic 2.0, except arguably worse because this includes old game mods and skins and all kinds of other creative things. The worst part is that in the comments people were talking about the files being hosted on Mediafire which is really good about keeping download links up. So these damn skins are probably out there somewhere but there's no way of finding them, all because Adfly went belly up. I tried using some workarounds like Bypass.city but no dice.

Sorry I'm pissed and had to vent somewhere about this. Genuinely enraging. Oh well, at least I have the CC skin.

Small update on this but I later found that the creator of these skins has a DeviantArt page. You can still downloda some of them like this but it's pretty mixed odds on if you'll get the actual files or just a preview image. Luckily the Tsukihime one I wanted works!

[Maypews]

Ancient site for Super Mario 64 speedrunning tips and tricks.
http://www.sm64.com/

[Parzival]

https://dagobah.net - flash video archive
https://ytmnd.com - yes, this site still exists
https://www.theshadowlands.net - classic paranormal web 1.0 site
https://www.smwcentral.net - super mario world romhacking hub
https://www.zoneoftheenders.org - ZoE fansite
https://www.mst3kinfo.com - MST3K fan news site, still active
https://forums.unfiction.com/forums/ - thought lost, the premier ARG forum of its day was successfully archived
https://flashpointarchive.org - another flash archive, this time also of games
https://gikopoipoi.net - 2d chatroom
https://www.vgperson.com/games/ - classic rpgmaker horror (and other) games available for free and in english
https://xeno-underground.net - xeno series info
https://www.templechan.org - God's imageboard

That's about all I got for now. I have a bookmark folder maze of cool sites I've found over the years, and I still have to check which links are even still live.

[Maypews]

I still have to check which links are even still live.

Always sad to have a site go down in the time since you first found it, makes the internet feel even more ephemeral than we know it to be. My list of links to add to my site had swelled up to like 70 over a span of 4 months and when I went to add them to my site's link directory at least 5-10 had gone down.