The web has changed a lot since then.
The age of university student home pages gradually gave way to an interregnum
of propaganda and paywalls; for a while, it really looked as if knowledge would
become purely a privilege of the rich, until (believe it or not)
Wikipedia
came to our rescue — fending off that particular dystopia,
not through the quality of its output, but by making it difficult for special
interests to dominate the flow of information. To this day,
Wikipedia protects us from that dystopia while nudging us toward another;
and honestly our modern social media seems in some ways rather a step down
from the hand-coded university-student html pages of the early years.
But this page has slowly grown through it all, and so far
(as of the date at the top of this page;
knock wood),
I still have the pleasure and honor of offering readers the hospitality
of this humble web resource. Welcome to my surfing page.
That said,
this page is honestly no more than a hotlist with delusions of grandure:
when I find a URL that I want to hang on to, for whatever reason,
I (usually) put it here. Making it globally available being one way
for me to contribute to WebCulture.
Since I'd be putting in the effort to maintain my "hotlist" anyway,
I can get the satisfaction of contributing at little-to-no extra cost
(in theory).
It's still just my hotlist, though.
Traditionally, major web indices —a classic example being
yahoo—
started a lot like this page, with grad students trying to organize
their own growing collection of links, and they just kept growing.
That's not my goal here.
I sincerely hope you find lots of fun and interesting stuff here,
and I'm making it available to you in the hopes that you will,
but it isn't intended to be a web index per se.
Some of the pointers from here are to other people's pages that
are pretty comprehensive, such as
FAQs,
but these pointers are only here because I decided I wanted them.
Every pointer on this page is here on my sufferance.
Because there are lots of different reasons for me to want to keep a URL,
and all of them end up here, you'll find an enormous range of variation
in the quality of the stuff here.
IMHO, some of it's really neat, some of it is just barely worth saving,
and most of it is somewhere in between.
Deciding which is which is left as an exercise for the student.
Each entry has one or two dates on it.
The first date is the last time the URL was changed.
If this date is recent, either I've just added the pointer,
or I've just changed it because I discovered the target page had moved.
If this date is old, I haven't changed the URL in a long time.
At this writing a few of these dates go back to 1995, though most (if not all)
of those will eventually be supplanted by more recent urls using https.
The second date, if any,
is a more recent time as of which I know the pointer still worked.
If there is no second date,
that's because it would be the same as the first date.
If the first date is old and the second date is recent,
you're looking at a fairly stable URL:
I put it in a long time ago, and it was still working pretty recently.
If a stable URL like that doesn't work for you,
there's a good chance the problem is only temporary.
About the timestamps
After about a year as a web publisher,
I came to appreciate just how often pages on the web move around.
Nothing seems to stay put.
Of course I'd update a URL when I noticed it was out of date,
but I didn't even know how long ago I'd last tested each URL.
So I instituted the following time-keeping system.
Navigation
Physical places
Subject catalogs
Selective lists
(Once there were many of these; somewhere, though, society has forgotten
what richness is lost when we give up our nagivation to search engines.
The same happened to library catalogs, around the turn of the century;
most of the rich human insight built into the cross-references of the old
physical card catalogs was lost.)
Search engines
Other resources
Communication
See also:
Literature,
Education,
Programming languages
Radio
Television
Language
General
/ Conlanging
/ Sounds and symbols
/ Dictionaries
/ Thesauri
/ The Press
/ Writing
(12-Apr-17; 31-Dec-20)
See also:
Literature,
Education,
Programming languages
I've been thinking about designing an esoteric language myself for years, and once I even started one; but it's been difficult for me, because the usual way of making a language hard to use is to omit abstraction support, and I just can't find it in my heart to design a language that way. The obvious solution is to design a language that supports abstraction in a perverse way — but it's hard to imagine any way of supporting abstraction that would be more perverse than the way C++ does it.
There's been a new wave of extensible languages since around the turn of the century. I'm a bit concerned about a tendancy to not learn from past mistakes; not that I don't believe in extensibility, I just don't believe in unstructured extensibility, just as I don't believe in unstructured control flow. (On the difference between structure and restriction, see my design of the Kernel programming language, especially guideline G4 on type encapsulation.)
"Magicians, especially since the Gnostic and the Quabala influences, have sought higher consciousness through assimilation and control of universal opposites— good/evil, positive/negative, male/female, etc. But due to the steadfast pomposity of ritualism inherited from the ancient methods of the shaman, occultists have been blinded to what are perhaps the two most important pairs of apparent or earth-plane opposites: ORDER/DISORDER and SERIOUS/HUMOROUS." — Principia Discordia.
When they took the fourth amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent.
When they took the second amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun.
Now they've taken the first amendment, and I can say nothing about it.
