100 random non-social media websites, 20 offbeat youtube channels to check out, 20 online missions to do instead of scrolling on social media -- the internet is so much bigger than the algorithms would have us think so I hope this inspires you to go out and explore!

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

anyway, here's all of the recommendations from the reblogs. not all of them are text-based, but it's a great mixture of styles. also don't forget the links in the second paragraph of the OP which will take you to FMHY where there are a bunch more games listed.

Games

A Dark Room - text-based science fiction role-playing game.

corru.observer - science fiction adventure web game.

Improbable Island - old-school text adventure game.

Candy Box 2 - incremental clicker game that evolves into RPG.

Arcanum - open source wizard clicker game.

sandspiel, Powder Game, Powder Game 2, The Powder Toy - more sand physics games.

Orb.Farm - fishtank simulator.

Façade - experimental game with a real-time interactive narrative where you try to fix a failing marriage.

The Catacombs of Solaris - trippy art game.

Yume Nikki Online - online version of the surreal classic plus fangames.

The Barncle Goose Experiment - combine element/alchemy game based on antique theories of abiogenesis.

Fallen London - free-to-play text-based open world RPG.

Nested - very unique text-based universe expanding game. described as possibly @orteil42's favorite thing he's ever made.

The Process of Elimination - interactive web novel (by @hypertextdog)

Discworld MUD - multiplayer, text-based, online game (a MUD, or text MMORPG) based on the Discworld books.

Horse Master - surreal text game about training a horse.

EYEZMAZE - flash (RIP) or HTML5-based puzzle games.

You Are Jeff Bezos - text game. spend Jeff Bezos' fortune.

The Password Game - challenging puzzle game where you have to meet password requirements (by neal)

Universal Paperclips - incremental paperclip making game.

Half-Earth - planetary disaster planning game where you try to save the world using socialism.

ChooseYourStory - community-driven website centered on CYOA style story games.

PhD Simulator - random event based text game. make your choice each month and see if you can graduate on time.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - open source roguelike.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - turn-based survival roguelike set in the modern day.

Nethack - open source roguelike originally released in 1987.

FarmRPG - simple, mobile-friendly, text-based farming RPG.

Kingdom of Loathing - browser-based community MMORPG.

PokeRogue - browser-based Pokemon roguelike

Tools

Text Game Builder - works in your browser, with just a little bit of Python (by @grumpygandalf)

Twine - great (free!) tool for making text-based games quickly.

Ink - scripting language for interactive fiction (also free)

Flashpoint Archive - a community effort to preserve games and animations from the web.

PICO-8 - fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs.

Non-Games

Library of Babel - interactive illustration which attempts to simulate what it might be like to browse The Library of Babel.

Superbad - technically not a game, sprawling website full of secrets.

17776 - serialized speculative fiction multimedia narrative about football in the far-future. beautiful, creative, legendary. created by Jon Bois, a legend and one of my favorite writers of all time.

Choice of Games - text-based, choose-your-own-adventure games (interactive fiction). some free-to-play, others can be bought like an ebook.

The Deep Sea - scroll to the bottom of the ocean. encounter the humble squid and his friends (by neal)

Space Elevator - like The Deep Sea, but up instead of down. you can equip your avatar with a scarf (by neal)

Internet Artifacts - an interactive history of the early internet (by neal)

If The Moon Were Only One Pixel - scroll through an accurately scaled model of the universe.

r/incremental_games - reddit community for incremental games.

r/WebGames - reddit community for web games in general.

goodrx is the most well known one, but if i'm trying to find the cheapest price for a patient i compare it to scriptcycle, and use whichever is offering the best price. you just type in the medication (PLEASE make sure you're getting the right drug, dosage, and quantity) and your zip code and they will spit out some offers for you

some pharmacies may have their own discount card to compare to as well!

if you are getting a name brand medication, you can also look at the manufacturer's website to see if they offer any evouchers for you to use too

For anyone who hasn't seen them before, Hidden Search Operators are handy tricks you can use when you're either searching or filtering AO3.

summary: string is a generic way of explaining that you can search AO3 for a specific word that appears in a summary. You can do this from the search bar in the header, from the Any Field box at the top of the Advanced Search form, or from the Search Within Results box at the bottom of the filter menu.

