Link to me: Skyhold Button

At first I didn't have a general links page, because I felt like I'd be linking either to obvious things or to the same things everyone else links to, but as I've been looking around the small web I have seen reflections on the importance of curation versus algorhythmic discovery. Yes, some of the sites and resources I like to recommend are popular and you'll find them linked elsewhere, but this serves as a list of places I recommend, so it says something about me as well as about the sites.

Given how hard it is for small content creators to get attention without spending all their time and effort trying to court the algorhythm like they're minor nobility at Cinderella's ball, the curation of links and blogrolls, sharing and making things you've enjoyed easily found, is probably as important as content creation when it comes to making the small web a better place. Rather than currying favor with those who have more power than you, why not spend your time with equals, discussing your projects and exchanging recommendations.

If you're curious, by the way, my feedreader/blogroll is part of my reading page on Dreamwidth. My other link recommendations are below and in my digital garden.

Aspirational

These are the kinds of sites that make me want to work on my website. My site may not look much like any of them, but they're what I looked at when I was thinking that I wanted to get back to having a personal website again.

  • Marijn
  • maya.land
  • Ritual Dust
  • Ocean Waves
  • Fencraft
  • Faeriepunk
  • Nefaerien
  • MayVaneDay

Fiction & Zine Links

Website Resources

Other Resources

Cheapskate's Guide to Computers and the Internet has a ton of articles on different technologies and experiments.

Simplifier "...(M)y work here is about creating a stable foundation of technology that is reliable, understandable, and practical for an individual to build for themselves."

Open Source Low Tech "I prototype and develop basic technologies which anyone can make using recycled materials and simple tools."

MasterWiki turns MasterClass classes into articles in the style of WikiHow.

Security

own your data

is an indieweb principle, that your content should not live in the cloud or in a social media silo but on a site you control

sizeof(cat) has a lot more links along these lines

Solarpunk and Adjacent Topics

Solarpunk is... well it's a bit like all the other -punks, steampunk, cyberpunk, etc, where it's an aesthetic, it's a fashion option, it's a worldbuilding description, but it's also a loose collection of ideals and goals that can be used or aspired to in everyday life here. It has degrowth and gardening and permaculture, it has all the tech of cyberpunk but has an optimism that most of the punks don't have, an aggressive optimism but optimism none the less.

Deepening Resilience: Earth-based Responses to Climate Change

LOW←TECH MAGAZINE

Intentional Communities - Find, Join, & Learn about Intentional Community

Extinction Rebellion

GODS & RADICALS PRESS

Lost Valley Education Center

Resilience

Local Resilience Project

SOLARPUNKS

Ashes Ashes

SPROUT DISTRO - Anarchist Zines & Pamphlets

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures "is an arts/research collective that uses this website as a workspace for collaborations around different kinds of artistic, pedagogical, cartographic, and relational experiments that aim to identify and de-activate colonial habits of being, and to gesture towards the possibility of decolonial futures."

The Manifesto - Dark Mountain "What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. Meanwhile, beyond the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it."

Living Resilience "Our mission here at Living Resilience is to offer optimal support and resources to people who are brave enough to see the human-caused collapse of Earth and Human systems we are currently in, and the even larger collapse events to come."

Pirate Care is a transnational research project and a network of activists, scholars and practitioners who stand against the criminalization of solidarity & for a common care infrastructure.

Four Thieves Vinegar are the inventors of the epi-pencil (an inexpensive, DIY epi-pen alternative)

Occupy Medical "believes that everyone, regardless of income or status, should have access to medical care without the fear of financial burden or being considered unimportant by their caregivers. We strive to listen to everyone who comes to our clinic, to build a positive culture in the community, and to give the best care possible at no cost to the city and the people."

For the Indigenous Haida community, ecoanxiety is nothing new "It is taken for granted by Governor Brown, by the climate scientists studied by Robbins and Moore, and the many people now reporting symptoms of ecoanxiety, that this new abnormal we call the Anthropocene is a new problem. But, guided by the insights of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, let’s jump back in time for a moment. In the second half of the 19th century an apocalypse happened on a series of islands just off the west coast of what we now call Canada."

