Annotated links
Blogs
Gyrus is 'obsessed by such things as embodied consciousness, altered states, sacred landscapes'. Also articles and interviews, particularly interesting one with Phil Hine.
Jim Fitzsimons writing from Dublin. Orwell, Einstein, peak oil, satire, and a good old bit of bong outrage.
Mark Pilkington's online extension of 'Strange Attractor Journal'.
Paul Cray, a fellow B S Johnson reader.
Seb is that witty bloke from the pub. Forlorn and funny.
Alistair I met way back in 1986 when he was living in Clapton and editing 'Encyclopaedia of Ecstasy', a chaotic fanzine drawing together strands of punk, mysticism, and magick. Now up in Galloway, Scotland, Alistair remembers times that were formative years for myself as well.
Phil Hine's blog reflecting on tantra, history, occulture, gender, and the like.
Edgy writing by Patrick O'Neil, 'survivor of the lost generation'.
Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company
A great blog about Henry Miller.
Underground culture
Great Moscow-based bi-weekly alternative newspaper, in English, started by two American journalists in 1997. Top-notch writing and attitude, funny and crude yet well-informed, covers world affairs, not just Moscow. That's some effort to keep this going as a free newspaper since 1997. Recently they put up a message board to 'give voice to the Voiceless', but threatened to take it down again almost immediately, disappointed in the 'half-literate insolence and common chat-forum back-talk', posting a public message about it, saying: 'You leave the Voice-of-the-Voiceless stuff to the experts, namely, us.' You can get it in PDF in the original newspaper format, or as ordinary webpages. There's a book also: 'The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia'.
Interesting site dedicated to preserving things that could easily be swept under the carpet, such as this exposé of a doctored Iraq war photo from the London Evening Standard. That's the last time I read that newspaper. Has the subtitle 'rescuing knowledge, freeing information', great idea for a website, a lot of fascinating material here. Very interesting archive of screenshots of 11 US drug paraphernalia sites that had the plug pulled on them by the Feds and that now display the Stars & Stripes with an enforcement notice by the DEA.
One of the editors of Flame used to subscribe to KAOS in the 80s, he was known to me only as 'La ver blanc' (The White Worm). We never met. Years later I ended up working on a mainstream publication where he also worked. Neither of us knew that we had a previous connection under our assumed identities, but I found out by a circuitous route. I'll never forget the look on his face when he brought the page proofs down to me and I put it to him: 'You wouldn't be La ver blanc would you?'
An inspiring conglomeration of creativity by Anthony Weir, 'a male hermit-anarch who has successfully resisted employment for forty years' and who explains a good deal more about himself on the 'about' page I've linked to. One of those websites you come across every so often that has a huge spirit that sucks you in. I think I got there doing a search on Taneda Santoka, then I noticed him quoting Fernando Pessoa and boiling his kettle over a fire, before I knew it I was lost in it all. Great.
Occult
There are a seemingly endless number of occult sites, of varying quality. While not a definitive collection, certainly the sites below I've found of value.
Good collection of materials relating to the Western Magical Tradition, put together by Al Billings. This site has preserved the late Benjamin Rowe's Enochian site, Norton's Imperium, and his primer on the subject Enochian Magick Reference (one section of the Enochian Miscellany). Also has the works of Frater Achad in PDF, including the fascinating and utterly mad 'Liber 31', and various Classics of Magick, such as the books of the Lemegeton. Also Jack Parsons' Book of Babalon (Liber 49).
The Magickal Review's Enochian materials
Digital scans of the following British Library microfilms: MSS. Sloane 3188, 3189, 3191, and Cotton Appendix MS. XLVI Parts I and II. Plus other related quality materials, including an Enochian font based on Sir Edward Kelley’s 'perfect form of the holy letters' in MS. Sloane 3189.
Extensive collection of texts and illustrations relating to western alchemy. The gallery of Mclean's own hand-coloured alchemical emblems is particularly interesting, so too his alchemical paintings, which are facsimiles in oil on canvas of alchemical illustrations.
