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!
👀. 💅🏼. ✏️. 🤠. 🦋. 🔮. 🧬. 🗺. 🍭. 🤯. 🧠. 🦦
- 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
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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
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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
- Website full of cool chrome logos and typography (on cars, mostly). 10/3/2024
- 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
- OMG, I was an answer in the October 1, 2024 USA Today crossword!!! I think you have to pay if you want the archive, but here’s an article debriefing the solving process.
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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
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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
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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
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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
- My new friend Robert Vinluan, who I met at xoxo conference a couple weeks ago, has this very funny bit where he is plays all five members of a boy band.
- Browse publicsurplus.com if you want to bid on, like, fire trucks and stuff.
- It can be sooo fun to read about scenes, and this 2023 Architectural Digest article about The Chelsea Hotel scratches the itch.
- Extremely absorbing Wikipedia articles: Unethical human experimentation in the US,
- Radioman’s website! (the formerly homeless guy who has been in like 300 movies as a background actor)
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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.
- Wikipedia articles by location (map view)
- 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!
- More good old school online museums! Early Office Museum, Cigar History Museum, Spark Museum (vintage radios), Highest Bridges (uses mediawiki), Folk Art in Bottles (archived), barf (same guy that made the barf bag museum made a guide to romance!), Antique Glass Salt & Sugar Shaker Club (archived), Disappearing Bridges (mostly about Pennsylvania), Highest Bridges, Former Ontario Highways, Soda-machines.com (archived), Gallery of Historic Book Labels.
- Mum.org is a big, old school online “museum of menstruation” compiled by a guy named Harry Finley since 1998. 8/20/2024
- Good old school websites: a New York ragdall cat breeder, loom salesperson(?). 8/19/2024
- Live webcam of watching grass grow since 2005. 8/19/2024
- Bad analogies taken from high school papers. Not sure if these are just urban legends but they’re still fun. 8/19/2024
- 400 people applied to adopt a parrot named Pepper who kept saying “do you want me to kick your ass?” 8/19/2024
- The Art of the Title, a blog about film title sequences. 8/14/2024
- YouTube channel that covered WW1 and WW2 week by week in "real time" for 10 years.
- “The Lost Art of Steamship Gossip” Slate article. you used to get full lists (including annotations) of the names of your fellow passengers — an experiment in transparency that’s pretty much unimaginable today
- 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
- One Irish guy filed 23,000 aircraft noise complaints in 2022 alone. Over in Australia a different guy filed 20,716 complaints in 2023, about half the total number of complaints.
- Steve Albini maintained a blog called “What I made Heather for dinner” of recipes he made for his wife
- Ask Jeeves was so big from 200-2004 that it had Jeeves as a Macy's Thanksgiving Parade balloon.
- You can buy a minions-themed home router.
- There are Google reviews for a ventilation shaft in New York. Most are jokes but some seem pretty serious (“Top 2 ventilation shafts in the world. It rivals the Tashkent ventilation shaft in architectural design...”)
- A Few Goodmen: Surname Sharing Economics Authors, a 2014 economics paper by Allen C. Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Lucas Goodman, and Sarena Goodman.
- 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. 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
- Click that Hood is a quiz on neighborhoods of the world (but it’s pretty hard!). 8/5/2024
- https://spellcheck.xyz/ is a daily wordle-esque game that tests your spelling/vocab! 8/1/2024
- 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.
- A decade old blog post from the British Museum with a lot of medieval art of snails in combat
- 100 of those celebrity “READ” posters. The Shaq one is amazing but I can’t find it anywhere!
- A website full of two paleoartists’ renditions of prehistoric megafauna
- There is a physical garbage truck museum in Sanford, Florida!
- There’s an old school website about historic garbage trucks called classicrefusetrucks.com, which is where I learned “dumpster truck” and “dumpster” are former trademarks (a la Band-aid and Kleenex). In the 1930s in Knoxville, the Dempster brothers’ construction business called their trucks “Dempster Dumpsters” since the trucks did dumping. Eventually people started using “dumpster” to refer to the trash receptacles themselves. More Dempster history! Also, historic ads for refuse trucks, Film appearances, and “UNSOLVED MYSTERIES” (in archived versions)
- Bored? Chat with fellow watchers of the Namib Desert watering hole livestream.
- 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!
- There used to be a really wholesome website called “Land Rover Forum” where people talked about Toyota Land Rovers starting in 1997.
