How to Get Out of Here

Here is a listing of links that have caught my fancy, organized randomly. Please contact me if any of these links appear to be permanently dead.

If you must know, my most-commonly visited sites are Google, Amazon, FanFiction.net, and the IMDB, but everyone knows where those are.

DVD AUTHORING

• The DVD Demystified FAQ is a great source for DVD-related information, and the book DVD Demystified is a required reference for any DVD authorer.
• Doom9, the central resource for DVD authoring. It's forum also the best place to go if you need any help. It also includes links to every tool you could ever need, so I don't have to link to them here.
• The best price-for-features authoring tool on the PC market is MediaChance's DVD-Lab Pro ($250, or another $50 to add in a video editor/encoder).
• Templates for printing your own DVD case inserts can be downloaded from Media Xpress.

ANIMATION (mostly animated theatrical shorts)

• The Encyclopedia of Disney Animated Shorts. The best resource for Disney-made shorts. Unfortunately, it looks like it died in 2009.
• The Looney Toons and Merry Melodies Page. Information on Warner Brothers cartoons. The highlight for me is information about what's been censored from the cartoons playing on TV. Also catalogs a lot of WB cartoon video collections.
• Jerry Beck's Cartoon Research, the site I rely on for up-to-date animation news.
• Classic Cartoons on DVD. Reviews of the pitifully-small number of DVD's devoted to classic animation.
• Facets. This site sells a variety of hard-to-find videos and DVD's--I use it for animation videos that you can't find in your local store or on Amazon.com. A word of warning: only order what's in stock--it took nearly a year before receiving an order that was only "temporarily" out of stock (they didn't take my money until they shipped, so at least I didn't think I was being cheated).
• thought experiments lain, a speculative site on the series Serial Experiments Lain. What this series needs is more sites like this one.

FAN FICTION AND ART

• The RRDatabase, which is, despite a very erratic update schedule, still the most comprehensive collection of fanfiction and art on the Internet for Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers.
• Robin's NIMH Fan Fiction Archive. This is the largest and most comprehensive collection of fan fiction and art inspired by The Secret of NIMH.
• The Unofficial Eric Schwartz Web Site, the place to go to see the work of one of the best furry artists on the Internet.

H. P. LOVECRAFT (aka Cthulhu and kin)

• The H.P. Lovecraft Archive. The best introduction to the author and his works.
• The H.P. Lovecraft Library. The most-complete online collection of Lovecraft stories.
• Miscellaneous Lovecraftian mischief: Cthulhoid Entities: How to spot them and what to do when you've been spotted.

MIDI's

• John's Midi File Choral Music site, quite possibly the only link of this page that still does what it's supposed to do.
• The Classical MIDI Archives. This is where I get most of my Classical MIDI's.
• The Classical MIDI Connection. If it's not at the Classical MIDI Archives, it's probably here.
• Computer Music Resources on the Internet, a good collection of articles about the interface between music and electronics, including good descriptions of how MIDI works. Recommended by Scott at Bear Mountain School.
• The John Williams MIDI page. A site for my favorite movie composer.
• David Barnes. The site of one of the sequencers I like.
• Gary W0001. Another good sequencer.
• I use Cakewalk Pro as my preferred tool to listen to and examine MIDI files. Once upon a time Cakewalk distributed a free demo of this program that could do everything but save and print sheet music. They later withdrew this file, but with a little searching, I'm sure you can find a download site (hint: the file name is cwpa601d.exe).
• MIDI is the language of gods. This is where I got MIDI File DisAssembler, an excellent (free) tool for making minor modifications to MIDI files (it coverts MIDI files to and from a sort of pseudo-source code that can be viewed in a text editor--very non-GUI, so not for the timid).
• AnvilStudio, a very nice and very free tool for editing and creating MIDI files in a sheet music-like format. I've had some problems getting the program to work with MIDI's I've found on the Internet (in which case I've turned to MIDI DisAssembler; see above), but I have no complaints for the one and only MIDI I've created from scratch.

MISCELLANEOUS

• Bing Translator, for those of you who didn't know there's a page out there that will translate text and web pages between different languages.
• Lemon 64. One of many sites I visit for all my Commodore 64 needs (the C=64 being a versatile personal computer from the early 1980's for those that don't know). I taught myself Basic programming on the Commodore, and very nearly learned Assembly before moving to the world of IBM-compatibles.
• The Ancient Egypt Site. An informative site on Ancient Egypt, created by an actual Egyptologist. Unfortunately, the site is not yet complete, being rather scanty on the New Kingdom period.
• The remains of Web Site Number 9. This was once the Internet's largest collection of "mistings", the text-based answer to Mystery Science Theater 3000, taking as its targets spam mail and poorly-written fan-fiction.
• The Urban Legends Reference Pages. This is a fun page to visit.
• The Evil Overlord List and A Horror Movie Character's Survival Guide (the later originally part of The Cabinet of Dr. Casey, a now-dead horror webpage). Two lists that go great together.

IN MEMORIUM: Notices of great webpages that are no more

• HalloweenTown (www.HalloweenTown.com), dedicated to The Nightmare Before Christmas.
• De Web Mysteriis (www.eerie.fr/~alquier/cthulhu.html), the most stylish H. P. Lovecraft site I ever saw.

This page maintained by McPoodle43 @t Gmail.com. Page last updated September 12, 2012. (Not counting the update on July 8, 2023 to add John's Midi File Choral Music site.)