Stuff I like 


Inconclusive, unorganized, sometimes awe-inspiring! Ignore the typos throughout and my inconsistency in adding the date — but let me know if there are broken links (I recently archived them all so if things aren’t working, first try removing the whole archive.org business from the URL). You should totally email me if you have a link I might like or if you just want to say hi.  Dare you!
👀. 💅🏼. ✏️. 🤠. 🦋. 🔮. 🧬. 🗺. 🍭. 🤯. 🧠. 🦦


  • Basically everything on walzr.com is delightful or profound or useful and this newspaper front page archive is all three! very easy to click back to see a year ago today, or a month ago, or whatever. 





  • Spent way too long reading about Lurleen Wallace today so here’s a too-long summary! Need a Sofia Coppola movie about the tragic wife of four-time Alabama governor (and 1960s presidential candidate) George Wallace. He’s most famous for bitterly defending segregation so I expected him to be awful but somehow the way he treated Lurleen is more terrible than I imagined. As a baseline, he neglected the family and constantly cheated. He refused to inform Lurleen of her cancer diagnosis, letting it metastasize untreated for FOUR YEARS until a different doctor finally told the woman her own diagnosis — and when she shared the news she realized people had known for years. After George basically killed her, he made Lurleen (who was very shy, disliked politics, was literally dying, weakened by last-ditch surgeries and radiation treatments, you get the picture) spend her last two years of life as governor of Alabama so he could govern despite the term limit. He up and left during her final painful months for his far-fetched presidential campaign. When she died, he refused her single request for a closed casket (!!!), parading her emaciated body through the streets for political theatre. He dumped the three youngest kids with relatives and returned to the racist campaigning. I find Lurleen interesting as a character because she’s simultaneously a victim and a perpetrator of cruelty! Many such cases


  • Some of the Nobel Prizes that have gone to people who self-experimented (link is to twitter)

  • After Teddy Roosevelt left office, President William Taft tried to make his own own version of the teddy bear called "Billy Possum" because he liked eating possum (people even gifted him live animals on the campaign trail). It did not catch on. One ad depicted the Billy Possum cooking and eating a teddy bear (quite the choice for a children’s toy!)

  • The old essays by Laura Kipnis are kinda fun for subway rides etc. Lots of pop culture references I forgot/didn’t know about





  • website called “trend list” might be fun if you like quirky web design and graphic design in general? (It’s fun to browse but i can’t figure out how to actually navigate it)



  • Another top-tier personal website of an eccentric tenured math professor: Thomas Forster. I particularly like his 8100 word appreciation of Pygmalion (half as long as the play itself) and the paragraph on his homepage about all the famous people (broadly construed) he has mutual friends with. Apparently Facebook keeps suggesting he friend Jacinda Arden. 10/9/2024

  • Somehow I didn’t know about the bathtub hoax til now. In 1917 a guy named Mencken published a fake history of the bathtub involving Christmas plunges, “violent discussions” in newspapers, and president Millard Fillmore. Mencken later wrote, "My motive was simply to have some harmless fun in war days.” In 1926 he cleared up the hoax and bemoaned its spread. “Pretty soon I began to encounter my preposterous "facts" in the writings of other men.” 10/9/2024


  • A guy on Flickr called jeffreyww, who uploaded hundreds of photos of things he ate with titles like “Mmm… cookies!” and “Mmm... Grilled steak for the win” and “Mmm... sometimes it just has to be pancakes”. Almost as bizarre/transcendent as Wikimedia Commons user Corn cheese.

  • The lip dub Wikipedia article mentions my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, which put on a lip dup in response to being  #10 on Newsweek’s list of dying cities. “The video was labeled by Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times as "The greatest music video ever made." 10/8/2024


  • Bop Spotter: a San Francisco person has a phone hidden in the city, constantly set on Shazam, that reports when certain songs are playing at that one specific intersection. 10/3/2024

  • The Netherlands has an online map of all street signs in the entire country. 10/3/2024


  • In the Ford Theatre’s explanation of why it no longer performs Our American Cousin (and hasn’t since 1865), the last reason is simply that the play isn’t funny. “its class-based humor poking fun at country bumpkins and British aristocracy simply doesn’t land nor carry the attention of modern audiences.” 10/1/2024

  • There is a committee of like 7 people at ICANN who, when together, can combine their keys into one key and make changes to DNS. (I hope I’m understanding that right? check The Guardian article from 2014, and an ICANN article clarifying things. 10/1/2024

  • I certainly do not read all the slate star codex blog posts but they’re fun here and there. For choosing which posts to read: one person’s compilation, another, and the Most popular posts. 10/2/2024

  • Fun to go on the linguistics stack exchange and sort by various things! 9/30/2024

  • Wanker’s Corner, a locale (and store) in Oregon named after early settler Mr. Wanker.

