LOL (lots of links)

Stuff I like

inconclusive, unorganized, maybe awe-inspiring, maybe not
👀. 💅🏼. ✏️. 🤠. 🦋. 🔮. 🧬. 🗺. 🍭. 🤯. 🧠. 🦦

New England cider donut map. 9/27/2023

Idaho Potato Airbnb. 9/26/2023

Vacuum cleaner online museum 9/25/2023.

Website that shows you a random cat of Wikipedia. 9/21/2023.

An interesting visualisation of how often each OpenStreetMap tile is accessed. 9/19/2023.
My favorite poem is in this Roz Chast New Yorker cartoon. 9/19/2023.

The Shrinkflation Tracker, by Sam Lader 9/16/2023

You can... get a Bill Cosby impersonator in 2023??? 9/13/2023.

3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan 9/12/2023

Book on the Internet Archive of weird As Seen on TV products.

officemuseum.com, an HTML site about antique typewriters.

tumblr full of interesting Wikimedia Commons categories

Dees Nuts sued Mr. Beast’s Feastables over the use of “Deez Nutz.”

LOL at this old Vice article chastising a WSJ advice column. 9/6/2023.

retired engineer who sold Mexican jumping beans on an extremely charming HTML website. 9/3/2023.

commercial for Donald Trump board game 9/1/2023.

San Diego Hysterical Society. 8/30/2023

When I was sixteen, I secretly confessed to my boyfriend that my dream job was running a hyperspecific museum. It hasn’t happened (yet) but I did feel some murmors of the heart when I read the Atlas Obscura “Ultimate List of Wonderfully Specific Museums” 8/30/2023

The Verge did a big interview with Perkins Miller, the CEO of Fandom (the host of all those fan wikis). 8/2/2023.

The Geometry Junkyard. 8/28/2023.

Geography professor’s web page (be prepared to scroll a lot)

David K Jordan’s extensive personal webpage. 8/28/2023

Sheldonbrown.com, another perfect minimalist HTML page run by a kooky guy. This one is about bikes. 8/28/2023

kleinbottle.com, the webiste of eccentric professor Cliff Stoll who used to be a Cold War cybersleuth and now makes silly useless objects. 8/28/2023

Check out how your NYC apartment looked in the 40s! This website was created by Julian Boilen with photos from the NYC Department of Records. 8/28/2023.

Very simple tool for quick bar graphs. 8/28/2023

Dangerously fun game where you chop up shapes. 8/28/2023

An interactive globe of the ancient earth, before the continents looked like they do now! Really fun! 8/28/2023

Humans are slower and perform worse at solving Captchas than machine-learning bots! 8/28/2023
Ed Droste from the indie band Grizzly Bear is second cousins with another guy named Ed Droste who founded Hooters. 8/23/2023

The world’s only giraffe without spots was born at a zoo in Limestone, Tennessee. 8/23/2023.

you NEED TO PLAY METAZOOA.COM! It’s a wordle-like guessing game where you guess animals. You can tell if you’re getting closer because the site will tell you what taxonomic rank (kingdom, phylum, class, order, etc.) is shared by your guess and the correct answer. I don’t know if I’m making sense but you just need to play it. 8/22/2023.

PEPTOC HOTLINE gives you prerecorded life advice and pep talks from K-6th elementary school students from Healdsburg, California. The phone number is a local US number 707-8PEPTOC. Press number: 1 if you're frustrated, 2 for life advice, 4 for children laughing with delight and 6 for how awesome you look . 8/22/2023

The earliest known insult:"You are wearing such rags that your butt sticks out of them," an Akkadian insult 4000 years ago . 8/22/2023

The Yaghan people, indigenous to the Southern Cone (Argentine and Chile area) didn't wear clothes until European contact -- even though their climate got really cold! I forget that clothes are, like, not a prewired instinct like eating and sleeping. I would read a whole book about the psychology of dressing oneself . 8/22/2023

The Guardian chose a bizarre, evil-looking MS paint style lemon illustration for a how-to article in 2021 . 8/22/2023

Lasagna Love is a website that makes it easy to find neighbors to make lasagnas for. 8/22/2023

Big old organized archive of stories and books in the "mathematical fiction" category. 8/15/2023

100 things I know by Mari Andrew. 8/10/2023

A Japanese show called Trivia no Izumi held a competition where cats competed to see who could lift the heaviest fish. A clip is on Youtube! 8/6/2023
Martin Scorcese’s extremely online daughter’s TikToks 8/4/2023.

Comedy wildlife photo awards. 8/3/2023.

WikiVoyage has a travel guide for the moon. 8/3/2023.

Internet Archive has 6800 free Lego instructions. 8/3/2023.

There’s a book of Antarctic slang. 7/25/2023.

NYC restaurants by decibals. 7/24/2023.

69 as “funny number” dates back to 19th century! 7/24/2023.

Flickr category “Stick figures in peril” 7/22/2023.

Single person maintains huge “what’s special about this number” page. 7/18/2023.

I was delighted and unsurprised to learn that The Political Graveyard, a sprawling 90s-looking website with obsessive records of political history, is maintained by an Ann Arborite!

Life may be hard. But remember we live in a world with Croctoberfest! 7/17/2023.

Floors article from London Reconnections about wayfinding signage for floors in rail stations.

The accident report is out for Ever Given, the ship that got stuck in the Suez. A lot went wrong! 7/17/2023.

WIRED article about the 70-year-old man who investigates cheating in marathons and other long-distance races.

Pokemon blocks gene name. article is from 2005. 7/17/2023.

history of netscape buffering symbol. quick read! 7/16/2023.

David Lynch cooks quinoa. 7/14/2023.

there’s a great YouTube video about The Glitter Conspiracy and I got a tiny tiny credit, which was cool! I just answered a little question about Wikipedia! 7/7/2023.

the US forest service lets you rent these restored historic wildfire lookout cabins for cheap. can find them on recreation.gov

extensive Wiktionary list of synonyms for “wow”

medieval manuscript where a dog is crawling through the pages

A man who witnessed Lincoln's assassination appeared on the tv game show "I've Got a Secret" in 1956 when he was 95! 7 min Youtube clip

This woman has claimed, for two decades, that she is the creator of the matrix and the terminator and there were rumors (not true) that she won a $2.5 billion lawsuit over the rights

The scribble of a flow chart from an FTX bankrupcy filing
Headline: Neil Patrick Harris apologizes for serving meat platter that looked like Amy Winehouse Corpse at party

Tim Berners-Lee's 1991 paper introducing the World Wide Web was rejected and he had to show a poster instead
Guy (possibly a student?) called mrtortilla3895 writing his life story in the YouTube comments of Clair de Lune for 1000 days. posted on Twitter by oscar schwartz. some inspiring messages toward the end! “Give life a chance, even if it punches you in the stomach. To those of you who read my comments, thank you for staying in my journey. To those of you who reply to my comments, I read every single one of them. To those of you who do their own entries, keep on doing it. I’m so glad that this little community is so nice, who are supportive of each other”
you can get a replica of the jersey of a slam-dunking skeleton worn by the 1992 lithuania olympic basketball team. and the site is amazing.
A thread of medieval jokes that still go kinda hard
Michael Cera betting Jeopardy winnings on “what seabiscuit” (the answer was The Handmaid’s Tale)
if you turn off hardware acceleration in your browser you can screenshot to your heart’s content on ANY streaming site!
FOX gave away a Simpsons house replica in 1997
Buzzfeed News quiz: George Santos or Barbie? Who (supposedly) had this job?

