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

• Wikipedia’s list of works based on dreams
• The Stem Projector is the kind of ridiculous gadget i’d think up when i was seven, with no regard for any practical value or market — haptic channel surfing! Instagram filters for movies! Automatically-generated mood boards! Just complete nonsense and i want it now.
• “The Stink A”, or, why Kiwis have trouble typesetting Māori
• “The R.D.D. Nickel Atlas of the Universe”
• Oops, all Youtube!
  • In the spirit of every Youtube video since 2016, i would first like to say that this segment is brought to you by Sponsorblock. Begone with those crummy razors and earbuds!
  • How HD TVs ruined sitcoms (12′)
  • Mobile gaming is the definition of wasted potential (17′)
  • Garfield lore (16′)
  • The origins of cursed images (12′)

I found out that Mark Toney’s¹, in Newcastle, serves Dutch-style apple pie, and it immediately gave me flashbacks to my childhood like the critic in Ratatouille. I honestly started crying. Delicious stuff. …Sorry, what’s that?

Apologies for the interruption; my legal team have informed me that i have to actually put links in my link roundups. Who knew‽

• A 100-year-old Virginian woman hand-makes custom jackets to give away
• “My afternoons with the singing bowl lady” — A rare sympathetic portrayal of new-agers, one that neither revels in tired atheistic snark nor makes me want to tear my hair out with vapid bollocks
• What should a 9000-pound electric vehicle sound like?
• Wikipedia’s list of mythological objects
• How to write English prose well — A welcome antidote to the usual scolding towards uninspired curtness
• How (Saint) James Cameron made the water in Avatar: The Way of, erm, Water look so good²

• “My pitch for a colossal photorealistic statue of the queen”
• This cool Roman blanket is actually an earthquake-warped mosaic
• The history of Newgrounds’ school-shooting games
• The author of Minecraft’s end poem on how it came about and why he put it in the public domain after a retreat to a Dutch psychedelic mushroom temple
• A man gripping his phallus is the world’s oldest known narrative scene, further confirming that modern people are massive prudes
• The man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas (jump the paywall)
• 100 Gecs have done a collaboration with Skrillex, because of course they have

P.S. Lords of Misrule starts tomorrow. Hope you enjoy everyone’s submissions — i know i did! :-)

• The gay rodeos of Oklahoma
• Pissoirs are exactly what they sound like from the name.
• People who rid their sites of just Javascript are cowards. All the cool kids have no HTML!
• A wonderful, wonderful video showing the moment that two scientists find a lost species of bird in New Guinea. It’s impossible to watch it without smiling.
• Nobody knows when movies come out any more — seriously, when actually is that Barbie movie coming out?
• What we lose when we hide the violence of the past — see also Everything₂ on “visceral insulation”
• Immerse your brain in psychedelic internet goop with Mindmelt.party

• A list of “human universals” — things said to be common across all human civilisation.
• “I agree with the flag-waving patriots that America is God’s own land — I just happen to believe that that God is Dionysos.”
• Are Boeing’s first aeroplanes secretly being stored underneath a sacred mountain in New Zealand?
• Is there any song more melancholic, and yet, so hypnotically addictive, as “Golden Brown”? Something about that harpsichord just sends me to another world.
• I’m going to need you all to look at this ridiculously comprehensive, wide-ranging sci-fi alternate history map project Thing — including the associated lore docs, which are currently longer than the first Harry Potter book. Joanne could never.

• If you have any interest in web development stuff — which i suspect is a decent chunk of my dear readers — then you should look at these Pokémon cards right fucking now.
• Sign language in VRChat, using a cool new hand-tracking feature! Furries’ spare cash 1, Facebook’s billions upon billions 0. Well — it’s probably more like Furries 50, Facebook 0 at this point.
• “Slow Roads”, a neat little driving simulator. Every day i grow more astonished at what people can do in a web browser.
• The Youtube rabbit hole:
  • “Dear Raid: Shadow Legends: I don't want your money. I want a Date.” [3′]
  • Watching The Fifth Element¹ recently had me thinking, naturally, about Russian pop singer Vitas’ 1999 classic “The Seventh Element”, which is far catchier than it really deserves to be. [4′]
  • The criminally underrated Captain KRB on the downfall of Myspace and the ruins of the web, which, well, you’re probably on Neocities, you’re going to watch it either way [30′]
  • BlameItOnJorge investigates creepypasta lost media, which is the sort of thing that’s basically guaranteed to make me watch your video. [33′]