• Tickle Me Elmo vs. a particle accelerator
• The Artemis II launch, but with “Free Bird” playing
• RavensBlight’s paper toy shop: Dozens of free papercraft you can make at home!
• A teardown of LG’s unreleased rollable phone shows why it never made it to market… but damn, does it look cool.
• Slop Sculpt! Bash together a crummy 3D model and it’ll sloppify it into anything you want. Here’s my otter:

• The end of baldness
• The New Yorker on the age of AI writing. I’m broadly open to machine learning in the arts (see posts passim), but writing is one area where most applications strike me as sad and self-defeating.¹ For films, TV, games, i get it — it can ratchet down costs and make bizarre psychedelic visuals no human could ever imagine — but if you’re not even the one writing the text in your work that consists entirely of text, why bother?
• Charcuterie: an online explorer for Unicode characters. Pretty nifty interface!
• “Is my writing too wet? In defence of gloop”
• “How citations ruined science”
• HufflePuff. Alive-internet theory in action.
• “The AI Revolution in Math Has Arrived.” Features an excellent quote about the jagged frontier:

  And the mistakes, Schmitt noted, are weird ones: There is virtually no way that a person with any training in mathematics would make such a plethora of basic errors while also succeeding in coming up with subtle, original, and correct ideas.

  If we were ever to make contact with a truly alien intelligence, i suspect it might resemble arguing with Claude.²
• Train Jazz, or, turning the New York City Subway into music
• Twelve Hungry Men
• Ex-Classics. What a wonderful idea for a site — books which used to be considered classics, but which have fallen into obscurity, hosted online for all to read anew!
• Radu Jude, the Bard of Bucharest. I must go to Romania one of these days. There’s something in the water there.
• The title “Irish Zionism” does this video an injustice. This is the spiritual successor to that video about building a giant Jeff Bezos head that detoured into Turkish hair transplants and pirate ships. But on speed.
• Local interest: Signs of Change at Grainger Market, from the recently discovered Cultured North East, a must-follow for anyone in the area.
• Kevin Kelly’s list of “contemporary heresies”. All of these are brain-melting in their own way, but, to plant my flag in the shroomy ground, i think 6, 15, 19, 29, 38, 52, and 73 are… kind of cooking?

• The New Statesman interviews Thomas Heatherwick, Britain’s most divisive designer
• Bajini: “It has been argued that the account of the Baijini in the Aboriginal folklore are in fact a mythological reflection of the experiences of some Aboriginals who have traveled to Sulawesi with the Macassans and came back.”
• Man who talked down hospital bomber says would-be attacker asked for a cuddle
• How the North East almost became a linear supercity. T. Dan Smith is a fascinating figure and i really need to learn more about him.
• The Utopia of the Family Computer
• Oryzo
• A Landing a Day — A blog, regularly running since 2009, which must have been surgically targeted to be Right In My Wheelhouse:

  In this formerly once-a-day blog, then pretty much a once-a-week blog and now an every-other-week blog if I’m lucky, I use an app that provides a random latitude and longitude that puts me somewhere in the continental United States (the lower 48). I call this “landing.”

• Project Backbone, an interactive globe showing the physical infrastructure of the internet. We don’t tend to think of the internet as having a corporeal existence, but it’s all around you if you look!
• “Luddism does not deserve to be rehabilitated. It was a medieval throwback, reactionary and primitive, a pre-Marxist labor convulsion closer in spirit to the Khmer Rouge’s fantasies of agrarian restoration than to the universalist solidarity of Eugene Debs.“
• Meet the man making music with his brain implant. God, i love living far enough in the future that this is just a normal headline.
• My journey to the microwave alternate timeline
• On the abyss that is Mr Beast
• What artworks do museums think of as “their Mona Lisa”?
• Dawid Moryc Apfelbaum, a Jewish soldier in the Warsaw Uprising who may not have actually existed
• Emymin.net’s Cool Websites and Links — Came across this in my backlinks, naturally.
• Thnickels! They’re nickels, but thick. My jaw dropped when i saw the date “2025”.
• Thær — I dunno what this is, but the vibes are cool!
• Vijay’s Vibes — Click to go to a random link, mostly small 3D web toys
• …Like this thing!
• Making food out of thin air
• The Cercle Hermaphroditos was the earliest known transgender advocacy group in the U.S.… see also Jennie June, whose article is if nothing else a fascinating window into the time before our modern LGBT terminology was standardised
• “Prototyping turned into an excuse for not thinking”, or, why not to launch first and fix all your bugs later
• Where is it like to be a language model?

