:: Aaron's Site of the Week ::
Every week I pick a site from the directory and spend some time clicking around it. Then I write about what I found. Here are all the sites I've featured so far.
This week I found Stormgasm.com, a storm chasing website built in 2001 by a crew of hardcore tornado chasers who've been documenting violent weather across the plains for over two decades. It's a raw, sprawling archive of tornado videos, chase logs, and storm photography that feels like opening someone's weather-obsessed filing cabinet.
https://stormgasm.com/
This week I found a massive archive of downloadable web browsers going all the way back to the earliest days of the web, including software you've probably never heard of. If you've ever wondered what it was like to browse the internet with something called Cyberdog or Santa's Browser, browsers.evolt.org has you covered.
https://browsers.evolt.org/
This week I found a massive astrophotography archive spanning nearly four decades, built by Cape Cod photographer Chris Cook, complete with deep sky images shot on actual film, a hand-built backyard observatory, and some of the most gorgeous nightscape photography I've seen anywhere on the web. If you've ever looked up at the stars and felt something, you owe yourself a long click-through session here.
http://abmedia.com/astro
I stumbled across fLaMEd fury, a personal website that's been running since 1999 and feels like a perfect time capsule of what made the early web so fun to explore. Between the vinyl record collection, the beer fridge tracking 1,620 unique beers, and a genuinely heartfelt essay about loving the web, I spent way longer clicking around than I planned.
https://flamedfury.com/
I stumbled across Matthew R. Watkins' home page at Exeter University, a sprawling rabbit hole where a mathematician-turned-saz-player-turned-mathematician-again has spent years cataloguing the mysterious connections between prime numbers and physics. If you've ever wondered what happens when someone follows a genuine obsession across decades and builds a hand-coded archive of everything they've found, this is it.
https://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/mrwatkin
This week I found a sprawling, hilarious archive of mid-century cookbook horrors that had me clicking through page after page of ghastly food photography and razor-sharp commentary. If you've ever wondered what possessed someone to put meat in Jell-O or make a Bacon Milkshake, James Lileks has the answers you didn't know you needed.
http://lileks.com/institute/gallery/index.html
I stumbled across a site dedicated entirely to cataloguing every appearance of Moai statues in video games, and it's currently sitting at over 1,055 entries spanning from 1983 to 2026. It's exactly the kind of obsessive, lovingly maintained project that makes the web worth exploring.
https://moai.games/
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.
https://ascii.co.uk/
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.
https://bluemoonfalls.com/
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.
http://trainweb.org/nrmrc
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.
https://www.stamp-collecting-world.com/
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.
http://setileague.org/