Random Site of the Week Archive (2015-2016)

Where some ideas are stranger than others...	RANDOM SITE ARCHIVE at the Moonspeaker
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PREVIOUS RANDOM SITES OF THE WEEK The links below all open in the same window or tab as this page by default. Clicking the star (★) at the end of the entry will open the headline link in a new window or tab instead. This seems to me to be the best way to make it a bit more convenient to visit random sites without closing or losing this page while not making it a surprising or annoying default. Based on my tests so far, the new tab should pop up to the right of the parent tab, and the new window on top of the parent window. Another thing to draw attention to is that this feature began in 2018, and so some sites have changed a great deal over the past several years. If you want to be sure to get a sense of the version of the site that originally featured on The Moonspeaker, it is worth looking the link up on the wayback machine and dialling back to at least the year of the random site date. This is especially important for multi-author, political projects and their associated blogs, which will inevitably reflect changes in personnel and other outside pressures. With politics also come accusations of various types of malfeasance, which may or may not be well-grounded when made or at the time the site was encountered, so it is all the more important to check the source. Current \| 2008-2014 \| 2015-2016 \| 2017 \| 2018 \| 2019 \| 2020 \| 2021 \| 2022 \| 2023 \| 2024 \| 2025 RadFemArchive (2016-11-26) : One of the great frustrations for Radical Feminists and those who would like to learn more about their theory and politics whether or not they agree with them, is the difficulty of keeping Feminist works generally in print. The RadFemArchive makes electronic copies of out of print texts available for free and beyond the confines of university libraries, an important service. ★ Roads Were Not Built For Cars (2016-11-19) : Companion website of an early crowd-funded book by Carlton Reid, which goes through the actual history of the paved roads so many drivers treat as solely their own entitlement. An excellent companion paper to read with the site or book is Whose Roads? by Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute. ★ OpenMedia (2016-11-12) : A respected Canadian non-profit organization founded in 2008 that works on preventing the internet from becoming a mass censorship and surveillance service controlled by corporate interests. It has an excellent blog and carries out important research as well. ★ idlewords.com (2016-10-19) : Maciej Cegłowski, proprietor of Pinboard's writing home online. Its tagline is "brevity is for the weak" and he lives up to the letter by providing excellent long read pieces on topics ranging from travel to technology issues. He also maintains an archive of his talks, which for some reason is not linked to directly on the main page, possibly because his current tag cloud has lost track of it. Nevertheless, don't miss them, they are as erudite, accessible, and often hilarious as his long blog posts. ★ LibraryBox (2016-10-08) : A low powered web server that can be used to provide remote access to files where access to the internet is for some reason difficult, as well as to set up a local mesh net of interconnected boxen for a small area. This is a free software project, so you can buy one or build your own because the software and recommended hardware specs are provided right from the LibraryBox website. UPDATE: Alas this project is now quietly moribund. For those able to acquire supported hardware, the software must be downloaded from the site snapshot at the internet archive. ★ Quintillian's Institutes of Oratory (2016-09-18) : This is an excellent on-line edition of Quintillian's famous text for teachers of rich roman boys with political aspirations. It is in fact still relevant today, not least because the basic oration structure he describes is still how we are taught to write essays. ★ Schneier on Security (2016-09-07) : If you'd like to read a mainly level-headed, practical perspective on security for your computer, on-line, and more widely in life, Bruce Schneier's site is a great place to start. I highly recommend reading his post on Choosing Secure Passwords to start. ★ Moonhawk's Pages (2016-09-01) : Linguist Dan Moonhawk Alford's website kept online after his passing by his good friend Don Watson. More than worth the to read his discussion of the Whorf hypothesis and the key twin papers God is Not a Noun in Native America and God is a Verb. The former was cited by John Mohawk, Seneca philosopher and late editor of Akwesasne Notes, which is no small endorsement. ★ RAFT Alliance (2016-08-25) : Prior to europeans arriving in the americas, the level of diversity in plant and animal species was far greater. A fundamental purpose behind all the effort