Links of Interest
Navigation
My Links
Portfolios
Other collections of my work:
- Linktree: Another place to see links to my work and social profiles.
- Aeneas Nin Games: My itch.io repository for all the games I've made.
- Downpour Games: My small but soon-to-expand collection of games made with Downpour.
- Creepypastas: I wrote a fair number of well-received internet horror stories back in the day. You can find them here.
- Comics: Drawings and graphic narratives produced during my scant downtime in grad school.
Socials
Places to connect:
- Bluesky: You can find me under the usual handle at everyone's favorite Twitter replacement.
- Lexaloffle: For PICO-8 game dev.
- SFWA: My profile at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association.
- PayPal and Ko-fi: If for some reason you want to give me money, you can do it at either of these links.
Other Ways to Access This Site
This site is accessible from the following URLs:
- https://www.alexanderbjoy.com
- https://www.aeneasnin.com
- https://aeneas-nin.bearblog.dev (This will be the link to use if I ever lose control of the other two domain names.)
RSS feeds of my blog are available here:
- https://www.alexanderbjoy.com/feed/?type=rss
- https://aeneas-nin.bearblog.dev/feed/?type=rss
For Atom feeds, remove ?type=rss from the URL.
Other People's Links
Places on the Internet and in the real world that I have found worthwhile for one reason or another:
Inspiration
- Alt Text as Poetry: A philosophy (and free workbook) for thinking through creative but functional approaches to alt text.
- Archillect: A web crawler that turns up interesting images.
- gradient.horse: Draw a horse and watch it run along the horizon line with hundreds of other horses.
- Jodi.org: Explore a dense, seemingly infinite labyrinth of ASCII and glitch art. (Yes, all those Ws in the URL are intentional.)
- Library of Babel: A random book generator in the spirit of the Borges short story.
- Mistigris: ASCII and retro computing art collective.
- Oblique Strategies: Web implementation of the infamous creativity kit by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt.
- Public Domain Image Archive: Massive collection of out-of-copyright visual material.
- Visual Phenomena & Optical Illusions: Gallery of optical illusions, including explanations of how they work.
Reading Material
Libraries and Collections
- AGAINST AI: A rich assortment of materials to help educators combat AI's intrusion into their classrooms.
- Ex-Classics: A collection of formerly influential works. Fascinating to dig through.
- History of Philosophy, Summarized: A remarkable visual map of the history of Western philosophy that shows who is responding to whom, and what they're arguing.
- Library of Short Stories: A free online library for reading and downloading public domain short stories. Lets you sort by length and genre, too!
- Neglected Books: A blog dedicated to rediscovering forgotten books.
- Project Aon: Sizable collection of old Lone Wolf gamebooks.
- Project Gutenberg: Immense collection of free public domain etexts.
- Standard Ebooks: Lovingly crafted free ebooks of public domain classics.
- Steal This Wiki: Collaborative update and rewrite of Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book.
- Things to Read: A Downpour game in disguise that aggregates thoughtful essays, articles, and short stories.
- Video Game History Foundation Library: Searchable collection of video game development materials, magazines, artwork, ephemera, and more.
- Weird Old Book Finder: A search engine that returns exclusively the results found in weird old books.
- Xikipedia: A pseudo social media feed that algorithmically shows you content from Simple Wikipedia. Turn doomscrolling into a learning opportunity!
Webcomics
- Cat and Girl: Reads like a collection of trenchant, satirical monologues from characters who only ever talk past each other.
- Nedroid: Infrequently updated nowadays, but the archives are full of treasures.
- NonCanon: Some of the cleverest writing you'll see anywhere.
- Pepper and Carrot: Like if Studio Ghibli made a comic about magic, and also gave away all the Krita ingredients for free.
- The Perry Bible Fellowship: An absolutely blackhearted Internet classic with remarkably inventive frame compositions.
- Poorly Drawn Lines: Spins gold out of nothing (complimentary).
- The Sasquatch Diaries: Baroque, surreal one-panel comic reminiscent of mid-aughts Adult Swim.
- Swan Boy: The funniest and most original character voices since Achewood.
Games
- Apotris: Feature- and customization-rich Tetris clone for a variety of platforms. Tight, precise controls make it especially fun to play.
- Diedream: A solo RPG framework with a glitchy aesthetic that's designed to be played entirely in your head. Includes a method for simulating random dice rolls, plus an easy-to-memorize oracle.
- Digital Football: Blaseball, but with American Football.
- Ironsworn: The gold standard for solo TTRPGs. The digital edition is free!
