• 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.

• ProjectMapping.co.uk, a veritable hoard of transportation maps from Britain and around the globe
• Drawing.garden
• Via Techdirt, the most based article ever written: “Plagiarism is fine”
• The Library of Congress’ pronunciation guide to names of public figures
• The rare old-school sci-fi which sets itself on Uranus
• Notes on the Ivory Coast
• Wisn­int­ospa wios­aḑc­iżp­üozj­uvx­ünfie Iţkuil — The new fourth revision of Ithkuil, everyone’s favourite ridiculously complicated conlang
• Jeff Bezos Rowing Boat. I promise you you have no idea where this is going.

• マリウス.com
• Lucas Pope on making a Game and Watch–style demake of Papers, Please
• Abaroth’s World: “An eclectic mixture of my interests including models, optical illusions, historic buildings, roleplaying games, heraldry, puzzles and gardening.”
• The Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters “George”
• The Neglected Books Page, where forgotten books are remembered
• Diamonds Suck!
• Lochgarry’s Blog
• “ParaTheatrical ReSearch”: Some weird Italian bullshit of some kind going on here
• “The Spirit-Alembic of the Matreiyan Order of Hsien Tao: A non-religious Mystical-Science New Age Order”
• yip.pe: fun little paint tool thingy

• Rudiments of curvilinear design
• woahhh
• The Hot Ones crew unveils Pepper X, the new world’s hottest
• The Economist has a lovely obituary for the Sycamore Gap tree — may it rest in peace.
• Two iceberg charts of surreal movies and strange films. I may have to watch, erm, all of these — especially Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, which keeps coming up in my dives into net-art history…

• China’s reincarnation ban has found a Mongolia-shaped thorn in its side
• A visual book recommender — like a big map of the literary world, designed to simulate the experience of looking through a used book store. Wish there were something like this for films!
• Along the same lines, here’s Gnod, the “global network of discovery”… and i suppose there’s never a bad time to link to Every Noise at Once
• The State of Neocities — largely orthogonal to why i packed up ship for a proper host, but interesting nonetheless
• n
• Atlas Altera: “A Wealth of Nations”

I hate this sort of thing, you hate this sort of thing, let’s get it out of the way. In addition to capturing old web pages, the Internet Archive is also home to untold thousands of old videos, games, and books — each of the latter of which correspond to a real, physical book in their collections. They lend them out like a library, for only one person at a time… until the pandemic, when they made the perhaps ill-advised decision to lift the borrowing limits for that limited time. Publishing companies, who weren’t too happy with that, pushed the nuclear button, sued them over the entire idea of digital lending, and now a federal court’s decided against them. They’re planning to take the fight as high as they can go — and they could use your donation.

As i said, i hate to do this — you don’t need me to tell you about all the ways the world is fucked up — but i’m willing to make an allowance when it affects me in particular. So many pieces of internet history, even on this site, now only exist as digital ghosts in their machines (hell, i even had to replace one of the links here with an Archive.org link after the author was suspended from Twitter). And i can’t count the number of musty out-of-print books that i would have never been able to access here from my comfy chair in England if it weren’t for the IA preserving them for a new generation.

So please — toss them a few bucks and protect our history.

Anyway.

• Nature_Timespiral.png
• In which Captain Underpants carries the entire western comic industry on its back
  • “Steamed Hams”, but the frames are reorganised so they’re singing “Call Me Maybe”
  • “Steamed Hams”, but Skinner makes a “Steamed Hams” video
  • “Steamed Hams”, but it’s “Take On Me” (bizarrely high effort)
  • Mammoth meat meatball (sadly went uneaten)

• The King Crimson wars
• Most Apple TV+ shows look fake, but this Tetris movie actually looks pretty good
• The Corridor crew break down Avatar 2’s visual effects
• Stargate’s surprisingly accurate Ancient Egyptian
• The Oakland Buddha, or, in which a Buddha statue does a better job at stopping crime than the Oakland police department
• Joe Rogan goes to the beach that makes you old