Indigenous people put into developing so many varieties and diverse relationships with the land was to avoid starving, whatever happened with the weather. The RAFT Alliance is an organization endeavouring to restore those systems, with an ever greater urgency in this, so far one of the hottest years on record ever seen. ★ Hyperbole User Manual (2016-08-17) : If you are not a fan of emacs you may not find yourself using this program, but it follows through on interesting premise by effectively allowing an emacs user to treat their computer as if it were a part of the internet, navigating it via links in the form of buttons and performing other tasks. If nothing else, it is a nice demonstration of another approach to creating an interface for a person to make use of their comupter. ★ Bev Jo - Radical Feminist Writing (2016-08-10) : This blog is just what it says, and includes the wonderful on-line, updated edition of "Dykes-Loving-Dykes: Separatist Politics" which she and her coauthors originally published in 1990. ★ Redstockings (2016-07-31) : A Volunteer-run and curated archive of documents, photos, and other historical materials from the Women's Liberation Movement, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. This is another contribution to the critical necessity for women to create and maintain their own historical documents. ★ Guide to DRM-Free Living (2016-07-05) : Whatever your position on DRM, if you are on a budget or looking for convenient links to free ebooks, music, video, and a range of tools to make your own, this guide is an excellent starting point. If you've never looked into these sources before, you're going to be pleasantly surprised. ★ Métis in Space (2016-06-26) : I briefly mentioned this podcast awhile back. It is the ever awesome place you can hear Molly and Chelsea "hilariously deconstruct the science fiction genre through a decolonial lens." They're not kidding, and they check out everything from the obscure and B-Movie to the familiar standards. UPDATE as of 2024-07-14: Unfortunately Molly and Chelsea have given up the podcast website and it is mostly moribund. A cybersquatter has grabbed the domain, so the link points to a copy in the Internet Archive. ★ Bret Victor, Beast of Burden (2016-06-07) : Victor's sense of humour is quirky, and his area of expertise is interface design, that is how tools are made usable by humans and useful for their purpose. His ideas are challenging and reflect a fundamental and responsible belief in a better future, especially by "Reforming our infantilized society." ★ Anarchist Library, The (2016-05-27) : Recently I was tracking down a reference in Fields, Factories, and Workshops by Petr Kropotkin, which led me to this site. It includes a growing collection of works in a range of open formats, from XeLaTeX to ePub, and to my knowledge is the only place on-line so far outside of possibly the Wayback Machine that includes all of Kropotkin's works. ★ âpihtawikosisân (2016-05-20) : As she says herself, this is the blog of a Plains Cree speaking, Métis woman from alberta currently working on a masters degree at the university of alberta, writing acutely on Indigenous history, the white problem, Indigenous legal developments, and potential futures. Chelsea is also one half of the awesome team behind the podcast Métis in Space. ★ Savage Minds (2016-05-09) : A reasonably busy blog dealing with anthropology-related topics, often responding to current events. It was founded in 2005 and is another part fo the ongoing effort to get scholars more engaged with people beyond their immediate colleagues. Contributors include graduate students, anthropologists working "outside of the academy" and of course, many professors. ★ Programming Historian, The (2016-03-31) : Central repository of tutorials for humanities majors in how to perform automated document and database analysis, as well as mapping and digital presentation of research results. Everything is open source and peer reviewed, although the project team appears to be struggling to find a balance between a desire to review and edit to perfection and posting new materials. ★ Starship Reckless (2016-03-24) : Molecular biologist and SF writer Athena Andreadis' blog. Compulsively readable, chockablock with science, literature, and a complete lack of genre snobbery that is all too rare. If you don't want to start at most recent, I recommend the Andreadis Unibrow Theory of Art. ★ Public Library of Science (2016-02-29) : One of several key projects to ensure publicly funded research is made freely available, PLOS includes a range of peer-reviewed journals with all papers released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. It happens to be mainly biologically oriented, but there are other important philosophically related projects including arXiv.org. ★ 2D Goggles - Dangerous Experiments in Comics (2016-02-22) : This subsite is updated intermittently because