  • A guy named Steve had a blog in 2003 called “Steve Don’t Eat It” in which he recounted the experiences of consuming horrendous foods





  • Radioman’s website!  (the formerly homeless guy who has been in like 300 movies as a background actor)

  • Alan Abel’s Timeline of hoaxes (guy who made a satirical activist movement to put clothes on animals (including 1963 White House protest demanding Jackie O put pants on her horses), Citizens Against Breastfeeding claimed the act was incest (and found authentic adherents, including a woman from Santa Barbara who sent 40k), a fake school in the 1970s recession that claimed to teach the art of panhandling, appeared in a 1999 HBO documentary falsely claiming to have the world’s smallest penis, etc etc tons more)


  • Virginia City, Nevada holds World Championship Outhouse Races. People push outhouses through the city. The event is inspired by a real incident in which people blocked the door to the courthouse with outhouses to protest plumbing restrictions.

  • There is such thing as the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championships and you don’t have to qualify. You just get tickets right when they go on sale and show up. 
 





  • Fun, searchable map that shows which people are from which areas of the world! It uses the Wikipedia API.



  • In truck spill news: “Boxes of french fries covered Los Angeles highway after crash, causing 6-hour long cleanup,” reports USA Today. It appears the police called the fries “hazardous materials.”



  • In ship spill news: The NYT wrote about The Lego Spill of 1997 caused by a cargo ship that lost 62 of its shipping containers and nearly capsized. The 5 million Lego pieces keep appearing on shores in Europe!















  • 400 people applied to adopt a parrot named Pepper who kept saying “do you want me to kick your ass?” 8/19/2024









  • locations and relative sizes of peat bogs in england and wales vs places where the surname "moss" is disproportionately common (tweet)



  •   2009 Shaq tweet: “Dear ashton kutcher yo momma so old the key on ben franklins kite, was to her apartment. Respond if yur not scared”



  • Paris Review article about how an anonymous Federal Government employee doodled every day on his calendar during the entire 1980s The entire set was sold at auction for over $5,000
  • I am very charmed by an email to Vanderbilt neuroengineering professor Daniel Gonzales from Vanderbilt Daniel Gonzalez that basically is like “hey, for months I have been getting a bunch of emails meant for you and gently informing the senders and I don’t mind but just so you know I’m graduating soon and won’t check this email anymore.”
  • Statistically happiest American based on Gallup polls would be an observant Jew, Chinese guy, 5 foot 10, has kids, lives in Honolulu, older than 65, married, runs his own business, makes more than $120k a year. There is a guy who named Alvin Wong who fits all these! There’s a 2011 NYT article about him. He does seem happy!
  • The Albanian prime minister’s doodles are available for purchase on Artsy for like 3500 euros.
  • The IRS updated its employee manual in 1989 to say that in the event of nuclear war, the agency will resume tax collection within 30 days.
  • How Alex Trebek says genre. (Twitter video by Alex Jacob)
  • The word “boycott” comes from an English land agent named Charles Boycott who collected money from the Irish until they all collectively ignored him
  • This math paper from 2021 that opens with “Since the dawn of time, human beings have asked some fundamental questions: who are we? why are we here? is there life after death? Unable to answer any of these, in this paper we will consider cohomology classes” on a compact projective manifold that have a property analogous to the Hard-Lefschetz Theorem and Hodge-Riemann bilinear relations.”
  • Illustration of the proper method of wrapping a Royal Air Force pigeon for air delivery, c. 1919









  • Ask Jeeves was so big from 200-2004 that it had Jeeves as a Macy's Thanksgiving Parade balloon.












  • Catalan doesn’t play around with its top level domains. Requires all .cat websites to have a version in Catalan within six months of registering the domain.



