Ron's Links Page

See also my bookmarks at Backflip and my online hotlist, both of which are unannotated, but probably more current, with thousands of links.

...with several links to various computing-centered pages, mostly Mac-oriented.

Mac sites

• INFO-MAC HyperArchive ROOT ... a mirror of Sumex, the central repository of Mac software on the Internet.
• U. Mich. Archive ... the WWW front end for the famous and beloved U. Mich. site. Not as nicely organised as the Info-Mac HyperArchive above, but still better than trying to FTP in...
• TidBITS ... a great e-newsletter for Mac enthusiasts. Also has links to various info files, FAQs, and shareware.
• MacTech ... all the articles ever published in MacTech Magazine. I eventually bought the excellent CD-ROM. More proof that you can make money by giving things away for free.
• Macintosh TeX/LaTeX Software Page .... so you've got FunnelWeb on your Mac but don't know where to go to get TeX and LaTeX? This is where.

Programming

• FunnelWeb ... an unbelievably NEAT tool, available free on many platforms. FunnelWeb is a versatile "literate programming" preprocessor that is completely language-independent -- you can use it to program in C, Java, BASIC, Intercal... It will produce documentation in TeX, and in some versions, LaTeX and even HTML. But it's more; FunnelWeb's author uses it in a lucrative business designing WWW pages. It's great for designing pages with a consistent look and feel. I used it for this site. I may eventually upload my own compiled binary of FunnelWeb 3.05AC, a souped-up FunnelWeb, for the Mac.
• The BASIC Archive ... This is a, if not the, central repository for BASIC info on the Web.

... which hath not much to do with tight white polyester pants, but everything to do with Discordianism and SubGenius: the search for SLACK.

Discordianism

• HyperDiscordia and Principia Discordia ... two very good online versions of the Principia Discordia, plus. HAIL FUCKIN' ERIS ALREADY!

SubGenius

• SubGenius.com ... more than you wanted to know about "Bob". The OFFICIAL SubGenius site, run by Ivan Stang. Plus lots of "free" software (you don't want to know what you're giving up in exchange).

Related Heresies and Mutations:

• The Universal Life Church ... The original ordain-everybody-by-mail-for-free church. You too can become a legally-ordained minister, online even.

... links to science that manages to squeeze into the Conspiracy's paradigm, but that's still out there.

Better, Faster, Stronger...

• Anders Transhuman Page ... Again, Anders has collected a terrific bunch of links to stuff all over the Web designed to bring down the Gods' wrath upon us for our hubris.
• Extropy Institute ... I don't really agree with their ethics or politics, but you'll find a lot of gonzo stuff here.
• "Functional Mods and Antique Rockers" ... an essay of mine on self-modification from Singularity #1.

Miscellaneous

• "Cylex" by Antoinette LaFarge ... one of the best pieces of futurism I have ever read, dressed up as a piece of science fiction. A MUST-READ.
• Principia Cybernetica Web ... an attempt to make a system out of Systems Theory. Great stuff.

...If you live in an area like Kentucky where finding books on magick is almost an esoteric art in itself, you might appreciate this listing of bookstores, publishers, and book distributors on the Web that specialise in the occult.

Pride of Place

...goes to two particular favourites of mine.

• As You Like It Library ... a non-profit subscription "metaphysical library" here in Seattle. 12,000 volumes. Priceless. NOTA BENE: They will handle subscriptions by mail, so you can use this library even if you live nowhere near it. I urge you to support this library. (I no longer have a link to this library. Does anyone know what the URL is?)
• Kessinger Publishing produces fine reproductions of many WAY, WAY out-of-print books on topics occult. These are books from the 19th and early 20th centuries (and some from even earlier) that are simply unobtainable anywhere else. You can download an Adobe Acrobat file of their catalog of over 1000 reprints at their site. A must-see.

Other Good Bets

• Thaddeus Books ... I've dealt with Thaddeus, and I'm very happy with them. Even if you don't have a credit card, they'll ship your book as soon as you tell them the check is in the mail. What service! What trust in the human spirit! And they have good taste in occult books too. Tell Jerry where you saw the link.

Religious

• Juxta Publishing ... a Baha'i publisher out of Hong Kong.
• Judaism.com ... corny name, great selection of Judaica (books and online resources). Plenty of obscure Kabbalistic stuff. Just one question: JUDAISM.COM? What's next, Romancatholicism.com? (Southernbaptists.com wouldn't surprise me a bit...)

