Please feel free to use any of these buttons to link back! (Please save the image to your own webhost instead of hotlinking)
A list of sites that I got resources from while building this site.
| Pexels | Source for any photos used that aren't my own |
| Unsplash | Another source for photos used that aren't my own |
| Tiny pixel pride flags! | Source for tiny pixel pride flags on splash and welcome pages |
| WebSameGame | Source for WebSameGame |
| POTI-board Kai official website | Source for oekaki BBS software |
| The Minecraft Overviewer | Source for software used to generate Minecraft map |
| DreamHost | My website host which should really pay me for all the people I've referred to them |
I wasn't sure if this was an entirely useful category to have but not everyone has a 88 x 31 button...
| SIX_EYES | I don't know how to describe this site. It's...fascinating? I'm not sure how anyone wrote this ? Surreal content. Personally love the cave systems. |
| Cameron's World | There is an explanation at the bottom of the page. It's more fun to click first and wonder, I think. |
| WebXP | An emulation of a Windows XP desktop. Filled with fun little things. |
Resources for making things! Mostly graphics with some music thrown in.
| Free stock photos | |
| Pexels | Free stock photos. I use this site the most when looking for photos. |
| Pixabay | Free stock photos. |
| Unsplash | Free stock photos. |
| Free graphics | Free graphics and image generators. |
| Toptal | Free tools for web dev. Check Subtle Patterns under the Designer tab for hundreds of free tiling patterns! (Licensed under Creative Commons, even) |
| fffuel | "fffuel is a collection of color tools and free SVG generators for gradients, patterns, textures, shapes, backgrounds & decorative graphics." Very useful for making abstract (or not) graphics for websites. |
| ICOOON MONO | Free icons. Commercial use OK; the only things they don't allow are resale of graphics and registration of icons as trademarks. |
| Bellsnwhistles.com | Free website graphics with that old web flavour. This site was recommended to me in like, the late 90s/early 00s and it looks exactly as you'd expect. Frankly, I'm surprised it still exists. |
| Page Works | Animated website graphics, also from the 90s. Do read the Do's and Dont's page for permissions. |
| Dragon Adoption Site Links @ MonsterBrainSoup | Adopt dragons for your website. I used to visit these sites as a kid!! Some are inexplicably still alive... |
| tagliare | Public domain or CC0 images cropped to banner/icon size (intended for further editing to make website banners, etc). No restrictions on usage, except that hotlinking of images is not allowed. |
| Free fonts | |
| 04 | Free pixel fonts - the source for the tiny fonts people often use on buttons (click on BITMAP FONT). Non-commercial use allowed. |
| rain-road | Pixel fonts. Website is now defunct, but fonts can still be downloaded from the Wayback Machine. No redistribution/reposting/modification, commercial use OK. Click on the magnifying glass to see the sample pages. |
| gau+ | ガウプラ | Font foundry that provides fonts that can be used for commercial purposes. However, redistribution and embedding of the font file (including usage on websites and programs that render text on demand), as well as usage in logos is not allowed. |
| Font Squirrel | A font resource that does its best to source commercial-use fonts that can be used for free. |
| Free music | |
| 魔王魂 | (Japanese) Massive resource for free original music and sounds. Licensed under Creative Commons 4.0, requires credit, can be used commercially. Do not upload to streaming services. Non-audio files are not free to use. Data from music purchases do not fall under these rules and cannot be used. Hover over the second item in the header - the bottom 3 options (歌もの, BGM, 効果音) link to the song, BGM and sound effects sections respectively. |
| DOVA-SYNDROME | (Japanese) Huge library of free original BGM and sound effects. Usage rules are stricter than 魔王魂's and I recommend reading it. |
| RYU ITO MUSIC | (Japanese) Free BGM with generous terms of use. The rules page can be translated into English. |
| Oekaki Software | |
| POTI-board EVO | A modern oekaki BBS with new drawing applets. Runs on PHP, easy to set up and use. |
| Wacintaki Poteto | Downloads for oekaki board software. Surprisingly, it is still being updated, and oekaki boards haven't been made completely obsolete along with Java support - the newest version supports ChickenPaint, an HTML5 drawing app used on Chicken Smoothie. Bring the oekaki boards back! |
| Lospec | A site with various resources and tools for learning and creating pixel art. Even if pixel art isn't your thing, the palette lists are a great resource for limited palette art. |
| Old Maps Online | A site that collects historical maps from various locations around the world. |
| TOY | (Japanese) A site that lists writing prompts/questionnaires for developing OCs. Divided into several themed sections over a large variety of topics/relationship dynamics. |
| Open source, experimental, and tiny tools roundup | "This is a list of small, free, or experimental tools that might be useful in building your game / website / interactive project." |
A mash of resources for learning...various things. Some are very specific?
