This is a companion piece to the favorite neocities pages page. As it happens, I've stumbled upon a few websites in my day that are just plain obviously made by someone who didn't bother to learn much web design. Or maybe they did and never bothered to update anything. all the same, there are some pages on here that are foundational in my inspirations of this here website. I can't abide by everything on these websites, a lot of them are products of an older internet. Still, they're neat and I dig them a lot.
The Funny 115 is Mario J. Lanza's personal website dedicated to his writing about Reality TV Game Shows. The site is named after his original "Top 115 funniest Moments on Suvivor" list and has since expanded to accomodate two more versions of the list for newer seasons, a set of podcast episodes dedicated to providing historical context of older Survivor Seasons (the Survivor historians Podcast, if you have heard of it), a series of write ups about his favorite movies, a series of shitposts and memes about Sandra Diaz-Twine, a commentary on Norm Macdonald, a Funny 115 on Saturday Night Live Sketches, and COUTNLESS other pages of html editorials.
I definitely spent too many hours reading all of the things posted on this website as a young Survivor-obsesesd teenager. I figure it left a big enough impact on me to feel like I ought to do something like this one day. But of course, what the hell would I even rank? Still, his various posts and their style had a notable influence on me, and I would be remiss if I did not include it here. A word of warning that this site is written by a good ol' fashioned Gen Xers and so his language and opinions are definitely reflective of someone of that generation. It's his site, not mine. Still, his website made me understand that I could make a website to host whatever I felt like, and I think that's real cool.
The original Funn 115 landing page, http://www.funny115.com/v1/version1.htm deserve special attention. The page is an HTML table with various thumbnails which themsleeves link to a page with each write up for the funny 115. On the top of the page Lanza notes when the page got its 100,000th unique visitor in 2008 and it's 300,000th unique visot in 2011. I think this is so neat and so charming. You don't see many webpages like this these days. The write-ups of Survivor scenes are pretty good too, if you ever wanted to see someone attempt to convey humorous TV scenes in HTML.
I had Professor Ron for a course during my undergraduate days at UW-Madison, and I had the absolute privilege to stumble upon this majestic page. I would encourage you to read his page titled Personal notes, there's so much on here that is so decidedly not here to teach mathematics at the University level. This particular page is one of the reasons why I knew that one day I wanted to make a website.
"My addictions
"in fact, I bet that most people do not recognize the fact that they are addicted to something (and many do), and most addictions are either benign or positive. For example, I am addicted to coffee."
It's so good.
Beyond Prof. Ron's perosnal notes, there are some fasciating things you can find on this website. FOr one, you can actually find most of the assignments of the courses he has taught over the years, and the corresponding MATLAB files. I took the course CS513 with Prof. Ron and all the pdfs of homework assignments are still hosted on the site five years later as of writing this post (May 1, 2025). Maybe you can glean from the assignment due dues, but I took this course in the Spring of 2020, so we had to contend with the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. It's amusing to see this historical event reflected in homework assignments hosts on a college professor's website. Then again, this was how I had to handle this unprecendented time.
Other assignments on Prof. Ron's page are from as far back as 2006, but that isn't even the oldest stuff. There's course files still hosted on this website that were made before I was born. See if you can find them for yourself. They still work in modern versions of MATLAB.
This site's a bit of a treasure trove, even if I'm certainly not a numerical linear algebra guy. I'm not going to ask the question "Who is Amos Ron?" because I don't think that's appropriate. Besides, I know him and he might remember me. He's a fascinating character. His site is certainly a reflection of himself.