- Loner: A minimalist, rules-light solo RPG. All its content is Creative Commons, and readily available on GitHub. Also see the Loner Assistant for browser-based online play.
- Maze: Loving HTML recreation of the extraordinarily difficult puzzle book that inspired Blue Prince.
- Neurocracy: Solve a murder in the future by exploring its Wikipedia.
- Vector Racer: A browser-based implementation of the classic graph-paper racing game. The tracks are pretty clever!
- your ai slop bores me: Pretend to be an AI and provide responses to people's queries. Or submit a query yourself and see how the pretend AI collective replies.
- Yume Nikki Online Project: Cooperative online implementation of the 2004 dreamworld adventure.
Tools
- 'afterwriting: A free utility for converting Fountain screenplay files into nicely-formatted PDFs. Downloadable for offline use.
- Cool Text: Free, no-nonsense means of generating text logos for websites.
- copyparty: Turn virtually any device capable of running Python into a file server.
- The Death Generator: Create fake screenshots using authentic graphics and fonts from classic games. Made by Foone Turing.
- edit.tf: Teletype art tool that saves your creations directly in the page URL (so you save your work by bookmarking, emailing, or copying and pasting it somewhere).
- Eldiron: Open-source retro RPG creation engine.
- Everyone's a Syndicate: A widget for embedding RSS feeds from your friends' blogs on your website. More details here. See the Blog Syndicate section for an example. Made by Fallible.
- ExposedByDefault: See the vast trove of data that your web browser distributes with every interaction. Try it for yourself here.
- FreeTaxUSA: Stick it to those parasites at TurboTax with this (mostly) free online filing tool.
- Grid Paper Generator: Customizable templates for creating printable grid paper. Try the two-point perspective option for some mind-bending visuals.
- Habeas Dockets: A tool for lawful, online access to restricted habeas corpus documents from courthouse public terminals. Volunteer for the project if you live near a federal courthouse.
- jrnl: A command-line interface for writing and maintaining a digital journal. Perfect for implementing my two-sentence method.
- Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices. Help build resilient text message infrastructure on the cheap!
- MOSS: Delightful painting toy where every brush is a tiny program.
- Nepenthes: The nuclear option for battling AI crawlers. Traps them in an endless tar pit. Proceed with extreme caution.
- Nightshade: Coat your digital art in AI-destroying poison.
- Obsidian: Outstanding note-taking and knowledge organization tool. An easy way to implement a digital Zettelkasten.
- Puter: A browser-based computer.
- Pwnagotchi: Part virtual pet, part pentesting plaything.
- Random Name Generator: Includes a robust selection of linguistic traditions to choose from.
Places
- The Gyro Spot: Top-quality gyros in Manchester NH's millyard.
- Lolita: Subterranean Gothic taco bar with an inventive menu in Boston's Back Bay.
- A Lot of Thai: The finest Thai food in all of New England, hiding in a strip mall in Merrimack, NH. Try the drunken noodles or the duck soup!
- The Map Center: One-of-a-kind shop for maps, books, and geographica in Pawtucket, RI.
- Yagg Sii Tenn: Authentic, high-quality African cuisine tucked in a suburban NC business park. Be sure to sample their moringa, mint, and lime drink.
Lists and Roundups
- Cool Tools: A list of tools and playthings for digital projects, curated by the great Nathalie Lawhead.
- Everest Pipkin's Tool Roundup: A list of small, free, or experimental tools for building games, websites, and interactive projects, curated by the incomparable Everest Pipkin.
- Flashpoint Archive: An effort to preserve yesteryear's Flash games and animations.
- Gavengelthegrim's Horror Archive: Sizable and meticulously curated collection of horror games on Itch.
- The Philosophy Paperboy: A utility that aggregates all the day's publications (that it can find) from philosophy journals. Great for keeping abreast of your favorite topics, or despairing at the firehose of material with which the "publish or perish" model has saddled us.
- Polybius: Detailed, regularly updated dashboard covering the Authoritarian Consolidation Index for the United States.
- Trump Crashed This: Crowdsourced archive of air and maritime disasters since the Dipshit-in-Chief took office.
- United States Disappeared Tracker: A dashboard that visualizes places in the US where ICE has kidnapped people without due process.
- Warp Door: Frequently-updated compendium of cool indie games.
Blog Syndicate
Here is an RSS syndicate of recent(ish) posts from blogs I follow. Note that these words are not mine, and have not been vetted. Made with Fallible's Everyone's a Syndicate.