~ Early Web Links ~

I stumbled across ASCII.co.uk, a sprawling love letter to text-based art and the ASCII standard itself. If you've ever been charmed by a little text drawing in a forum signature or spent too long picking a figlet font, this one's for you.

I stumbled across Blue Moon Falls, a handcrafted site dedicated entirely to getting the most out of Pokémon Red, Blue, Yellow, Gold, Silver, and Crystal. It's packed with original research, custom-built tools, and a level of care that makes you want to dust off your old cartridges immediately.

This week I found the North Raleigh Model Railroad Club's website, a lovingly maintained site that's been running since 1997, and it turns out they've been right in my backyard near Raleigh, NC this whole time. If you want to see what a community-built web presence looks like when people care deeply about their hobby, this one's a treat.

I stumbled across a massive stamp collecting reference site built by one guy over 12 years, with nearly 1,000 pages covering the classical stamps of Europe and North America. It's one of the most impressively thorough personal knowledge projects I've ever seen, and it's completely free to explore.

This week I found the website for The SETI League, a grassroots nonprofit that spent thirty years coordinating amateur radio astronomers searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. It's a massive, lovingly maintained archive of homebrew radio telescope plans, signal detection photos, original SETI folk songs, and the kind of earnest scientific community-building that just doesn't happen on the modern web.