Links
Articles
Some articles I found of interest.
- “Is Japan Still The Future?” Wired Magazine, September 2001. A now-nostalgic overview of Japan’s technological place in popular culture as it was then.
- “Midnight in Moscow,” Vanity Fair, July 2006. “Inside Moscow’s nightclub scene.” A now-oddly-nostalgic tour of the hedonistic days after the end of the USSR, when oligarches went wild.
- “Let’s Die Together – Why is anonymous group suicide so popular in Japan?,” The Atlantic, May 2007. (Local copy)
- GQ:
- “The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit,” 5/8/2014. “For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend – or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real. Until one day last year, the hermit came out of the forest.”
- “The Last Glimpses of California’s Vanishing Hippie Utopias,” 9/11/2021. “Half a century ago, a legion of idealists dropped out of society and went back to the land, creating a patchwork of utopian communes across Northern California. Here, the last of those rogue souls offer a glimpse of their otherworldly residences – and the tail end of a grand social experiment.”
- “Searching for Susy Thunder,” The Verge, 26/1/2022. Profile of a mysterious 1980s female hacker.
- New Yorker magazine:
- Climbing the Redwoods by Richard Preston, 14-21/2/2005.
- “Last Call – A Buddhist monk confronts Japan’s suicide culture.” 17/6/2013.
- “The Really Big One – The Earthquake That Will Devastate the Pacific Northwest,” The New Yorker, 20/7/2015. An article speculating on the consequences of the predicted next major earthquake in the region.
- “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” January 30, 2017 Issue.
- “The White Darkness,” February 2018. “A solitary journey across Antarctica.”
- Outside Online magazine:
- “Life’s Swell,” Fall 1998/23/8/2002. “To be a surfer girl in Maui is to be the luckiest of creatures. It means you're beautiful and tan and ready to rip. It means you've caught the perfect dappled wave and are on a ride that can't possibly end.”
- “Raising the Dead,” 1/8/2005. “At the bottom of the biggest underwater cave in the world, diving deeper than almost anyone had ever gone, Dave Shaw found the body of a young man who had disappeared ten years earlier. What happened after Shaw promised to go back is nearly unbelievable – unless you believe in ghosts.”
- “Quakenami! Why the Pacific Northwest Is Doomed,” 25/8/2011. On the predicted megaquake that is due to devastate the region.
- “Open Your Mouth and You’re Dead,” 25/1/2012. On the extreme sport of freediving.
- “The Man Who Runs 365 Marathons a Year,” 29/4/2020. “One day, Michael Shattuck started to run. He liked it, so he ran longer, sometimes for as many as 65 hours each week. He never wanted to stop. What was he running from?”
- “Shutting Themselves In,” NYT, 15/1/2006. Profile of Japan’s hikikomori, “shut-ins” or recluses. (Local copy)
- “The End of Retirement – When you can’t afford to stop working,” Jessica Bruder for Harper’s Magazine, August 2014, on car- or van-dwelling retirees in the USA; later expanded into a compelling book, Nomadland, and same-titled movie.
- “The Avenue of Revolt,” The Passenger, 2020. On the “Yellow Vests” (gilets jaunes) protests in France.
- “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” Marc Andreessen, 16/10/2023. An emphatic rebuke to the anti-technology sentiment that has become prevalent in society in the 2020s.
- Cats musical: my only favorite musical (no apologies!), so a few extracts from various books.
Personal sites
An eclectic selection of other personal sites. Many of these are “old-fashioned” (by modern Web standards) non-commercial “indie” (independent) sites that have been on the Web for many years; they reflect the personality of their creators. I don’t necessarily agree with all their views on some topics (mainly politics). More topical personal sites are on my Web design page.
- * Front Page – www.arachnoid.com: Paul Lutus
- Beardy Guy Musings: Denny Henke
- Bill Dietrich’s home: sailing, computers, Spain, Linux
- Camera Tim: Tim Seifert’s website
- D. Moonfire: self-published fantasy author.
- dan.info – Dan’s Sites: Daniel R. Tobias
- Davar Web Site: Vladimir Veytsel
- David (Earl) Pinero’s Web Place
- Felix at Home: Felix Plesoianu
- Greg ‘Groggy’ Lehey, “a retired Unix kernel hacker.” (The original 2006 article where I learned of him!)
- gunlaug.com welcomes you
- Gwern.net: Gwern Branwen
- Ian Fieggen’s Site
- IT and communication – Datatekniikka ja viestintä: Jukka Korpela
- Jason Journals: “This is the personal blog of Jason McFadden: Gen X, Texan, Husband, Dad, Geek, Blogger, Believer.”
