Nautilus

Ever wanted to exercise more, but didn’t know how/didn’t have a plan/were overwhelmed by the insane number of choices online/no money?

Look at darebee. All of their workout plans are FREE, come with timers and checkboxes right on the page, and even better, ARE OFTEN RPG THEMED so you can fucking role play while you exercise wtff (and yes, the story and the workout changes with your choices)

They have programs for if you only want to do seated exercises, programs if you don’t want to get on the floor, and programs for ALL levels of fitness, including injury recovery.

Plus, if like me, you get anxious about making sure you’re doing it right, they have a full free library of videos for each exercise.

AND ALL THIS SHIT IS NOT JUSTS FREE, IT'S AD-FREE

Go forth and defeat your enemies

Scientists Prove That Experimental Animation Can Cure Social Media Brain Rot

Watching only seven minutes of experimental film or animation can help enhance creativity and act as an antidote to brain rot caused by mindless YouTube video consumption, according to a recent study conducted by University of California, Santa Barbara scientists. According to a story in The Hollywood Reporter, researchers Jonathan and Madeleine Gross came up with these findings as they were designing an experiment on creativity.

They discovered that levels of creativity for the people watching the experimental films were immediately higher compared to those watching YouTube videos, which didn’t change at all. The random sample were more open to seeing the world in new ways after watching the films. Researchers split nearly 500 random participants into two groups: those who watched the animated shorts (which came from the Short of the Week platform) and those who watched the viral video content, described as “home-video-style domestic antics.”

After watching the experimental shorts, the subjects were asked to read a five-sentence short story and also sought to measure subjects “openness” and “conceptual expansion” — the researchers’ terms for a flexible, multimodal sort of thinking — by asking them to note connections between seemingly different concepts. The subjects who watched the challenging films scored much higher on both metrics.

As Madeleine Gross explains, “What it said to us is that we enjoy these kinds of [social media videos, cat clips, etc.] videos but they aren’t doing much for our brains. And the challenging shorts were having an immediate positive impact.”

Jan Švankmajer

- Jabberwocky (1971)

- Dimensions of Dialogue (1982)

- Darkness, Light, Darkness (1989)

- Food (1992)

Ivan Maximov

- From Left to Right (1989)

- 5/4 (1990)

- Provincial School (1992)

- Bolero (1993)

- Wind Along the Coast (2004)

- Rain Down from Above (2007)

- Tides to and Fro (2010)

Igor Kovalyov

- Hen, His Wife (1990)

- Andrei Svislotskiy (1991)

- Bird in a Window (1996)

- MILCH (2005)

Felix Colgrave

- The Elephant’s Garden (2013)

- Fever The Ghost (2014)

- Double King (2017)

- DRY RUN (2018)

My faves in case you need any recommendations. (Some of these are really not appropriate for children, so keep that in mind lol).

The Dark Crystal - 1982 - the Skeksis will give you nightmares. I am honestly very proud of the remake for being just as disturbing if not more so than the original.

Watership Down - 1978- NOT FOR CHILDREN - Jesus Christ why did so many of our parents show us this film at a formative age? It's all about trauma and death and displacement and there's literal blood and murder. Not a G Rated Film. Still, it's very good. Loads better than that CGI remake from a decade ago.

The Secret Of NIMH - 1982 - Incredible movie. Minor disturbing elements. Probably my favorite on the list. It's just a great adventure story with real world issues (animal experimentation, mental health problems, disabilities) and there's even a lovely romance. Highly recommend.

Legend - 1985- This film is just straight up disturbing. Yes, there's a lot of beautiful shots of unicorns and sexy, 20-something year old (insane Scientology wack job) Tom Cruise and gorgeous Mia Sara, but there's also torture, madness and literally the Devil (Tim Curry is the entire reason you should watch this film)

Labyrinth - 1986 - I only really have two words. David. Bowie. My 10 year old self found out about a lot of burgeoning kinks while watching that man prance around in eyeliner and a codpiece. It's a wonderful adventure as well - if you ignore the blatant romantic and sexual tension between Bowie and an underage Jennifer Connelly (none of us could)

The NeverEnding Story - 1984 - Lots of disturbing imagery in this one! The Nothing was fucking terrifying, and the creatures in this world seemed uniformly creepy, but still incredibly well done. Love the adventure of it.

The Princess Bride - 1987 - Not technically a kids film maybe? Lots of adult themes and adult jokes, but safe for kids imo. I adored it and still do. Incredible performances by Cary Elwes and Mandy Patinkin. R.O.U.S, Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya! (need I say more?)

