• Sorry to lead with a depressing one, but sometimes we live in a depressing world and it can’t be helped: Rest of World covers the bombing and rebuilding of a Gazan tech hub.
• A beautiful article on the struggles of geologists to truly comprehend the vastity of deep time
• An absolutely legendary Youtube algorithm pull: “Viva la Vida” played on a Dutch mechanical funfair organ. It’s so jaunty!
• Charli XCX has a Substack now. Sure, why not.
• StellarCatalog.com. I love how astronomers go full-tilt into the sci-fi æsthetic whenever they design websites.
• Google Gemini AI time machine. I spent an embarrassing amount of time playing around with this. Historical accuracy’s a bit questionable and the output text keeps leaking into the image, but still!
• On that note, this piece in Wired about the potential for an AI bubble is the rare nuanced take that comes close to how i feel. Let the damned thing pop already so we can all shut up about it and start treating machine learning like a normal technology, instead of either the Great Satan or the Machine God!
• We rarely lose technology
• Said piece taught me about the Sloot Digital Coding System, invented by a Dutch engineer who claimed that his new algorithm could represent an entire feature film with eight kilobytes(!!!) of data. Shortly before he signed a contract to sell it, he died of a heart attack. Spooky!
• The ancient Roman Lycurgus Cup shines red when lit from behind and green when lit from before.
• “The Book” claims to be “the ultimate guide to rebuilding civilisation”, and it’s yours from only £99.00. What a steal!
• List of individual body parts. Amazing stuff here.
• Cynthia Plaster Caster, a “recovering groupie” who made plaster casts of celebrity cocks for nearly fifty years. What an icon(?)
• “Welcome to the Lighthouse Directory, providing information and links for more than 24,600 of the world's lighthouses.”
• I’ll leave you with a feel-good human-interest story: please give a round of applause to Splash, America’s first search-and-rescue otter!

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

A brief prescript: if you want some links that were too good for this roundup (not to shatter the illusion too much…), check out the nine new ones on the main site’s linkroll!

• The Netherlands is quietly shifting towards a four-day workweek (archive). Please stand for the national anthem.
• The history of the New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checking department (archive)
• Sonic Rush Rerun, the inevitable fan PC remake of the DS classic, has arrived, and i couldn’t be more excited
• Torturing a Sega 32X, for science
• Whose Penis? A lift-the-flap book
• Atlas of Space. Nothing that hasn’t been done before, but i like the presentation, and it gives me the inspiration to maybe possibly make my own clone at some point.
• The robots have come for the Piccadilly Circus caricature artists
• A gallery of old playing cards
• I successfully got clickbaited by the actual fucking railway company with this video.
• Tajikistan’s “Tunnel of Death”
• Vaybertaytsh
• List of stories set in a future now in the past
• Cai Guo-Qiang’s Head On is wonderful.
• The Scots woodlands are now home to… Black Hebrew Jacobites‽
• The number of Shakers left in the U.S. has risen to three
• Ông bà anh chị em, or, what happens when your language straight-up just doesn’t have pronouns.

I’m sure you’ve all seen WPlace.live by now, which has become an unexpected internet sensation, and it was on my list when i first found it (back when it seemed to be used only by Brazilians)… but, eh, it’s lost its luster. Too much spam, too much brigading. There was a nice period at the start where everyone in the Holy Land was keeping to their side of the Green Line. Tel Aviv, Nazareth, Gaza, Jerusalem, Bethlehem — all beautiful. Now it’s just a giant mess. Anyway! Links.

