THIS IS... the directory of cool stuff i found.
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this is a biggole list of all the cool stuff i've found! feat. huge rambling paragraphs because i am literally incapable of being concise. you don't need to read the rambles if you don't want to, you can just click the links. list will be sparse at the moment but will grow exponentially as i discover and rediscover certified Cool Stuff to link to. my primary goal is linking to cool websites, youtube channels, and communities you might not have heard of yet, but there might be some media recs or more common websites/channels/communities on here. no real restrictions, basically.
1. the youtube channel BlueFishPieIsAwesome .
you may be thinking to yourself.. KITTO! this channel has no videos! indeed, this channel has no videos, but it does have playlists. and let me just say, as someone who will go into bursts of spending alarming amounts of time finding videos to sort into chronological order, i felt an immediate kinship with this individual. they've compiled and sorted the extensively long zackscottgames minecraft series, Every Single Hololive Minecraft Server Stream (nearly 2000 of them), every video from a steven universe quote channel, every non-stream video from a specific vtuber, every million+ viewed video from a hololive member, and maybe most interestingly to me personal, made a playlist aiding in documenting a forgotten and now-dead minecraft server. completely insane, but also, jokes aside, i really really respect this. take a moment to click that link and just be in awe of everything this person did to sort and compile all of these playlists. i genuinely wish i could find a way to thank this person personally both cause their zackscottgames playlist saved me large amounts of grief in making my minecraft youtube playlist (and their holoserver stream playlist will probably do the same in the future) and also because i just admire this sort of thing. really cool. only thing else i can say is that i wish this person had these videos downloaded or mirrored somewhere since some videos have gone missing from the playlists but also i do understand that not everyone (read: not most) have space for Actually Over 5000 Videos, so, really, kind of a nitpick.
2. the youtube channel turbulentt .
once i took a moment to be in awe of the previous channel i realize i hadn't spared enough thought to This madlad, who's channel i had found previously before i understood how time consuming it actually is to make something like this. alarmingly, this playlisting project is of an even LARGER scale, of Actually Over 9000 Videos, which is completely insane. these playlists are primarily focused on compiling and sorting yogscast minecraft + gmod videos, and thus has more of a singular focus than the previous channel. Gotta say i never realized how large scale yogscast actually is. anyway... this, too, is extremely admirable, stretching across several channels in whats gotta have been a real treasure hunt to find all this stuff. again, some videos are missing, but asking someone to mirror Nine Thousand Videos is asking way too much, so it's not a real complaint. i guess my only actual nitpick is that in their 3rd yogscast playlist fredrik knudsen's video on the mouse utopia experiments has somehow snuck its way in to the front...? that's not yogscast you silly goose! good video though.
3. the youtube playlist All Minecraft Footage From 2009 (Many Videos Since Privated) .
while the minecraft in 2009 playlist that i made has more videos, i can't deny that i used this playlist as a jumping off point for making my own , and that it shares a majority of this playlist's videos in common. i can't imagine how long it must have taken or what methods were used to find all of the videos that got put in this playlist, especially since many of them are currently privated or unlisted. i do have a bone to pick with how the description says that it's got every single minecraft video from 2009 in there and also how there's a 2010 video in the playlist for some reason, but i really am genuinely grateful for it's existence and admire it's efforts for archival. wonder how long it must have took - my 2009 minecraft playlist didn't take too long, but that's mostly because of my piggybacking off this one, heh. also ... i haven't watched any of the videos from the creator of the playlist, but it seems like they have an actual youtube thing going on? so maybe show some love to that if you like current-day made old minecraft videos.
4. the multimedia web story thing 17776: What Football Will Look Like In The Future , and it's sequel, 20020 .
so, ok, this is basically just a media rec, which i sort of wanted to not prioritize because i want to do a separate media rec page, but this is one of my favorite things ever and also pretty short and also according to youtube views less than 30k people have read 20020 which causes me psychic damage every single day so i'm just going to slap it here anyway on the off chance someone will see this and read it.. seriously, i think everyone should read this, i have a hard time imagining not liking it, and its So underrated for what it is.... and what is it? well, to give even a basic summary of the actual plot would spoil the first few chapters, which i guess isn't a huge deal but i think the way the information is delivered is fun and should be experienced firsthand. basically, of what i can tell you, it's speculative fiction utilizing text, gifs, images, music, and video to deliver a story. there's expectedly a lot of football, but you can enjoy it without knowing anything about or liking football (source: doesn't know anything about football and loves 17776). i do actually like the sequel a bit better, but every part of this is really good. also it's made by jon bois, who i don't watch but who is apparently a Youtube Guy, so ? something to consider i guess...