ABSOLUTELY insane Quaker names compiled by Isabella Rosner
They’re IN LOVE! An American paddlefish and a Russian sturgeon hybridized despite not even being in the same family! “It’s like if they had a cow and a giraffe make a baby.” Then he quickly corrected himself, because the lineages of those two ruminants split only a few dozen million years ago. The evolutionary paths of paddlefish and sturgeons diverged 184 million years ago. For those fish to breed is more like “if a human came out of a platypus egg,” he said.
Writers writing in their diaries about not writing
there's a species of parasites which doesn't have mitochondria, the *only* known multicellular animal to not have them, which means we don't know how they get their energy from. And they might've evolved from jellyfish CANCERS that became stable enough to be their own species?!!?
NYT article about the Georgetown professor who decorated a sidewalk with 10-foot sculptures of Bumblebee and Optimus Prime, making the neighbors mad.
Headline: “A New York fertility doctor who was accused of using his own sperm to impregnate several patients died over the weekend when the hand-built airplane he was in fell apart mid-flight and crashed, authorities say.”
Last Stand of the Hot Dog King, article about Dan Rossi owning owned 499 street vending permits, the city passed a law saying you could only own one permit, a law he maintains was retaliation against him. Now, he says they want him away from the Met
One of McDonalds’ first promos, back in the 70s,was Garfield Mugs. So good! I want one so badly!

Black bear walks into bakery and eats 60 cupcakes
Wikidata search for
Number of living people who have walked on the moon, inspired by xkcd
moviespoilers.io , which has, as you might guess, movie spoilers! 7/2/2023

A really good, long, mindblowing ProPublica article about penile enlargement. 7/2/2023.

Journal of Astrological Big Data Ecology!!!!!!!! Goofy, high effort jokes. About science! Be still my heart, etc etc 6/30/2023.

good roundup in The Verge of good tech books. 6/30/2023.

As a former Highlights subscriber, I liked Julie Beck’s Atlantic article about Goofus and Gallant. 6/29/2023.

Really good long read in The Guardian about the guy in charge of Durex condoms. 6/28/2023.

“The NASA Joke Cycle: The Astronauts and the Teacher,” where you can also (with a free JSTOR registration) read examples of Challenger jokes. kind of weird. 6/25/2023.

a website with every NYC apartment listing all in one. i’m not describing it well. it’s not practical. it’s really cool! 6/23/2023.

200k unique “get well soon” messages scraped from gofundme. 6/23/2023.

the excess equipment the pentagon gave to police departments includes 6 french horns and 1 euphonium, 179 assorted lawn mowers, 271 assorted treadmills,72 golf carts and 1 order of golf balls, 2 pizza ovens, and more !
random imperative statements from wikihow! by Sam Lavigne. 6/23/2023.

top risk zones for white collar crime. by Sam Lavigne and others 6/23/2023

Stupid shit no one needs and terrible ideas hackathon.

I was on Lateral, Tom Scott’s trivia podcast!

Mr. Personality, a five-episode reality dating show from 2003 where the male suitors wear latex masks and Monica Lewinsky is the host!? 6/20/2023.

some episodes of the reality show Vanilla Ice Goes Amish are on youtube. 6/20/2023.

guineapigzero, a zine about doing medical trials for $. there was a segment about it on This American Life a decade ago. 6/14/2023.

really cooool midcentury ads for flights by David Klein in the Internet Archive! 5/23/2023.

joke book from the fifth century. 5/23/2023.

tiktoker who reviews fancy bathrooms. 5/22/2023.

“gigabrain” is like chatGPT but it’s answers from reddit. 5/21/2023.

website that lets you make cool QR codes! 5/21/2023.

Elan Kiderman Ullendorff on Google Doc publishing: “A doc teaches you how to get into competitive Pokemon. A doc helps you determine whether you are lesbian. A doc exhaustively screenshots and analyzes food in the 2019 TV series Ming Dynasty. A doc walks you through the steps to rip a CD. A doc is a list of galleries representing only white artists. A doc is a room you need to escape. A doc is a recipe book shared between friends. A doc is a log of dose trips. A doc is the salaries of TV writers. A doc tracks the points awarded on every season of Drag Race. A doc chronicles the activities of an internet account called "Dad." A doc indexes the lore of Starset albums. A doc is a syllabus for decentering whiteness in design history. A doc asks what we should do before January. A doc is a love letter to a friendship. A doc is a toolkit for getting through the pandemic. A doc is a map. A doc is a playlist of experimental films and videos. A doc offers ideas for how to teach ceramics making virtually. A doc sends masks to prisons. A doc is email correspondences between My Little Pony characters. A doc is a place to put texts you want to send to your ex. A doc is a list of things to do after prom. A doc is a poetry mixtape.” 5/15/2023

directory of laptop friendly work spots. 5/14/2023.

Atlantic article from 1949 called “Pizza” which talks about pizza as if it’s a completely alien concept. 5/14/2023
very bleak but kinda funny baby boomer countdown death clock. 5/14/2023.

New York Zoological Society’s very cute announcement in 1958 of its three new platypuses. 5/12/2023.

polar bears are swimming in Detroit! 5/12/2023.

NYT story about women who were named after Connie Chung, which was written and photographed by women also named after Connie Chung. 5/12/2023

queermaps, an online archive of gay bars. 5/11/2023.

Cool viz of longest lamest edit wars on Information is Beautiful. 5/10/2023.

NYT obit for a guy with a 37 million word long diary. 5/10/2023

gifs of toadlets being bad at jumping! 5/10/2023.

learnrecursion.com 5/9/2023.

The Vintage Sewing Designs wiki has more than 100,000 pages! 4/5/2023.

You can get certified in “rat tickling” online from Purdue University. 4/5/2023.

A map of the year in truck spills from Atlas Obscura. it’s from 2016, though, and it doesn’t really work. 4/4/2023.