• Making a restaurant in a river so you can eat an invasive species
• Protoweb, a service hosting old versions of websites for retro computers to access.
• StoryTerra is an interactive map of stories (films, books, games, &c.) that take place in a certain place and time. A bit laggy, and there are a few omissions from whatever algorithm they’ve used to categorise it, but still fun to explore!
• An Australian ship used a quantum gravimeter to navigate for six days
• Raspberry Shake, a decentralised network of Raspberry Pi-based seismometers that anyone can join.
• Gen Z isn’t powerless against technology. There’s a lot of doom and gloom about around my generation’s poor relationship with the computer, and while it has merit, i found this article a refreshingly optimistic counterargument.
• Salt Lake City’s Catholic cathedral is not subtle
• A supercut of characters in TV and movies going, “What are you gonna do, shoot me?” and getting shot.
• The ultimate Xanthe-bait: A group of medical scientists conjectures that the mythic feminising effects of Salmacis pond, sacred spring of Hermaphroditos, may have been very real and a result of the presence of mycoœstrogens. (via Linkfest)
• How one artist conned his way into having the most translated article on Wikipedia
• manul life could be dream
• I love this idea: playing bingo with obscure unviewed Youtube videos. Legendary algorithm pull.
• “Giving people money helped less than I thought it would”
• Babe what’s wrong? You’ve barely touched your ship goo
• The incredible Zimmer tower

Wow. I’ve really done fifty of these, huh? (More than that, really — i didn’t start numbering them until i was already a good few in.) Well, uh… here’s to fifty more.

• The UK’s weirdest number-one hits
• Hiking Colorado’s tallest mountains in high heels
• Double pendula
• Introducing Blackdot, the hyper-precise ML-powered tattoo machine.
• “More news on Thundercrows”
• Games that push the limits of the NES. This whole channel is pretty great, actually!
• Arcaicam Esperantom, an antiquated variant of Esperanto invented to fill the niche of Latin quotations in books.
• Novels about TV
• Lettervoxd: Rare words scraped from film subtitles. (Via the venerable Language Hat.)
• A hypertext tribute to “Two-Headed Calf”. (Via Web Curios.)
  • On the same website: prompts for inspiration.
• Wander around a weird glitchy 3D onsen (ibid.)
• A Russian woman was found living with her daughters in a cave in Karnataka
• The fearsome ichneumon
• A gorgeous map of the best places to see the northern lights
• fi-le.net

• In 1986, a lake in Cameroon exploded and killed seventeen hundred people. This was due to entirely natural causes and was the second (and, so far, final) time anything like it had happened in recorded history.
• Gex, but it’s a ’90s Saturday-morning cartoon. Incredibly charming.
• A historical tech tree
• The rise and fall of Akasha Song, a dark-web DMT kingpin extraordinaire with a pet lemur.
• How to become an intimacy coördinator, Hollywood’s newest and most controversial job
• An oldie but a goodie: Scientists laugh at a googly-eyed squid
• Indian scientists search for the perfect apple
• File under “actually interesting ML art”: What happens when you train an AI on nothing?
• The Alphabet Book Challenge: Guess which word each of these weird alphabet books chose for the letter in question!
• Britain’s war on lawns
• Behold, The Box
• S-Config.com, a charming cyberpunk-ish personal website. I don’t actually remember where i found this, but it’s here!
• The Old Robots Web Site

• Internet Roadtrip! Think of it like Twitch Plays Pokémon for Google Street View. Last i followed it, the chat’s plan was to make its way to Canada no matter what, and it appears they’re now balls-deep into Nova Scotia. Godspeed.
• ChatGPT is breaking American colleges
• The mystery of the pygmy nuthatch, or: an investigation of how Charlie’s Angels got its ornithology very, very wrong.
• Heavyweight.cc: “All of the gravitas, none of the fees”.
• “Unparalleled misalignments”: pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other. For example: father figure and dad bod, or mass extinction and weight loss.
• Happy pride month to the g0ys — that’s G-zero-Y, a Brazilian subculture of men who are attracted to men, but spur anal sex and don’t consider themselves gay or bisexual. Good for them.
• Blockbuster’s abandoned entertainment complexes
• The demented world of Samuel Smith’s, Britain’s strangest and most draconian pub chain
• The curse of Kenya’s long-distance runners

• “Buddy Holly” but it’s a Pokémon battle theme
• Man sets off on 53-mile walk dressed as a curlew
• The raccoons who made computer magazine ads great
• Biocubes.net
• I didn’t know i needed T. rex–scented perfume until now. The makers describe it as “leather”, “unconventional”, and “woody”.
• “The Homeromanteion was a text used between the second and fourth centuries to provide automatic oracular answers to questions. Three dice are cast to generate one of 216 possible numbers, each referring to a line selected from Homer’s Odyssey or Iliad.” In other words: Xanthe-bait of the highest order. Try it today!
• “Everyone says they’ll pay more for ‘made in the USA’. So we ran an A/B test.”
• Prototaxites, a genus of twenty-five-foot-high towering fungi that ruled the world in the Devonian.
• Water sommeliers are on the up and up
• Recording a tree for a year
• How the record for Minecraft’s smallest 4×4 redstone door was broken
• The Kaymaklı underground city, Turkey’s own Coober Pedy.
• People infected with toxoplasmosis are perceived as more attractive. Are you toxo­plas­mo­sis­max­xing yet?