Syndey Padua is an extremely busy animator and now semi-globetrotting graphic novel author. Her work is well worth perusing, and if you can't wait for updates to this site, pop over to her main site to see some of her other projects. She is also an impressive amateur historian, have a look at her suggested readings. ★ Ancient Lives Project (2016-02-15) : Where to go to contribute to the crowd sourced transcription of the Oxyrhynchus papyri. You can identify letters (no need to be able to read greek) or even just measure the scanned papyri fragments. So far at least 100 texts have been published from this project, including fragments of ancient plays, gospels, and philosophical texts. ★ Paypom Treaty, The (2016-02-09) : The Grand Council of Treaty 3 has posted a pdf of the notes made for Chief Powasson in 1873, when the Lake of the Woods Ojibway were signing a treaty with the crown in right of canada. There are notes of this type for many treaties in canada, all remarkable for the differences recorded between what was said and what was written. ★ Virtual Museum of Métis History and Culture (2016-02-04) : A remarkable archive of publications, oral history transcripts, photographs, language resources, and much more. It is provided by the Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies and Applied Research, which has been pursuing a long term digitization and cataloguing project that also notes other important Métis resources across the web. ★ Project Vox (2016-01-13) : Home of a project working to bring the writings of early modern women philosophers back into print or even into print for the first time digitally and in hard copy. Some of these women have other works that have remained fairly available, usually because they were deemed "gender appropriate," but in the main these works have been ignored purely because of the sex of the writer. ★ Intersex Roadshow (2015-12-31) : Thanks to Bitch Media, I stumbled on this all too infrequently updated blog, in particular the Intersex Genitalia Illustrated and Explained post. Cary Costello's explanations and illustrations are excellent and respectful, a combination that can be all too hard to find as soon as the topic of genitalia and their sometimes binary-ness comes up. (Note that sex is binary, humans like other mammals may experience disorders of sexual development that alter external appearance.) The comments are actually useful, simply skip over the inevitable pile of recent spam. ★ Original Hacker's Dictionary, The (2015-12-27) : The Hacker's Dictionary, better known to some of us by its earlier name the Jargon File, is a subject of continuing low level religious wars, in the computer programmer sense. This page reproduces a 1988 era version, and it is well worth having a look, especially by comparison with the controversial branch still maintained by Eric Raymond, but be ready for distracting html code errors when you consult the latter. ★ Christi Belcourt (2015-12-22) : One of the Métis Nation's great artists, from Manitou Sakhigan, Alberta. Her works range from paintings to stained glass, prints, birch bark canoes, and her part in the amazing Onaman Collective. I can't possibly do justice to her art with words, the best thing is to see it for yourself. ★ Missing CDs, The (2015-12-18) : The "missing manual" series published by O'Reilley has become something of a juggernaut, successfully displacing practically every other series directed to the same audience with "idiot" or "dummies" in their titles. This companion site is where the various code snippets and sample files from the books can be downloaded from, as well as the occasional program. The site includes a significant amount of material from earlier editions, a great help to anyone who must use an older version of the given missing manual's subject. ★ Indigenous Knowledge Commons (2015-12-07) : An excellent source of on-line courses, bibliographical information, and digital publications of all kinds. There are tools and digital publication options for scholars and students, including readers in specific topics. It also has a clear and easily accessible protocols and permissions page. ★ Suzette Haden Elgin's Verbal Self Defense Home Page (2015-10-30) : Unfortunately I have no idea how long this site will stay up, because Suzette Haden Elgin passed away after a long illness in January of this year. An alternative link I have found is at adrr.com. She was a true and wonderful Feminist pioneer, who believed firmly that we all have the capacity to manage the power of language to better our lives. To see her sci-fi works – and honestly, you should – have a look at her homepage at Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. ★ Strange Horizons (2015-10-10) : A decent on-line magazine of "speculative fiction" – a term which I think has settled down into being an umbrella monicker for fantasy and sci-fi works, even though there is plenty of disagreement