Here are some sites that I have found to be educational and
entertaining.
The Webmuseum's Paintings section is a good place to learn about art and art history.
Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr.'s Illustrator Biographies brings back some memories. Frank Godwin, who drew Puss 'n Boots, is there, and Basil Wolverton and Wally Wood among others. Sad to learn that Ronald Searle, the Punch cartoonist, spent WWII as a POW of the Japanese. Many stories and well selected drawings.
Terry Wright's "Rooms with a View" specializes in fractal post-processing and also offers fractal prose.
Jack Stalnaker's "The Meeker
Museum" shows us Hollywood's true legacy (well, a part of it,
anyway!).
Jonathan Williams'
"The Jargon Society Musings" is similar to Stalnaker's approach but
concerns mostly writers, writings, and poetry, instead of actors.
John M.
Reese, Composer offers original music, thoughts and writings.
Good sense of humour too.
The Works of Carl Emil Carlsen has some charming visual art projects.
H.H.Munro
("Saki")'s Short Story, Tobermory is an amusing story.
A "demo scene" program is one which when run, shows you some
computer graphics and animations to the accompaniment of music.
The groups of people who make these programs have names, similar to
band
names. Future Crew and Electromotive Force were two quite
prominent groups. Their old classic productions, 2nd Reality, and
Verses, respectively, unfortunately don't usually run on modern
computers. But Future Crew's chief musician, Jonne Valtonen
(alias
Purple Motion), used a format that most MP3 players support, so he can
still be heard. My favourites of his are the 2nd Reality
soundtrack, Darkness, Shadow Run, Spring, Starshine, and
Turbulence. "Purple
Motion" archive.
Interesting development: The older, classic demo scene
productions I mentioned above that usually do not run on modern
computers - some enterprising people have worked hard to convert them
into movie format and collect them onto a DVD, available for
purchase. The project involved many technical challenges. MindCandyDVD.com
Essentials of Music
has good summaries of classical music eras and composers, from the
middle ages to now. I believe the site is part of the Sony
empire,
as the illustrative music clips are all from the Sony catalogue, but
they're well chosen and there's more than a few I wouldn't mind
owning!
To Fractal home page.