Koenig's website dedicated to the history of what has become the most farcical magical organisation on the planet, the Ordo Templi Orientis. Personally I can think of better things to do than wade through this lot, let alone write it, but what the hell it's there for anyone to pick through the legacy of petty squabbling spanning over a century, reaching its pinnacle with the Caliphate OTO, who have brought magick down into perpetual law-suits, bureaucracy, and corruption. The most interesting articles are those from 'Starfire' on the Typhonian OTO, by Michael Staley (note, however, that his essay on the Babalon Working and Jack Parsons contains gross errors that I examined in detail in my article on Parsons in KAOS 14).
Very interesting investigative essay by Colin S McLeod delving into inconsistencies in Aleister Crowley's account of how he came across Stélé 666 in the Boulaq Museum, Cairo.
The Antiquities of the Illuminati
Eclectic mix of esoteric texts, self-described as 'networking the higher learning', from high magick to alien conspiracy. Has an extensive annotated links section, which is a massive subsite in its own right.
Twilit Grotto: Esoteric Archives
Joseph H Peterson's large collection of Renaissance occult works. Recognised scholar of grimoire culture.
Subsite of the Gnosis Archive.
Online version of 'The Equinox', Crowley's journal.
Wiccan and magical, with a good collection of occult links.
Psyche's site, covers a broad spectrum from paganism to chaos magick.
Fenwick Rysen's collection of chaos magick articles, as well as Enochian materials.
Information about the work of Ramsey Dukes, as well as articles, reviews, and a forum.
Ben Fernee's list of second-hand and rare occult books. Also occult art gallery. Some particularly interesting alternative versions of Thoth tarot card designs by Lady Frieda Harris, and their prices.
Essays on chaos magic, tantra, magical groups, technique, Cthulhu mythos. Also reviews and information about Phil's chaos magic books, and a journal.
Site of Australian performance artist, tattooist, and chaotic globe-trotting occultist Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule.
Sources of the Waite/Smith Tarot Symbols
Research by Robert V O'Neill into the motifs of the Waite tarot deck. Some very interesting observations and speculation.
Jack Parsons' FBI files [link not longer working, see below]
Unintentionally funny 1950s FBI investigation into occultist and rocket scientist Jack [John] Parsons in two PDF files, made available on the FBI Freedom of Information Act site. UPDATE March 2008: I noticed that the FBI had removed these files. There is an interesting blog entry on The Strangest Secrets about this and other files they have removed. I was able to download the files from the Internet Archive but given that it is easy to block the archive at any time with a robots.txt file (I do it myself on this site) I thought I'd upload them to my own server. So here they are: Part A and Part B. If you're interested in Parsons, see my long review article on him in KAOS 14, which clears up many errors that are floating around about him.
Site of The Aleister Crowley Society. Some particularly interesting images in the galleries.
Six paintings by Cameron, Jack Parsons' 'elemental', which featured in an exhibition in Long Beach, California, in August 2001: 'Reflections of the New Aeon'. Some of the other works in the exhibition are also worth checking out.
Emma is a French abstract artist and occultist, the occult influence clearly coming out in her work and themes.
Harry Smith (1923–1991) was an American occultist and artist. There's a small selection of his artwork. Among the photographs of Smith is this one of him standing next to Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson).
Very informative look at how libraries, mostly in London, deal with occult collections. A 2004 MA dissertation by Cecile Dubois in PDF.
Dennis Stallings' site on the Voynich manuscript, James Hampton, Phaistos disk, and the like.
Voynich Manuscript Mailing List HQ
Possibly one of the most esoteric mailing lists in the world: cryptography, an obscure manuscript, languages no-one can read, and symbols no-one knows anything about but everyone has an opinion. I loved it! Very civil too. (I wrote about my own one-time obsession with the Voynich manuscript in KAOS 14.)