How Indigenous Peoples Are Fighting the Apocalypse "I’m thinking through the convergence of these apocalypses: the genocide of colonization and the ecocide of climate change. I’m trying to understand how Indigenous Peoples have persisted in the face of existential threats, because I believe that our survival ought to matter to more people than just ourselves. That it ought to matter to you."

Reasonable Prepping

The Prepared - Common sense emergency preparedness

The Survival Mom - Helping moms worry less & enjoy life!

Food Storage For People Who Don't Hate Food

Anarchism & Socialism

It's Going Down - Anarchist News and Analysis

Libcom News

symbiosis

Black Rose Anarchist Federation

BSA - Resource Guide

The Handbook of Handbooks for Decentralised Organising

Anarchist Library

Regeneration Magazine

CrimethInc. ex-Workers' Collective: Your ticket to a world free of charge

Cosmonaut

Open Collective helps groups manage finances openly and collectively

An Ex-cop's Guide to Not Getting Arrested

Permaculture & Gardening

TC Permaculture

Permaculture Rising - Oregon, North America

How to Start a Garden - 10 Steps to Gardening for Beginners

Self Watering Planters - DIY Demo, How They Work, Tips for Use

What is permaculture? - notes from the Permaculture Living course

How to Start a Small Garden in Your Apartment

Fresh Food Fast: How to grow veggies you can eat within 8 weeks!

More Info: additional books and links

Shared Resource Library

resources for organizers

Master List of Zero Waste options

Collapsepunk and dystopia

For when you're feeling less optimistic.

Let's Talk Collapse "Collapse is a complex and controversial subject. I found a lack of organized guides for newcomers to the topic and have set out to build my own by cataloging the most relevant individuals, concepts, and resources on the subject into the most effective overview possible."

I Lived Through Collapse. America is Already There. "This is how it happens. Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner. If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down."

What to Expect as America Collapses: prepper fantasies versus lessons from living in a less-developed country "I recently spent a couple of years working in a country with a lower standard of development than the United States. As I’m trying to anticipate how America’s decline will unravel, I’ve been reflecting on my time abroad and how those experiences contrast sharply with how “preppers” envision collapse."

Facing the Climate Emergency: Grieving The Future You Thought You Had "After you acknowledge the apocalyptic scale and speed of the climate emergency, you must allow yourself time to grieve. There are so many losses: the people and species already lost, your sense of safety and normalcy... Above all, in order to live in truth, we have to grieve for our own futures—the futures we had planned, hoped for, and thought we were building. Grief is appropriate—while, on one hand, this is the loss of an abstraction, not a living creature. On the other, it’s a huge loss—the loss of our most cherished plans, goals, fand fantasies."

How To Go To Work When Collapse is Near "I replied saying "Well, then, welcome to the doomosphere. I have some books and authors to help you research, if serious." Interestingly enough, he took me up on it. My first thought was to do it as a "tweet-storm," but then I realized that it was going to go a bit long for that. Collapse has been my main intellectual interest for over a year now. I want to do justice to those who write about it."

Collapse Reddits

Downshifting

Dropping Out: Why and How? "In short then ‘Dropping Out’ is simply the – critical – process of ‘leaving’ the normalcy imposed upon you by society. It is to say ‘I would rather not.’, ‘I do not do that.’ or ‘No.’ in the face of assumed choices. It is the beginning of freedom."

In Taos, a community of ‘voluntary anarchists’ is taking off-the-grid living to the next level "While the houses, with their rounded corners and colorful walls made of cans and bottles, may look more like spaceships than human dwellings, the opposite is true: The buildings are even called “earthships.” Located just outside of Taos, this community—known as the Greater World Earthship Community—provides full-time housing to at least 130 people."

5 Steps to Embrace Lifestyle Deflation Without Deprivation

  • Figure out what enough really means to you
  • Work slowly toward minimalism
  • Big impacts come from the big three expenses: housing, transport, food
  • Focus on what you can do, not what isn't
  • Make sure you have goals to define what you really want

Low-Carbon Life "It's re-imagining our lives to be more resilient, more abundant and more luxurious, while also being gentler on the Earth. Sound impossible? It's not! My little family of four utilizes appropriate technology to lower our homestead's carbon footprint, and it makes us happier, healthier and better connected to our community. Check out what we're doing to learn how."

Sloww has a lot of links and articles about slow living, but the really aggressive nags for their mailing list make it unpleasant to read.