The CIA has a podcast called The Langley Files. The FDA has a podcast called New Era of Smarter Food Safety TechTalk Podcast. The Social Security Administration has a podcast called Social Security Publications (it’s literally a presenter reading one of the agency’s publications word for word). The Government Accountability Office has a podcast called Watchdog Report. FBI has a podcast called Inside the FBI. 4/4/2023.

On giantmicrobes.com you can purchase stuffed animals of microbes such as chlamydia. 5/3/2023.

if you know me well, you have probably heard me voice my desire for easy-access audio from Jeopardy! games for me to listen to as a podcast. TURNS OUT THERE’S A 24/7 JEOPARDY RADIO!!!!!!! My cup overflows. 5/3/2023.

Wiktionary category of obsolete English words. 5/1/2023.

Scrollable timeline of Twitter’s demise 5/1/2023.

There’s a wikifeet gift shop. 4/29/2023.

David Rumsey map collection on the Internet Archive. 4/15/2023.

Guy gives tours in various Spanish cities of the physical infrastructure that underlies the internet. 4/15/2023.

Middle aged woman spent 500 days alone in a cave for an experiment. She wrote a book and knitted a lot and didn’t want to come out. 4/15/2023.

Gretchen McCullough, who wrote the (great!) book Because Internet, has a list of good pop linguistics books. 4/13/2023.

How rectangular is your state? 4/11/2023.

Meta AI made this site where you can upload a drawing and then instantly animate it doing movements. 4/10/2023.

Someone got a version of GPT-3.5 to run on a TI-84 calculator. 4/7/2023

Shrimp Week on Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Instagram. 4/7/2023.

Possibly the worst Super Bowl commercial I’ve ever seen. From Brittanica.com in 2000!! 4/4/2023

Timeline of Wikipedia edits that go back and forth on whether there are rats in Alberta. 3/14/2023.

NYC released the most popular 311 calls over years and included some memorable calls... “ A goat is tied to the stairwell in my building.” 3/12/2023.

download high res public domain art at artvee. 3/12/2023.

Chuck E. Cheese animatronics still use floppy disks haha. 3/12/2023.

“Altered states,” or proposed states of New England that never happenned. Vermont used to be “New Conneticut”! Newfoundland almost joined the US, not Canada! 3/10/2023.

Cool website builder mmm.page. I should redo this website and use this 3/6/2023.

It’s cool that radiotrophic fungi just LOVE radiation. It’s kind of charming. How silly of them. How funny. 3/6/2023.

My are.na collection of bananas in culture. 2/21/2023.

International banana museum and its youtube video. 2/21/2023

NYT rounded up the 25 most important tweets. 2/25/2023.

The man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas (from Read Max newsletter). 2/15/2023.

Buzzfeed interviewed the guy who made a 102,040,171,200,000 pixel dick pic. There’s also the world’s biggest penis website. 2/15/2023

Are.na collection of eggs in art and design. 2/14/2023.

Myanmar fitness instructor posts video of her cardio dance, accidentally records a coup in the background. 2/7/2023.

Endless AI generated Seinfeld on Twitch. 2/4/2023.

Durham guy set up camera at a short bridge and posts videos on YouTube of trucks getting their roofs sliced off. The bridge is nicknamed “the can opener.” 2/2/2023.

NYT How to make a crossword puzzle. 1/31/2023

Found Magazine — comprised of little found notes. Based in Ann Arbor! 1/30/2023.

the only good gift guide (NYT Styles desk 2020) 1/30/2023.

original Orson Welles wine ad takes where he’s really bad. 1/26/2023.

people worried that the electric push button would make human skills atrophy 1/25/2023

Actually good computer generated handwriting. 1/24/2023.

Horny ancient graffiti “Farewell, because you suck well.” 1/23/2023

A film editor (and also my very cool friend!!!!) Sascha wrote a Slate article a couple years analyzing the editing in Trump’s campaign videos. 1/23/2023.

He played dead on TikTok everyday for nearly a year, hoping to be cast in a TV show or movie as a corpse. CSI: Vegas did.
A Nieman Lab article that opens: “’Reader, would you be surprised to learn that you had been a terrorist suspect?’ The author William T. Vollmann wrote in Harper’s in 2013 about the process of FOIAing his FBI file and discovering that he had been a Unabomber suspect.” 1/23/2023
These interactive pages on earbirding.com will teach you how to create mental images of bird sounds according to their pitch pattern, speed, repetition, pauses, and tone quality. 1/23/2023
"the average SAT score of the highest ranked school that rejected a student is a much stronger predictor of that student’s subsequent earnings than the average SAT score of the school the student actually attended" from this NBER paper 1/23/2023
Kid from a 2013 Popeyes meme (instantly recognizable) got sponsored by Popeyes! 1/23/2022.

“maponshirt” lets you print a map on a shirt. It’s really not that groudbreaking but it’s fun to play with the website interface. I found it when I was trying to find cool retro OpenStreetMap merch (anyone have any tips?) 1/10/2023

Trashwiki, a hub for dumpster divers around the world. 1/10/2023

That one Chuck Norris-joke-esque college admissions essay that got send around on email chains in the early 2000s. 1/5/2023.

Heated Wikipedia discussion on whether “world’s smallest dinosaur” should be included in the lede in the “bee hummingbird” article. 1/4/2023

Wikipedia as it appeared in 2001. 1/3/2023

This is very bizarre and NSFW but this Russian photographer has been taking portraits of nude women who have code painted on their bodies. There are.... so many of these photos. They’re very strange and I’m amazed that he’s so committed. 12/30/2022

Yesss Defector published its hater’s guide to the 2022 Williams Sonoma catalog! Haha. 12/30/2022.

A site that documents all of the genders... according to forms. 12/23/2022.

Tumblr full of sandwich cross sections!! 12/18/2022

Tumblr full of candy bar cross sections. very satisfying!! 12/18/2022.

An oral history of the time six doctors swallowed lego heads to see how long they’d take to poo. 11/30/2022.

Master doc of all dril tweets. 11/29/2022.

The YouTube channel Answer in Progress put together a super video about why Japan’s internet has such bizarre, cluttered UX. 11/26/2022.

Compilation of bad local injury lawyer ads. 11/26/2022.
Claude Shannon, the 20th century mathematician called “Father of Information Theory,” wrote about the probablities involved in juggling. 11/25/2022.

This Cleveland Magazine profile of a local Ohio injury lawyer/ambulence chaser Tim Misny is genuinely one of the craziest things I’ve ever read. 11/25/2022.

1985 street interview asking Irish people what they’re giving up for lent. 11/25/2022.

Youtube video of guy on public TV blending drinks, exercising, painting, and answering phone calls at the same time. 11/23/2023

Fun colors and design on my friend Forrest’s personal website. Zone out and move your mouse over the letters for one or two or thirty minutes!!!!! 11/22/2022
Kevin Kelly compiled the best magazine essays ever. 11/22/2022.

