THE BEST OF THE WWW

Kinda hipster music, but like, good. Pop folk, variously tending towards one or the other.

The internet's favorite stream-of-consciousness jazz-pop artist. His site is notable for including direct mp3 downloads of most songs, its minimal styling, and various extra categories.

H.P. Lovecraft inspired rock, a style growing in perfection by the album...

Evocative electronic music, often in the vicinity of chiptune. Haven't dug deep into his discography but the FEZ OST, having introduced me to it, is deservedly recognized as a banger.

Chamber pop but the hypertalented band kid kind rather than the classicist kind (self-described as "chamber punk" which may be more accurate than pop). Also has a Neocities site with album progress logs and music articles.

Not actually my favorite band despite the Creep button in my footer (it's just the first thing i thought of putting there and i wanted an excuse to link the MTV Beach House incident).

Sharply figured, catchy bedroom pop (i don't know what that genre is, i guess kinda direct lo-fi synthpop pop), or as of their latest album, dense synth dream-pop. Their albums are famously emotional roller coasters for many.

Twas the first decade of the 2000s and a bunch of college guys with diverging aesthetic inclinations decided to be a rock band. They made two pretty good albums. Defunct.

John and John, my favorite band. Beloved for style experimentation and humorous, occasionally obscure lyrics. I'm drawn to them for both those reasons and their less commented upon (except by the band) focus on excellence in "servicing and delivering melody" - or in other words, simply being tunesmiths.

"All: We are the men men men"

Links directly to their album "Auto" because that's the one I'm particularly familiar with right now. Holy heck that's a good album. Kinda improv folk but with eerie electronic touches.

Begun on the MSPA forums, this story quickly reached a level of plot and mechanic complexity greater even than that of Homestuck. Kind of reminiscent of Matt Smith era Dr Who (meant in the good way.) Instantly root-for-able protagonist, excellent horror, dodgy but conceptually fascinating science. Dialogue is a bit jank once the story gains more characters but it was written on a forum ok

Fixed-art comic using premade dinosaur graphics that apparently gave Ryan North's computer a virus when he downloaded them. Aside from the occasional story arc or running gag, serves as a staging ground for the author's random thoughts.

This comic doesn't have an RSS feed and now I've forgotten to read it and I have no idea what's going on!! Ahhh!!! Pretty good science fiction story. Unwinnable wars... technological thefts... missing identity... UPDATE: This User Has Found The RSS Feed

Somehow makes "random equals funny" and "smashing together badass things makes a more badass thing" work. A serious contender for the title of greatest web comic of all time. Occasionally the comedy is overly edgy and grating near the start of the comic but this gets ironed out.

ok I haven't read many of the comics here yet but look at this freakin website! Look at it!!!

Magic school story (uh, science school, rather) where the school is not all that it seems... known for its beginnings as a slice-of-life blended with a longer-form epic plot, the plot has tipped more into epic these days.

Sprite comic with then-unusual animated elements. Very silly and early 2000s but turns surprisingly philosophical by the end.

*sigh* yeah i'm a homestuck. the first two ms paint adventures are dumb and probably not worth reading. Problem Sleuth is a lil edgy but very much worth reading. Homestuck will likely poison your mind for life. It's simultaneously one of the most artistically important web comics ever made and flawed enough to make many readers bootstrap the entire structure of media criticism while thinking about it. It's hilarious, poignant, epic, and medium-breaking, but dare I say... problematic...

Fun in the Arctic Circle with Pokey and friends! Sometimes hard to understand!

Funnier than XKCD

Straddles the line between gag-a-day and space opera. Nowadays not quite as elegant in doing so but still worth checking out, and the original arc is great in the way of concept, humor and character.

Seasonal stories featuring fully characterized GeoCities gifs, including the titular tisTree. As a love letter to GeoCities-era creativity, Taras Tymoshenko appears to have built the whole project using a fairly old-fashioned HTML edifice.

Notable for being composited from old (turn of the 19th century) line illustrations. Infrequently updated nowadays.

A lot of people knock XKCD for being relatively unfunny, "too reddit," etc but it's charming and indisputably a good source of digestible infographics. Also the "What If?" pages completely live up to the promise of their concept.

While the name would suggest this is a superhero parody series, Baman and Piderman share no features with their namesakes besides appearance. The cast quickly grew beyond these two and also are the cutest bunch imaginable. Usually visually minimal, but expressively animated, and characters' bodies often are seen disobey laws of anatomy and physics.

Fever dreams you'd have falling asleep at the computer circa 2009.

Will (fictional) is tasked with completing the platformer his sister made for him before her death. Tone bounces between a high-energy twitch stream and a nearly unfiltered exploration of grief.

Central to much of 2000s online culture. Weird Flash animated comedy sketches in the town of Free Country USA, with a population rarely visibly exceeding a dozen. You will never forget these characters.