• Using machine learning to repurpose existing drugs for rare diseases
• New York chefs are dulling their spicy food
• Black leopards are, allegedly, quietly thriving in the British countryside
• A trip to Stoneleigh, Surrey, home of the Original Cockney Museum.
• Height-Weight-Chart.com shows a pictographic grid of people representing every combination of the human form, from 4′10″ and 90 pounds to 6′11″ and 490. Reminds me a lot of the Human Clock. (Via Web Curios, as are the next two on the list.)
• Jack.black. No relation.
• Now you, too, can touch grass with the world’s first astroturf phone case.
• Atlantis Sea Colony: “Building an underwater future”
• The world’s most beautiful sewage treatment plant
• I don’t really know how to summarise this one beyond the clickbait headline.
• How Flow was made
• Why Chinese skyscrapers and American five-over-ones are so different

• By now, you’ve probably heard the breathless news that they’ve brought dire wolves back from the dead. And, sure, maybe technically they’re just regular wolves genetically engineered to match the dire-wolf phenotype.¹ But that’s still such a cool achievement that i can’t bring myself to be a spoilsport about it, and neither should you. Anyway: Time has the cuter photos of the wolves, and the New Yorker goes more in depth on the people behind it.
• The bizarre application process for the Barkley Marathons
• “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” but it’s in fluent Latin
• The plan for Almere Pampus, the newest neighbourhood in the Netherlands’ newest city
• The Severance theme but it’s in the Super Mario 64 soundfont
• New longest Linear A inscription just dropped (via Language Hat)
• The Economist reports on the winding road to beatification of the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint
• Local interest: Injured and rescued seals helped at a new centre in Morpeth

I live in mortal fear that one day i’ll mess the Roman numerals up and wipe out the last link roundup by mistake. Anyway—

• Who killed Andy the Footless Goose? If you visit one link from this post, make it this one.
• What happens when an entire country stops having children
• The creation of the greatest calculator app in history
• “A portal to hell at an aluminum plant that swallowed up the entire shop in a matter of seconds.” Somehow not clickbait.
• The Sunquest sundial, which adjusts for the equation of time automatically. (Bonus link: the U.S. Navy’s observatory comes in with the best explanation of what the equation of time actually is that i’ve ever read.)
• Along similar lines: the nocturnal, a sort of star-dial to help you find the time at night.
• Behold, the one-horsepower leisure exoskeleton! File under the continuing theme of “utopia is here and it’s actually quite boring”.
• Sega won’t do it, so fans have ported Sonic Unleashed to PC by themselves. Nobody holds a grudge quite like the Sonic fandom.

• AreWeDoomedYet?.org shows a live estimate of how likely asteroid 2024 YR₄¹ is to come barreling down to Earth. (via Interconnected)
• An update on the story of the Ten-Thousand-Year Clock. Sad to hear they’ve cancelled the grander-scale version they had planned.
• What are the most Mario colours?
• The warlord, the oligarch, and the unravelling of Russia’s Amazon
• Boom Technology have finally broken the sound barrier
• Metal pipe particle accelerator
• Some interesting and beautiful developments built in the past few decades
• “Many of the Pokémon playtest cards were likely printed in 2024”
• The Star Trek: The Next Generation theme, but the sound is coming from the Enterprise-D
• In Greece, cats don’t go meow — they go neow.
• “I Tasted Honda's Spicy Rodent-Repelling Tape, And I Will Do It Again Unless Someone Stops Me”
• Category:Individual musteloids
• Two similar stories: introducing the “timeline app”, which appears to be an RSS reader for people whose brains have been frazzled by social media², and Buzzfeed wants to launch a social-media site optimising for joy rather than anger.