Libraries, Archives, Collections

Local Stuff

The Prelinger Library

The best library in SF. Located at 301 8th St #215. See website for the new hours (it's not just Wednesday anymore!).

"Weeds: A Talk At The Library" by Nicholson Baker (Unabridged)

The text of an incendiary talk concerning the then-ongoing culling of an estimated 200,000 books from the SFPL system during the transition to the new building in the mid 90s. A later condensed version can be read here.

SFPL SF Chronicle Archive

Your SFPL card gets you access to the entire digitized Chron archive, stretching all the way back to the 1800s.

Interesting Collections

The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals

An enormous and well-organized collection. see the archive page for a full alphabetical list.

Send Back My Stamps!: Metal Fanzine Archive

“SEND BACK MY STAMPS! is a site dedicated to reproducing interviews and ephemera from Fanzines produced in the early days of the (heavy/death/thrash/black etc.) metal underground.”

LighthouseFriends.com

A large database of information about every lighthouses in America. Searchable by state, lighthouse features, and custom google maps.

Daily Script

An enormous collection of scripts and screenplays, some as far back as the pre-code era.

CigarettesPedia

A database of cigarette packaging, current and historical. International.

California Digital Newspaper Collection

"This collection contains 322,665 issues comprising 4,150,501 pages and 23,801,593 articles." Can search or browse by title. date, tag, county, etc.

The FAXTOY Browsable Faxes Collection

Faxtoy was a website designed for testing your fax machine: it had a number you could fax to, and it would display your fax as an image if it was received correcly. This is the entire collection, of "rougly 200,000" faxes.

LOC Country Studies

Since WWII, The Library of Congress has produced (and, infrequently, updated) a series of monographs detailing the relevant information American officials (diplomats, military personelle, etc) might want to know about a country before visiting, covering all sorts of topics (history, culture, politics, etc). These are specifically published into the public domain, and are freely available online — it's basically Wikipedia but better.

Processed World

The full run of a zine from 1981 to the early 2000s. It was made by and for weirdo office & tech workers, and is voiced from a critical perspective on topics like labor practices and tech industry overreach.

Calscape.org

A database of plantlife native to California. Enter a location in the search bar to see which spieces are native to that area. Usefull for planning gardens and IDing interesting native plants you might be curious about.

Columbia, The Albert Field Card Collection

A collection of scans of early, mostly hand-drawn playing cards.

The Readies

Digitized versions of an extremely obscure 1940s format called “Readies,” which ran on modified (automatically-scrolling) microfilm machines. Much of this is short, experimental poetry.

The Victoria Press Circle

A website dedicated to an Victorian-era femenist publication and the people who wrote and worked there. Contains both raw data and a blog hilighting interesting material in the collection and personal reflections while compiling it.

The Ejection Site

A very large oldschool website all about ejection seats.

William Blake's Jeruselem

Scans of plates from William Blake's illustrated poem Jeruselem, from the Yale Center for British Art. Downloadable at very high resolutions.

Synthesizer Manuals Collection

Includes some sub-groupings by manufacturer.

Girl And Queer Bands

A frequently updated, no-nonsense list of non-male-majority US hardcore punk bands. You can view the list by region, active/inactive, or alphabetically.

The Cutting Room Floor

A wiki dedicated to cut / unused content from video games. Interesting technical details into ROM hacking, and some fascinating "What if?" for familiar titles.

JG Ballard - The Interview Concordance

Link above is the intro/about page. Click Here to go to the Concordance.

Glossaries

• Realgems.org List of Gemstones
• Australian Slang
• (Working on this section)

Free / Cheap Media

Books

• Gutenberg.org: A huge collection of free ebooks, emphesis on public domain. Also great for finding illustrations when coupled with google's "site:" tag.
• Fadedpage.com: Free ebooks, ephesis on public domain. Somewhat easier to navigate than Gutenberg. Found while searching for a .mobi of "The Devils of Ludon".
• The Internet Classics Archive: an MIT.edu site started in 1994. Focuses primarily on material from the Western cannon.
• Hermentics.org's Online Esoterica Library: A small, but neatly organized collection — with very nicely formatted .pfs. Found while looking for collections of grimoires.
• Sacred Texts: A decently large collection of foundational / notable philosophical, esoteric, religious, alchemical (etc. etc.) works organized by topic and global region.
• Smashwords: Cheap & free ebooks, primarily self-published. Found while searching for the competetive Smash player/comentator Wife's memoir, "Team Ben" (It's not well-edited, but it's short and very worthwhile if you're interested in this subject).
• ThriftBooks.com: Like Amazon but sometimes much cheaper.
• Librivox: Free audiobooks (YMMV re: quality)