| Lissa Explains it All | This was THE site I used back in the day to learn how to build websites. Some of the tech no longer works, but it's still a very good resource for beginners! |
| W3Schools | Somewhat more dry than the above, but a good reference for web dev. |
| Tania Rascia's Articles | A number of tutorials for more in-depth web dev at various levels of depth. Great if you want to do more complex stuff, but the complex stuff is way too hard to understand and you need the material to be readable. |
| FFXIV Chocobo Racing - A guide for all skill levels | As it says on the tin. I love Mario Kart simulator |
A collection of things that are fun to browse if you're, like, bored and only want to read text. Or look at pictures.
| digital wellbeing | Information and resources for dealing with modern overdependency on devices and the Internet. It's probably a good idea to read this and not click any of the other links I have listed. |
| Everest Pipkin's Crypto Article | An easy to read and understand explanation of the environmental issues surrounding cryptocurrency and NFTs. Sorry, the title was too long... |
| Twitter Threads | Please don't actually browse Twitter, I just needed a header for this section lol |
| Wonii's Dracula Daily Tumblr Post Thread | A thread documenting funny Tumblr post screenshots and analyses following Dracula Daily. |
| yana's Tumblr Post Thread | The absolute largest Tumblr post thread to exist (probably). At the time of posting, it's at 14k+ posts so you will be reading for...a while. Content is mostly funny, lots of LGBTQ+ stuff. |
| Search for yana's Tumblr Post Thread | A search tool for the screenshots in the thread! |
| Dan Olson's NFT Discord Thread | Very interesting read (by which I mean I started cringing a couple of tweets in) about the state of NFT uh...communities. Dan Olson made a video titled Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs that's very much worth a watch. |
| William Yearout's Liminal Space Thread | OK actually the original thread was deleted. The thread poster got lost in a building with Backrooms vibes... |
| Tom Taylor's Log Cabin Thread | The poster booked a creepy log cabin to do some writing in... |
| Chi Nguyễn's Stuck Bowls Thread | Thread of attempted suggestions to unstick 2 bowls. |
| Scott Benson's Cat Thread | Sid endures!!! |
| Paris Zarcilla's Cat Thread | Guy finds cat with kittens under bed, goes through the entire gamut of human emotions. |
| Étienne's Thread on the Multiocular O | Many eyes. CW for trypophobia probably. |
| Shiv Ramdas' Rice Thread | The epic saga of the poster's brother in law and a literal truckload of rice. |
| Robert Komaniecki's Music for Kids Thread | A thread of examples of music for children where the adult musicians went way harder than they needed to. |
| Robert Komaniecki's Music Moments Thread | Thread of interesting moments from music across different genres, explained with music theory. |
| Please don't actually browse Reddit either... | |
| AITA for “perpetuating ethnic stereotypes” about Jorts? | Jorts the cat's origin story. A rollercoaster ride. |
Horror/creepypasta. READ AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION, content warnings may be incomplete.
| SAYA IN UNDERWORLD | Translated horror creepypasta from Japan. Contains some uncomfortable images. See my picks below: |
| The One-Man Hide And Seek | About a creepy ritual. This spread on the internet some years ago and there are quite a few stories about it floating around. |
| 怖い話 (okaruto @ tumblr) | Translated horror creepypasta from Japan. Here are my picks: |
| Kotoribako | About cursed puzzle boxes. CW for some gory stuff and murder. |
| Real | About the aftermath of a ritual. I read the original thread in Japanese and did NOT want to go the bathroom alone for a week... |
| Pandora | About an old ritual and an abandoned house. |
| Monkey Dream | About a scary dream. Graphic descriptions of gore. |
| Kisaragi Station | About a train station that isn't supposed to exist. I actually don't consider this one scary. The lore of Kisaragi Station has expanded somewhat beyond this post - maybe I'll add more links in the future. |
| 雨穴 | Videos by Uketsu, which are surreal and sometimes contain creepy/weird imagery. I'm honestly impressed by the quality of the props. My picks: |
| とある一軒家で見つかった、不気味なビデオテープの真相 | About some VHS tape that was found in a house. CW for suicide. |
| 【不動産ミステリー】変な家 | About a house with a strange floorplan. |
| SCP Foundation | In case you haven't heard of the SCP Foundation: this is collaborative fiction documenting fictional entities as discovered and logged by an organisation that seeks to contain them for the safety of humanity. The more well-known entries are largely horror-themed, but not all of them are. |
| The Backrooms | Wikipedia article for the Backrooms, to provide some background. In summary: the Backrooms are a space conceptualised in a creepypasta, that is built on the unsettling feeling that liminal spaces tend to evoke. |
| Kane Pixels' | Kane Pixels' videos based on the Backrooms concept, with a heavy found footage/VHS vibe. |
| The Backrooms (Wikidot) | There are offshoots of the Backrooms concept that took the concept and developed them into more expansive worlds - similar to the SCP Foundation format of collaborative fiction, contributors to the Backrooms wikis document the entities and levels discovered. |
| The Backrooms (Fandom) | There are actually multiple wikis for the Backrooms, with some differing levels and lore. As I gather, the Fandom and Wikidot ones are the largest...? The wikification of the original creepypasta is kind of divisive, but personally I enjoy both the open-ended minimalism of the original post and the runaway documentation of the wikis as different things! |
| Mystery Flesh Pit National Park | "A collection of artifacts relating to the now-defunct Mystery Flesh Pit National Park". Beautifully designed paraphernalia and another one for the "the real horror was capitalism all along" file. |
Small indie games and useful things.
