Resources for Creating Things
As a purveyor of weird/quirky internet things, there are few things I love more than coming across a new little tool to make fun things with. Here's a running list of some of my favorites that I've found!
Games
Bitsy is a "little editor for little games or worlds" and one of my personal favorite tools on this list. A good first start if you want to make a game and have never made one before. It's got a pretty extensive wiki if you want to add audio, animations, etc. Flickgame is just about as simple as it gets. You get 16 colors and 16 slides, and clicking colors is how you get to different slides. Super easy and fun! Flicksy is both of the above combined! Make more complicated sprites that lead between branching rooms. Full disclosure, I've never actually made something with this, but it's been on my radar for a while. Twine is almost too mainstream to put on this list, but it's a great one to know about. It's a tool for making those interactive fiction games where you click on the words to progress. So fun and hugely customizable.Music
Beepbox is my current favorite way to create music. You start with 16 measures and get a pretty expansive set of preset instruments, with the option of making your own adjustments. The song is stored in the web address, so sharing is as simple as copy pasting the link! You can also export your music AC-chan makes automatic compositions from titles that you enter! They're always quirky and sometimes even quite good. Here's the song it made for rarimena: Art
Piskel is a way to make pixel art sprites and animations. It's easy to use and you can resize sprites too! GraphicsGale is a free program for pixel animations. It's more in depth than Piskel but also more complicated, so take your pick! Glitterboo is a tool for adding glitter to images. It uses the details in your image to blend effects. I've used it extensively for this site! Online Gif Tools is the best tool out there for making transparent gifs. Use it to complete your glitter gifs! Name that Color does just that. Useful for finding out color names. Kidpix.app is a version of KidPix that works in your browser! Waifu 2X will try to enlarge the images you have. It's meant for anime and manga styles but usually still works well for other images! Website Building
Domino is another tool that I've never actually used but have always wanted to. It's "a tool for collaging fragmentary thoughts and ideas without the friction of assembling them into linear writing", and is essentially a bunch of boxes that connect to one another, sort of like a mind map. ProBoards is a free(!) forum creation website. You can even customize the layout with your Neocities coding knowledge! Carrd is in no way underground, but as far as easy website tools come, it's one of the best, so it deserves to be here. Plus you can definitely make interesting and quirky things with it - this little game is one of my favorite carrds I've ever seen! Wikplayer is an html music player. Put in track links from YouTube and Spotify and it'll play them on a cute little player. Plus you can upload your own skins for the player! GifyPet is a widget for websites with a customizable pet that you can feed! I'm a big fan. Pixel Speech Bubble is the site where you can make those pixel speech bubbles that are in every moodboard. GifCities is a GeoCities gif search engine powered by the Internet Archive. Lots and lots of fun and baffling gifs to be found. Catbox is a hosting site for files. Use it to host your mp3s so that you can play them in the bg of your website! Petpet Generator is a way to make custom versions of those pet gifs. You know the ones. Hekate's Layout Builder is an awesome tool for website building! If you want to play around with how things look or create a very specific design, this tool is invaluable. The ACME Heart Maker lets you make candy heart graphics that say whatever you want. That's a lot of power. The same site also has a license maker and a label maker. Seamless Pattern Generator attempts to create a seamless pattern from a picture. I've used it for many of the bgs on this site! Animatedimages.org has a ton of free to use gifs and is easily searchable. Other Cool Sites
The Squilbert Network has everything. I wish I could be as cool as this site's creator. The Lesbian Herstory Archives is a digital collection of lots and lots of cool lesbian history items, like buttons and t-shirts. It's fun to see all of the artifacts they have documented. Not Bionic Reading is a free alternative to that cool font that makes it faster to read. The Grocery List Collection is a huge collection of found grocery lists. Reading through them makes me feel closer to the human race. This Website Will Self Destruct is a website that will go offline if it doesn't recieve an anonymous note for 24 hours. PostSecret is a group art project consisting of postcards wth people's secrets that have been sent in. It's an interesting and sometimes heartbreaking read. Spacefem has a great page about Eris Day, which honors the day that the dwarf planet Eris was discovered and why we should celebrate it. Country Heart Designs is an old archived site with all sorts of fun graphics and printables. robotfindskitten is a delightful zen simulation where you're a robot who needs to find a kitten!Credits
The various glitter gifs on the site were found on Unsplash and made glittery with Picasion's Glitter Text Maker. Other gifs are from GifCities. Stamps and buttons are linked to their sources if I could find them, unless they're made by me! Some backgrounds from SunnyNeo, Springhole, SleepySprout, and Miiko.