Various Links Revised 3rd February 2003

ART 
Gustav Klimt - A page featuring a fair number of works by one of my favourite artists.  If you are in the market for an arty wrist watch you might even care to visit the rest of the Laks-Watch site. 
LITERATURE 
The Alliance of Literary Societies - Rosemary Culley's definitive compendium of contact addresses and links. Whether your interest is in Charles Dickens or Dick Francis, here is the place to find an appropriate society. Has a link to an excellent on-line bookstore, from which you can obtain that novel you have long wanted to read, but hitherto been unable to locate. 
Celestial Timepiece: A Joyce Carol Oates Home Page - A page dedicated to one of the greatest American writers. 
HORROR, SF and FANTASY 
Grim Commander's Fright Library - A superb gateway to short stories, long stories, poetry and even novels, mostly of horror, fantasy and suspense - old and new. There are also links to similar sites and a very good storehouse of game-related material, including lots of WADS for Doom, Duke Nukem, et al. 
Sweet Despise: Dark Literature - A fine personal appraisal of the horror genre, with some very useful reviews and select bibliographies. 
The H.P. Lovecraft Archive - H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a very fine writer of horror fiction. He is probably best known for creating the Cthulhu Mythos: a new slant on a very old premise - that Man is not the first monarch of all that he surveys, but merely a pathetic and puny insect feasting on the left-overs. Great Cthulhu, a tentacled but variable monstrosity, is pretty-much out of the picture - not dead, but dreaming in his abyssal house at R'lyeh. It's a nuisance for him/her/it, but vast telepathic powers enable C to influence those minions who are free to do evil, including foolish humans; and as Cthulhu is probably as close to immortal as you can get, time is of no great consequence. 
CINEMA and TELEVISION 
Edward G. Robinson - Michael Mills' splendid and elegant tribute to one of the finest yet most under-rated actors of Hollywood's golden age, including pictures and a filmography. Why, you can even *listen* to Edward G! 
Lexx Links - Matt Herd's ultimate Lexx resource, beside which all others are no more than Nano Shadows unfit to lick the boots of Stanley Tweedle's worm.  Here you will find a dark universe of goodies, including pics of the players, informative texts and too-cool java chat enhanced by Matt's animated smileys - and it's no exaggeration to say that there are almost as many links as the Giga Shadow has predecessors. If a hopeless overachiever, you might care to learn the lyrics of those toe-tapping and never-to-be-forgotten Brunnen-G classics, which should prove invaluable at dull parties hosted by repressed and easily-embarrassed bores. 
CRYPTOGRAPHY, FREEDOM, CENSORSHIP AND PORNOGRAPHY 
The Cryptography and PGP Page - With the vast amount of often very sensitive information now on computers - often being e-mailed hither and thither - the subject of privacy is something that none of us can reasonably take for granted . On this very useful page you will find details of an excellent encryption program called PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), as well as information about the science of cryptography in general. Best of all, you will be shown where you may download a copy of PGP. 
The Web Page of Sean Gabb - Various writings about truancy, guns, sex, religion, id cards, money laundering, etc., plus articles from Free Life, the journal of the Libertarian Alliance. An excellent page. 
Students' Association for Freedom of Expression (SAFE) at MIT - Whether or not you believe in the propriety of censorship, this site offers a significant gateway, to the smuttly, the eccentric, the bizarre and the potentially dangerous. Randy Flagg would cheer, Lord Denning would not. 
PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS AND RELIGION 
The Ayn Rand Institute - The home of Objectivism.
Church of England - The official home page of the Church of England. 
Catholic Net - For the papists.
WEIRDNESS 
The Fortean Times - The journal par excellence for strange and unlikely phenomena. 
MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE
Fractal Music Lab - Elegant page devoted to the strangely beautiful world of fractal music.
ZOOLOGY
The Tree of Life Homepage - One of my bright ideas that never germinated was a web-based introduction to animal nomenclature and systematics - a glossary and survey of the animal kingdom. It was a pleasant reverie, but a few minutes' consideration made me realise that it was over-ambitious for the commitment of time and effort involved and for the amount of space it should take up in my web directory. For it to be of any real use and worthy of something more than a trivial glance, it would have necessitated my doing away with all those wonderful and worthwhile things which have served to make my site so popular with so many people, both young and old (ie, young boys searching diligently for "pitchers of nekkid loidies", and retired judges experiencing "this remarkable World Wide Web concept" (the latter having become so frail and senile that they are envious of the liveliness of animated gifs). No, I simply could not do without such jewels in my crown as my exquisite collection of Sian Phillips pics. Just as well that I didn't bother, really, because I might subsequently have visited The Tree of Life -and the despair thereafter, at seeing how paltry and ill-composed my own creation was, should certainly have rendered me depressed beyond my usual bleakness. 
The European Snake Society Homepage - Obvious bookmark for any self-respecting herpetologist, with links to ophidian sites elsewhere. 
COMPUTER GAMES 
Thangorodrim - The Angband Page - Angband is a rather silly little game in which one must negotiate a series of ASCII-ish dungeons (in the form of a heroic "@" symbol), as a warrior, rogue, priest, etc. , of any of a number of Tolkienesque races, such as hobbit and dwarf, gathering treasure, armour and weapons - which are bought and sold (along with such other things as one may find and which don't seem intrinsically useful) in the various shops on the town level. Thus one may amass sufficient funds to purchase things a bit more spectacular than the standard swords and leather armours, and so on. In the absence of a decent artifact armour (or - usually better - some dragon scale mail), I always enjoy the feel of a little mithril chain mail - a pleasant picture of which I have in my mind. Strangely, the image of myself therein seems somehow more muscular and comely - which is hardly necessary, as I am close to seven feet tall and almost 325 lbs of solid muscle (yet lithe and mobile as a young panther). Had I been born a few decades before 1960, I might well have been mistaken for the prototype of Robert E. Howard's "Conan" - though my patrician features and jove like brow are perhaps more readily suggestive of Lester Dent's "Doc Savage". Except for those little rolls of fat just above my hips.
HOBBIES
Joseph Wu's Origami Page- Visit Mr Wu's site and you'll soon be walking with a cane and dropping annoying and sinister paper figures wherever you go.

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