Alcyone Systems has been "doing something or other with things and stuff on the Internet since 1995," which is how the site describes itself, and honestly that tagline alone made me want to dig deeper. This is the personal domain of Erik Max Francis, a Unix/Linux developer based in San Jose, and it is dense with stuff. The kind of stuff that only accumulates when someone has been building on the same plot of web real estate for nearly three decades.
The homepage is structured like a directory, with single-letter icons next to each entry. It's clean, functional, and deeply organized. There's a software section, a network of affiliated sites, and a members area. No JavaScript frameworks. No hero images. Just links and descriptions, the way the early web worked best.
Let me talk about the software, because that's where I lost a good chunk of my afternoon. Erik has written and released over a dozen tools, almost all in Python, covering a range that borders on absurd. There's BOTEC, a "back-of-the-envelope calculator" for astrophysical and orbital mechanics calculations that includes a database of all named Solar System objects. It treats all orbits as circular and coplanar (limitations it is very upfront about), but it was originally built as a data-generating tool for a computer RPG system. There's chess.py, a chess move adjudicator that "understands the rules enough that it can watch moves and verify that they are correct" but does not actually know how to play chess. Erik notes in the credits that he is, curiously enough, "not a very strong chess player." I love that.
There's CAGE, a cellular automata simulation engine that comes with implementations of Conway's Game of Life, Langton's self-reproducing automaton, and Langton's "vants." There's Church, a module for exploring lambda calculus. There's discord, which converts Gregorian dates to Discordian dates ("a silly made-up dating system that divides a year into five seasons of 73 days each"). There's fauxident, a fake ident daemon for situations where running a real one would be a security risk. There's a Lindenmayer system explorer. A Counter-Strike server log monitor. A Googlism API wrapper. A unique ID generator. And EmPy, a full-featured Python templating system that has proper Sphinx documentation and is clearly the most mature of the bunch, now at version 4.2.1.
Each software page follows the same format: summary, overview, requirements, license, usage, known problems, wish list, release history, and author credits. It's meticulous. Some of these tools haven't been updated in twenty years, and that's fine. They're snapshots of problems someone wanted to solve at a particular moment, preserved exactly as they were.
Beyond the software, the affiliated sites section is its own rabbit hole. There's Crank Dot Net ("cranks, crackpots, kooks, & loons on the net"), LOSERS dot ORG ("your guide to losers on the Internet"), CatCam ("what do your pets do while you're at work?"), and sade deluxe ("the ultimate Sade encyclopedia"). There's a Daily Planet page that generates a new virtual planet every day using ppmforge. There's a page about the actual star Alcyone, which is the site's namesake.
Erik's personal homepage is equally structured, with sections for languages and linguistics, classic legal documents, copyright-expired electronic texts, physics information, and various things he's written. The whole thing is generated using m4 macros, which he documents on a dedicated page. The copyright footer reads 1995-2026, updated as recently as January 2026.
What strikes me most about Alcyone Systems is the sheer volume of curiosity on display. This is someone who wanted to model orbital mechanics, simulate cellular automata, adjudicate chess moves, explore lambda calculus, and convert dates to a joke calendar system, and then published all of it for free, with documentation. Go click around. Bring some time.