Begins as a Petscop-inspired game development log, ends as a machinima puppet show character drama and a growing mythology. The series might be over or there might be a new storyline in the works, it's been unexpectedly revived several times.

The Analog horror O G, introducing what are now worn tropes with an untarnished gravity.

What if the National Park Service used to maintain trails inside a buried Old God? What could possibly have gone wrong?

The story of Paul and the unfinished PS1 game he found. The game and his life are full of compounding mysteries, many answers we are never privy to. Pretty much nothing else feels like watching this.

A main progenitor of surreal, deliberately error-laden animation on YouTube. Visually evolves from MS Paint-core to something a 90s alt cartoon to writhing digital painting. Also makes excellent music under the names PilotRedSun and PiltRedSky.

Mixed-digital-media children's series that teaches the values of ??? ??? and often terrifies stragglers. Beautiful soundtracks. Possibly indoctrination into a metaphysical system of world-as-dream.

What began as a short bureaucratic urban horror piece has become one of the largest creative writing communities on the Web, growing into numerous horror and speculative fiction genres, some of which have reached entirely new depths of expression here. 2747 is my favorite article.

STOCK-A-DOODLE-DOO, MONEYGRUBS. A beautiful tale told through screen recordings of the recovery and coming-of-age of a definitely-late-30s business man. To be clear this isn't actually a financial advice channel (well, The Stockroach attempts to make it such but is usually distracted by his creative talents and personal troubles).

Jon Bois' projections of what football will be like in the future. Beloved and unexpected narrators.

A master of two particular forms of Blender animation: photorealistic stop-motion and 2D composite. Beyond looking gorgeous, his animations are usually of the living-vicariously-through-hilarious-strangers'-relationships comedy type and i live on that stuff.

Eerie and amusing performance art, 3D animation and comedy sketches and horror shorts, often speculative-technological.

Apparently biding his time until he can either break into television or become a rural shopkeep. Brian David Gilbert became recognized for his short musical comedy videos. He continues to create the occasional musical comedy video, though usually less frivolous than of old. Also has put out some excellent horror shorts (not intentionally a jorts joke).

Darn fast implementation. The user can load many famous and interesting patterns, from humble still lifes to a full Turing machine. For those unaware of what the Game of Life is: here's the rules: there's a grid of square tiles that can either be "dead" or alive". At each step, cells with three neighbors come to life and cells with zero or more than three neighbors die.

If you were on YouTube as a kid Cyriak's initially innocent body-horror animation loops may have either traumatized or fascinated you. Luckily I was in the latter category. Most original videos are synchronized to his dissonant, poppy electronic tracks.

Foone Turing wrote the most entertaining and meandering Twitter threads (especially if you're into computer science) before fleeing to Mastodon and they're all compiled and sorted by (main) topic on their wiki. She also links other resources she's created such as the Death Generator, which creates facsimile dialog boxes for dozens of retro games.

Famous for the Wayback Machine, a fairly wide and deep set of snapshots of the whole public Web, containing many treasures otherwise lost. Also hosts a heck of a lot of other media (with very little apparent moderation so be warned about browsing without a set goal.)

If you've ever watched a classical music video on YouTube you've at least seen the thumbnails of musanim's color-coded piano roll videos. Channel creator Stephen Malinowski has been developing this or precursor software since the 1980s and has created thousands of videos in the last two decades, often testing new visualization methods and emphases. There might be a downloadable version somewhere.

Sometimes regarded as the secret mastermind behind all that was good and hilarious during early Web 2.0. At any rate created or co-created a prodigious amount of comedy, horror comedy, meme, meme comedy, meme horror, and meme horror comedy work, a good deal of which has either aged well or has become a beautiful time capsule. Also he is Lemon Demon, an excellent synth-rock act.

Runouw are brothers Robert and Steven Hewitt (but mostly Robert?) and they made some of the greatest Flash games of all time. The most famous is Super Mario 63, but their originals ought to be equally iconic. Especially the Last Legacy games- get you a flash emulator and check them out pronto!

SFW, I promise. Advocacy and a naming system for Base 6 numbers, and various other resources and systematizations of a similar nature.

Shark ISP. Demoscene artist and unfictonalist.

Micrographs of- who knew- drawings hidden by silicon chip designers!

A forum dedicated to Doctor Who prop references, plans, models, and builds, especially the TARDIS exterior and interior (i am fixated on the latter). Not as active as it was before its months offline but still a great resource.

One of the pioneers of the 60s wave of synthesizer music, she created the best-selling "Switched-on Bach" on the Moog and several famous film scores. She later produced innovative works in digital sound synthesis and alternative tuning. Her website details these and other interests and projects, and provides downloadable resources for many. It also remains firmly in the mid-Web 1.0 design tradition, both visually and in its occasional references to the novelty of Web technology.