Bob Dylan was in a 2004 Victoria’s Secret ad. Very random. The Cut wrote about it. 11/20/2022.

Kim Kardashian was the muse in the 2007 Fall Out Boy music video for Thnks Fr Th Memrs. 11/20/2022

Odd Salon is a speaker series where guests talk about odd stuff. There are videos! 11/6/2022.

ScanOps shows the hands and other evidence of human scanners in Google Books. 11/2/2022.

The New Forker, an interactive map of New Yorker restaurant reviews by my friend Reed Kavner!! 9/27/2022

a++ shows the must-listen episodes of podcasts. 9/27/2022.

Mark Vigeant has a cool website 9/27/2022

American Archive of Public Broadcasting! Just putting this here so I have the link handy! 9/15/2022.

It’s as good a day as any to read this sprawling Vice article about the history of Franzia. 9/14/2022.

Jessamyn West (a librarian, technologist, all around hero) has maintained the librarian.net blog for two decades. 9/8/2022

Gallery of aesthetics 5/7/2022

Max Read on those weird “wrong number” spam texts 9/5/2022

Guy set up a neural net to go through 50 hours of archived cartoons in an attempt to identify a weird mystery cartoon and failed to identify it 9/5/2022

Good to check https://retractionwatch.com every now and then 9/5/2022

Soda constructor. fun to play around with. 9/5/2022

Every now and then you come a personal webpage of an academic that absolutely sends you into a black hole of good links and new interests. That’s what happened when I found the site for retired University of Michigan linguist John Lawler!! Sad I never got to take a class from him! 9/1/2022

The Internet Archive has preserved a very extensive 1997 “Nerdiness Test”. It takes a while (maybe like 10 or 15 min) but could be fun to do with a friend. 9/1/2022
I’ve come back to this New Yorker article about lives not lived. “We seem to find meaning in what’s never happened. Our self-portraits use a lot of negative space” 8/31/2022

This Internet Explorer 1995 ad goes hard 8/31/2022
If you like the Rice Purity Test, you’ll like this metasite with TONS of purity tests. 8/30/2022

Chessguessr is Wordle for chess moves. 7/20/2022

Thousands of classic Polish films are free online. 7/20/2022

Atlas Obscura article “What is the Biggest Bird in the World?” 7/20/2022

Calvin and Hobbes search engine! serach a word and it pulls up a comic with the word. 7/20/2022
“Everything is everything,” a startlingly comprehensive map of NYC bagels. Now I have Lauryn Hill stuck in my head. 7/18/2022

Quanta (I love Quanta) wrote about the Princeton math professor who dropped out of high school to be a poet and then became a mathematician (PhD from Michigan, go blue) and won a Fields Medal and only works for three hours each day and is getting “better and better at ignoring deadlines.” I have too many favorite lines to list but one is “He often works in the public library, in the children’s section, where it’s pretty noisy. “I don’t like quiet places,” he said. “It makes me sleepy.” Huh says this about many things.” 7/6/2022

Pigeons can be art critics! <3 6/30/2022

The Wikidata game makes it easy (actually pretty easy!!!!) to make small Wikidata edits. 6/23/2022

When the official Twitter account for the country of Sweden let random citizens run its account for a week at a time. 6/22/2022

The dude from the “the worst person you know” memes speaks out! 6/21/2022

Sometimes, it’s really hard to find a good photo for a Wikipedia article. Here’s a lengthy but interesting discussion about what photo should go in the article about arming teachers. 6/15/2022.

I like everything by Maggie Koerth, but I REALLY liked this article about synesthesia and alphabet fridge magnets in National Geographic. 6/14/2022.

Tarpley Hitt’s top 10 assassinations in Gawker. 6/14/2022

GQ profiled the Life is Good founders. 6/9/2022

Nobel laureates reveal the things they do not understand. 6/9/2022

#HEXWORDS! Why bother with a random green when you can choose to be a #BADA55 !!! 6/8/2022

web app that lets you draw your own azulejo tiles 5/29/2022
List of Google easter eggs. 5/28/2022

World’s longest palindrome sequence. 5/23/2022

All* novel plots 5/23/2022

*most

they translated the Bible into emoji 5/21/2022

Dracula Daily newsletter sends you Dracula in real time (it's written in letters and diary entries). It started May 3.

A pie chart of what other languages call “pie charts.” 5/17/2022

Redittle helps you search Reddit better. 5/16/2022.

Reviews for “Brain HP,” jelly beans for gaming 5/16/2022.

Plagiarism Today was plagarized... in an apology for plagarism
first TikTok from space 5/13/2022.

Map of Reddit 5/12/2022.

MEL Magazine talked to the writers of Arrested Development about the iconic line “It’s a banana; what could it cost, ten dollars?” 5/11/2022.

Laughing at this bug report: “Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash.” 5/10/2022.

GQ interview with the columnist Adrian Chiles of The Guardian, whose bizarrely banal columns have titles like "What is an app? I honestly have no idea.", "Do not go gentle into that hot tub! A luxury spa is the wrong way to remember Dylan Thomas", "Have you cried with despair in public? There is nothing braver or better.", "I panic-bought a dartboard – turns out I am a shockingly mediocre player", "Lockdown has slowed me down. So why can't I spare two minutes to clean my teeth?" 5/9/2022

Caity Weaver’s 2018 NYT feature on glitter that made people suuuper curious about who was the largest purchaser of glitter. 5/9/2022.

Website that yells at you for touching your face. 5/9/2022.

Stanford computer science professor and “father of analysis of algorithms” Donald Knuth wrote about why he hates email. Here’s how it starts: “I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.” 5/4/2022.

Chicago launches 'Chicagwa' canned drinking water campaign. 5/3/2022.
Twenty Thousand Hertz has done a few tech-related episodes before, looking at the Netflix “ta-dum” sound, the Xbox startup sound, and Minecraft’s unusual sound effects. 4/27/2022.

Writing app where you have to keep writing-- if you take a break more than a few seconds, it deletes everything. 4/27/2022.

Website that lets you search a word and then will give you common adjectives for that word. 4/26/2022.

reverse dictionary— search for words by their definition. 4/26/2022.

twitter poll archives from @aella_girl. 4/25/2022.

Aconyms used in chemistry (specifically NMR) that are ridiculous... PENIS (Proton-enhanced nuclear induction spectroscopy), DUMBO (Decoupling Using Mind Boggling Optimization) etc. 4/19/2022.

Detect bird sounds with a Raspberry Pi and BirdNetPI. 4/18/2022.

Easter bussy (sorry). 4/18/2022.

eGMB climate activist video side by side with the scene from Don’t Look Up. 4/15/2022.

