Packbat's Links List

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This linklist is gonna err on the shorter side, just because vouching for sources feels stressful.

(Packbats @ Packbats: this is the shorter side? shaking our damn head)

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etymoline.com Online Etymology Dictionary
Do not trust folk etymologies. Figuring out where words actually came from is extremely difficult, and making up stories that excite people and get spread is much easier. This is the most accessible and reliable source for etymologies.
JSTOR
At the beginning of the pandemic, JSTOR set up a thing where randos like us can register and read 100 closed-access articles a month for free. To their credit, as of January 2024, they're still doing it. If you're looking for something that academics publish journal articles about, you can find some of those academic journal article takes on it here.
The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
Do you ever have questions which can be answered in the form of a list of integers in order? It's a niche need, but if you need it, there's a resource for it.
Numerical Recipes: The Art of Scientific Computing
Do you ever want to know how to implement a computer algorithm to solve numerical problems? Again, niche need; but again, if you need it, it exists.
HTML Living Standard
A big reference document about HTML, our favorite markup language, and all the cool details that it's gotten since we learned it in the late 1990s.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2
Advice for making webpages that actually work for users who aren't you. Seems to be current as of right now.
more than one
A 101 page about plurality: the existence of multiple self-aware entities in one physical brain.
Healthy Multiplicity
A big resource page for plural systems that we Packbats really could stand to take more advantage of.

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CryptPad.fr
The ... flagship? version of an encrypted online collaborative scratchpad tool. You can do documents, you can do whiteboards, you can make forms for people to fill out.
The Hippocratic License
A tool for creating free software licenses that impose ethical restrictions on the use of the covered software. Up to version 3.0 as of January 2024.
Creative Commons
The popular tool for creating free media licenses.
Contributor Covenant
A good code of conduct. If you need a code of conduct and don't know where to start, start with a good one. There's resources about your responsibilities enforcing it, too.
Furnace (chiptune tracker)
Chiptune tracker with a lot of included chipsets and a lot of rad demos.
Magic Wormhole
A tool for sending files from one computer to another without uploading it to a website. There's lots of other things that use Magic Wormhole and they're compatible with each other.
ImageMagick
A command line tool for creating and manipulating images. We used ImageMagick to make a bunch of dithered versions of photographs once.
cmus
A console music player for Unix-like operating systems. Our computer seems to suck at playing music and this is resource-light enough that it actually doesn't stutter (much).
Atkinson Hyperlegible
Our current (circa ) go-to proportional-width font. Designed to be easy to read for those with low vision.
Fairfax HD
Our current (circa ) monospace font for text editing. Not sure why we picked it but y'know.
PICO-8
The most famous fantasy console. Screen that's 128 pixels square with fixed(ish) palette, a Lua dialect for programming, a lovely little built-in music tracker, cross-platform and web compatibility. We love it.
Toki Pona
A philosophical conlang. An attempt to find the meaning of life in 120(ish) words. A language that is fun to learn and play with. We've had some really bad experiences with the online community, but we really enjoy the language.
SFZFormat.com
The SFZ format is an open format for creating sample-based instruments. Includes a extensive collection of links to SFZ instruments.
How to Use a Writing Cleanroom to Avoid Plagiarism by Jonathan Bailey on Plagiarism Today
An essay from a few years back about writing, using sources, and never copying anything into your original text that does not immediately get its citation put in at the same time. Plagiarism has been a hot topic around the end of 2023 and this seems like a good contribution to that conversation.
(divorcing) White Supremacy Culture
A book, available free online, analyzing the culture of white supremacy and how it reshapes our organizations, our communities, and ourselves.

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Project Gutenberg
Ebooks with expired U.S. copyrights. If you wanna read an old book or a less old book that didn't get its copyright renewed or something, you might be able to find it here.
Standard Ebooks
A smaller collection of out-of-U.S.-copyright ebooks, intended to be definitive, high-quality editions.
IMSLP: Petrucci Music Library
A collection of U.S.-public-domain music scores. If you ever have a hankering for a bit of early 20th century dance music arranged for solo piano, you know where to go.
viscountexx.buzz
the webbed page for many in faer vtuber role as the faerie Viscountexx(Vi-count-ex) of Chitin(Kai-tin). you may not have faer names. fae stream and also make online things. we are fans and friends of faer.
Blondihacks
Quinn Dunki is an impressively knowledgeable maker. She is most famous as a YouTube machinist, but we really enjoyed going through her blog posts, such as the Veronica series about making a homebrew 6502-based computer.
Ben Eater
Do we distrust anyone who openly accepts donation in bitcoin in 2024? We very much do. That important note having been made, Ben Eater's breadboard computer series on YouTube have been tremendously educational for us specifically, giving us a much clearer understanding of what a computer is and how simple ones work.
James Sharman (Youtube) (Sharman Patreon)
Exploring the world of homebrew computing led us on to James Sharman's pipelined 8-bit computer project. It's going very slowly - there's well over a hundred videos about it - but we love the approach it takes, focusing on building every part - CPU, VGA card, UART, everything - rather than using stock components.

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"Against Access" by John Lee Clark
An eloquent essay about abled people focusing on 'access' to abled-people stuff in a way which isn't about the autonomy and self-actualization of disabled people.
Avoiding traumatizing images/video on social media (and dealing with them when you have to see them)
A guide to dealing with traumatic shit on social media. Sometimes the internet is horrible.
"Imagine you had a friend..." by Crommunist
An extended description of a very specific kind of harassment, abuse, and monstering campaign that some will sometimes engage in when told they did a bad thing. Been there, it's a bad time.
why all manmade "ma pona" suck
An essay about a common fantasy in the Toki Pona community, of the theoretically-utopian society where everyone speaks the constructed language they love, and the colonialist, racist, etc. tropes that quickly follow.
"Meet Me in the Woods" by Theo Wilde
A transformation webcomic. Very queer, pretty fun, pretty art, pretty early on as of . We're hype.
Dead Winter by Allison Shabet
A zombie webcomic, telling a zombie apocalypse story where people come together and find ways to rise to the challenge, and being an asshole is a good way to get killed. It's been going for ages, and while there are some artistic decisions early on that are a bit ... gaze-y, it's also very cool and has whole animated sequences?? It's a good time.

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