  • Badalona is a municipality near Barcelona. Ronald Reagan’s treasury secretary was named Donald Reagan. Zilwaukee is across the lake from Milwaukee. Mario/Wario situations.



  • A September 30 1963 Peanuts strip about ZIP codes, which had just been introduced, where 5 says “My dad says we have so many numbers these days we’re all losing our identity.”



  • Fossilized footprints in New Mexico show a toddler walking with an adult, and getting picked up and put down over and over. National Parks article. PBS video.



  • Since 1995 there has been a group called the Texas Camel Corps dedicated to studying and reenacting events of the United States Camel Corps, an 1850s military project that imported camels. You can visit the group’s current website or the archived older versions of its website which are more detailed. 8/6/2024






  • starringthecomputer.com is a website run by one guy that documents the computer models that appear in blockbuster movies. 8/1/2024



  • http://timezoom.org/ takes timelines from Wikipedia, combines them, and puts them into zoomable view.
























  • Eater article about how Robert Siu is the second most active reviewer on Yelp, averaging 4 reviews a day. He won a Yelpie (“Yelp’s equivalent to a Pulitzer”). I am amazed both that he manages to go to so many places and that he writes more than one paragraph in his reviews! Here’s the full Yelp list of 2023’s most prolific users. The guy at the top of the list, John M. from Orlando, is a bit more bloggy and less practical with the things he reviews. He gave “weather” five stars: “While most of us realize that we can't change the weather, I sometimes have to be humbled to realize how powerless we are to it”.
  • Knitting wasn’t invented until the year ~1000 but Peruvians did naalbinding which was similar close (Youtube tutorials), and tons of people around the globe made “sprang.” Blog post and followup about ancient textiles!







  • You can buy prints of cool posters created by Canada’s Department of Agriculture between 1947-1973. I don’t actually think I’m going to buy any but if I did, it would be the one about rat control in Alberta (because Alberta is now considered rat-free which has led to a few Wikipedia kerfuffles)!















  • “The Final Curtain” is a prank website from 1998 about a combined graveyard, funeral service, and theme park. It’s by a guy named Joey Skaggs who did tons of similar pranks from the 1970s to 1990s, like a fictional company that offered hair transplants from cadavers to living people, a celebrity sperm bank, and “‘Cathouse for Dogs’ where for $50 you could get your dog sexually gratified.” Some are better than others for sure but it’s a fun read

  • Ursula Le Guin’s old website is so nice (much better than the polished new one) and I like the blog. I’m assuming she surfed the web between 3 and 5pm.






  • Guy in Minneapolis with large wooden sculpture of a pencil in his front yard performed his annual pencil sharpening ceremony. The whole neighborhood came to watch. (TikTok link)












  • In June 2024, it came to light that the Oklahoma Department of Education couldn't log into its own website for two years because the employee who had run it left and didn’t tell it to anyone (gvt video of a meeting where it was discussed)









  • Google blog announces a new "Shipping Network Design API" for and operators of container ships to optimize their trade routes. 6/10/2024












  • Amazing that there is an annual horseshoe crab count in New York City! “Teams of volunteers fan out across the waterfronts of Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens during high tide before and after the new and full moons to count crabs during their fornicatory frenzy.” 5/29/2024












  • From page 70 of Making the Alphabet Dance: “There are only a handful of words in the unabridged Merriam-Webster that exhibit three identical letters in a row without hyphens, apostrophes, or other punctuation: are headristressship, goddessship, patronessship, and wallles … The unabridged Random House dictionary also admits goddessship, and the Oxford English Dictionary adds countessship, frillless, and duchessship. Hostessship appears in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, in Act IV, scene iv.”



  • The US Board on Geographic Names hates apostrophies! From a 2013 WSJ article: “The U.S., in fact, is the only country with an apostrophe-eradication policy. The program took off when President Benjamin Harrison set up the Board on Geographic Names in 1890. By one board estimate, it has scrubbed 250,000 apostrophes from federal maps ... Irish names (O'Fallon, Ill.) and French ones (Coeur d'Alene, Idaho) aren't possessives and get by. While administrative names can endure (Prince George's County, Md.), the committee has granted only five possessive apostrophes in 113 years: Martha's Vineyard, Mass.; Ike's Point, N.J.; John E's Pond, R.I.; Carlos Elmer's Joshua View, Ariz.; and—in 2002—Clark's Mountain, Ore.”



