• ClosedAI.com. Clicking around enters you into a deep rabbit hole whose contours or reason for existing i am yet to figure out.
• The slow radioactive flood of Kyrgyzstan’s breadbasket
• The Samples of Sonic Rush
• “Again, in a dispute with Cicero, Metellus Nepos asked repeatedly ‘Who is your father?’ ‘In your case,’ said Cicero, ‘your mother has made the answer to this question rather difficult.’”
• I would like to give a shoutout to the Don Q Inn, a truly audaciously themed motel in Wisconsin.
• The magic of the monster-spawner minecart, Minecraft’s forgotten mechanic
• The Druridge Bay curlew, or, the most controversial bird in English history
• IC 342: “If the galaxy were not obscured, it would be visible by naked eye.”
• Trevor (duck)
• Canadian engineers are sworn to wear the Iron Ring upon their hands in a ritual penned by Rudyard Kipling. Incredible.
• This video has singlehandedly added years onto my lifespan.
• Oh, and whilst i’m here, Lords of Misrule has begun rolling out its entries for the Saturnalia season. Do check the first one out should you have the time.

• They found a mummified sabre-tooth kitten!
• Technology Connections buys a freeze-dryer so you don’t have to
• Machine-learning-generated Minecraft is a constantly-shifting immaterial nightmare where any action is but a suggestion and object permanence is anathema. In other words: close enough, welcome back, LSD: Dream Emulator.
• A detailed inventory of cuss words in Ancient Greek — including, even this far back, μητροκοίτης mētrocœ́tēs “motherfucker”!
• Incredible toponomy going on in Utah with the Oquirrh Mountains, pronounced /ˈoʊ̯.kəɹ̠/.
• The Antarctic Fire Department. Part of me is a little disappointed they plumped for a .org domain rather than the rarer .aq.
• Flavour swapping Doritos and Mountain Dew
• The painful pleasures of a tattoo convention
• Subpixel art
• Nuking things with a twenty-thousand-watt “macrowave”, for science!

• How British-Nigerians quietly made their way to the top
• PS5 Has No Games: The Musical (Brought To You By Talking Heads)
• On the naming of America — i’m still an Amerrisque truther myself.
• Point Nemo, the most remote place on Earth, has a lot going on there
• Crokinole! A Canadian board game of flicking discs into holes.
• A river in Wiltshire is being “rewiggled” to reduce flooding.
• Abuna Yemata Guh, an ancient church hewn into an Ethiopian mountaintop and only accessible by a treacherous foot journey.
• In which a runaway inflatable pumpkin blocks a road in Ohio. Happy Hallowe’en!
• “Found this book at the park and it's full of stuff about feet??”
• In continuing “old culture is eating new culture” news, The Ringer reports on the revival of repertory screenings.
• Deep into Youtube: A punk rock song against the Intellivision Amico
• In which Timothée Chalamet crashes a Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest
• Bowling Green, a park in New York where, during the revolution, a statue of George III was taken down and decorative crowns on the fences were sawn off — the marks of which are still visible today!

• ALS stole his voice. Machine learning gave him it back
• Urban British foxes are slowly self-domesticating
• The Mormon Dream Mine
• Patina and intimacy
• TidyBot, bringing the dream of having robots do every single chore one step closer (via Interconnected)
• Finn-men
• The last format war: blu-ray versus HD DVD
• The death of the magazine, and quality writing with it, is one of the sadder trends of the internet age. They can pry Empire and Private Eye from my cold, dead hands.
• The top-secret rooms where top-secret documents are top-secretly read
• A beautiful complex function plotter
• Gravity wells
• Bop Spotter
• Living allohistorical dreams and nightmares on The Campaign Trail
• Britain’s last coal power station closes its doors.
• “Google” (1953)

• The wonderful miniatures of The Hudsucker Proxy
• 又双叒叕
• In which the maintainers of the universal time-zone database find out a Norwegian town wants twenty-six hours in a day
• Streamer wanders into a network of machine-learning-generated accounts, goes slightly insane
• “Aurora is a rumored mid-1980s American reconnaissance aircraft.”
• The quest to beat Minecraft in under sixty seconds
• Marco Pierre White, the final boss of cooking
• “A true hermaphrodite rabbit served several females and sired more than 250 young of both sexes.” What an icon.
• The National Gallery demolished some false columns and found a note from a rich donor saying he always thought they were ugly
• We have successfully made Doom run on nothing
• Four Thieves Vinegar: “Right to repair for your body”
• Putting a classified nuclear warhead schematic in your product logo like a boss
• Cooper*