Oriental
Websites relating to the Book of Changes are on my Yijing links page. Oriental materials in English on the web can sometimes be shaky in quality, the sites below are some of the best I have found. I'll be adding to this section when I have a little time. Always interested to hear of good sites on the Daodejing and Yijing.
Extensive collection of annotated Daoist links.
Numerous translations of the work, with Chinese and pinyin.
Great collection of research aids, the running glossary of characters in the order they come in the Daodejing is particularly good.
In-depth materials on both the Daodejing and the Yijing. His listing of the Mathews' dictionary numbers for the Chinese characters of each work is useful. Brad has an good page of Daoist links.
33 chapters translated by Burton Watson. Oddly Watson's name doesn't seem to appear anywhere on them. (Complete works in Chinese.)
Lin Yutang's translation of Chuang Tzu
Lin translated 11 chapters of the Zhuangzi, including six of the seven 'Inner Chapters'. His translation has a lovely lilt to it, as he has in his own writings. All 11 chapters, plus translator's notes, are on a single page here. The site also has Lin's original introduction. Lin started out basing his translation on that of Herbert A Giles, but could hardly find a line that he could leave untouched, so ended up vastly improving on it and creating a quite new translation.
A project by Derek Lin and others presenting some original translations-in-progress from the Daodejing and Zhuangzi, as well as articles on Daoism and stories. I like their stated commitment to providing accurate translations, and their versions are well worth checking out. I prefer a more concise style in translating the Daodejing (such as Addiss and Lombardo), but I like the care they're taking here.
Extensive, knowledgeable, and up-to-date entries from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The 1910 translation of all 13 chapters by Lionel Giles on a single page, minus his commentary, along with the Chinese text on an accompanying page. Another site has his introduction and the translation with the commentary included, split over four parts.
The Ethical and Political Works of Mozi
Electronic republication of the translation by W P Mei (London: Probsthain, 1929) with modernized romanisation and added notes.
Wonderful article on China's love of these singing insects, delving joyously into ancient Chinese literature.
A site by Stefan Landsberger dedicated to the Chinese propaganda poster as it has been produced from 1949 till the present day, all from his own collection.
Not the delicate lines of ethereal Japanese woodcuts of cranes these, much more folk deities like the Kitchen God and talismanic door prints for frightening ghosts away. I love “Modern girl” on a byke. The commentary speculates that the artist had seen neither a modern girl nor a bike.
Prof Stephen Field's essays on the origin of fengshui. Stephen did one of the two translations of the 4th century BCE Tian Wen, an enigmatic Chinese book of mythological riddles that remains one of my own personal fascinations after having the good fortune to solve some of them in 'The Mandate of Heaven'.
Absolutely marvellous rendering of the Yijing, Lunyu, Daodejing, Shijing, and Tang Shi in Chinese and translation. Beautifully presented, an obvious labour of love involving considerable technical expertise.
Site where scholars can present research, book reviews, and ideas on Daoism. Includes a bibliography project. Stephen Field's review of my own book 'The Mandate of Heaven' has been published here.
Bird Names in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese
Useful resource, particularly for those who translate Chinese poetry. Interesting that owls in China are commonly called 'cat-headed hawks'.
Good collection of classical Chinese poetry in Chinese and English translation, including the complete works in Chinese of a number of poets, such as Li Bai, Bai Juyi, and Wang Wei.
Project by the University of Virginia Library to put texts of Chinese literature on the web in Chinese (English translation included if available). A work in progress. Included so far are: 300 Tang Poems, Gu Yao Yan (Traditional Chinese ballads and proverbs), Shi Jing ('Book of Songs'), Hong Lou Meng ('Dream of the Red Chamber', just chapter 1), and 'The Clouds Float North: The Complete Poems of Yu Xuan Ji'. The '300 Tang Poems' has the Big5 character-encoding metatag missing, so that will have to be set manually.