Longform / Digital

• Longform.org and Longreads.com both have giant archives linking to thousands of good articles. Longform.org also has a fantastic weekly podcast, featuring in-depth, nuanced hourlong(ish) interviews journalists and writers.
• Outside Magazine's best-of list, as selected by its writers and editors.
• You probably know them primarily as the creators of Normcore (coined in "Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom"), but it's worth reading through all the K-Hole pdfs. See this short British Vogue documentary if you want more context on the group. They haven't released anything in several years, though the group's constituent members are active.
• Spy Magazine: Google Books has the full run of Spy, a ruthlessly catty and widely influental NY culture magazine from the 1980s and 90s.
• Compute Magazine: Archive.org has the full run from '79 - '84.
• Holdiaymag.wordpress.com hasn't been updated since 2014, but it's got a bunch of stuff from Holiday. (If you're not familiar with Holliday, try this Vanity Fair article. My favorite article here is "Life with a Peacock" by O'Connor)
• ...And last-but-not-least, The Times Machine: Digitized versions of the New York Times going back a century and a half.

Streaming Terestrial Radio

• World Radio Map: A great place to start!
• KUAA 99.9FM Salt Lake City: An excellent multilingual comunity station. The station's style is organized more by general aesthetics than specific genres, leaning towards 50s - 70s rock, soul, and oddball vinyl.
• KKUP 91.5 FM Cupertino: A comercial-free comunity station. Often plays interesting roots, soul, blues, country & western, folk, bluegrass, etc.
• KFJC 89.7 FM Bay Area: A non-format independent station, lots of variety.
• KZSC 88.1 FM: UC Santa Cruz.
• KXSF 102.5 San Francisco: A recently (re?)launched comunity station. Only active during particular hours, check the website.
• KALX 90.7: UC Berkley.
• KPOO 89.5 FM San Francisco: A small station in SF playing jazz, blues, soul, R&B, gospel, disco, etc. See the program guide for a list of specific shows.
• Hot 105 (Miami): Home of The Quiet Storm with Freddie Cruz.
• WVUM 90.5 (U Miami, FL): College station where I used to DJ. Plays a lot of taped shows when school is not in session.
• 96.5 KOIT Radio (SF)
• There's a radio station in Sacramento which is run by highschoolers, with a 10-watt (mono) transmitter reaching a 5-mile radius, called 91.5 KYDS. I haven't been able to find an internet stream anywhere, but it's a great listen if you're ever in the area. There were a few dedicated weekly shows, but the bulk of the programming was just whatever the kids wanted to play, punctuated by haphazard and occasionally interminable airbreaks. They were constantly dropping stuff that was totally off my radar.

Internet Music

• Keygen Jukebox: I'm not familiar with the original context for this, but I love the site design, and it's got some solid janky computer bops.
• IMSLP: Free sheet music, audio recordings, and MIDI files.
• Internet of Music: Blast this while you HACK THE WORLD.
• ...And don't forget about bandcamp.com/tags.

Movies to put on in the dackground

• [YT] Killdozer: 1974. Horror movie about a posessed bulldozer.
• [Kanopy] Legend of the Mountain: 1979 (newly restored). Beautifully shot atmospheric supernatural period film by an accomplished kung fu director.

Software

• Macintosh Garden: Mac abandonware
• Macintosh Reposityory: Mac abandonware
• hyperlink's free software list: handy!

Early Web / Design

Articles, Series, Docs

A Vernacular Web, Vernacular Web 2, and Prof. Dr. Style (Vernacular Web 3)

A series of three presentations by Olia Lialina right on the cusp of the mobile era (2005, 2007, and 2010) looking back to the early stages of web design in the mid-90s. The focus is both anthropological and aesthetic.

The Computer Chronicles

An SF-based television show which ran from 1983 - 2002 (AOL Time Warner was January '01). Hosted by the inimitable Stewart Cheifet. Many early episodes feature Gary Kildal, the creator of CPM. The show itself tracks (in aesthetics, subject matter, and sorts of guests who are interviewed) the rise of computers from a niche business item to their present ubiquity in a fascinating way.

