Well, i don’t know about you, but i’ve had a nice few weeks. Went to see the new Batman at the cinema, bought some records, went out on a couple of jaunts — you get the idea. Anyway. Links.

• Noah Verrier, oil painter
• Angus Barbieri’s fast
• Jim Carrey covers “Creep” — perhaps the only song that gets better when sung off-key
• The GoJauntly app generates green walking routes in your local area — right up my alley! I think it’s only in the UK for now, alas
• Hollywood greenlights a Billie Joel biopic… despite not having any rights to his music, name, or image — good luck with that
• Ukraine’s ateliers are pivoting to the business of Molotov cocktails
• An ominous emergency broadcast two days before a train crash in Hoboken: “Would you, could you, on a train?”
• An excellent website for an excellent dog
• GNU Terry Pratchett — “A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.”
• A manhwa¹ version of Asimov’s The Last Question

You know how this works. From X to Y, here’s some links i’ve scavenged from around the ’net.

• The site of Travis Ludlow, an 18-year-old Brit who recently became the youngest person to fly solo around the world
• “I ride bike not submarine”: Grab, a delivery app, apologises to a rider who was tasked to deliver food to a bridgeless island in the Straits of Johor
• From the ever-provocative Atlantic: Old music is killing new music
• Dann of Dannarchy.com on that time Sears sold a ray which shot concentrated arcs of electricity at your skin
• A cross-section of British life on a passing train. Something about this video is just so… lovely?
• Teen born without legs named Virginia state wrestling champion — I suppose as long as you’ve got arms…
• The Youtube rabbit hole:
  • Where the hell did the Jeff the Killer image come from, anyhow?
  • Why Fred is the best Scooby-Doo character
  • That time the Hell’s Angels tried to buy a Canadian nuclear bunker
  • Peter Bergmann, the man who never existed
  • Red Letter Media on the Bruce Willis fake movie factory
  • A three-part series on the rise and fall of Hendrik Schön, the German “scientist” who almost faked his way to a Nobel prize (I, II, III)

I fucked up my fingers prying open a Yankee Candle too hard the other day. At least it was my off hand. Anyway. Links!

• The Missourian town which was overrun by deadly cobras [29 minutes]
• If “American Idiot” was a bro-country song — truly, truly cursed in the best way
• The Ordnance Survey’s favourite maps of 2021 — some good taste from the boys in the newsroom
• The quest for an artificial womb
• Books set in hyperbolic space, where parallel lines curve away and never meet back up
• The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art, & Natural History, a division of the Last Tuesday Society — straight onto the bucket list
• Bin∞cular shot — a gallery of inaccurate binocular shots in films. Once you see it, you can never unsee it

• Starting us off straight into things you shouldn’t watch if someone else is peeking over your shoulder, weird-internet-history connoisseur Justin Whang brings us the stories of the men with knobs on their arms. [14′]
• Early English editions of Euclid’s Elements used pop-ups to illustrate 3D proofs.
• T.i.l. about the “quasiquote”, a punctuation mark used in early fan zines to indicate ‘paraphrased or inexact quotes’.
• Two nice stories to end the day:
  • A deaf Californian gridiron team is absolutely steamrolling its opponents
  • The Dutch immigrant businessman building a giant scale model of Canada in Toronto

I figure over time dates will get ambiguous — it’s time to start numbering these bad boys, from the top. Five for your perusal this time around…

• The New Republic on the claimed devolution of Thom Yorke’s songwriting — well-argued, but them’s fighting words!
• Monkeytype, a ridiculously customisable words-per-minute type-tester — clearly someone’s passion project… With proper punctuation turned on, I get around 127 w.p.m, which is apparently four times as fast as the average? 😅
• Seinfeld, but it’s a Don Bluth cartoon from the ’90s — shockingly well done
• Newton’s fractal — maths nerds only; the plot twist at the end will shock you
• Some fun Ascii calendars