The classic Chinese collection of Zen koans, known as Mumonkan in Japanese, in Chinese and English translation. The title of the work is often translated as 'The Gateless Gate'. The character men, meaning 'gate', occurs only once however, and a more accurate translation would be 'The Gateless Frontier', as in a border crossing without barriers. Those who imagine that the apparent paradox inherent in 'The Gateless Gate' typifies the Zen challenge to rationality through absurdity have been writing essays about a poor translation alone.
Excellent site with translations, pinyin, and both simple and traditional Chinese characters for each poem (as gif rather than code). The translations, which are original and unique to this site, are given in word-by-word form and fully worked English. Also a few insightful book reviews.
Very interesting interview in the 'The Seattle Times' with Bill Porter, the translator of Chinese poetry also known as Red Pine. Porter wrote the wonderful book 'Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits'.
Five Lectures on Chinese Poetry
I read this book by Lu Zhiwei some years ago and found it marvellous. This is a web rendition of the lectures, which are in English, on a Russian site. Lu's book is written with a lighter touch than the book by James J Y Liu, 'The Art of Chinese Poetry', which is also a good primer.
The whole of Waley's 1919 book 'More Translations from the Chinese' is online at Project Gutenberg.
The journal Asia Major has put almost all of its articles freely online in PDF, an absolute treasure trove. Some very good essays on Chinese poetry and myth, including several papers by the stylistically charming Edward H Schafer, one on the Moon Palace and another on the creature he calls the Chinese Dhole. Of interest to Yijing aficionados is Edward L Shaughnessy's article on the Fuyang Zhouyi. Donald Harper's article about Wang Yanshou's Poem on the Macaque I much enjoyed.
Selection of Hamill's translations of Chinese poetry from his book 'Crossing the Yellow River'.
Chinese poetry translations by Tony Barnstone with Chou Ping.
Ancient Chinese Civilization Bibliography
Extensive bibliography of materials in western languages, aiming to be inclusive from the Bronze Age through the pre-Buddhist era. The bibliography is a continuing work-in-progress maintained by Paul R Goldin.
Vast site on many aspects of Chinese interest, by Uli Theobald. The alphabetical index to Chinese literature is a particularly good route into a lot of detailed pages on this subject, including a selection of poetry in Chinese with English translations. The overview this site provides of Chinese literature is impressive.
Breathtakingly generous presentation of de Crespigny's academic Han dynasty historical studies.
The great Ming dynasty factual novel by Luo Guanzhong, translated by C H Brewitt-Taylor.
Two typescripts previously unpublished by Dr B S Bonsall, namely translations of Red Chamber Dream (Hong Lou Meng), and Records of the Warring States (Zhan Guo Ce).
Paste in a Chinese character and get an analysis of it, including seal, bronze, and oracle bone forms as gifs.
Excellent site by Donald Sturgeon containing a wide range of ancient Chinese texts in Chinese, some with translations.
81 PDF files comparing the Chinese of various versions of the Daodejing.
Photography
Quite brilliant photographs of abandoned buildings by Henk van Rensbergen, with commentary, many taken with a constant effort to avoid security. A very attractively designed site.
England's greatest curry photographer. Speaking as the bad-ass who got Alex hooked on poker, I particularly like his black-and-white study of the Poker World Series at Binion's Casino, Las Vegas, in 2000.
John McDermott's stunning infrared photography of Asia. Take for example this incredible shot of Wat Sala Kaew Ku (The Garden of the Crystal Grotto) in Nong Khai, Thailand. He says he turned to infrared photography after witnessing a total solar eclipse at Angkor Wat, Cambodia, in October 1995; he wanted to capture his vision of the place seen under these eerie surreal light conditions. There's an interesting note on infrared film. Another good infrared photography site is Darkness and Light.
Trained as a painter, Loretta Lux uses the camera as tool of painting, you might say, composing ethereally stunning posed photographs of children, reminiscent of hand-tinted Victorian postcards but just a little odd. She has an interesting look herself (these last two links taken out of the frame of the website).
Useful resources
The entire Chambers 21st Century Dictionary, Thesaurus, and Biographical Dictionary (1997 edition).