Examples:

summary: Bruce

summary: "Bruce Banner"

summary: Bruce OR summary: Banner OR summary: Hulk

You need to put quotation marks around your search term if it is more than one word. The quotes make sure that the site searches for those two words together.

The other two operators listed work best in the Search Within Results box.

expected_number_of_chapters: 1 will return results where every fic has only 1 chapter currently posted.

You can use expected_number_of_chapters: -1 if you want results where every fic has more than 1 chapter currently posted.

Check it out at afroindex.org! 💛✨

so, ways to get around this:

turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us

don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace

a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)

instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian

including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too

including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue

for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend

when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!

if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache

some online resources and museum collections:

fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples

the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates

costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)

v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece

lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces

nypl digital collection for photographs

national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art

national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific

stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource

wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain

auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!

Pigeon Mail

here’s a roof guide that i use because i used to be shit

i dont remember the source, b/c ive had this for like years, but i suggest messing around with these roofs with different shapes/sizes of buildings

in fact, you can mix and match and have one roof with a side room with a different roof on it

Leo works hard at his iron core of self-control, but it's an open secret that he has a temper, and over the course of the series most of the family cops a lashing at some point, usually when he's stressed or anxious. Leo and Raph have their own occasionally vitriolic love language that leads to them outright throwing down more than once, Mikey earns a couple of sharp dressing downs, and even Splinter takes both a verbal and physical beating during Leo's extended mental breakdown.

At the same time, I've been plumbing the archives over this point specifically and I still can't find a moment where Leo hits Don as an individual with anything heavier than exasperation or a silent Look. He kind of bites at Donnie at the end of Dragons Rising, but even then his anger is spread across the whole team, not aimed at Don alone.

It's all the more interesting because this restraint doesn't quite go both ways! Don's mild-mannered overall, but he absolutely lets it be known when he's tilted into the realms of genuine annoyance: whapping Mikey for messing with the Battleshell, rounding on Raph with a dangerous glint in his eye upon being judged 'cranky', grousing at Splinter about being forced to train on a supposed vacation - and scorching Leo with the sulky underside of Don's injured pride during the same. "There goes Leo, making us look bad again."

(Which is also, incidentally, one of those moments that will always have me arguing for a subtle mean streak being part of 2k3 Don's characterisation. Like, ouch buddy, you know that's a collective sore point.)

It's not favouritism, exactly, but Leo definitely seems to find it easier to extend a measure of grace to Donnie that he really struggles to extend to Raph and himself, and even somewhat to Mikey. Part of it is that Don isn't a 1:1 competitor in the ninja family hierarchy scene; leader isn't a role anyone's expecting of Don, Don himself isn't interested in challenging Leo most of the time, and he so obviously contributes through his tech speciality that he gets cut a fair bit of slack on the ninja front - being excused from training to focus on the crystal problem, copping mild exasperation from Leo at worst for cheating at ninja hide and seek, not getting chewed out by even Angsty Mode Leo (TM) for accidentally bringing an entire spaceship down on their heads.