• The Poozeum of Williams, Arizona, self-described as “#1 for fossilized #2”.
• The Ivorians recruited for a football team that doesn’t exist in a country that doesn’t exist
• i guess we doin circles now. I love these dumbass memes.
• An Italian burglar was caught after stopping to read a book about Greek mythology. He’s literally me…
• An abandoned underwater strip club off the southern coast of Israel
• Several articles that can be summed up as “the what people of where now?”:
  • The Confederates of Brazil
  • The Marshallese of Arkansas
  • The Māori of London
  • The Manichæans of China, still around long after their religion stopped being a major player on the world stage
  • The Cagots of France and Spain, a group who were persecuted for reasons nobody really knows and then assimilated into wider society

• Britain should build a new town where the East Coast Main Line and East–West Rail meet
• Highway 1 is falling into the ocean
• How thick cold water could (could) have jump-started multicellular life
• Surfing (in) the American Dream (shopping centre)
• New Euripides fragments just dropped
• In “we live in a world of unparalleled luxury and it’s kind of boring” news: American Airlines has so many flights they’re running out of numbers
• Terry Wallis, a man from Arkansas who randomly woke up from a vegetative state after nineteen years
• What to do if a nuclear missile is heading for your location right now. Thankfully, it’s not, because nothing ever happens.
• Danny Filippidis, a Canadian skier who went missing only to turn up in Sacramento six days later with no memory of the incident
• Big fan of this “World Travel Map” by one Zhaoxu Sui — with a thematically appropriate use of the Mercator projection, to boot!

• The saola, a large mammal which was discovered in the Vietnamese forest in… wait for it… 1992! Really makes you wonder what else is hiding out there.
• Circuits
• “ Can studies of living animal colour constrain the colours of dinosaurs? A case study with big theropods”
• A record history of the Cannonball Run, the illegal street race from New York to Los Angeles
• Really enjoyed this documentary about the varied weirdos of the life-extension movement. I came away surprisingly endeared by that one billionaire guy with the cock monitor.
• Absolutely gutted to find out that you could stay in a hotel shaped like a giant beagle until just this year.
• Walking Nairobi

• In the category of “most likely to graduate to the full linkroll”, we have Aporee.org, a collection of soundscapes from all around the world
  • And on a similar note, here’s some sounds of the forest(s)
• William Buckley, a convict who was sentenced to Australia and proceeded to successfully escape and live with the natives for thirty years
• Epic dishwasher haxx
• Eight speedrunning categories that have completely broken
• TIL about Karaite Judaism, the Jewish equivalent to Islam’s Quranism or Protestants’ sola scriptura
• Tidings.potato.horse, a mediæval content farm with news stories written by generative bards
• Eighty guys singing the Halo theme in a bathroom
• Centuries of childhood

• Nobody will believe you when you say this, but the phrase “sweet summer’s child” is from Game of Thrones. Every citation before that is supremely literal, talking about an actual child of summer.
• A 3D tour of the Temple of All Religions in Kazan, Russia. Almost normal until you get to the Egyptian room.
• Trying on Nasa’s new spacesuit
• That one lost pop song that was found in a porno
• Calcutta’s Pen Hospital will nurse your broken fountain pen back to health
• How actors remember their lines
• Āryabaṭha numeration turns numbers into compact pronounceable syllables. Kind of genius — we already took our digits from the Indians; why didn’t we lift this as well?
• The U.S.’s purge of naughty waypoint names from the skies
• JetBlue Flight 191
• Elizabeth Prophet, the prophet who failed after the apocalypse that wasn’t
• The Horny-Award-winning drug semaglutide now shows remarkable benefits for kidney disease in addition to everything else. I give it a year before we find out it cures cancer or something.
• The best, worst, and weirdest Star Wars knockoffs
• Someone on /r/Gallifrey is going through nearly every piece of canonical Doctor Who media in chronological order and i’ve never been more intimidated.
• Don’t be a Mimsy
• Radio Caroline marks its sixtieth year on the waves
• Zubrin’s nuclear saltwater rocket — one of the most powerful rocket engines ever proposed, described as “powered by Chernobyl”.
• Here’s an interesting historical curio: an instructional video from the British government on travelling to West Berlin through East Germany.
• Why ornament went away. We are so back: “So it is now possible to buy perfectly proportioned classical ornament, nearly indistinguishable from stone, that has – if the molds and the factory infrastructure are treated as a given – taken only minutes of labor to produce.”