Miscellaneous

• Llewellyn Online ... Yup, it's Llewellyn Publications. You either love 'em or you hate 'em. Me, I love 'em, what with their publishing great Qabalistic compendia like The Key of It All. I've even come to love some of the stuff I used to hate, like the "Llewellyn Practical Guide" series, which actually conceals a great deal of useful knowledge in cloying baby-talk for non-magicians.
• Magitech [CREW] ... You've seen the crude, hand-lettered ads in magick zines, now see the website! Overpriced, badly-printed books and outrageously expensive "radionics" devices. Personally, I wouldn't, as the saying goes, trust this bunch further than I could comfortably spit them. (Remember, this is a CREW link.)
• Abaxion [CREW] ... Looks like miscellaneous occult books and supplies with a specialty in Wicca. (Review forthcoming.)

The Dark Side of the Force

• Atomic Books ... dark, "hip" books.
• Feral House ... really, really dark "hip" books.
• PolyEster ... dark "hip" books from Australia.
• Loompanics ... you wouldn't believe some of the stuff Loompanics publishes. A publisher that lives by the First Amendment, God bless it. Mostly not occult, but it does have some, and you just have to learn about "The Best Book Catalog in the World"!
• Luxor Press, Inc. [CREW] ... Thelema.

Non-Usan Bookstores

Anders Sandberg pointed out that this page is mostly good for people in North America. For easy access, here's a grouping of occult bookstores outside the U.S., most on other continents.

• Juxta Publishing ... Hong Kong... see "Religious."
• PolyEster ... Australia ... See "Dark Side of the Force."

... full of links on topics surrounding interactive fiction, collaborative writing, and computer-generated art.

Adventure-Style IF:

... by which I mean interactive fiction in the mode of Infocom (e.g. Zork, Trinity, and A Mind Forever Voyaging)

• Inform Programming ... Although I am partial to TADS, Inform is the compiler/language which comes closest to TADS in power and flexibility.
• OZ Project Home Page ... these people are tying together command-line parsing with emotional representation, knowledge bases, and other AI techniques to bring IF to the next level.

Hypertext-Style IF:

... the other main branch of the interactive fiction tree, as exemplified by Michael Joyce's Afternoon and Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden.

• Hyperizons ... The premier survey of hyperfiction links on the Web.
• Stuart Moulthrop ... one of the foremost writers of the Eastgate School. Highlights on this page are excerpts from Victory Garden, and Stuart's hypertextual guide to Alan Moore's comix series Watchmen.
• Eastgate Systems Home Page ... speaking of the Eastgate School, here's Eastgate's home page.

Computer-Generated Writing:

... stochastic text generation and other techniques à l'Oulipo.

• Computer Generated Writing ... the premier page for this stuff.
• Creative Virtue Press ... from the moderator of the Paramind Computer-Generated Writing mailing list.

Collaborative Writing:

• The Superguy Home Page ... a collaborative writing project that's been going for years and years, centered in a superhero universe.
• The Commonplace Book ... Add your favorite quotations from anywhere in the literary ideosphere.
• WAXweb ... a collaborative annotation of the cult film WAX, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees. Includes video snippets.

Miscellaneous

• Twisty Pages ... This site has a lot of info on both "adventure" and "hypertext" IF. Not to be missed is the really cool HTML index to ftp.gmd.de, the rec.arts.int-fiction main archive.

...a bunch of links to science that the New Inquisition (TM) branch of the Conspiracy would consider slightly, ah, suspect ...

• Cold Fusion Technology Homepage ... the technology that wouldn't die. Research is still going on in hundreds of labs (at, e.g., would you believe, Toyota?) and the effect has been reproduced. Learn more about CF on this MIT homepage, home[boy|girl].
• The Kooks Museum ...a great site from Donna Kossy, author of Feral House's Kooks and editor of the zine of the same name. No longer being maintained.
• Arkuat's Meme Workshop ... Memetics seems to be falling into disrepute. I don't care. It doesn't have to be Technocracy-approved SCIENCE to be useful.

... a page around topics magickal (i.e. Qabalah and such, as opposed to prestidigitation).

Magickal Orgs:

• The Servants of the Light ... The only one of the dozen or so Golden Dawn offshoots I wrote to who gave me the impression of having something solid behind them. They claim it's because they're a "contacted school." Highly recommended.

Pagan and Mythological Pages:

• Gnosis Archive ... a great site for Gnostics veritable and manque.