On top of that, Leo clearly regards Don as the next most 'sensible' brother, especially in those early seasons where Raph's still working through the worst of his impulsive tendencies and they're all still pretty green when it comes to real combat. It's not that he's never anxious about Don (and certainly not like Don never makes a bad call), but he generally just... trusts Don, even beyond the obvious trust earned by being their technical specialist. From where Leo's standing, Don's not going to launch himself into ill-advised fights, and he's probably not going to thoughtlessly poke buttons or goof around at the wrong moment, so he doesn't need to be 'managed' as actively as the other two. He's not quite as serious as Leo, but he's introverted and thoughtful in a way that meshes well with Leo's own tendencies, so Leo just sort of seems to automatically expect that Don's assessments will generally be correct and his decisions sound, because he naturally gels with how Don's forming them. (Of course, this has its own pitfalls - Don insists it's just a cold, so Leo lets it go, and, well... he should have pressed Donnie much harder on that whole situation, as it turns out.)

So yeah, Don gets a lot of grace. And, as noted above, he's not always completely gracious in return: there are a few snide comments, a few unkind laughs and more than a few moments of figuring that asking for permission seems like a lot of hassle when he could just go ahead and check out that blackout or duck off with April into a dangerous side dimension. At the same time, I actually think Don - more than Raph or Mikey - takes Leo's steady shelter for granted. He laughingly remarks in The Shredder Strikes Back that Leo's the one turtle they don't have to worry about; after that's proven rather dramatically incorrect, he tells an unconscious Leo that "you're going to pull through this, I know you are - you have to". Over two months into Leo being sent away to the Ancient One, Don's the one who keeps forgetting he's not there. Leo relies on Don as a veritable fountain of tech and knowledge, but it's partly because Leo's busy doing what he does that Don's been given the space to develop those skills in the first place. Don's often quite taken-aback any time Leo goes down, and always full of wide-eyed relief once his brother's fighting fit again.

It's an understated symbiosis compared the other match-ups you get between the brothers, and the show is strangely reluctant to show the two of them spending much time together as just a pair, but it ends up forming the critical spine of how and why the family makes a successful field team. It helps that we get to see how things go when one or the other is taken out of the picture, and the answer is pretty universally "not well". (Not to say I think it would go much better were either Raph or Mikey removed under similar circumstances, but there's something to be said for the particular practical scaffolding Leo and Don provide in both the day-to-day and in field operations.)

It's interesting also that, although the fandom likes to portray Mikey as able to wrap his big bro Leo around his little finger, in canon it's Don that breaks out the pleading to get his way.

Compare that to Mikey's pleading when he wanted to dress up as the Turtle Titan on a mission, and Leo firmly shut him down

Sure, you could argue they're very different circumstances – one is just keeping a salvaged vehicle (something Don does a LOT), while the other is in the middle of a high stakes mission.

But both have Leo falling heavily into that responsible sibling/leader role. (You can also absolutely see where the fandom gets the "Mama-Nardo" nickname from, when he has lines like these! 😅).

What's interesting is that he doesn't compromise and let Mikey wear even part of his costume, but he does indulge Don (and his brothers know he will – Mikey says Don "has a shiny new train car", not he might 'get' one if Leo lets him keep it. It's already a done deal as far as Mikey sees it).

Then there's how both Leo and Don go into full protector mode when the other is down. Sure, they jump to the aid of their other brothers, too. But there's something almost desperate about how intense they get when either of this duo is seriously hurt.

You've already mentioned The Shredder Strikes Back - Tales of Leo arc. If I might also add to it, Don's the most outwardly concerned about Leo at the farmhouse. That doesn't mean the others aren't worried about him: it's just that Don abandons all pretense and lets his concern show openly.

No jokes. No quips. No funny anecdotes. No hiding his feelings behind humour or anger. He's just all worry for his bro this episode. Maybe that's just who Don is, but I also think Leo's beating shook him to his core, to the point he couldn't distance himself with jokes or temper like the others.

Then you get Leo's poisoning in The Big Brawl, and Donnie's iconic Protectiveness™️ coming through so wonderfully.

And on the other side, you have Leo going full "No matter what it takes" when Don double mutates in S4. Yes, I believe he'd do the same for any of his family in that situation, but Leo is visibly lost without Donnie at the lair.

His stoic facade cracks, and he can't keep the despair from bleeding through, just a little