• 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.

• sit down, son
• A hypertext edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne
• Why does Santa play the saxophone in China?
• The biologic architecture of Eugene Tssui
• On the Old Believers of Siberia:

  The events that had excited the world were unknown here. The Lykovs did not know any famous names and had heard only vaguely about the past war. When in recalling the “first world war” with Karp Osipovich the geologists engaged him in conversation about the last one, he shook his head: “What is this, a second time, and always the Germans. A curse on Peter. He flirted with them. That is so.”

• Some Wikipedia oddities:
  • The Horizontal Falls of Australia
  • A lost Chinese silent film where Charlie Chaplin visits Shanghai
  • “The Accident”
  • Project Offices
• The scale of volcanoes
• How to find your way home to Earth when you’re adrift in the universe
• On David Bentley Hart’s unique translation of the New Testament. Mr Hart has previously been linked to on the style guide for his illuminating guide on how to write English prose well, which i think technically makes him this website’s Official Token Favourite Christian.
• I’ll let the headline speak for itself… The Silurian Hypothesis: It was the Cephalopods
• A Swiss laboratory has invented bioluminescent wood (via Linkfest, which was new to me)
• Tojo’s head (bald) slapped in court
• Cosmos: “Scan your hand, build a keyboard”
• Why Netflix films are so shite
• Black Blood of the Earth, or, the most weapons-grade coffee known to man.

  When Subject 1’s cup of unadulterated was half empty, he grabbed his water bottle and poured the remainder into his clear glass coffee cup. He looks at it and then puts his hand up because He Needs An Adult. He said with concern, “I added water but it didn’t change color.” We all wandered over to peek into the dark heart of his mug. Even diluted to 50% of the original strength, it is still as black, oily, and potentially lethal as a tar pit.

• 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!