5. DeathMatch Gaming's The Daylight Owl Minecraft Webseries .
does this also count as a media rec? i dunno, i suppose i'm not properly recommending it. basically, this is a minecraft roleplay series that started in 2011 and ended in 2018. i haven't.. actually. finished it? ever? it's not like it's particularly lengthy, but the beginning is boring enough for me that i think i could only get past it because i was Really Young. it's like torturous because i remember everything after a certain point being pretty good (at least to wee laddie me) but i just for the life of me cannot sit down and actually watch up to that point. Heh, one day i'll actually watch through it... so, why am i linking it when i can't even watch all of it? well, the finale only has 3K views, as opposed to the ~400k the series was able to receive at it's peak.. this is partially due to the long hiatus the series took and also due to the finale being released in a Big Minecraft Drought (2018 Bad Year). and anyway, when i looked today i realized that the channel had unlisted all of the daylight owl videos leaving them only accessible through playlists, and privated every non-series video on the channel. i guess based on what i'm seeing i am getting sort of worried that these people feel ashamed or embarrassed of the thing they made, which is just about the most evil thing i can imagine. plus, if the other videos on the channel were privated, i mean, it's good that the TDO videos are still around, but i'm kind of worried these too will go missing eventually.. so, i dunno, i realize it is a tall order when i myself haven't even sat down to watch the whole thing, but if you have a soft spot for initially kinda cringy/janky trying to be edgy/spooky webseries that gain in production quality (and overall quality too, i believe) as they go on, then i think you should check this one out. it breaks my heart to see something so unique with so much time effort and heart put into it get swept by the wayside because it's initial audience moved on and newer audiences never heard about it.
6. The archival website for the 'redstoner' minecraft server, redstoner.com .
OK, so, i don't know what this server really is, i haven't ever played it or heard of it before today, and i won't get the chance to seeing as it's no longer operational, HOWEVER... this site. is so cool. the server itself may be dead but this website serves as somewhat of a monument to it, keeping in-tact downloads and forum posts... i really admire this, i have a feeling a lot of servers just. sort of quietly delete stuff when they die or close down. but the server's worlds, schematics, forum posts, player list, and more, are preserved just the way they were for previous server members to revisit or new strangers like myself to discover.. just think it's neat. beautiful that it's not entirely gone. i mean, it's quite difficult to Actually get rid of every trace of something, but preserving a website and a forum and download links is in no way a default or effortless decision, so i am just grateful that this site exists.
7. The subreddit r/GoldenAgeMinecraft .
i think if you have any interest in older versions of minecraft you'll have heard of this one already - it's grown quite a lot since i joined it in 2018, and so have related communities the Golden Age Minecraft discord, Omniarchive (both site & server), and the Modification Station discord server. regardless, if you care even a little about minecraft's oldest versions, i would recommend joining this subreddit. well, reddit's going down the toilet, so maybe you'd be better off joining one of those discords, but there's a lot of valuable information that can be found by searching in this subreddit.. and just a lot of cute posts, lots of screenshots of old minecraft builds made in modern day, it's nice to see everyone having fun
so, this is, in essence, another media rec. iactually haven't revisited this one in a while .. but i've always loved it and i still see references to it occasionally, so i'm going to trust my memory is not betraying me here and that it really is as good as i remember. as far as i can recall, it was never actually scary to me? the appeal wasn't that it was scary, which was the appeal with most other creepypastas i like, but rather like.. i dont know.. how high effort and high quality it is i guess? its really charming. its so Its Own Thing. drastically higher effort than other creepypastas ESPECIALLY of the time. and like, i dont know, its jsut good? not scary OK not to me at least but its just good. and anyway, it feels like enough of a weird web thing to deserve a place on this list. also it looks like there's some kind of sequel thing going on and for the record i haven't touched that nor do i know anything about that so if it's bad then don't come at me for linking to the site that hosts it heheh
9. the youtube channel SeaGlowingPro .