Miscellaneous Magick-Related:

• Anders Mage Page ... Anders Sandberg does it again! This is actually a page for the role-playing game Mage, but there is a great deal of actual magickal knowledge here.
• Magical Blend Online... Yep, it's the online home of Magical Blend magazine. You can get some, but not all, articles from issues of the magazine here.
• The Monroe Institute ... Home of Robert Monroe, author of the groundbreaking Journeys Out of the Body and inventor of Hemi-Sync technology. This should almost go in my Mad Science Links.

... Planlingvoj (pron. plan-LING-voy) is Esperanto for "planned languages," languages that, like Esperanto, were consciously designed (including Loglan/Lojban, Klingon, Elvish, and many less well-known.)

Esperanto Pages:

• Esperanto.net Multlingva Inform-Centro ... the Esperanto.net Multilingual Information Center is the best place to go to get Esperanto information in dozens of different languages, including English. Click on your country's flag to get information in your language.
• Esperanto Access ... one of the best places to go for Esperanto information in English. Contains a large library of Esperanto texts.

Loglan/lojban resources

• Loglan.org ... A language based on propositional logic that was featured in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
• Lojban.org ... Lojban is a spin-off of Loglan, but the lojban people have the better-developed language.

"Imaginary" languages:

... the distinction between "imaginary" conlangs and the other kind being that "imaginary" ones were created for science fiction or fantasy, or are otherwise supposed to be the language of an imaginary people.

• The Klingon Language Institute ... the home for 20th century Terran study of the language and culture of everybody's favourite Star Trek aliens.
• The Tolkien Language List Archive ... Quenya, Sindarin, the Black Speech, Westron, Khuzdul, all the languages of Tolkien's Middle Earth are discussed here. PLUS, plenty of other Tolkien links.

Miscellaneous:

• Constructed languages ... Richard Kennaway's page of miscellaneous "conlang" resources. Very good.
• Micronations on the Web ... I prefer to call them "nanonations" because they generally have ~1/10^9 of the world's population as citizens. The U.S. Government calls them "ephemeral states." Most people call them "imaginary countries." Whatever you call them, this is the page for them. Some of these nanonations have their own languages, like Talossan.

...Polyticks: noun, from Greek poly, "many," and English ticks, "blood-sucking insects," hence "many blood-sucking insects." Here's a page to help us get them off our backs.

• LETSystems Home Page ... Alternative currency systems. Simple!
• Oceania: The Atlantis Project ... Money, hell, these people are starting their OWN COUNTRY! Sure, they're all snot-nosed little capitalists, but I'll probably at least VISIT.... Sadly, this site seems not to have been updated since 1995. See also Planlingvoj Links for "nanonations" with their own languages.
• The Libertarian Party ... what would a Usan polytickal page be without a link to a prominent Usan "third" party? Also capitalists, but their platform is comparatively sane.
• Positive Revolution FAQ ... how to do good without doing harm at the same time.

...A page of reference materials, as if everything on the Web weren't reference material.

• The On-line Books Page ...one of the many pages on the Web for locating electronic books; this is the best one, methinks, and will get you to most of the others.
• Everton Publishers ... A page for genealogy buffs; I'm just starting for the seventh time.
• Open Directory Project ... a grand index of the Web. And it's free (as in free speech).

...Sophia: Greek for "Wisdom", the ancient Gnostic goddess. This is a page for philosophers (lovers of Sophia) and those who worship Her, knowingly or not.

Philosophy

• Boethius: Consolation of Philosophy ... the classic medieval text. Sophia Herself makes an appearance as the Goddess Philosophy.
• The Human Evasion by Celia Green ... someone once wondered why students of David Hume (who denied the existence of causality and said people are merely "bundles of perception") don't bark like dogs and leave their conferences via the windows. Celia Green asks why most people don't take seriously the idea that the Universe might vanish suddenly like a soap bubble, or even address the Question of Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing. The answer, she says, is a social construction called "sanity".
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ... a burgeoning philosophical resource, with sophisticated articles on many topics, with more on the way.
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy ... much like the Stanford project, but articles are generally shorter and of lesser quality. Still, covers some topics that the Stanford Encyclopedia does not.

Religion

• Christian Classics Ethereal Library ... not just a repository for the Pillars of the Church; also contains priceless mystical classics like The Cloud of Unknowing.
• World Scripture: A Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts ... a classic compilation of cross-cultural expositions of the Perennial Philosophy.