What Is the Slow Movement? "The Slow Movement advocates a cultural shift toward slowing down life’s pace. A cultural movement in favor of slowing down in a world obsessed with speed is a useful prequel to any debate about prosperity and macroeconomic policy. By considering the Slow Movement, we can contemplate one of the fundamental societal values that inform our current economic policy: how is time best used or spent."

Art Resources

Haven't figured out where to categorize these yet

A Tentative Definition of Kudzupunk "My head churns full of southern gothic, of solarpunk, of Afrofuturism, of cyberpunk. I see it expanding ever outward, an irresistible transformation. The despairing let the Green swallow them up. A few fight back, armed with goats or flamethrowers, dedicating themselves controlling a patch of earth. Many adapt, slowly and variously. And some… some embrace it, merging biology and technology."

A Guide to Living in Interesting Times "Whatever you call them, here we are. Beginning the third year of the worst pandemic in a century with no end in sight and no agreement on how to proceed. Regressive politics in much of the country and much of the world. Supply chain disruptions and the worst inflation in 40 years... And for those of us who pay attention to such things, an increase in the currents of magic. That creates its own peculiar set of interesting times."

The IndieWeb Movement: Owning Your Data and Being the Change You Want to See in the Web "Instead of relying on another platform to host your thoughts, with their specific branding guidelines and restrictions, you should be the platform you want to be. By making the social network revolve around your site, you're keeping it within your grasp and built for the things you want."

Web Directories, Link Collections and Bespoke Search Engines

Are you not entertained? Do you need yet more links? Well here's a bunch of links to find more links! Go forth and find your rabbit hole!

How I Read Without Amazon

Physical Books

It's hard to beat a good local library for browsing, if you're lucky enough to have one. I'm fortunate enough to find a lot of books through mine, both physical and digital. Want to use your local library? Library Extension tells you if your local library has what you’re looking at, while WorldCat allows you to search virtually every library out there.

Want to support a brick and mortar alternative to Barnes and Noble? Bookshop or IndieBound can help with that. Failing that, there's always Powell's, which is one of my local bookstores and also one of the largest indie bookstores in the world. I am, again, priviledged to have access to many local bookstores, offering both new and secondhand options. I also get cheap used books from BetterWorldBooks.

I don't always buy hardcopy books- I've moved enough times in my life that I really value the ability to own an ebook library- but I also enjoy owning really beautiful books, or having physical copies to read we're having Family Reading Time (yes, we're really that twee I guess) and I'm putting my screen down because my kid can't really tell the difference between me on my phone reading a book and me on my phone messing around. I especially like graphic novels in hardcopy, and I tend to buy MG and YA books I'm interested in so that they can hang around in case my kid gets interested in them later. I did a lot of exploring of my Dad's paperback collection when I was a kid, and I want to make sure my kid has that opportunity.

eBooks

The rest of the time, I tend to go for ebooks. The joy of never not having a book has not dimmed since I was trying to get books on my PalmOne, and I love having my entire Calibre library available on my phone, should I need it.

While many of the older books on Kobo have DRM, recent purchases I've made from them are downloadable and I was able to load into Calibre.

TTRPGs

DRM-free Bundles

Goodreads Alternatives

Fanfic Ebooks

It's free! It's sometimes better than the original! It's often queerer than the original! How can you go wrong? First of all, I like to download fics in ebook format when I can:

  • Archive of Our Own: The AO3 has almost everything represented, it's a huge resource, and it has built-in magical epub/pdf/mobi downloads. Love it.
  • Squidgeworld: another large multifandom archive. It uses the same software as the AO3 so is equally easy to download.
  • Ebook Library: This doesn't have a huge selection but it's curated and the fics are formatted individually. I've read fic I wouldn't have read otherwise because it was collected here.

For stuff on other fanfic archives:

For stuff that's on LiveJournal, deviantArt or other websites:

  • dotEPUB: Saves a webpage as an epub. Short and sweet. In dA, I make sure to use "download as HTML" and then save from the plain HTML doc that opens.
  • Instapaper: You can use folders to collect a bunch of webpages on a theme and then save them as a single epub file with a table of contents. Good for fics with chapters in multiple LJ/DW posts. Also sends to Kindle if you already have one.

Other pages: