I went to a local astronomers’ meetup the other night. Apparently they gather every new moon by the reservoir to do more proper dark-sky stargazing — they picked the new moon, i assume, to avoid a scheduling conflict with the werewolves.

• I can’t explain this any better than the site itself: “telephone is a game played by artists. It works like the children’s game of the same name. […] In our case, we pass a secret message from art form to art form, so a message could become poetry and then painting and then music and then film, throughout all possible forms of art.” If there is one link you visit out of today’s roundup, make it this one.
• Charles le Brun’s animal–human hybrids are at once terrifying and beautiful.
• Very much in the vein of the linkroll’s “Paradise Engineering”, RaceToSpaceProject.com is an entry to a deep rabbit hole involving a plan to send humans to space before we run out of oil(?) and turn this into a major motion picture(??) to spread the word to the masses(???)
• Sketchy.boats, the website which catalogues boats that are just… a bit sketchy.
• Hallowe’en Clock
• Welcome to Everything’s Computer Corner, the part of the roundup where everything’s computer!!!!
  • The Next Four Years is a machine-learning-generated novel that rewrites itself daily to reflect the twenty-four-hour news cycle, always predicting tomorrow based on today’s headlines. Everything’s computer!
  • “The future of AI filmmaking is a parody of the apocalypse, made by a guy named Josh.” Everything’s computer!
  • Are LLMs djinn? Sure, why not. Everything’s computer!!!!
• Life-changing eye implant helps blind patients read again. The diagram in this article is perhaps the most cyberpunk thing i’ve seen all year.
• The top twenty-five most wanted “lost species” — kinds of life which may well still be out there, but which haven’t been sighted in decades.
• What’s the deal with the poster for The Shining?
• This 1986 screen test footage of Sam Neill of James Bond feels like an artefact from a parallel universe. (No disrespect to Mr Neill, who surely would have been great in the part, but i feel strongly that Bond should only ever be played by actors from the British Isles.)
• Truro City FC travelled 914 miles to play a match in Gateshead
• In 2016, Mexico City began staging a Day of the Dead parade because they saw it in a James Bond film and thought it was cool. More defictionalisation, please!
• From the crew behind Apollo in Real Time, ISS in Real Time is an interactive catalogue of twenty-five years of human spaceflight.
• Why Busy Beaver hunters fear the Antihydra
• Student boilersuit
• I severely disagree with this, but it’s an out-there enough idea that i had to share it: The United States should build a giant city in the Nevada desert where people can opt out of the social contract and do all the drugs and non-violent crimes they want.
• And, finally, a good video about Pepsi

Quite a few this time! I happened upon, like, six fascinating links in a row right after publishing the fifty-third link roundup and didn’t want to repeat myself too soon. Regardless:

• Possibly the greatest post in Reddit history?
• Nosferatu Flow or Nosferatu Vogue? You decide.
• The New Yorker goes to a film-restoration festival in Bologna
• The Ocean Photographer of the Year award-winners for 2025
• Peak Jut, a new measure that tries to find the most visually imposing mountains rather than the tallest.
• The world’s longest airplane is being built to haul around the blades of wind turbines
• Denton House: “Built in 1795 as a farmhouse, it was converted in the 1860s to a Georgian-style mansion. It is currently a McDonald’s restaurant.”
• The story of a fruitarian death in Bali
• Notes from Prince Harry’s ghostwriter
• “Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape.” But can it run Doom? (Probably.)
• The “Polish System” used an even grid of squares to try and visualise the entirety of history.
• The Ithaca Kitty, the U.S.’s first mass-market plushie
• A working large language model made entirely out of redstone. Words fail me.
• Continuing the machine-learning theme, ”continuous thought machines” take inspiration from biological neurons to add a dimension of time to the process of “thinking”. There’s some marketing fluff to wade through, but the idea seems promising.
• “A vivid testament to a life lived hornily”
• Epic Systems takes in five billion dollars per year. Its corporate headquarters is a fantasy castle.
• Hector (cloud)
• I don’t think i quite realised just how revolutionary The Matrix’s bullet-time effect was until watching this video.

• You, too, can be the proud owner of a bull-penis walking cane for just $99.00.
• A sceptic takes a dive in a sensory-deprivation tank
• 4D Golf
• RealDice.org. Tired of pseudorandom number generators? Try a real D20 today!
• How Lough Neagh turned into an ecological disaster
• The story of yot, the Greek letter that wasn’t quite
• “Created in 1997 and once a Victorian toilet, the 10 sq metre venue was at risk of demolition until the residents of Malvern, Worcestershire, stepped in”
• Dau, a Russian filmmaker’s attempt at a real-life Synecdoche, New York, is still trundling along
• All glory to Tonic, the adorable cat from Caught Stealing.
• Colombia is using “coral IVF”
• “A highly scientific ranking of [all-party parliamentary group] vibes”
• Through some dark internet magic, WebsiteLaunches.com proclaims to show you all the new website launches in the world, as they happen — which is mostly unremarkable storefronts, but there’s a mesmerising quality to it nonetheless. It’s an ocean out there.
• Kelly’s One of a Kind Mink. I, uh… I’m scared. I need an adult.
• Inside Philadelphia’s new underground museum of mobiles
• “New Latin verse, please: Reviving Vates”
• The vegetable lamb of Tartary
• The Rumfords, a terrible lost sitcom about a cartoon family moving into a live-action neighbourhood. Honestly, the core premise here could be pretty fun if done well!
• An extremely cool scientific model