about that since there is less a boundary than a gradient between the two. The magazine includes a fine body of work including both original stories and non-fiction articles, and it is a volunteer-run effort well worth supporting. ★ Work of Edward Tufte and Graphics Press, The (2015-09-30) : If you have read Robert Bringhurst on typographic style or gotten entangled with LaTeX, it is likely you have encountered references to the excellent work of Edward Tufte. In a nutshell, his books and his website are all about how to present information visually in an honest, effective, and beautiful way. ★ Library of Babel, The (2015-06-10) : A fascinating realisation of Jorge Borges' famous story. It is accessible both with and without javascript, and if you wish you can even download the books. The ancillary essays are an excellent read in their own right, don't miss them! In a way, this may be the closest to an internet one-time pad cipher, though of course it really isn't anything of the sort. ★ Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web, The (2015-05-30) : For all the folks out there who are interested in typography in general, Robert Bringhurst's book on the subject is an incredible read. He did not consider web typography though, and so Richard Rutter began the project of translating Bringhurst's principles to the on-line medium. The project isn't quite done, and is open to other contributors. ★ De Vere Society, The (2015-05-23) : Whether or not you have ever had a strong opinion about who the author of the works of Shakespeare is, this site is well worth browsing. The articles are clear and respectfully written, always a refreshing thing to see when it comes to controversial topics, with excellent, non-ecumenical bibliographies. For information on the Shakespeare oeuvre itself, my go to source these days is Open Source Shakespeare. UPDATE: The De Vere Society opened a substack, Shakespeare Identitfied in 2025. ★ Turing Digital Archive, The (2015-05-16) : A partial collection of scanned documents from Alan Turing's papers including articles (both published and unpublished), letters, and photographs. Unfortunately the image viewer is flash-dependent, a peculiar decision likely related to the attempt to prevent the downloading and reuse of the materials. ★ Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments, An (2015-05-09) : A wonderful and hilarious little book that is well worth purchasing for regular rereading. Ali Almossawi's combination of illustrations and just enough text is still rarely applied to trickier topics like sorting out solid reasoning from what is at best only a facsimile of it. ★ Big Bang Never Happened.org, The (2015-04-03) Eric J. Lerner's site covering additional information related to his 1991 book of the same name. Well worth a read, as is the book itself, regardless of your position, if any on the question of whether the big bang theory is a valid description of the origins of the universe. Lerner's argument is not mainstream, nor is it on the extreme edges of physics, and he may simply have been ahead of the curve. ★ Long Way Home, The (2015-03-22) An excellent blog providing thoughtful explorations of racism, sexism and homophobia in speculative fiction including many helpful links. Alas Ardhra has not been posting much lately, but she is keeping her blog up, which is a wonderful service. To start, have a read of What is Cultural Appropriation? which honestly I can't recommend highly enough for clarity and completeness. ★ Iain McGilchrist's Website (2015-03-06) : If you have not read McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary or at least watched his animated RSA talk, then do watch the latter right away, and then at least read the introduction to the book on his website. To my mind, his book is the true follow up to Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach and even provides insight into why Hofstatder himself has never been able to follow up on it. ★ Internet Archive (2015-02-16) : Long overdue for a moment in the Random Sites spotlight, older denizens of the internet will know this site by its older name, the Wayback Machine. It has developed from a webpage archiving project into a non-profit organization archiving books, video games, sounds and much, much more, often under creative commons licenses or out of copyright. But do watch out, these folks are not immune to politically driven but not legally required censorship. ★ Feminist Reprise Library (2015-02-09) : A site providing access to hard to get papers and excerpts from various feminist authors, especially lesbian feminists whose works are all too often out of print. The person who created and maintains the site provides very little information apart from the articles themselves, and it is mercifully devoid of the social media tags that proliferate like a bad rash on so many sites these days. UPDATE as of 2024-07-14: This site is now