- Jeffersonian’s Home Page: “Welcome to my home page. My two overriding passions are the cause of Liberty, especially in defense of the Constitution & Bill of Rights of the United States of America; and the collection & study of weapons, especially firearms.” Link is now an Internet Archive version as he disappeared from the Internet after May 2022 (sadly, I found out in 2024 that he died on 22/5/2022 – see my 17/1/2024 Journal entry). I missed reading his blog and story, so I took the liberty of uploading some what I had saved of his site to a Neocities site: a blog, RIFLEMAN’S JOURNAL from 2002 to 2022, and stories from a fictional world, The Jeffersonian Republic project. (I did not upload most images as there are a lot of them.) Previous archived URLs the site was hosted at: www.iguanasoft.com/~jeffersonian/; jeffersonian.therealgunguys.com.
- Kev Quirk: “If you’re at all interested in web design, blogging, technology, watch collecting or homesteading, there’s probably something for you here.”
- LJPUK: Lee Peterson. “By day I work in IT as a Senior Technical Solutions Architect and the rest of the time I am creating stuff I am passionate about.”
- Lynx Vilden: a woman who practices Stone Age living and skills. Some articles about her are collected locally. A book chapter extract: Back to the Stone Age.
- M. Alan Kazlev – “esotericist, palaeontology nerd, veganarchist, and hopeful scifi-weird writer.”
- Manu – I write: Manuel Moreale
- Mark Irons’ Home Page (note: Mark Irons is, sadly, deceased, passing away in 2012)
- The Moonspeaker: C. Osbourne
- Netigen: “These are dispatches from the in-between, where memories shimmer and fade like half-forgotten dreams. Here, in the space between yesterday and tomorrow, I try to make sense of it all.”
- Nice Marmot: Dave Rogers
- Ran Prieur: “I am known on the Internet as somebody who writes about dropping out of society, the critique of civilization, sustainability and the collapse. I'm a softcore doomer. I write about why this entire society is unbalanced and a large mistake and why the mistake is ending and how you can, how we can get out of it. How we can live better.” (Also mirrored to an independent archive, and at Archive.org.)
- Richard Stallman’s Personal Site: Free Software Movement advocate.
- Robot Wisdom: Jorn Barger’s ecclectic site, sadly no longer active.
- starbreaker.org: “rock operatic speculative fiction (and more) by Matthew Graybosch.”
- swankivy.com: “Ivy’s personal homepage. Original speculative fiction writing, poetry, short stories, lots of pictures, doodles & art, my webcomic, vocals, creative stuff, lots of links, and fun pranks to pull on others!”
- Ulillillia City: what was the somewhat eccentric personal site of Nick Smith (now Ryan Kadrian since 2023) (an interview) His website is no longer active, unfortunately, but he has a Facebook page and a Patreon. He has autistic traits, but he seems to be doing much better with his life.
Stories
Some short stories that I liked.
- “Blind Perseus” by Angus McIntyre
- A Colder War: a novelette by Charles Stross: a Lovecraft-influenced story; genuinely creepy!
- “The Days Between” by Allen Steele. On reflection, I don’t feel that spending the rest of one’s life alone on a starship after waking from hibernation too early is necessarily a nightmarish scenario, if you are the solitary type! It is not too much different from spending your life as a hermit or hikikomori (shut-in).
- “The Extra” by Greg Egan: Longevity? Be careful what you wish for.
- “A Full Life” by Paolo Bacigalupi: “A science-fiction story about America in the age of climate change.”
- “Hey, You Down There”: A creepy tale by Harold Rolseth that I first read in a 1981 anthology called Twisters. (See my 31/3/2021 Journal entry.)
- “The Great Moveway Jam” by John Keefauver. The traffic jam from Hell! I read this when it was first published in Omni magazine, March 1979, and it remained in my memory!
- “The Hunters of Pangaea” by Stephen Baxter
- “L’esprit de L’escalier” by Peter M. Ball: a creepy story about stairs leading down into an endless abyss!
- “Lena” by “qntm.” “MMAcevedo is considered by some to be the ‘first immortal’, and by others to be a profound warning of the horrors of immortality.” A darker view of mind uploading.
- “Undone” by James Patrick Kelly
Children’s classics – for when you want to escape back to innocence.
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
Useful sites
Thursday, 5 March 2026 at 11:41:49 am