Captivating Algorythms by Nick Seaver, Journal of Material Culture, August 2018.

An article by a Tufts anthropology professor, analyzing the shift toward “captivation” in recomendation algorhythms in the mid-2000s via the epistemic framework of trap-making. Relatedly, see this collection of articles on algorithms and culture.

Code Rush

An hourlong documentary from 1998-99 which follows the employees of Netscape as they prepare to open-source their Navigator as Mozilla.

Space Movies Cinema

An oldschool page from NASA, which includes a large collection of highly-compressed video files of notable space events, as well as speeches with transcripts, etc.

HTML / CSS / etc. tools

• GIF Cities

  "The GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine. GifCities is a special project of the Internet Archive to celebrate 20 years of preserving the web. Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. Please donate to help us in our efforts to provide “Universal Access to All Knowledge” including GIFs."

• Color Chart - Just For You!: A painstakingly formatted hex color lookup table.
• CSS Gradient Generator: A GUI tool for setting up complex CSS gradients.
• Alan Wood’s Unicode resources: An incredibly thorough, no-nonsense Unicode site.
• Rick Mathew's Misc. Tips and Topics: An ancient bare-bones website from a physics professor with tons of great info. I found this while looking into the details of JPEG compression.
• Tutorials Point - Frames: A quick, clear explanation of HTML frames.
• Star Trek Ipsom Loren: For when standard Ipsom just won't do.
• Calibre's Regex Guide: A fantastic intro guide to Regex, including several subpages with examples for specific use cases.

Etc.

• UX Myths: A Collection of research-based articles.

History, Histor­iog­raphy

San Francisco

OutsideLands.org and Open SF History

Sister websites of the Western Neighborhoods Project. Open SF History focuses mainly on archival and user-submitted photos, which you can browse via map.

Found SF

Another great site for history articles and personal narratives with a specific focus on under-archived communities and voices. The site is voiced primarily from a leftist perspective, and its editors are more overtly engaged with politics than most history sites.

The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco

Web Classic. Check the index or sort by year. Lots of great info here.

The House That Jack Built: A History of San Francisco Tomorrow

A 1985 retrospective by Jack Morrison for the 15th anniversary of SFT. This came up while researching an article about postwar urban development, and it's a fascinating first-hand account surrounding several key planning decisions, such as the US Steel building and Golden Gate Freeway.

Elsewhere

Perspectives on the Past in Southeast Asia

SEA history, historiography, archeology, maritime (etc) blog from students at the Univeristy of Sydney, AU.

The World At War: History of WW 1939-1945

An extremely large Web Classic page, focusing on the European Theater.

A Thousand Lakes of Red Blood on White Snow

An excellent article on the oft-forgotten Russo-Finish Winter War (1939-40)

Music / Pro­duction

Note: This section is pretty messy right now. Expect updates at some point.

Old Video Game Soundfonts

• Well-organized SNES SF rips
• Several games across several systems.
• Some PSX SFs & other stuff on this site
• SNES Square RPGs
• FFVII (also prof dr. style!)

Roberto Devereux

Full Stagings:

• Roberto Devereux (With Libretto) HQ: late 70s / early 80s?
• :A 2005(?) staging: with a rad office setting!
• (Req. SFPL Login) 2006 Production dir. Francesco Bellotto

Flute

FLUTE list Featured Member Archives

Dec. 1998 - Jan. 2001

Jennifer Cluff's Flue Articles

Personal webpage of a Canadian Flutist and Teacher. Tons of quality info here, including several real-world Q&As from students (from beginner to collegiate levels), a plethora of links to other teachers' pages and articles.

How To Practice by Leonard Garrison.

Some thoughts on practicing (in general), and some gnarly collegiate-level flute excersizes.

FLUTE list pages

An enormous archive of material which began life as the FLUTE LISTSERV in March of 1996.

Niche Styles

Les Baxter (1922 - 1996) was an American composer / arranger, notable for his work in the Exotica genre. A website called Tamboo.com has a great selected discography and an unedited interview from the year prior to his death. Be sure to read the prefaces.

Misc­ell­aneous

The YES Company, an SF-based estate sale company.

The Train Riders Association of California has an excellent Links Page, which will take you to various smaller regional rail-based organization such as the BayRail Alliance. (See also: TrainWeb.com).

A helpful Transgender copy editing guide from RadicalCopyEditory.com.

Jenny Holzer's website - thinking about starting a section on artist's websites?