AI generated math paper 4/11/2022

Random substack button. 4/11/2022.

Birds that look like Guy Fieri 4/8/2022.

I know there’s so much to mourn in the Russia v Ukraine conflict that is more consequential than this “retro computer musueum beloved by children,” but it still made me sad! 3/29/2022.

Alvin & The Chipmunks 1980 album “Chipmunk Punk” played at 16 RPM is “secretly the most important postpunk/goth album ever recorded. 3/11/2022

Remember when Maureen Dowd ate too much weed candy and freaked out? 3/11/2022

What ever happened to Humans Of New York? 3/11/2022

Words That Seem Related But Aren’t. 3/6/2022

some really top-notch analysis of the reverse snap from Avengers: Endgame. 3/6/2022

the Wadsworth Constant is the internet axiom from 2011 that states that you can safely skip the first 30% of any YouTube video and not miss anything. 2/24/2022.

Story in Wired about Spanish guy who lost his false teeth and then got them back in the mail after someone did DNA analysis. 2/24/2022.

A study finds it can figure out your identity by examining which phone apps you use, and when. 2/21/2022.

Research paper about how the historic emergence of writing correlates with inequality. 2/21/2022.

The field of bioacoustics, which is biologists jamming microphones into the earth, listening to it, and learning stuff. 2/21/2022.

Just click it. 2/16/2022.

Female dolphins have a clitoris!!!! 2/14/2022.

The Rhodes Scholar barista who got Starbucks workers to unionize. 2/14/2022.

Why it took Mexico 470 years to realize one of its islands did not exist. 2/14/2022

“Real Me and Fake Me,” by Joe Dunthorne in the London Review of Books. He realized that someone on Instagram was impersonating him to schill crypto! 2/14/2022

“Revisiting Threes, 2048, and the Endless Chain of Ripoffs,” by Kevin Nguyen in The Verge. 2/14/2022

Vice did a 6000 word deep dive into the rapping crypto scammer Forbes couple. 2/11/2022.

good blog post from Evan Chen, a mathematician, about writing. It resonated with me! “In high school, I hated English class and thought it was a waste of time. Now I’m in college, and I still hate English class and think it’s a waste of time. However, I no longer think writing itself is a waste of time.” 2/11/2022

sometimesredsometimesblue.com which is sometimes red and sometimes blue

Let me be great! 1/27/2022.

beesbeesbeesbees.com, a site that simply shows Oprah releasing bees into a crowd. 1/27/2022.

Website with an endless horse. 1/27/2022.

Ooooh The Verge tracked down a 1980s hackers. Fun read. 1/26/2022.

Good article about shitty Walmart bikes. 1/13/2021.

Ivanka Trump appeared in the documentary “Born Rich” (free on Youtube!) 1/8/2021.

Emoji magic 8 ball. 1/5/2022.

The scale of everything in the world. mindblowing!! 1/5/2022.

Livestream of last McDonald’s meal in Iceland. 12/30/2021.

The best video on Youtube (telling the Dalai Lama joke to the Dalai Lama). 12/29/2021

Another classic gem from The Pudding-- map of the US by each town/city’s mose Wikipedia’d resident. 12/29/2021.

I LOLed a few times at this 15 min video about a guy trolling scammers. 12/29/2021.

Iceland trolls Facebook with the “Icelandverse,” an “open-world experience”. 12/29/2021.

1909 film to show how spiders fly, made of mechanical models of animals and stop motion! 12/29/2021.

Why some potatoes are better than others. 12/29/2021

This website takes you to random cool websites. I really like it. 12/26/2021.

Iconic story of brothers exchanging a pair of pants for Christmas for 25 years, each time with increasingly extravagant wrapping. I thought this would be some dumb feel-good Christmas story but it’s actually... a highly entertaining feel-good Christmas story

lmao really funny and touching obituary. 12/20/2021.
The State of the Species, an essay which reminds you that humanity is a little blip in the history of time and puts you in your place!!!!

Ooh, this website runs on solar powered servers. Super interesting read about energy use in web design. 12/15/2021.

An easy way to make gifs out of youtube videos. 12/15/2021.

Busy simulator makes a bunch of alerts/notifications so you sound busy, hah. 12/15/2021.

pairtype: practice typing your worst letter combinations. 12/7/2021.

Wikipulse: submit a Wikipedia article and it tells you seasonal popularity, trending data, etc. 12/7/2021.

The Deep Dreams podcast uses GPT-3 to generate word stories to lull you to sleep.

A tool from The Markup highlights Amazon products that are made by Amazon. I don’t know how useful this will actually be for me, as I don’t shop on Amazon very much, but it exists!

omg Elizabeth Holmes’ daily schedule is so embarassing!! 12/3/2021

the classic Reddit tale about “enraging the parents of my girlfriend by pretending not to know what a potato is.” 12/3/2021
The Science of Mind Reading,” by James Somers in The New Yorker.

When Multilevel Marketing Met Gen Z,” by Kaitlyn Tiffany in The Atlantic. long but so good!!!!!!! 12/3/2021
Tool: Screenshot,” by Kim Beil in Believer. A lovely history of/reflection on screenshots as artifacts 12/3/2021
The placebo effect in dogs is a real thing sort of. 11/28/2021.

Reddit post about why math is good. 11/22/2021.

I found Todd Schneider’s website from his 2014 Slate article about the longest disambiguation pages on Wikipedia. Turns out he has a number of cool data projects including an N-gram analysis of The New York Times weddings section and a followup for Vox. 11/21/2021.

crouton.net. 11/21/2021.

This site summarizes terms of service and ranks them on privacy so that you don’t have to read them. 11/20/2021.

all the best tech headlines compiled in one site. 11/20/2021.

PLEASE, if you click one link, let it be this one. The Finnish government has a startlingly good social media presence and this video featuring “Epic Tax Guy” is the best thing I’ve ever seen in my life!!!!!!! 11/14/2021.

Sabrina Imbler from NYT wrote about bee screams. 11/11/2021.

brb redesigning my website to look like this. 11/10/2021.

Good and critical and very smart NYT review of emrata book. 11/7/2021.

Elegant interactive Wikimedia page on cognitive biases. 11/7/2021.

The MarineTraffic website is a live world map that shows thousands of ships around the world. Click an icon on an icon for photos/info about the ship! 11/7/2021.

On the job with a Wikipedian in Residence. 11/6/2021.

Story in the Daily Mail about Joe Biden farting in front of Camilla. maybe he did it for Diana. 11/6/2021.

website full of math art!!!! 10/5/2021.

New York Post documents Pete Davidson’s relationships. 11/5/2021.

What’s the deal with Instagram letterboards? this is a good essay. 11/5/2021

All Things Insteresting published 35 cool maps. 11/4/2021.