  • 10,000 word essay on cardboard. It probably didn’t have to be so long but I still liked parts of it. 5/27/2024






  • I love articles like this! Joshua Bote from the SF Gazeeter located the kid from the semi-viral 1940s newspaper clipping who spent a "lost week" in SF theaters. 5/16/2024



  • I have not tried the app “Artly” but it has been recommended to me as “Duolingo for art history.” I have some gaping gaps in my art knowledge so this might be good for me 5/16/2024






  • lots of tools show the most common words in a text but I like this one that shows most common phrases. 5/15/2024



  • haven’t tried it but people like the text manipulation on the website languageisavirus.com. 5/15/2024









  • Australia’s richest woman (mining billionaire Gina Rinehart) is demanding the National Portrait Gallery of Australia remove her portrait and OMG you need to see the portrait. I laughed out loud. 5/25/2024






  • Lots of discourse about “nepo baby” musicians. My only addition to the discourse is that Tiffany Trump and Allessandra Mussollini have songs that are kinda not that bad.









  • Mark Twain’s patented a history trivia game and in a 1914 piece for Harper’scalled “How to Make History Dates Stick,” he said historical dates were “like the cattle-pens of a ranch—they shut in the several brands of historical cattle, each within its own fence, and keep them from getting mixed together.” I looked up the memorization-worthy dates and they were just the years of rule of  a bunch of European leaders, even the kind of irrelevant ones. 5/8/2024
  • In 2015, the USPS’s Maya Angelou stamp had a quote that wasn’t even hers. 5/7/2024



  • 2017 article from The Awl (RIP) about a column called Queries and Answers that ran in the New York Times Book Review from 1920ish to 1970ish and was basically Shazam for poetry — readers sent in half-remembered poems and random readers helped identify them. Here’s an example from 1946. My favorite part is the Vermont retiree “Mrs. Henry D. Holmes” who identified SO many poems that she got fan mail and was, according to a 1937 article, Vermont’s most widely-known woman. The section’s editor, Hazel Felleman, published a bunch of the most-searched-for poems into a smash hit, top selling anthology in 1936 and I want to read it! 5/7/2024.

  • QZ article compiled questions that people have asked to NYPL reference librarians over the years. I like Clive Thompson, so this 2016 article in Smithsonian Magazine about the history of American newspapers was fun. 5/7/2024.
  • There is such thing as “Cintas best restroom hall of fame”! 5/7/2024









  • 404 article about Pokemon Go players abusing OpenStreetMaps.5/5/2024






  • All the men’s Olympic water polo champs since 2000 are from the same section of Eastern Europe. 5/2/2024






  • look at all the book covers this woman (nicknamed “The Everywhere Girl”) was on just from doing one stock photography photoshoot in the 90s! 4/30/2024






  • 9-year-old Seagull boy wins seagull screeching competition! “Cooper took his lucky mascot with him - a small model seagull which he calls Stephen and spells with a "ph", but his parents call Steven Seagull, like the actor Steven Seagal.” 4/24/2024



  • Ooh, this website shows recent edits to OpenStreetMap. 4/23/2024



  • The best baby name website is magic baby names, the one that tells you what sibling names are most frequently paired with a name (based on US census data)



  • list of autological words (words that describe themselves, like “unhyphenated” and “wee” and “common” and “spellable.”)









  • The Casio “Calculighter”, a calculator and lighter in one



  • an 11th century man named Richard the Horny popularized shoes that were so gay, they made them illegal (saw this from my pal Olivia)



  • Bell Labs employee Harry Nyquist who was a productivity multiplier. People who had lunch with him were frequently super successful. From the book The Idea Factory: “"Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn't the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, 'he drew people out, got them thinking'"






  • A guy went to see all 43 pieces of art from Animal Crossing IRL!!









  • My friend Michael wrote a book that’s just full of the digits of pi



  • NYC’s building energy efficiency rating system has the acronym BEER









  • Lynyrd Skynyrd’s high school gym teacher was named Leonard Skinner! Maybe everyone knows this but I didn’t until today!