Convert a number in base 10 to any other base. Why? Well I found it useful when checking that the 81 tetragrams of the 2000-year-old Taixuanjing were actually in perfect base-3 order. Oh, you didn't know that eh?
Chances are that a website that no longer exists was archived by the Internet Archive's waybackmachine. If you know the URL, feed it in and travel back in time on the web, and also see earlier versions of presently existing websites. (BIROCO.COM blocks the Internet Archive's spider with a robots.txt file, so you won't find it there.)
Generates to order the famous 4-centuries-old dummy text for typographers and designers known as 'Lorem ipsum'. The site also has a history of its use and translation. This generator is free of repetition and devilish inclusions. The original text has been discovered to originate from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of Cicero's 'de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum' (The Extremes of Good and Evil), written 45 BCE.
WorldLingo and Systrans
Online machine translation.
WHOIS for domain information.
Best way to find an out-of-print book.
Uses live up-to-the-minute currency rates.
The first is good for a quick UK streetmap. Multimap covers the world and has extensive aerial photo coverage.
The World Clock shows current local time in cities and countries, in all time zones.
BBC monthly sky maps and observing notes. (The Jodrell Bank monthly page is more detailed.)
Web design
Excellent innovative browser. Invented the concept of opening links behind the window you're currently reading, and then multi-tabs. A feature I particularly like is the ability to get back a webpage you've closed down by accident by hitting Control Z. You can also rejoin a browsing session at the point you left it after closing the browser with pages still open (which also applies if your computer crashes, you can go back to where you were). You can get skins for Opera.
A good browser, multi-tab like Opera, with a great selection of extensions. You can also download themes to skin the browser.
Useful vault of old browser versions, for site testing.
Where many web designers cut their teeth on the latest stuff. One of Jeffrey Zeldman's sites.
Form to encrypt email address links on websites, protecting them from email-harvesting robots while revealing them to real people. This is the best one I have found.
Enter in a single RGB colour code and the calculator comes up with a colour scheme of 12 other colours said to be in harmony with it. Sometimes you can get some pleasing combinations. Worth a try if you need to add a colour to an existing scheme and want some inspiration.
Well-known CSS authority. The section entitled the edge has some great demonstrations of what is possible when you start to want to get more creative with stylesheets.
Repository of various possible CSS layouts.
Big John's site dedicated to cataloguing and demonstrating CSS browser bugs. Many thanks to him for spotting one of my CSS errors that was driving me nuts.
CSS hack to overcome one aspect of Internet Explorer's lousy CSS implementation. (The need for browser hacks is what initially makes CSS difficult to get your head round, and why people should abandon Internet Explorer for the latest Netscape, Mozilla/Firefox, or Opera, just keeping IE for those silly sods who make sure their sites only work in that browser.) There are other, newer, box model hacks, such as those collected by the css-discuss list.
Subscribe (free) and receive daily email digests of this knowledgeable list. Not quite beginners' fare. As Zeldman said, it's tough to keep up with this list on a daily basis. Also a searchable Wiki to act as a long-term memory of the list.
Fascinating demonstration of the use of CSS to create geometrical shapes.
Really useful collection of methods for vertical and horizontal CSS lists, for menus. Also Listutorial, which takes you through the stages of some of the methods.
Well-written and informative tutorial on using lists to make an image-swapping menu.
Well-explained tutorials taking you through the intricacies of CSS 'floats' and 'selectors'. By the same people, Max Design, who created Listamatic and Listutorial, above. With CSS tutorials as good as these on the web you really don't need to buy a book.
Very handy reference.
Incredible and beautiful demonstration of the power of CSS layout. An invitation to designers to submit a CSS layout for the same page, i.e. each new layout is controlled solely by a different CSS file. Some astonishingly good designs, some decidedly dull ones too. And a few designers would benefit also from an editorial background, seeming to forget that at the end of the day the page should be easy to read as well as looking good. Very useful for learning CSS for those who prefer to learn by taking apart the good work rather than reading books.