- 2000 tongue in cheek (but still somewhat rigorous) study in BMJ titled Comparing apples and oranges: a randomised prospective study"
- Have you ever wanted to browse images of ancient papyrus scribbles on a massive and unwieldy website? Then https://papyri.info/ is for you
- 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)!
- There’s a fan page Kenworth ’S’ model truck, the first truck built for Australian conditions! (archived link)
- The blog Pantheos features TONS of lists, usually geography-related oddities like The 130 longest underwater highway tunnels in the world and info about the fire towers that used to be all over Illinois before the 1970s, when many of them were obsolete and removed. Also “Borderline states” – largest percentage of out-of-state workers, World’s tallest air traffic control towers, Working List: USA’s tallest interchanges & flyover ramps (lots of Texas on the list), world’s 50 busiest container ports
- “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)
- The Mongolian president’s website scrolls horizontally because the Mongolian script is read top to bottom.
- Jennifer Mills News, the weekly periodical that Jennifer Mills has been writing about herself for 20 years. And here’s a New Yorker article about it too!
- 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)
- the man named Henry Lizardlover (becasue he loves lizards that much) has a great archived website.
- good Antarctica blog brr.fyi
- Google blog announces a new "Shipping Network Design API" for and operators of container ships to optimize their trade routes. 6/10/2024
- Armadillo online. 6/10/2024
- Clive Thompson made a weird old book finder. 6/10/2024
- I recently did a surprisingly bad job identifying buildings in the NYC skyline so I’m trying to study up. There’s an interactive map from National Geographic that’s pretty cool. And of course Wikipedia has a wonderful “list of tallest buildings in New York City” article. 6/5/2024
- 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
- Spider coins from around the world. 5/29/2024
- This collection of word oddities and trivia could change your life. 5/28/2024
- 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
- Ahhh! Big Pew article on link rot :( 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
- I like how this personal essay about working in a frame shop is so... listy! lists everywhere. very good lists. and yet it’s an essay. 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
- “This is the Williamsburg of Your City” by Max Read in Gawker. 5/15/2024
- You could buy the entire contents of a Red Lobster in an auction today. Need to be checking this website more. 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
- Learned from this newsletter that the discovery of the jet stream was originally published in Esperanto! 5/13/2024
- 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.
- The font (“sleazy Helvetica”) on the sign of the Hunter College NYC subway stop!
- 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
- Youtube channel that’s just cats and model trains. 5/5/2025
- The amazing Matt Shearer of WBZ news stayed in the hotel above the highway (link is an Instagram video). 5/5/2025
- 404 article about Pokemon Go players abusing OpenStreetMaps.5/5/2024
- WSJ wrote about the last of the stock photographers. 5/5/2024
- All the men’s Olympic water polo champs since 2000 are from the same section of Eastern Europe. 5/2/2024
- The Supernanny Fandom wiki, which is bizarrely detailed, has a page on all the bone breaks that occured throughout the series. 5/1/2024
- 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
- the Neglected Books Project uncoverers odd forgotten tomes! Good New Yorker article article about it. 4/29/2024
- 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.”)
- In the 1870s, the NYC Board of Health made a map of the stenches in NYC!
- Add coffee stains to LaTeX documents
- 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'"
- Brian Eno’s diaries about being addicted to photoshop (posted on twitter by my friend Max!)
- A guy went to see all 43 pieces of art from Animal Crossing IRL!!
- tweet with a message of all acronyms. I kept referencing it in conversations and then couldn’t ever find it so I figured I’d put it here.
- Pizza Hut Taiwan sells turtle-shaped mochi pizza with cilantro.
- 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
- RFK Jr’s website let anyone make events on it. It didn’t go well!!
- Politico article about White House reporters stealing stuff from Air Force One
- 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
- International insulator’s union has a great logo.
- Cool science book covers designed by Rudolph de Harak in the 60s!
- The rock in New Hampshire that says “I still love you, chicken farmer”
- A guy was saved from a false murder charge because he happened to be in the background of a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, which supported his alibi
- Puzzleposeur.com lets you fake results to NYT games lol
- All the European road signs about cows
- 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
- You can help draw the longest flipbook! (experiment by The Pudding)
- Garden of Computational Delights, a compilation of html sites by Samuel Arbesman
- 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!