Proflie on Sydney Leathers (girl from the Anthony Weiner scandal). 11/3/2021.

Website that changes design every time you blink. 11/2/2021.

How easy it is to lie with statistics. I expected this Youtube video to rehash correlation vs. causation but it was a riveting 18 minutes. 11/1/2021.

Bird makes Samsung notification sounds. 11/1/2021.

Reddit thread on “cow names” in other languages (ex Bessie). 10/31/2021.

Really wanna get my hands on the new Peter Thiel book but for now this essay by Anna Wiener will do the trick. 10/31/2021.

Otters in Snow stamps!! 10/31/2021

Neocities site with the best old-school horror gifs.

AI-generated English words (they sound so real). 10/29/2021.

Flowing data-- an essential bookmark. 10/29/2021.

Wapo article about 10 hour long Youtube videos, “2011’s weirdest Youtube trend.”

Rank your favorite fruits and compare with your friends! There’s something so wholesome and 2014-esque about this! 10/28/2021.

Actor Timothee Chalamet used to have a YOutube channel where he custom painted x box controllers, reports Vice. 10/28/2021.

Absolutely transfixed by this Smith College Library Rap, made by librarian Jodi Shaw. According to the caption, she spent two months making it and a week before orientation, her supervisor told her that she couldn’t show that she couldn’t rap because she was white. Also she made a big deal about how Smith was ‘hostile to white people.’ And then she changed the rap to add sections that defended herself (”I’ve got a good heart and I am a good mama and I did nothing to deserve this drama brought upon me solely because of my skin color”), and put it on Youtube. I find the rap cringey, the story even cringier, and I cannot stop thinking about it!! Apparently this was in the news in February but I missed it, I guess. 10/27/2021.

Human + chimpanzee = humanzee. 10/27/2021.

From the New Yorker a decade ago, an essay about a Michigan dentist and UMich alum who turned into a kickass marathoner! 10/25/2021.

Blobfish actually look quite normal most of the time. 10/25/2021.

Wikipedia Category:Nostalgia. 10/25/2021.

Modernist post offices of Michigan! Loved these pictures of post offices built after WWII in rural Michigan towns. “While the federal government offered a set of standard floor plans and mechanical systems, communities were given a great deal of leeway with facade materials and details—imbuing a degree of local character to what would have otherwise been a homogenized building type.” 10/25/2021.

Smallest stop motion film ever (made with carbon monoxide molecules!) 10/24/2021.

What Uranus scientists think about your disgusting jokes. (Futurism) 10/24/2021.

Reallyyy liked this article about how meth is changing chemically. I really like chemistry! People forget that! Not meth though! 10/24/2021

Vox had a really cute video to celebrate 10 million subscribers and their team gave shoutouts to people and/or websites that are really helpful! Things like connectedpapers.com, newspapers.com, worldradiohistory.com, Prelinger archives. It made me want to learn Adobe After effects and get better at making animations!!!! 10/23/2021

It’s an email from your fridge! 10/23/2021

Why pee comes out in those helical patterns. 10/22/2021.

Draw an iceberg and see how it will float. 10/22/2021.

The celebrity home / zillow gone wild guy Samir started taking a selfie a day and selling them as NFTs. 10/22/2021.

Twitter thread about cows and beans that look like cows. 10/22/2021.

The best of Billy Mays. 10/21/2021.

The pitch deck for the Trump Media Group (?!) which Matt Levine discussed at length in his very good newsletter Money Stuff. 10/21/2021.

Obviously billionaire are rich and obviously they don’t really pay their taxes but here are the specific ways they pass their wealth to their heirs tax-free. from Bloomberg. 10/21/2021.

Unsolved mystery archive. 10/21/2021.

unrepentent fungi thief. 10/18/2021.

People left very interesting (and thorough?!) comments on my BoingBoing post about the word “orange.” 10/17/2021.

View a random window from around the world. 10/17/2021.

Tiktok as the Southern Gothic- newsletter from Dirt. 10/17/2021.

IMPORTANT VIDEO 10/15/2021.

On a weird website binge! pointerpointer.com. 10/15/2021.

THE BEST MAPMAKING TOOL for graphs etc. 10/15/2021.

Okay seems like this Brazilian website is *only* a photo of a dessert??? but there’s an email??? gonna have to investigate this a little bit more. 10/14/2021.

Type in a movie, and this site will make a map of similar movies. 10/14/2021.

The sideways dictionary defines tech terms with crowdsourced analogies. 10/14/2021.

A bunch of AI projects all in one place. 10/14/2021.

Run Windows 95 in your browser! 10/14/2021.

Glow in the dark plants!!! unpaywalled paper describing the research is here. 10/14/2021.

Why we use the word “redhead” not “orangehead”, and why “ginger” doesn’t make any sense. 10/13/2021.

A “buttload” is an actual imperial form of measurement. 10/13/2021.

Neural networks from scratch ! 10/11/2021

The top baseball books on Goodreads are definitely about baseball! 10/11/2021.

What better time to learn about the Fermi Paradox? Just click it!! 10/11/2021.

This AI art almost moved me to tears? Weird night. The other art on the site is great too. 10/11/2021.

A site about Ronald McDonald statues with PERFECT web design. 10/10/2021.

Sudowrite, an AI writing tool!!!!!!!!!!! 10/10/2021.

A woman bought old film from Ebay and developed it!!!! Essay in the Guardian. 10/10/2021.

explaining the needless ubiquity of touchscreens in doctor’s offices and airports. the essay is kinda long. 10/9/2021.

Johnny Appleseed was more boozy than wholesome and the “an apple a day” had a resurgence with the prohibition movement as apples were repurposed from precursor to hard cider to a standalone food. Essay in Smithsonian! 10/9/2021.

Why everything is a trauma response. 10/5/2021.

Horrified by the nightmare that is reverse logistics. This article in The Atlantic by Amanda Mull is all about online returns. 10/6/2021.

Quartz article: Tea if by sea, cha if by land. 10/6/2021.

long egg production. sooo important. 10/5/2021

Why Ronald McDonald isn’t really around anymore. 10/5/2021.

Funny Tiktok. 10/5/2021.

Funny story about a garage door replacement. good dialogue. 10/4/2021.

The Crowd Tangle Chrome extension tells you what platforms an article has been most-shared on, among other data pieces. 10/2/2021

Good Vox article by Rebecca Jennings about how Tiktok tells everyone they have ADHD!!!!!! 10/2/2021

Brochure from Cyberslice, a company started in 1996 that allowed pizza parlors to accept online orders. 9/26/2021

The 2001 research-heavy letter to the editor arguing that the Genesis creation story in which God made Eve from one of Adam’s ribs may be misinterpreted— instead, the paper argues that God made Eve from Adam’s penis bone. This would explain why human males are one of the only mammals withone a penis bone (I wanna call it a boner bone but the real name is baculum). 9/25/2021.