• The Verge takes a trip on a submarine-cable-repair ship
• Vici.org, an “archæological atlas of antiquity” that shows you Græco-Roman history and artefacts in your area
• In Vesuvius Prize news, the vulcanised scrolls have now revealed Plato’s precise burial place
• Ian Ridpath’s Star Tales: “Myths, legends, and history of the constellations”. I did not know there used to be a reindeer constellation around the north pole!
• “Bring back the ‘Renaissance Man’”
• A gallery of n-wheeled vehicles, where 1 ≤ n ≤ 1496
• Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection
• Why are so many bodies in Britain found in a decomposed state?
• Kanye fails the quick-time event

• Frank Sinatra covers “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
• Mini rope bridges built in Forest of Dean to help dormice. Accidentally clicked to the main news page from here and broke my months-long streak of refusing to keep up with British politics, but, you know what, totally worth it.
• “Oyler conceives of her own claim to cultural elitism as a series of adolescent signifiers flung on with the pride of a Goth teenager donning her first Hot Topic belt.”
• In “the singularity is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet” news, here’s a machine-learning-generated song about taking a fat dump and getting paid for it that will stay in your head forever and refuse to leave
• Fifteen years of a road slowly getting torn apart by the San Andreas fault
• Bloomer update: Zoomers are way rich
• Finding human fossils in bathroom tiles

• “Spacebloom: A Field Guide to Cosmic Xflora”. What? Via last roundup’s Complete Review.
• The Bulbdial Clock: a clock that has lights instead of hands
• Went down a bit of a slide rule rabbit hole…
  • A simple linear slide rule emulator
  • And a THREE DEE!!! recreation of the mechanical Curta calculator
• How the Netherlands feeds the world with the future of technology. Please stand for the national anthem.
•           
• New otter species just dropped
• Richard Eijiro von Coudenhove-Kalergi, the half-Japanese Euro-federalist count who suggested “Ode to Joy” as the continent’s anthem and thought all races and castes would merge in the future into “something like the Ancient Egyptians”
• A self-stabilising robotic tail designed for astronauts in microgravity. OwO?
• One blasted level is all that stands between the Super Mario Maker community and finishing every level ever uploaded before Nintendo shuts down the servers in two weeks.
• Further proof mathematics is evil and fake: Chaitin’s constants, numbers which exist but whose value we can never know.
• The new Porter Robinson track is, of course, a banger.

• Every Best Picture winner ranked by how good a Muppets version would be
• Well this is fucking insane: real-time machine-learning image generation.¹ The singularity is here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet (as the saying goes).
• Motion extraction
• A (perhaps overly credulous) profile of “Project Ceti”, which wants to talk to whales using machine learning
• “I went to a rave with the forty-six-year-old millionaire who claims to have the body of a teenager”
• Selfish reasons to want a larger human population
• I don’t know if this is real — i just follow the links; i don’t make them — but here’s something that claims to be an animation test for a never-announced cancelled Disney movie called King of the Elves.
• The Complete Review, a “literary saloon” of reviews specialising in translated obscura
• Hillman’s Hyperlinked and Searchable Chambers’ Book of Days. I’d quite like to do something like this with Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World once i get around to finishing it.²
• Movies that have the aesthetic of a sample video file you’d see early Windows computers use to demonstrate their media players

I started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation recently — starting at season three, of course, as i was repeatedly advised — and i’m positively kicking myself for not doing it earlier. This is bloody good television (except Wesley, but i imagine they give up and throw him out the airlock at some point), and only now do i realise how often i have stood on the shoulders of giants without even knowing it…

(Data’s the best character. Obviously. He’s literally me™.)

• Anyway: holy shit, someone won the Vesuvius Challenge! A library of hundreds of ancient scrolls was turned into charcoal by the Pompeii eruption, dug up in the Victorian age, and now, with the advent of machine learning, we can finally find out what’s in them. Glimpses at life? Religious texts? The rest of the Epic Cycle? First up in the pile, it seems, is a newfound treatise on Epicurean philosophy.
• What would actually happen if you took your space helmet off in a vacuum? Geoffrey Landis, a Nasa scientist and sci-fi writer, answers. Spoilers: 2001 was right, you wouldn’t explode, and you could stay alive for around ninety seconds.
• Robert Martiensen, a retired rural Australian maths teacher, created thousands of artworks in secret
• The Hanging Stone is my Betelgeuse. Come on, tip over already…
• It’s kind of sad how short the TV Tropes page on works where “The Future Will Be Better” is.