Friends of Golfshrine

Otherwise known as the Links page, but honestly all these things are pretty cool and you should go to them too.

- maple.pet - The personal website of maple "mavica" syrup, the awesome webhost who so kindly allowed Golfshrine to exist here. Composes music, draws pixel portraits (see the Craig Stadler on the main page!), and does a lot of fascinating stuff in the weeds of computers that I've only passingly heard of. Also the creator of WebGBCam, a browser-based photo booth that replicates the look of the Game Boy Camera quite handily!

- Hardcore Gaming 101 - I used to write articles for them; these days, I use them as my justification for telling people that I've been published in print. (Just ever so slightly.) I also currently moderate their Discord server, where most of the action happens.

- The Top 47,858 Games of All Time - HG101's podcast, attempting to systematically, scientifically rank every single video game ever made. I've been on a handful of episodes myself, even though podcasting really is not my thing.

- Bad Game Hall of Fame - Cass and Charkie do deep-dives into games commonly thought to be "the worst of all time." Very deep and intensive research goes into the articles on this site, I'd dare say they become the definitive articles about the games in question as far as history and how they wound up coming out the way they did. These days they also stream on Twitch.

- You Found a Secret Area - beverly jane is a local friend that I meet up with once a year for convention season, and their blog covers a wide variety of topics, from game shows, to weird TV/movie tie-in games, to energy drinks. Very much worth a follow.

- A Question of Character - This YouTube channel run by NormallyRetro seeks to chronicle the strengths and weaknesses of characters from all manner of games and sometimes movies, in a distinctively awesome way. Funny as hell, and a new one every week. (Sometimes even musical!)

- Tangopunk Zine (18+ only!) - Tangobunny runs this monthly zine about a myriad of less-covered (in more ways than one) video game topics, from mysterious ciphers in arcade games, to pachinko simulators, to the occasional Japanese PC RPG. The production values of her zines are quite strong, and I'd say she's worth the subscription.

- Zerk Zone - A friend from HG101, Zerker mostly seems to blog about whatever, but is a Linux user since forever, wrote neat stuff like Dice Solitaire for Arduboy and a useful Dungeon Mapper program. For a while he was also documenting a lot of early X11 games, especially solitaire games like Oonsoo. His website might be the only place online I've ever seen write about Oonsoo.

- Commodore Z's website - Z is a a prominent figure in at least one of the retro computing communities I'm a part of. He makes a point of taking lots of photos of every Vintage Computer Festival he attends, and has an affinity for small rodent pets with lots of pictures of them, too.

- Dee Liteyears - I'd call her a chameleon artist. She has a powerful talent for drawing pictures in other artists' styles, especially ones from the 80s and earlier, and her website is full of 88x31 buttons, a lot of which she drew herself. (I've borrowed a handful of them here; great apologies for that!)

- Video Game History Foundation - Hang around certain kinds of retro game communities and you'll undoubtedly have heard of these people. Frank Cifaldi runs things; at present they're collecting full runs of video game magazines as a research library. I am a member of their patrons-only discord, where they've given Golfshrine its own subchannel (because I've otherwise spammed them with my updates ;) ). Cool people.

- The Obscuritory - Phil "Shadsy" Salvador - at present the VGHF's librarian - does deep research into games that I guarantee you have not heard of. Some of these are absolutely wild. His is the first account I've ever heard about a game I only found at a public library one time in the late 90s and swore stopped existing afterwards. Yeah. They're that obscure.

- Decker - If you're an old-guard Mac user who has fond memories of HyperCard, you might be interested in this neat little app - a modern-day HyperCard (graphical limits and all!) with support for scripting and all the dithering tools you could possibly want. You can even use it in your web browser without downloading anything.

- Kokoscript's website - Koko is the creator of a neat little DOS game called WordHopper, and has a fun affinity for old computers (check out how extremely IRIX her website is!). Cute artwork, pixel fonts, lots of fun things to click on in the marginalia too.

- Herzog zwei - A friend I met via cohost, has a lot of neat thoughts about old video games (especially a certain Genesis action-strategy game) and documents interesting things found while shopping at thrift stores. They're cool, is what I'm saying.

- Tanuki Computing - Another friend from cohost, Pom is an enthusiast about tanukis and assorted other things. Clearly they have taste!