And since this is a goodwill thing they don't really have much of a service level.

FWIW: http://perlmonks.org without certificate still works. It's Chrome and family which do the redirection, so you can switch to another browser like FF.

At least on my desktop chrome stops complaining after I confirmed once to show the site anyway.

Mobile chrome is annoyingly insistent though and requires constant confirmations.

see also SO how-to-stop-an-automatic-redirect-from-http-to-https-in-chrome