The Last Unicorn - 1982 - A beautiful film with stunning representations of innocence, good and evil. Just gorgeous really. I should rewatch it as it's been 20 years or so.

Adding a couple...

LadyHawk.

A romance / Action film about a knight and a maiden who are cursed. Her to transform into a hawk during the day & him into a wolf at night. Forever keeping them apart.

DragonSlayer

A coming of age tale about a wizard apprentice who must save a village from a dragon & the sacrifice lottery the village has established around it.

(Rare example of 1980s genderfuckery)

Willow

LOTR before we ever thought a LOTR film would ever be possible. You've probably seen this one, but just in case.

The Flight of Dragons

Transplanted into the body of a dragon a scientist must come to terms with magic, even while explaining it.

Krull

Classic adventure story severely undervalued in its time.

Some of the creepiest spider stop motion to ever exist.

Also, The Last Unicorn, The Princess Bride, Labyrinth, and *ESPECIALLY* The Dark Crystal are some of my all-time favorite film scores.

---

Well Ubuntu is a wonderful and free OS you can get to replace it, but in the mean time I usually recommend these two edits to make windows run faster.

ADJUST ADVANCED SETTINGS

search for 'View Advanced System Settings' and click on the control panel view that pops up.

You should be in the Advanced tab, click on the Settings... button.

You will probably see all these turned on. TURN THEM OFF! You will probably want 'Smooth edges of screen fonts' to stay on since the font gets very pixelated without it. I also leave 'Show thumbnails instead of icons' since I personally like seeing image previews in File Explorer.

Your windows will feel much different after turning lots of these off, come back here and make adjustments if needed.

Ok second edit

DISABLE WEB SEARCH

This requires what is know as a RegEdit. These directions will only add one Key:Value DWORD pair via the PowerShell terminal. But do know, deleting the wrong thing in Registry Editor can break your computer. We will be creating this Key with PowerShell so it will not delete anything in your Registry but if it makes you uncomfortable then please skip this step!

Windows added a bunch of behind the scene web searches all over the place, when you click the start button, Web Search! when you open file explorer, Web Search! What is it web searching? who knows! but it lags anything that interacts with it, which is everything, Thanks Windows.

You can turn this web search off by making this registry edit.

First search for PowerShell > Open

Once the terminal opens type in:

Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search" -Name "BingSearchEnabled" -Value 0

Mine has fancy color coding, yours might not!

This Set-ItemProperty command will create a new Key Item at location "HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search" inside our Registry, it will call this key "BingSearchEnabled" and set its value to 0 (the zero value turns it off).

Reboot your computer and the new Key will load into your windows and Look At That no more unnecessary web searching happening in the background.

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.

The story is told primarily through the liner notes that come with the CDs of each act, and we’ve been waiting for Act III for literally over sixteen years, since 2009. They released each song digitally on Bandcamp every week for a few months during the last quarter of 2025, and we hadn’t gotten any of the liner notes until MAGfest, where they were selling the CD physically with the libretto.

I won’t get into the actual ending details because there’s still a bit of an embargo, but some people thought it was really abrupt and sudden. It was abrupt. It was fucking scary! You should listen to the whole album on Bandcamp! I kind of loved it, but there were some plot threads that went unresolved. On top of that, years ago, there was a song called The Fight (which is a much more uplifting song than the ending we got) that they outright said was part of Act III— but it never showed up on the album. They said during a Twitch stream a few weeks ago that there was almost nothing left on the cutting room floor, so why was The Fight excluded?

So people started to do the classic thing that usually never ever works— theorize that there was another secret part they weren’t showing us.

Then, MAGfest people were buying the MAGfest Power magazine (which is a really cool magazine about all the stuff to see at the con) and noticed in an interview with Panther and Commander that they were dropping literal actual ARG hints. Along with that, they were selling bracelets with a cipher on them. Most of being in the Protomen Discord during MAGfest was watching people run around the Gaylord hotel trying to figure out what the fuck was going on before the Act III performance— there was a scavenger hunt that ended with one guy finding a jar of Ovaltine?— and you can read the whole thing about the ARG here. Spoilers for the libretto part of the ARG. It’s so fucked up.

I literally met the band at the meet & greet with my friend Veg, we asked Reanimator, “hey, what’s going on with Act III? Is that it?”

He tells us to “look at the disc”. Veg pulls it out, looks at the back without the design. Reanimator goes “no, no, the other side”.

Yeah alright man. Just cut off half of your logo like it’s only part one of two. Just cut your logo in half for your “final” album. Sure

‘The Magic of Jingle Sleigh Heights’