- Portland launched a crow-counting campaign and landed on the number 22,370
- 300 page Chemical Engineering PhD thesis that is essentially about loading the dishwasher
- YouTube playlist of 19th century American accents. The videos are from 1920ish and they show elderly people, including some Civil War veterans
- More about Kyrsten Sinema. Apparently she taught 6:30am spin classes to congresspeople and she butted heads about music preferences with Paul Ryan (who led P90X classes)
- Kyrsten Sinema’s not so great RateMyProfessor reviews. And Tyra Banks’ so-so reviews, and Matthew McConaughey’s really good reviews, and James Franco’s students saying he was great but definitely didn’t actually read student essays.
- Whip-its has a merch store! Heard about this from Michael, the guy person behind the ever-fascinating TikTok @schoolhousecaulk
- Kate Wagner’s article about F1 (especially the last paragraph, which was almost certainly why it was pulled from the site)
- clever ticket stocks, like “GEEK,” outperform the market
- Why “CHUCKNORRIS” is a valid color in HTML, and all the other weird word colors.
- congressional acronyms tracker, lol. By Noah Veltman.
- Map of the etymology of SF street names by Noah Veltman!
- Google reviews for Volvo Island.
- article about slang words for “drunk”
- languagemap.nyc and cool NYT article that goes with it.
- For recreational math problems, check out David Eppstein’s collections of links about recreational math publications, Number Theory, Combinatorial Game Theory, The Geometry Junkyard, Geometry in Action
- guess what year between 1900 and 2022 photos were taken!
- The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum has 60 polydactyly cats!! Hemingway really liked them.
- The very first episode of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood
- T Pain is (really) active on Reddit.
- A guy photographed all of his meals for a year
- Pinterest board of all the periodic tables!
- I had heard of the guy who is a professional apple ranker but I didn’t see his website til today! https://applerankings.com/
- NYT Magazine article about 21st century train heists!
- My friend’s dad made a website called “Palindrome City” in the aughts and it’s extremely wholesome
- the original Sims manual included a reading guide “to further elucidate their whimsical satire of post-war American suburban consumerism.” (I learned this from my friend Hajin)
- 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!)
- Burger.com has been the personal website of a guy named Donald Burger since 1996. It is so fun to click through. He has so, so many pages including mines he has visited, favorite roses, turtles, guide to bringing fireflies to Houston, good food, and a very good and thorough “this day in history” page!
- Zach Rose’s “Images with captions on Wikipedia” are.na collection
- Zach Rose’s “Hyperlinks on Wikipedia” collection
- “careful words” is a tool that describes itself, correctly, as “a little more than a thesaurus.” 1/23/2024
- https://oldtime.radio/ plays old time radio that is preserved in the Internet Archive! 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
- Data from historic Carnegie Hall performances made using Wikidata by cool Carnegie Hall librarians! 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
- Substack by Amelia Tait about a man who collects lost pet posters :-)
- Seven sets venn diagram by Santiago Ortiz!
- 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
- Getty Images photo of Donald Trump, Melania, and William Hung in 2004.
- website full of small, good browser games. 1/12/2024
- 2D pacman!!! this is very fun!! 1/12/2024
- www.penciltalk.org, a discussion forum dedicated to pencils. 1/12/2024
- The Little Wheels Museum, full of toy cars! 1/12/2024
- Dogs of Geocities. Good to project on the wall at parties! 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
- Emoji translator (English to emoji). 1/12/2024
- Close Up Photography of the Year awards. 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.
- Things We Got Stuck In Our Rectums in 2023 by Defector.
- 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
- All the old slogans for Bomis, the Wikipedia precursor.
- There’s an opensource alternative to splitwise called https://ihatemoney.org/
- Like Geoguessr but for NYC Subway stations! 1/2/2024
- Linux is the only major operating system to support developing in diagonal mode. 1/2/2023.
- All the best things that became public domain! 1/1/2023.
- 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
- Bloomberg article “Thanks to This Man, Airplanes Don’t Crash into Mountains Anymore”
- I would love to own the jersey from the U.S. Postal Service Pro Cycling Team. 12/30/2023
- I liked this short-ish writeup about the glories of Flickr and pre-iPhone online photo sharing. 12/17/2023
- You can vote on the hottest member of the Senate (and see the rankings!). Created by my stew pal Faraz. 12/17/2023.
- Bush’s beans has a merch store. 12/17/2023
- WSJ article on the “World Excel Championships” 12/16/2023.
- Glorious Trainwrecks slightly-niche online community collecting videogames that are extremely janky but somehow work 12/15/2023
- The Old Bailey Online is a database of historical crimes of London. 12/15/2023.
- The Drymipholia Collective is a group of people trying to breed Mexican avocados to grow in the Canadian lowlands.