Miscellaneous

• Science Without Bounds: A Synthesis of Science, Religion and Mysticism ... interesting attempt to synthesise, well, what it says. The entire book is available online.
• The Six Enneads by Plotinus ... the Neo-Platonic classic. Long -- really long. Print it out.

...weird sex, weird sex, whatcha gonna do? Sometimes you get tired of vanilla and you want ice cream flavours Baskin-Robbins just ain't got, like Jalapeño, Guinness Stout, or green tea...

Edutainment

• Summum Bonum Amen Ra ... An organisation that has been, you might say, masturbating religiously since 1975.
• You'll probably learn more, er, handy information about masturbation at these two sites, though: Jackinworld.Com (I was going to print out all the ways you can masturbate on this site, but I ran out of paper), and Let's Masturbate (yes, let's!).
• XXXenophile Online ... the coolest erotic comic books I have ever read, bar none. Science fiction/fantasy with a wonderful wicked sense of humour, great illoes, and really hot, imaginative stories. There's also a XXXenophile collectible card game -- picture a pornographic Magic: The Gathering.
• The Journal Entries ... The complete set, from way back. Has a lot in common with XXXenophile, above. Larry Niven actually had his lawyers send a cease-and-desist letter to the author (Elf Sternberg) for using his furry sapient felinoid aliens (think bipedal tigers), the Kzinti. Now they're called Felinzi. Niven lambasted Elf for bad writing, but the Journal Entries are a godzillion times better than the crap Niven is cranking out these days. Keep counting your money, Larry; at least Elf still has a soul. (Oh oh; this page seems to be down at the moment. Maybe it's moving somewhere else. Try a Google search for "elf sternberg".)
• Adult Interactive Fiction Archive ... Remember Infocom? Remember Zork? Remember Colossal Cave? Now imagine them with sex. This site also has a section on programming adult IF. (For information on non-erotic IF, see my IF Links.)

  Origami Underground ... Erotic origami? Yup. Man. Weird. Some of it is even animated.

Hardware

• Blowfish ... the best sex store of which I am aware. They sell some really unusual stuff, like something called the Violet Wand. This is a sex toy that employs electrical stimulation: you can charge up your whole body so that when you touch your partner(s), sparks fly. Well, there aren't sparks, really, but you get the idea.
• Salon and MSNBC have articles about teledildonic devices: what are basically vibrator controllers that attach to a ports on a your computer and increase or decrease vibration based on keywords in a chat window or some other command given remotely. I used to have a link to a company that offered one of these things here, but "fly-by-night" doesn't begin to describe these outfits -- try "fly at noon."
• Realdoll ... probably the most realistic sex doll on the planet -- not a blowup doll. I have to say I find them, er... attractive myself, and I'm not into dolls. If they ever give these things AI, Goddess help the human race; we'd better hope we have human cloning by then.
• Sybian and Venus 2000 ... the Sybian is a ridable phallic vibrator, and the Venus 2000, well, it's "a high-tech one-of-a-kind, hands-free masturbation machine with a high powered stroking action that will give you a natural and memorable orgasm. It is easy to use: simply insert your penis into a lubricated, flexible, natural gum rubber liner inside a plastic tube. Turn on Venus... and adjust it to the stroking length and speed you prefer." Kind of like an automatic Austin Powers Swedish-made penis enlarger pump (baby).
• The Bungee Sexperience ... a sling you attach to your ceiling that lets you experience something like zero-gee right down here on Earth.

Kinks

(or, it takes all kinds in the Age of AIDS)

• Welcome to alt.sex.plushies! ... Someone I know lost his virginity to a sock puppet. Fortunately, to the best of my knowledge, it didn't scar him for life. These folks it did. The complexity of their subculture is astonishing. And for some reason practically all of them have very strong feelings for Mattel's Pocahontas raccoon puppet...
• WARRIORS! ... This guy takes the pictures of those pneumatic valkyries they have in Penthouse, and photoshops them with brow ridges and hi-tech weaponry so they look like Klingons. (He does it for men too, using bodybuilder photos.) I mean really! This takes "Get a life!" where no man has gone before! (Don't tell anyone I kept a couple of the photos myself.) Warning: This site can be slooowww...

Misc

• Yahoo! Companies : Sex ... mostly vanilla retailers, but a lot of the commercial links on this page were filtered out from this list.

What if legislators who passed unconstitutional laws were fined or imprisoned? Think about it.

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