this channel is a cool one... its got videos to look at!!!! basically this guy is cool. recreated a minecraft build/map featured in a video from 2009 and made it downloadable, made several small mods for older versions of minecraft as well as lost or nonexistent version recreations, made a map/world for pre-classic merging several builds from 2009, did a bunch of other stuff pertaining to the history and potential history of minecraft & it's development... basically it is mega cool. mega awesome if you will. you really do love to see it
10. the youtube channel PippenFTS and more broadly, the Minecraft BuildTheEarth project.
this guy is making earth REAL. In MINECRAFT. ihavent gotten involved in this project its still very work in progress and i havent got too much more to say about it other than just pointing at it but not everyone's heard about it yet and it's the type of thing i'd be really upset i hadn't heard about while it was still in development once it's finished so. Click on that if you want to learn more or get involved cause they do need helping hands still i believe
11. the website Sithgames.com .
a cool website by some guy who made, worked on, & is making some really cool minecraft mods for really old versions of minecraft. i gave the 'back in time' mod a whorl and was absolutely blown away, i don't even know why but i was just in awe playing it. big recommend. the website is laid out and themed well, and supposedly there is also content for sonic & FNAF here, but i haven't really looked at that in too much depth.
12. Leonard Richardson's The Minecraft Archive Project .
it basically is what it says on the tin... the data itself has been uploaded to archive.org and trying to sift through that was actually pretty confusing for me, but i'm pretty sure this is an impressive collection if you actually know what's going on when you look at it, hehehe... reading about what the creator of this project has to say is very interesting, i won't spoil it but i learned something new when he talked about his reasons for starting to archive this stuff. really grateful for the effort put in here. he made maps that combine a whole bunch of old maps as well that seem to be absolutely worth checking out. however the part of this project that resonated the most with me was a few paragraphs near the end.. i will quote it here because it's very powerful and iwant to have it on my own website... full credits go to crummy though of course
"Whenever we humans create a new art form, the early stuff gets lost. It's not considered "art", it doesn't fit into the existing archives, it's a pain to collect, expensive to keep around, and nobody's in charge of saving it. So it gets lost. This is especially true for art forms favored by children or other people who aren't considered artists.
Time passes, and we regret the loss. We cherish every scrap that survives. Ninety percent of humanity's early films are gone, and a lot of the ten percent is crap, but we preserve it all because there's nothing else like it. Sometimes the crap turns out to be pretty good after all: pulp sci-fi and noir. Even ephemera, things that never get raised to the level of "art", become valuable as windows into the past: account books, restaurant menus, road maps, receipts.
I believe all this stuff is art and I want to save it. But even if history disagrees with me, and the MAP and the ESC are classified as ephemera, that's fine too. In the long run, it's all ephemera." (Leonard Richardson, The Minecraft Archive Project)
13. Niklink's unlisted homestuck video rescue project .
OK, so, some time back, youtube made the wretched decision to private all unlisted videos before a certain date, which was devastating for deranged minecraft fans everywhere. and also, apparently, deranged homestuck fans! i hadn't even thought about the videos from the homestuck fandom that would be lost, but thankfully this guy did. while most of the videos in the playlist are unfamiliar to me, i actually do recognize a few of them, and i'm really glad they haven't been lost to time yet. that would just be sad. it makes me wonder how many more fandoms have really lost stuff like this because they weren't large enough to have someone who wishes to or knows how to preserve things in it? it was a community effort as well, niklink asked people on the homestuck subreddit to links to these unlisted videos if they had them, and that's how so many were able to be found. sad to think of how much has been lost. right now though i'm just glad we get to keep [S] Humanity: Game Over and nora's homestuck liveblog around in their full glory for a little while longer, i remember having fun with those. and it's interesting too, cause my first instinct was to assume that these videos wouldn't be things i remembered or things with value, but they were. if this project hadn't been arranged then we really would've lost a bunch of cool stuff and probably for good. so yeah, thanks to niklink and the homestuck subreddit :D geez, can't believe i'm finding out about this just now
14. The Neocities Website Nostalgia of Island .
This site is just glorious. this person's minecraft saga was extremely engaging - there is a real knack for storytelling here. i highly recommend checking out this site. there's a section on literature, which i read, and a section on travel, which i didn't read because i couldn't pay attention to it (Not a travel guy.). gonna be thinking about this one for a long time. really want to find more sites like this one. additionally found something interesting and resonant in the way the site's creator describes moving towards a greater diversity of hobbies and creation, and thought the bit about consumption/creation was interesting in a myriad of ways i can't elaborate on due to not wanting to 1) talk too long about any 1 thing & 2) spoil the read. oddly enough, and this probably wasn't the intention, made me want to play minecraft. heh. anyway, the minecraft story on this site is really well told, as i said preivously.. i don't think you'd even need to be into minecraft to enjoy reading it. it's somewhat similar to Technoblade's potato war series, if you had enjoyed that, though it doesn't seem to be inspired by it to my knowledge. the literature stuff is interesting, i hadn't heard of most of those books, but somebody who reads more than i do would probably enjoy it even more... yeah, very cool site, give a looksie.