  • SQLite is maintained by three dudes who don’t accept outside contributors. And tz database, which pretty much the entire tech world uses for date and time, is maintained by pretty much one guy (and kinda another, but pretty much just one!)



  • NYT article about the real estate kingpin who literally walks the city to update his huge paper map of NYC properties.



  • some day I should sit around and explore the census data for a while.



  • from Twitter: “a truck carrying 100k chinook salmon smolts (yay!) crashed in eastern oregon and flipped over (oh no!) but did so right above a creek (yay!) and a bunch died (oh no!) but more than 75k of them were inadvertently released and will likely return there to spawn as adults (yay!)” news story





















  • On a website called “The Fish Doorbell”, you can control a little door for fish to pass through a boat lock in Utrecht.



  • I’m a few months late to Natan Last’s article in The New Yorker about crosswords, but I loved it. Somehow, it told a compelling story while still feeling as factoid-dense as crosswords themselves









  • website full of floating fragments from Craigslist “missed connections” posts



  • Max Neely Cohen digitized his wardrobe and put it online! Something that no one knows about me is that I did this in college and then lost the website files and stopped paying for the domain. I should start it back up! it’s fun to catalog things you own!






























  • Kate Wagner’s article about F1 (especially the last paragraph, which was almost certainly why it was pulled from the site)

























































  • My friend’s dad made a website called “Palindrome City” in the aughts and it’s extremely wholesome






  • Wholesome blog about obscure 20th century comic strips called “Stripper’s Guide”. Found it when looking up a 1920s comic strip called “The Guy From Grand Rapids” (that’s my hometown!)












  • “careful words” is a tool that describes itself, correctly, as “a little more than a thesaurus.” 1/23/2024






  • fun tool called creepyface.io that makes it so that your eyes look at the curser! 1/23/2024



  • convert images to ASCII art. 1/23/2024



  • Spencer Chang’s are.na of “small tools” 1/23/2024



  • Website that shows Wikipedia landmarks near you. It’s like wikishootme.toolforge.org but, crucially, *there is no map*. If you like maps like I do, you will prefer the other one. But I’m including it here because if you like reading blurbs without opening new tabs, this one will be way better! 1/23/2024






  • The website locallingual lets you upload (and listen to) audio samples of language speakers all over the world. shows you dialects and accepts and stuff! 1/20/2024












  • Interactive site that shows which Wikipedia articles were written by more female editors and which were written by more male editors.



  • In 2000 and 2001, a bunch of computer scientists worked together on a website to write code to be able to watch DVDs on their computers  running Linux technology (which was high tech!!) and they did it! They made t-shirts and everything. Then the movie industry tried to shut them down! 1/13/2024






  • website full of small, good browser games. 1/12/2024















  • GeoSpy tries to identify where photos were taken. It’s okay, but certainly not as good as the Geoguessr guy!!! 1/12/2024









  • map of ~the small web~ compiled by Kris from the newsletter Naive. 1/12/2024



  • Grover Furr’s website is extremely bare bones and perfect, like many websites of tenured professors are. I love them all!! 1/12/2024.






  • IKEA For Irish Pubs article in Eater. There is an actual company which exports green clover paddy paraphenelia to restaurants all over the world. 1/11/2024.



  • Listen To The Cloud, a site which lets you listen in to the chatter of airport communications over ambient beats. It’s interesting white noise. 1/11/2024



  • The inventor of the .zip file drank himself to death and one of his professional rivals left a brutal blog post about his obituary. Twitter has lots of puns about his death, like “Perhaps that's the only way he could decompress.“ and “RIP or should I say ZIP”.  1/9/2024


















  • Since 1995, every day, NASA has published an Astronomy Picture of the Day on a web site that has barely changed its design. 1/1/2024















  • You can vote on the hottest member of the Senate (and see the rankings!). Created by my stew pal Faraz. 12/17/2023.









  • Glorious Trainwrecks slightly-niche online community collecting videogames that are extremely janky but somehow work 12/15/2023












  • Stamps Back is all about the Bulgarian tech scene of the 80s!















