In 1991, Jaleco of America released an NES game called Totally Rad. It was a fairly decent late-generation platformer, but it was perhaps most memorable for its oddly relentless '80s-surfer-dude dialogue, which even at the time had started to sound dated. I played it at least once around the time of its release, but I had mostly forgotten about it until one day I happened upon a Japanese game from 1990 called Magic John.

It was Totally Rad. And yet it was not.

It turns out the iconic surfer-dude lingo of this game was a complete invention of the American translators. They also redrew a bunch of the graphics to be more Radical™. This series of pages goes through all the game text and compares the original Japanese text/graphics to the English 'tude-ified version. It's amazing. Honestly, in the end, it seems like the '80s version ended up being a lot more memorable than the original.

This is actually a link to a mirrored/rehosted version of the original page, which seems to be sadly defunct. Be sure to check the hidden hover-text on the images! See also: Kid Radd

A blog chronicling the strange world of "creatures that people normally find too creepy or gross or weird or ugly to care about." Don't click through if you're easily spooked by freaky-looking bugs, sea creatures, invertebrates, etc!

I've tagged it as "defunct" as it seems not to have had an update in over five years, which is a bit unfortunate. The tone is rather informal in kind of a fun way. I am especially entertained by their weirdly mean article about 'land planarians' (which, to be fair, do seem pretty gross):

It's horrible from beginning to end, but that's flatworms for you. I can't help but have a sneaking respect for something that looks so incredibly horrible, yet manages to get even worse when you learn more about it. Well done!

A new mathematical discovery as of 2023, this is a single shape that can be repeated to tile the plane (a monotile), but it tiles the plane in such a way that the pattern it creates never repeats (aperiodic). Apparently, no one knew of a shape that had this property before 2023. It's a cool thing about math that "basic"-seeming things like this are still out there to be found!

A directory of (at time of posting) 1,882 blogs about various topics, sorted by category etc. A cool place to look through if you want to find something interesting and new to read. See, blogs are not dead! :)

A Japanese commercial for a brand of crispy canned corn, with rock music. Surprisingly catchy. Everybody come to the kitchen and shake it up 'n' go!!

The band responsible for this, Uchikubi Gokumon Doukoukai, has other good videos of similar caliber on their channel as well; this one about not wanting to get out of bed when it's cold is also very good.

This is an incredibly extensive collection of music reviews by this guy who ran this website from 1996-2011. Scrolling through the list of artists fills me with a sense of awe.

I don't really know what the purpose of this is, because it's in Chinese and my Chinese knowledge is extremely limited -- plus all the text is in images so it's difficult to translate -- but it's certainly a beautiful site, and it's fun to click around even if you can't understand what it's saying. It appears to be a "zoo" full of classical Chinese art of various animals.

Probably works best on desktop rather than mobile.

A website that tells you exactly how far away the Andromeda Galaxy is at this moment in time! It's coming towards us really fast, so watch out!!

An incredible video for Neil Cicierega's Limp Bizkit/Peter Gabriel/Star Wars mashup from his album Mouth Dreams. The level of care and detail put into this video is excellent, with lots of great subtle touches. The creator has a couple other 'mouth' videos on their channel as well which are also worth checking out.

A search engine that searches pages that often don't come up in regular search results due to technical considerations ("dynamic DNS") -- this "why" page has some interesting links to things the creator has found using it, including live outdoor webcam feeds and random weather stations from around the world.