only available through the Internet Archive. ★ AOIDOI.org (2015-02-02) : This site may be officially on hiatus, but that doesn't change the value of the Annis' carefully curated series of ancient greek dialect descriptions and an excellent introduction to ancient greek metre. He also provides several annotated texts and a number of articles of his own on various greek poetry related topics. ★ Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (2015-01-26) : There are many programs out there to carry out page layout and typesetting. For speed, ease of set up and quality of results though, one of the best free packages out there is TeX. It is cross-platform, based on a document mark up approach analogous to html, it's free, and so good more presses and journals are adopting it all the time. ★ A Celebration of Women Writers (2015-01-19) : A wonderful site built and maintained by Mary Mark Ockerbloom that brings together at least hundreds of out of copyright or reproduced by permission books written by women. The range of authors and topics is spectacular, and the formatting minimal and careful. The result is highly readable texts on almost any screen. ★ Perseus Project at UChicago (2015-01-12) : It has come to my attention that the main Perseus Project site at Tufts is having some difficulties with its parser at the moment. An excellent alternative until the folks at Tufts have that sorted out is Perseus at Chicago. The only tweak you may need is to tell your web browser to override the site's font choices if you are working with Greek for ease of reading. ★ Marginalian, The (2015-01-05) : Maria Popova's wonderful site full of musings and annotated readings of books, mostly older texts that don't always get their due, and wondrous out-of-print gems that might never be seen but for her work, like the one linked here, The Green Beads. ★	How Random Is The Selection, Really? Mathematically speaking, not random at all. I bump into websites or webpages that strike me as cool, interesting, useful, or daft enough to have lots of fun with, and feature them. Being as I have eclectic interests, there will always be some thematic randomness, at least until there are enough sites picked out to be in obvious categories, which won't happen for awhile. I suppose you could consider this a hybrid of the blog roll that often resides on one side or the other of the screen on most wordpress blogs that I have read or touched on, and the old time "Links" page that used to be the backbone of the "web" part of the internet. Nowadays I am not sure whether webmasters and contributors spend much time anymore on thinking about how to add to the interconnections between websites online versus waiting for search engines to do much of the work, on top of rss feed subscriptions and the dreaded "social media." UPDATE 2018-07-16: Well, based on the sites I have been pulling together here, I think it is fair to say there are a few categories now. Science, math, and computer applications for a start. I have been adding more and more links to sources that in my view people should be able to read for themselves and decide whether or not they share the usual way the writer or group in question is depicted in the mainstream media. Publishing, Indigenous rights, history, and a smattering of linguistics, anthropology and archaeology. What Happens to Very Old Random Site Listings? If the site is still going strong, nothing really. Blogs and similar sites that have been switched into archives and no longer receive new posts or comments are marked as such once confirmed in their new state. A few sites and blogs now vanished from the internet are replaced by their archived versions at the internet archive. There were two links to pages rather than websites which at long last were rooted out. One was to a profile of Douglas Hofstadter formerly on the stanford university website, now only accessible via the internet archive. Protip, the profile gives far too much prominence to a book Hofstadter cobbled together while grieving for his wife who had died of a fast-moving cancer. The book is not very good and does not compare well to his most famous text, Gödel, Escher, Bach. Alas, Hofstadter has no real affinity for the web and the vagaries of united statesian copyright seem to have stymied most potential responding or homaging works in the vein of the online Library of Babel, which is too bad. The other link is to one of comedian Aamer Rahman's sketches, Fear of a Brown Planet – On Reverse Racism (alt source). This is a link to youtube from before it was served with https, and so does not properly redirect. Interested readers will be best served by searching for Rahman's channel instead. UPDATE: In a blur of unusual search engine success, I have tracked down Rahman's channel. I had no idea he had been on hiatus for seven years, and he has some great new material up.
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