  • Spicy England, a Tumblr that shows Google Streetview images of the industrial estates where England’s condiments and spices are imported to, distributed from, or packaged. 12/15/2023












  • top-read New Yorker stories of 2023! 12/14/2023















  • The very good crisps article in The Guardian by Amelia Tate. 12/8/2023






  • site from NASA with all the precipitation on the globe currently. 12/8/2023



  • “sonic garbage”, a site where you can mix weird sound bytes. 12/8/2023









  • Letterboxd list of the movies Jimmy Carter watched at the White House. 12/5/2023






























  • I like watching The New Yorker videos where cartoonists explain their cartoons and this interview with Maggie Dai is my favorite! I want to be her friend! 11/1/2023



  • The webiste pizzanipple.com has a gallery of nipple-pizzas (photoshopped to be in between the two).
  • The department of defense has to release a bunch of their photos and sometimes it’s fun to search banal terms like “baking” or “hug” and see what comes up. 10/31/2023






  • A LA QRTE is a portable printer that reads the QR code, feeds the resulting menu to ChatGPT, and prints a menu for you 10/30/2023
  • Article in The Verge about businesses with names like Thai Food Near Me, Dentist Near Me, Notary Near Me, and Plumber Near Me. 10/26/2023



  • Bill Watterson (of Calvin and Hobbes fame) has a new book! The New Yorker wrote about him. 10/26/2023.









  • fonts.nyc, a site where you can submit and identify interesting signs with cool fonts around NYC! 10/24/2023



  • Article about girl who got attacked with a baseball bat while she was dressed as a hot dog mascot has the funniest quotes I’ve ever seen. 10/17/2023
























  • Recursive recipes will show you the ingredients that went into into your recipe’s ingredients, and may leave you questioning your place in the universe. 10/16/2023









  • Strong Language, a blog about profanity! It’s by linguists and other smart people who think about words in interesting ways! 10/13/2023















  • Guardian article by Amelia Tait about the urge to buy “one in every color” 10/9/2023









  • Cried reading the Slate article about the woman who stays on the phone with heroin users so that if they overdose, she can immediately call 911. 10/7/2023















  • There’s a Korean idiom that’s similar to “looking for a needle in a haystack”: 서울에 가서 김서방 찾기. It means “searching for a Mr. Kim in Seoul”. 10/4/2023



  • Mangalica pig is a Hungarian breed of pig with a wooly coat that makes it look just like a sheep. 10/2/2023






  • Michigan city called Zilwaukee that was maybe named that to confused immigrants and trick them into moving to Zilwaukee (instead of Milwaukee). 10/2/2023






  • Iowa City police log: SUBJECT IS MAD ABOUT DRUNK PEOPLE, INCLUDING HIMSELF, BEHAVING POORLY. SUBJECT WANTS NEW SHOES AND TO BE YOUNGER AND HEALTHIER. OPTIONS WERE DISCUSSED. 10/1/2023












  • The Michigan Stove Company commissioned something called the World’s Largest Stove in 1892 for the World’s Fair in Chicago, and there’s a cool blog post about how the big stove got moved in 1965. 9/29/2023.



  • P!nk recorded a song dressed as a pirate called “We’ve Got Scurvy” for Spongebob Squarepants. 9/29/2023.



  • I enjoyed this interview with Paul Bucheit, the guy that built Gmail. But maybe it’s just because I’m too young to remember a world without Gmail. 9/28/2023.



  • 2016 Toronto Sun article about Macaulay Culkin going to a cafe in Paris where the wifi password was “Macaulay Culkin” and a frenchman came out to say “I knew you would be here someday”. 9/28/2023.







































  • 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.












  • 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















  • 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.






  • Dangerously fun game where you chop up shapes. 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












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





















  • 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!






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
























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









  • 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













  • 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.



  • NYT article about the Georgetown professor who decorated a sidewalk with 10-foot sculptures of Bumblebee and Optimus Prime, making the neighbors mad.


  • 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!
























  • 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.






  • 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.









  • 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.






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






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






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



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





















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






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





















  • 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.






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









  • 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.






  • 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












  • 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.









  • “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.


















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









  • 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.






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


















  • 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






  • 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


















  • 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.






  • 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
























  • 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
























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






  • 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






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









  • 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.















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










           *most






  • 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.









  • 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.












  • 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.






  • 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.









  • 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.







































  • 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.
























  • “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! 2/14/202