15. Quinn's Unofficial ImagineFun Guide .
This is a frighteningly in-depth guide to a minecraft server i've never heard of. Constantly in awe of how much stuff I just do not know. this is very cool - i didn't explore site much since i'm not planning on playing on that server in the near future and much of the information is primarily relevant to it's players, but it really is very extensive... the server appears to be based on Disneyland, if that's something you're interested in. frankly, i'm tempted to check it out just to see what it is about this server that drove someone to make something like this! A respectable and informative guide...
16. The Daily Bagel Website .
disappointingly entirely unrelated to bagels, this is a fairly general website here on neocities. it hasn't been updated in a while, but there's some cool old minecraft stuff - some of it i haven't even seen before (has a cool texturepack archive), and some of it i rediscovered (i can't believe i completely forgot mcarchive.net existed!), as well as some interesting perspectives on webpage size and bloat. the site is very incomplete, but what's there is worth checking out
17. The website hibiscus.pet .
A site with some cool minecraft mods & articles, + a quote page. worth checking out, would like to revisit those minecraft writings sometime..
18. The website documenting the minecraft world Broken Halo .
so full disclosure, i haven't actually read through all or most of the journal entries, but i've poked around the site and i just have to say how thrilled i am that something like this is being made in the current day. really recommend checking this out, it's so cool. basically got the same energy as those youtube minecraft let's plays that just go on for like years and years for some reason except in text and image forum, which i guess isn't an enthusiastic way to describe it but i do actually think this is super cool. it's only been running a year but the webmaster talks as though they're in it for the long haul and there's been a fair amount of updates already + who else is really doing minecraft 'let's plays' in the modern day anyway except those guys? so i think the comparison is fitting... anyway yeah really excited to have found this. wonderful
19. The mcyt archive .
THIS IS AMAZING! i haven't even been able to check all of this stuff out yet, but there's some articles on archiving and datahoarding that i haven't seen before that seem genuinely very useful... not to mention, i am over the moon to have bits and pieces of archives for all corners around minecraft youtube in one place like this. Absolutely wonderful. sooo exciting and relieving to hear that there are people so dedicated to trying to preserve this side of the internet even in current day, because it's such a phenomenon and twitch VODs and whatnot can be so hard to preserve... content is often spread across POVs and sometimes not saved, just little bits in little corners, and i think we really do need an effort to keep this stuff from being lost.. really warms my heart to see this! absolutely wonderful! i might have to join the discord...
20. Moon's Big Site of Minecraft SMP Fandoms .
this site is how i found the previous site, and it's got a nice list of most currently active and/or popular minecraft youtuber servers + a nice primer. a good reference
21. The website glittering.world .
Contains a pastable archive of a popular fanfiction and a few tools relating to minecraft youtube. Probably the place to read Mangoball. some very nice work! Cites hermitcraft.com as an inspiration for one of the tools, which is another cool site.
22. The website life-series.com .
An informative guide to the 'life' series of minecraft SMPs, which was useful for me because I had no idea what was going on there. Site looks to have not been updated in a little bit and most content is on one page, but it's worth checking out if you are curious about this series, as it seems like a good primer.
23. CHILDHOOD HOMES (and why we hate them) .
this is a short interactive story made with twine and it's quite good. i don't want to spoil much since it's really not a long read but child abuse is a large theme here so please heed the content warnings. also there are some flashing lights(?) i'm not sure if they're the kind that would cause a problem but caution is probably a good idea. good story, i want to see more like this, i hope you will read it too.
24. Nate T Bird's Crypt Crawler map for minecraft.
i've played this map a good handful of times over the years and i remember it being really fun. I don't know how obscure or at risk of being forgotten this is but i doubt people are talking about minecraft maps released in 2015 still today which is a shame because this one's fun (+ i'm sure others i missed are too). If you still like minecraft 1.8 then give this one a whirl, if I remember correctly it's not even too long.