- Macroevolution, a single operator website about mammal hybrids. Such as dog-cow hybrids!
- Stamps Back is all about the Bulgarian tech scene of the 80s!
- Extremely stressful game that only takes 20 seconds and will make you forget all words.
- Cry Once A Week is a website that shows you sad stuff.
- 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
- The annual Airing of Grievances submitted by users and compiled by the Tampa Bay Times. 12/15/2023.
- Google search trends from 2023.
- 25 years of Google Search! Extremely fun and nostalgic! 12/15/2023
- top-read New Yorker stories of 2023! 12/14/2023
- Internet Archive collection of manuals. 12/12/2023.
- cyberfeminist index. 12/12/2023
- Rotating ramen bowls. 12/8/2023
- 52 very good fun facts. 12/8/2023
- The very good crisps article in The Guardian by Amelia Tate. 12/8/2023
- Really bizarre dataviz from Harvard Art Museums. 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
- Blue Donut floating in space. 12/8/2023
- All the American Trains and where they are right now. 12/8/2023
- Letterboxd list of the movies Jimmy Carter watched at the White House. 12/5/2023
- a bunch of guys in Boston have been in a music group where all of them play typewriters for 20 years. 11/29/2023
- timeline of the internet. 11/29/2023
- The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards for this year have been announced! 11/27/2023
- a cool personal website 11/25/2023
- extensive record of historic bridges. 11/20/2023
- terrible real estate agent photos. 11/10/2023.
- Extremely intense Omegle shutdown letter! 11/9/2023.
- all of the books in the Simpsons (from Simpsons Wiki). 11/6/2023.
- Reading old New Yorker cartoons from the Internet Archive library. 11/3/2023.
- 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
- NYTimes came out with a cool map of NYC neighborhoods! 10/30/2023
- 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.
- Genre-defining https://links.net/
- World Carrot Museum. It’s the best website ever and I’m glad the Internet Archive preserved it, partiularly the rundown of carrots in artwork. It’s literally in the Library of Congress. 10/25/2023.
- 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
- English twice-borrowed terms. 10/17/2023
- Antidepressant or Tolkein quiz. 10/17/2023.
- Slide rule museum. 10/17/2023.
- Barfbag.com 10/17/2023
- The whole Whole Earth Catalog is now online! 10/16/2023
- There was no f sound in Proto Indo European! (link to the Mastodon account “ancient sounds”)
- Study shows that people cough on purpose during classical music concerts. 10/16/2023
- 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
- Signs at the North Pole 10/16/2023
- Internet Archive Scholar 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
- How many speeding tickets do you think the novelty “SEXY” license plate has? It’s 192. I didn’t realize that kitchy novelty plates were such a pain for law enforcement! 10/12/2023
- rudest ways that well-known people of history have declined invitiations. 10/11/2023
- map of accused witches!!! 10/10/2023
- Roundup of interesting manuals in the Internet Archive! I like the McDonalds McDonaldland Specification Manual (1975). 10/9/2023
- Guardian article by Amelia Tait about the urge to buy “one in every color” 10/9/2023
- Cat paw prints in the medieval floor tiles at Wormleighton St Mary’s. 10/9/2023
- Many episodes of Ologies with Alie Ward are very good, but I particularly liked the one about opossums! 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
- “Aaron Rodgers believes in the healing power of dolphin lovemaking” (New York Post). 10/6/2023
- Today in people whose lives need a movie: Liver Eater Johnson (I found out about him from this Tweet). 10/6/2023
- Someone called alofalani on Twitter made their car’s sunroof a stained glass window. 10/6/2023
- Mathematicians are like “math is important” and then they give things names like pointless topology and abstract nonsense. 10/4/2023
- 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
- If I wanna analyze city-related data I’ll use the simplemaps dataset! 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
- There’s a bizarre nun doll museum in Northern Michigan. 10/1/2023
- 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
- NYC police officer who got kicked in the balls so hard he died. 10/1/2023
- Really love the “bear walk” geocities gif. 10/1/2023
- New article in Our World In Data about how many animals get slaughtered for meat. 9/29/2023.
- 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.
- Newspapers.com collection of historic animal obituaries 9/28/2023.
- 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?
- 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
- 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!
- 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
- 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.
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Kevin G. from Mean Girls is my favorite lifestyle influencer. 3/29/2022
- "Clippy's Designer Wants to Know Who Got Clippy Pregnant. 3/15/2022
- 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.
- “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