The real research article called “The Taxonomy of Barney” from 1995!!!!!!! 9/24/2021.

Why everyone should stop calling the iPhone “sexy”. 9/24/2021.

The evolution of dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets. 9/23/2021.

Dunkin merch is kind of bizarre.... marathon Sauconys, a limited-edition bachelorette bathrobe, a branded tandem bike, this sweatshirt. 9/23/2021

Vintage cocktail recipe books. 9/22/2021.

I downloaded the fitness app Strava in 2017 and it changed my life. I was taking a post-high school gap year in Chicago where I didn’t have very many friends and I started running a LOT. Strava has challenges and segments that gamify the sport, and it connected me to the local running scene. Three marathons and one half Iron Man later, really can’t say enough about what it’s done for me. Anyway, here’s a long article in Outside Magazine about it. 9/18/2021.

This doctor wants there to be more organ emojis. 9/17/2021.

“Paradise Lost: The Rise and Ruin of Couchsurfing.com,” by Andrew Fedorov in Input. 9/17/2021.

Cool data viz article by The Michigan Daily about responses to a survey by Umich freshmen! 9/16/2021.

I could get lost in the anti-MLM subreddit for hours. I just found pinktruth.com which exposes the dark side of being a Mary Kay seller. 9/16/2021.

This guy wrote a fun gawker article about the fake letters he wrote to Dear Prudence (one ended up on Tucker Carlson) 9/14/2021.

The photos people left on an online “recipe” for ice cubes. hahaha. 9/14/2021.

The dark side of certain “eco-fashion” and vegan fashion materials. 9/13/2021

I love ex-Man Repeller writer Haley Nahman’s newsletter Maybe Baby, and she wrote about her moral dilemmas with Instagram influencing. I thought a few quotes from this week’s edition were too good not to share.

“I never liked the idea of selling my followers’ attention to brands, especially considering my ambitions as a writer. But I figured if I was picky enough and subtle enough, no one would really blame me. “Get your bag,” was the prevailing response to sponcon at the time, and still is: a full reversal of the sellout critique we grew up around in the ‘90s.”

“Taylor Swift is the perfect avatar for this value system. Known most for her down-home approachability—posting photos of her cats, writing songs about her life, letting fans into her actual home—Swift is one of the quickest celebrities to align herself with faceless corporate behemoths. Apple, Capital One, CoverGirl, Diet Coke, Comcast, Sony, Verizon, Subway, Walgreens, American Express, Target. She almost never misses an opportunity to make more money. I like Swift’s music, but it seems a fairly cynical way of doing business, and she’s rarely critiqued for it despite being critiqued for nearly everything else.”

Checkboxland, where everything is made of HTML checkbox elements. 9/12/2021

There’s something beautiful about the web page for the Woolly Worm Festival in North Carolina. 9/10/2021

“Trump Insiders Are Quietly Paying Teen Memers For Posts”

A round up of very good Letterboxd reviews of the new Cinderella movie
Inside the surreal world of “made for advertising” websites. 9/10/2021

This TikTok account is just videos of someone pouring cleaning products into a toilet. 9/10/2021

The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast explores mega churches, 2000s masculinity, and more. 9/5/2021.

I started writing like five posts a day for Boing Boing so now a lot of the things I would be adding here are ending up there. Anyway, I’m obsessed with this interview with the creative director of Webkinz that my friend Jackson Weimer did for Forbes. Welcome to the Curio Shop. Hope you find what you’re looking for 9/5/2021.

Miles Klee wrote about how he stopped taking his phone to the bathroom for Mel Magazine. 8/31/2021.

New York Mag article on the new Gawker. “How long do we think this is even going to last? There’s no ads even on the site yet. It’s like a snow globe right now.” 8/30/2021.

Nestflix, the website about shows within shows. 8/29/2021.

Garfield minus Garfield. 8/28/2021

A search engine for 30 Rock created by a Twitter user named @Phylan. You type in whatever you can think of and it will pull up captioned screenshots from episodes where that word was said. 8/27/2021.

https://aiweirdness.com - a blog run by Janelle Shane, where she uses artificial intelligence to generate strange and hilarious cakes, modern art, pickup li nes, paint colours, candy hearts and more. 8/27/2021

Here’s a very interesting article about how every movie looks kind of orange and blue. 8/27/2021.

And an awesome essay/interactive visualisation about how repetitive songs are by the Pudding, to complete the trilogy to the other two cool music articles already in the LOL (and an equally interesting accompanying video by Vox!). 8/27/2021

This article shows what it would look like if film directors designed your home office. 8//27/2021

All the essays by Collin Nissan, my favorite humor writer. 8/27/2021.

NYT article interviewing Claire McNear who reports on Jeopardy! for the Ringer and exposed former-host-pick Mike Richards’ inappropriate comments. I love Jeopardy and I love Jeopardy reporting and I’ve loved Claire McNear for a few years!! 8/25/2021

Conspiracy theory about OK Soda, Coca Cola’s bizarre, short-lived 90s drink marketed to the counterculture. 8/25/2021

Inside Hook was one of the first real places that ever interviewed me about Depths of Wikipedia so I feel an odd loyalty to them. Anyway, they have a kickass roundup of the 80 best single operator newsletters. Read the list. 8/23/2021

Essay about cultures that incorporate whistling in their language “Speaking In Whistles”. 8/23/2021

Some Wikipedia volunteer made an interactive webpage comparing the heights of tall things, all for strangers to enjoy. 8/20/2021

Jonathan Safran Foer, who wrote Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Eating Animals, has a bunch of weird conversation starters on his tumblr. Maybe fun to ask your friends if you’re on drugs or feeling profound idk. 8/19/2021

YouTube channel of hip hop lo-fi beats exclusively set to Simpsons scenes. 8/19/2021

Toilets with threatening auras on Twitter. 8/17/2021

Essay called “I didn’t know how to write about my sister’s death so I had AI do it for me” 8/17/2021

Ughhh new Gawker is so visually appealing and addicting and all around good!!!! 8/13/2021.