| Games by Everest Pipkin | Try Anonymous Animal and Roblox Dream Diary. |
| Games by takorii | Try ᗢ and tempres. |
| Butterfly Soup | "A visual novel about gay asian girls playing baseball and falling in love." Hysterically funny and relatably sad at the same time (but mostly funny). |
| Vilmonic | An artificial life simulator with genetics. Very interesting to just muck around in. |
| Yume Nikki | A surreal dream exploring game. Some horror content. Odds are you've already heard of and/or played it, but I'm listing it here for the fangames :) |
| Yume 2kki | Created as an unofficial sequel to Yume Nikki, this is the largest YN fangame and is built collaboratively. Downloads from an English source can be obtained from the 2kki wiki and there's even a site (YNOProject) that allow you to play in your browser! With friends! |
| .flow | Another well-known fangame, .flow plays more towards the horror side. Expect more blood and gore than the other fangames I've listed here. |
| Yume Nisshi | One of my favourite YN fangames - it's very pretty and has a bit more of a whimsical feel in the themes. It does, however, still contain horror elements. Due to asset theft the creator has locked the download with a password. |
| Free file hosts | |
| Miroware | Contains a few useful tools, such as a file hoster (can be used to host images), image corrupter, URL shortener and text...garbler. |
| Image Scrubber | A tool for removing identifying metadata from photos and blurring images. Runs in the browser. |
| petpet generator | A tool to make petpet gifs (runs in browser). |
| Imj | "Imj is a web-based movie barcode generator, montage generator, and image analyzer/plotter for creating visualizations for your large image sets." Very interesting image analysis tool that runs in your browser. |
| Dither it! | A tool for dithering images. |
| waifu2x | The one, the only...waifu2x uses a neural network to increase the resolution of input images. It's...surprisingly good! And it's saved my skin multiple times when I realised I was drawing at too low a DPI for print. |
| unlimited:waifu2x | An in-browser version of waifu2x (does not get uploaded to the server). I'm not sure how it performs compared to the main one. |
| watabou - itch.io | The main attraction is a collection of various map generators, but there are other generators as well as some games. |
| Cohoard - Format Chatlogs for Cohost | A tool for formatting chatlogs, intended for posting on Cohost, but it outputs in HTML with inline CSS so could plausibly be used in other places that take HTML/CSS input as well, such as Toyhouse. |
Small merch shops! Most of these are listed for original works - I like enamel pins, stationery and apparel.
| 8BBS | Hey! It's me! 8BBS (8-Bit Bird Song) sells enamel pins, washi tapes, and stickers mostly. I update roughly once a season with new designs. |
| 13magpies.net | Emi's shop! Themed largely on scenery/graphic design/birds, with lots of beautiful tapes, stickers, pins and more. |
| pegushi | Peggy's shop! A mix of original and fanart (Pokemon pins), lots of fish-themed stickers and tape and GOLD FOIL. |
| Rabbit Folly | bunbun's shop! So many cute animal pins!! Her watercolour prints are also gorgeous! |
| alchenart | Alicia's shop! Stationery, bags, charms; mainly original art with lots of love for crows and wibbly animals. Has some older Hollow Knight fanmerch in stock. |
| Umvvelt | A marine-themed merch shop that sells a wide variety of things, with the goal of promoting marine conservation. |
| starsalts | Shop that stocks a variety of products, most notably the repeating Pokemon pattern shirts (and other fabric products)! They've had issues with design theft, support the original here. |