A few free-to-rip-off basic CSS layout classics. Useful to play with when learning, but you'll soon want to use your own ingenuity if you're going to be at all interested in CSS layout.
Owen Briggs' very helpful CSS site. His relative font size experiments are useful. He also has a blog.
Attractive monthly online magazine by Joe Gillespie, designer of some of the best pixel fonts around.
Patterns for Personal Websites
A refreshing read on the various ways to structure a personal site. He talks, for instance, about deep content, how the web is benefited as a whole by the activity of just a single person with a depth of knowledge about a certain subject making that knowledge freely available. Also mentions the idea of the Secret Garden.
Splendidly opinionated and well-written personal site of Peter-Paul Koch, freelance web developer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In javascript, he says, rather amusingly, 'I function on international guru level'. If you want to learn about javascript this site should be your first port of call, he obviously knows his subject and is very readable.
W3 Schools Online Web Tutorials
A good place to learn about most technical web subjects.
Brilliant bit of freeware for mass-testing that the links on your website still work. The creator of this software also has a massive anti-Scientology site.
Amazingly useful freeware for measuring the pixel dimensions of any element on the screen.
Freeware that enables you to download an entire site from a server on the web to a local directory. Links are rebuilt relatively for offline browsing. Works extremely well.
Guide to producing a robots.txt file.
Check your robots.txt file is correctly constructed and conforms to the robots exclusion standard.
A particularly good selection of PHP scripts. Can also get other types of scripts.
Everything you need to know.
W3C HTML/XHTML validator & W3C CSS validator
World Wide Web Consortium validators. You can get 'valid code' icons for your site if you really want to.
You can check the markup for your entire site in one go with this one.
Clever method by Webspiffy to stop people hotlinking to images on your site, thus stealing your bandwidth. A follow-up to a How to fight off image theft.
Common fonts for Windows and Mac
Good presentation of the 'browser-safe fonts'.
Miscellaneous
Superbly funny Flash animations of August Strindberg and his balloon friend Helium.
Brian makes crazy Flash animations. I particularly recommend Run Potato Run – inspired. And I love the style of the 'Fancy Soup' series, great way to present monologues.
The Peter Lorre Library of Sound
Speaks for itself.
Behind the typeface: Cooper Black
Clever and funny Flash animation for typography buffs, and informative too. Takes ages to load on a modem, but worth the wait.
That chemistry can be a wonder to behold is forgotten in most textbooks, this site details some of the great favourites lecturers love to demonstrate to inspire motivation for the hard slog ahead. The Barking Dog I first demonstrated to myself in my garden shed laboratory at the age of 14 having no idea what was going to happen. This is a 'woof' I will never forget. One for the alchemists out there.
Ambergris: A Pathfinder and Annotated Bibliography
Ambergris, the partly digested bodies of cuttlefish ejected from the blow-holes of sperm whales, and from there to major constituent of fine perfume, is known in China as 'dragon spittle'. When I was doing research into ambergris from this perspective some years back I came across this wonderful site by Randy D Ralph, PhD. It's a model of how to present a 'pathfinder' site on a specialist subject, and beautifully done.
A lot to explore here on the fusion of art and computation. It shows Flash at its best, such as in Deep Lorenz, an exhaustive exploration of the Lorenz Attractor, and Paths I, showing the patterns that result from thousands of wandering particles. There's also a curious variation on the theme of the Mandelbrot Set: Buddhabrot. And the Henon Phase strange attractor is rather beautiful. This is a great site.
I was amazed to come across an essay on this, since this was my 'unusual hobby' at the age of 14.
Typewriter serial number database
If, like me, you like writing on old typewriters, you also like to know what year they were made.
Good selection of pictures of gleaming vintage typewriters, though a lot more expensive than eBay. You can also get a wide selection of typewriter ribbons, although if you have the original spools for your typewriter you can wind on by hand any half inch ribbon.
Site by typewriter enthusiast Richard Polt.
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