Curators of nice bits of internet

Remember when the internet was full of delightful things? It still is; it is merely hard to notice between the infowars and operant-conditioned Instagram envy-doomscrolls. There are people lovingly surfacing delightful things far from the active fronts of conflict, things that are delightful, interesting, educational and too finite to doomscroll. If I browsed things recreationally, I would consume the product painstakingly refined by the following delight-miners:

• kottke.org Rolodex of other fun sites

• Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything Newsletter is ace.

• webcurios

  If you had to give a rough overview of what you cover, what would it say?

  FINE. Roughly, I’d say something along the lines of ‘digital arts, online culture, web design and creativity, philosophy, economics, sex, art, death, drugs, music, animation, literary fiction, comedy, nihilism, advertising, marketing, pornography, rights, AI, identity, PR, and the crippling horror of being made of meat’.

• The Kid Should See This

  The Kid Should See This is a Webby Award-winning collection of 5,000+ kid-friendly videos, curated for teachers and parents who want to share smarter, more meaningful media in the classroom and at home.

• Andy Baio’s Waxy.org

  Frequent topics include internet culture, copyright and fair use, online community, independent and experimental media, and the intersection of art and technology.

• Robin’s newsletter

  My main newsletter goes out once every 29 ½ days. It ranges widely, across books and media and modern life, and I always try to make it feel like a note from a friend.

• Colossal

  Called the “Tate Modern of the Internet,” Colossal is an international platform for contemporary art and visual expression that explores a vast range of creative disciplines.

• The Public Domain Review

  Founded in 2011, The Public Domain Review is an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.

See also other free content sources.

• The Marginalian

  Hello, kith. My name is Maria Popova. I am a reader and writer, and I write about what I read here on Brain Pickings — my one-woman labour of love exploring what it means to live a decent, substantive, rewarding life. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, eventually brought online and now included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive, it is a record of my own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically — drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tentacles of human thought and feeling.

• kottke.org

  Founded in 1998, kottke.org is one of the oldest blogs on the web. It’s written and produced by Jason Kottke and covers the essential people, inventions, performances, and ideas that increase the collective adjacent possible of humanity. Frequent topics of interest among the 26,000+ posts include art, technology, science, visual culture, design, music, cities, food, architecture, sports, endless nonsense, and carefully curated current events, all of it lightly contextualized.

It spends a little too much time on US kleptocratic/authoritarian politics to count as escaping the doomscroll, but there is still fun in there.

• Boing Boing, are they still good? Like Kottke, more polemical than some here, probably
• Hackaday shows off cool DIY inventions. Yeah, I describe nerd shit as “cool” unironically. What of it?