Isitnormal.com

This website used to be pretty good/interesting about 15 years ago. It slowly lost it's appeal for me, however, due to various reasons. It was a closely guarded secret for quite a long time for me too.

The timecube website was the peak of the internet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube

https://web.archive.org/web/20160112193916/http://timecube.com/

Edit:

Omg I found an interview with Gene!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn2UCqL5qyo

Drew's Script-O-Rama.

OG movie script/screenplay database.

Dudes been running this place since 95, which is doubly impressive that he never got popped for copyright shit. There was a pretty crazy stretch where he was releasing scripts before they were even produced. Like I got to read the actual screenplays for flicks like Intolerable Cruelty, Lost Highway (movie makes more sense as a screenplay, btw) and even Beavis and Butthead Do America before they even hit the theaters.

https://www.damninteresting.com/

Best place for long form history and science content with audio versions that is criminally underrated.

Surprised no-one said <your lemmy instance here>

Spearfish Lake Tales by Wes Boyd. Really nice books written by someone who had a lifelong experience of writing. Start at the bottom (with the first story), and work upwards. This guy definitely died to early.

http://thesneeze.com/

I really liked this blog like 10+ years ago.

He's got a lot of funny stuff on there where he eats unusual food, talks about a fungus growing on his trees, and other things he has observed. He even has an interview with Adam Savage!

He is also the none pizza left beef pizza guy.

https://jmp.chat - cell phone number without the need for ID verification.

bruh.news - ai generated news headlines, pretty silly

All hail!

r33b.net

MetaFilter! It's an old-school text-only community blog that's been around since 1999. I love the variety and depth of posts on the front page, and the AskMetaFilter Q+A section is super useful.

https://www.marginalia.nu

It has many options inside, shows you kinda oldschool sites.

Not something I visit often nowadays, but I still peruse Gamewinners via the Archive for cheat codes on PS2 era and older games. Gamefaqs has the faqs and walkthroughs, but gamewinners had the cheats. Kinda sad that the best equivalent to it nowadays is youtube videos showing exploits of games.

https://twocansandstring.com/

Cool place to ask and/or answer questions, although I haven't been there in a long time.

Very niche, but if you ever need to decode a simple oldschool encrypted/encoded text (caesar cipher, reverse alphabet, substitution cipher, morse code etc) for an AR game or whatever, Canonn Decryptor is amazing, being able to decode most cryptograms virtually automatically.

epguides.com - episode lists for a lot of shows - dramas, sitcoms, science fiction, etc.

australiantelevision.net - episode lists and guides for a bunch of Australian TV series as well.

https://gemini.circumlunar.space

The Gemini protocol is pretty cool, if you liked the general feel of the internet in the BBS days. Mental Outlaw did a video on it a while back if you're curious. After watching that video, I bodged together a fully compliant Gemini browser in about 2 hours and spent the rest of the day hacking on it and browsing the "slow net"

https://prepaidcompare.net/

Let's you sort prepaid phone plans in the US. You can even sort by things like which carrier the mvno runs on or if it's unlimited slow data after your allocation.

It's wonderful!

I still use wikimapia.org

(It's not associated with Wikipedia.)