Geedis: An internet mystery for the ages gets solved! 8/9/2021

The US Social Security Administration estimates I’ll live to 85.8, which I found out from this calculator. 8/9/2021

Cool personal website for someone named Reed Kavner with a bunch of cool projects. I love finding people in the comedy x computers x education niche that I love!!! 8/6/2021

Aesthetics wiki about McBling. 8/2/2021

Attention Kmart shoppers: someone just emailed me a bunch of cool spots on the Internet Archive (thanks Mark!) and my favorites are this collection of Kmart background music and this collection of VHS intros. 8/2/2021

A pretty fun and punchy essay about why English is so weird and inconsistant. I’m the type of person that finds spelling/grammar errors completely permissible (occasionally even endearing) because our conventions are just so arbitrary. 8/2/2021

Website with logos drawn from memory. 8/2/2021

A 2013 Reddit post with real-life cheats. Bookmark this!!!! 7/23/2021

In 2016, someone analyzed 10,000+ Craigslist missed connections for Vox. 7/22/2021

A quaint 35-second video of a man doing what we all fantasize about: deleting his entire computer. 7/22/2021

Let’s all take refuge in this compilation of the world’s worst websites. 7/22/2021

I met @newyorknico yesterday, “New York’s unofficial talent scout” who showcases odd, interesting, and heartwarming New Yorkers on social media. A friend of mine got invited to his barbeque, and I tagged along. After I met him, someone told me about an odd camp of people that claims that Nico shouldn’t have a platform because he “wasn’t born in New York” (he was) and because he went to private school and therefore “can’t relate to real New Yorkers”. There’s always something to hate people for-- even the best people. Anyway, there are a number of hateblogs for xkcd, the STEM-focused internet comic that I love, and they’re delightfully petty. 7/19/2021

A timeline of the top 40 viral videos. 7/19/2021

This unconventional programmer makes silly, amusing, sometimes frivolous projects. I love them. Here’s one that makes 30,000+ variations of the “guys say they know a place and then take you to....” meme. 7/18/2021

I almost never watch TV shows all the way through, so this website which gives the best episodes for each tv show is great. 7/15/2021

Top 50 most fascinating people in Brooklyn article from Brooklyn Magazine. 7/13/2021

An old blog about things that look like ducks. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck.... etc. 7/10/2021

“I Kissed a Girl” to “Call Me By Your Name”, a data-driven exploration of queerness in music in The Pudding. 7/04/2021

For NYT Magazine, what six families spend in a month. 7/03/2021

The internet's original source code was sold as an NFT for $5.4M this week. 7/01/2021

I watched a few episodes of the documentary “This is Pop” from Netflix and my favorite was the episode on Autotune-- it landed such kickass interviews and makes you love T-Pain!!!
6/28/2021.

Toucan is a new Chrome extension which switches certain words to your language of choice, using spaced interval repitition to help you learn a language without trying. 6/27/2021.

One Time Secret offers an alternative to sharing passwords or credit card numbers via text message with your friends or family. The site creates a unique link which is deleted upon viewing. 6/27/2021.

This Bloomberg piece “Bland New World” is a meticulously-researched dive into the millenial DTC brands who arm themselves with generic branding (to take on The Man). 6/24/2021.
The Wikipedia page for Alexandra Petri. She was the youngest WaPo columnist in 2010, lost Jeopardy and wrote about it, and has had a bazillion frivolous projects to her name (also, her roommate at Harvard was Megan Amram). She once wrote “My goal is to be weirder than everyone else and hope that no one stops me. So far no one has.” Great Reddit AMA here. I think her life is cool! 6/24/2021.

“Nostalgia Is a Hell of a Drug,” on Gawker’s imminent return, this time led by Leah Finnegan (from The Outline, RIP). 6/24/2021.

The seven-year-old Reddit AMA of double-dick dude. 6/24/2021.
If you’re bored enough to scroll through this you should instead scroll through Wikipedia’s List of Common Misconceptions so you can become an “aaactually” guy. 6/22/2021.
The Letterboxed reviews on this 10 hour shot of paint drying are shockingly profound. Maybe when you stare at a wall for 10 hours you have epiphanies... I must try this! 6/22/2021.
How to Party 1950s Instructional Video- edifying! 6/21/2021.
Bouncing DVD logo to project on the wall at parties or stare at as a form of meditation. 6/21/2021.

Why your parents suck at texting , an 8-minute Youtube video on the ways capitalization, punctuation, and spacing choice in informal writing (twitter, texting, etc) can be highly developed and incredibly personal, like a form of digital handwriting. 6/21/2021.

“Robert Sapolsky on the toxic intersection of poverty and stress,” an Ezra Klein Show podcast episode. Listened to this one on a run and kept stopping to take notes. He’s a ridiculously compelling speaker and I was super into this discussion on policy, the justice system, and cultural commentary around poverty-- all through the lens of neurobiology. 6/19/2021.

A newsletter of the most-edited Wikipedia articles of the week. Each Friday, the Wikipedia-data-duo behind Hatnote send an email of the most edited pages and most active discussions. It’s an interesting way to reflect on the news (in an “oh right, that happened this week” way). 6/18/2021.

The ultimate “which character are you” quiz, which is like 100 Buzzfeed quizzes in one, and seems a little bit more reputable. And it only takes 5-10 minutes! One strategic (nefarious?) way to learn how your friends and/or love interests rank themselves on various personality scales is to ask for their results link and mouse over the dots on their graph. 6/18/2021.

Sending your friends ecards for every occasion. 123greetings has a Web 1.0 kitch feel that I’m obsessed with. 6/13/2021.

The “What font is this” chrome extension which, upon mousing over any font, tells you the size, font, hex number, weight, line height, and more. 6/12/2021.

The Sal Kahn interview on How I Built This. I can only ever remember my mom calling three men hot, and they were, inexplicably, my dad, Derek Jeter, and Sal Kahn. Kahn is hilarious and humble and genuine here unlike some other interviewees who take themselves too seriously. Did you know he was in a heavy metal band in high school which disbanded when he went to MIT? That he was raised in poverty in Louisiana by an immigrant single mother?! This might be my favorite podcast episode in months. 6/12/2021.

Two weird-internet worlds collided when I found out that one of the admins of the (genius, perfect) Instagram account Shitty New Yorker Captions is ALSO the author or this riveting 2011 read called A Conspiracy of Hogs the McRib . The account admins did a 20-minute radio interview with the New Yorker cartoon editor Emma Allen a few years ago and it was so funny I giggled! 6/12/2021.

This out of office message generator pulls from Wikipedia to keep your coworkers thoroughly entertained and inspired. You can put a random link, a random quote, or both next to your generic “out of office” message! 6/10/2021.

The Pudding put together a cool viz ranking rappers by unique words in their lyrics. 6/10/2021.

Another link from The Pudding: most hated and most loved things, according to data from the dating app Ranker. From the top of the list: Jokes, puppies, foreplay, animals, cuddling, pets, free samples, ice cream, the internet, Saturday. Also interesting are the polarizing topics: overachievers, Buzzfeed, talking about feelings, McDonalds, pulling all nighters, wasabi, Twitter, double dates, airports, sloppy kisses, black coffee. 6/9/2021.