And, to finish things off, here’s an Artemis II quickfire round! First, this picture of “Earthset” was the fastest i’ve ever switched to a new desktop background:

• Artemis II mission tracker/dashboard
• If anything happened to Rise the plushie i would kill everyone in this room and then myself.
• Christina Koch vs. Rise
• Carroll (crater). I teared up a little watching the feed when they all went in to give Reid Wiseman a hug.

• Two arcades both claim to be the “world’s largest”. Which is right?
• How thousands of AI Homer Simpson cover songs flooded Soulseek
• A cool personal page listing the webmaster’s favourite Chinese alternative music (via Gleech)
• A history of the Fn key
• Tembo, a drum machine that thinks it’s a draughts board
• Starboy! An adorable Tamagotchi-type thing that senses its environment, recognises faces, and… well, it’s just cute, all right? (via Interconnected)
• I can’t help it. I’m obessed with the Shape Store. Absolute slopkino. (via Inanimate, itself via Interconnected again)
• Claude Shannon’s own Minivac 601 computer in your browser (via– oh, you get the point)
• Channel Surfer — what if Youtube, but linear television? Very much in the spirit of Surf.city, which i used to have on my linkroll until it went down.
• Random Daily URLs! Looks like i have a new source to keep my eyes on… i wish this had an RSS feed instead of making me input my email address, but we can’t have everything in life, i suppose. (via the above)
• The world’s only Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum (is in Tennessee)
• Moss, a “painting toy” where every brush is its own weird programmatic filter. Interface is a little obtuse, but maybe that’s the point? (via Web Curios)
• Minesweeper but it’s the Strait of Hormuz
• Two new lost episodes of Doctor Who have been recovered!
• Australian feral camels
• New pronoun just dropped: 𲎿 (X也)
• British watch brands are gaining ground
• The New York Earth Room, one of several in a catalogue of Niche Museums. Sent me down a minor land-art rabbit hole.
• The Museum of Jurassic Technology (via the above)
• Dude Chilling Park, Vancouver
• On the quest to teach machine-learning models African languages

• AI by fax. Incredible things are happening in Germany.
• A fun little web sandbox… thing where you mess about with a grid of squares.
• Three Letters Game. Is this the new Wordle? Who knows!
• An hour-long recording of a drive through central London in 1999. Soundtracked, naturally, by nothing but the utmost tunes.
• Choirs are facing a tenor shortage
• The nightmare of time zones on a boat to Antarctica
• The first world leader to circumnavigate the globe was… King Kalākaua of Hawaiʻi???
• Wikipedia is available in over three hundred languages, and each one picks different images to illustrate its pages for the same topic. You can compare them here!
• Operation Burnt Frost
• Making Software: A beautifully illustrated website that will, apparently, eventually be a book, but i don’t know how the printed page could ever capture the intricacies of its animations.
• “They say the internet is dead, full of robots talking to one another. On the contrary—it is furiously, psychotically alive. It is a vortex of this new psychosis, tightening around a single axel, spinning faster and faster as it does. Log on, and that is all there is.”
• Street Race
• The Alabama Booksmith sells exclusively signed books, at publishers’ prices, in suburban Birmingham. Somehow it makes money.
• A synthesiser for colour palettes
• Ways we can fail to answer a question
• Inside the quixotic team trying to build an entire world in a twenty-year-old game
• I promise you you will not in a million years guess what “Maximus/Minimus” is without opening the page.
• “Gen Z lives in the archive.” Seems to line up with my experience as a zoomer — old music is just accessible as new music, so why discriminate?
• Vintage Hobbit recordings unearthed on Tyne and Wear Metro line
• There is no official web API for haptic feedback. Checkboxes, however, do generate a haptic buzz on your phone whenever ticked and unticked… even if they’re hidden… and even if it’s the computer doing the ticking. Behold the greatest bodge in web-dev history.
• If anyone else loves watching programmers argue about boring international standards as much as i do, here’s the maintainers of the tz database desperately trying to figure out what to call British Columbia’s time zone when it switches to permanent DST.

Okay, i know it’s gauche to begin a link roundup with an image file just after i forced your computer to load a Youtube embed, but i need to confirm that you’re seeing the same thing i am on your screens.

We’re all seeing that, right? A robotics company called “Satyress” that’s making centaur-shaped robots? I’m not just hallucinating the most concentrated Xanthebait imaginable? You’d fucking better be seeing it, or else i’m going to have start measuring my prozac dose in grams. Anyway. Link roundup #59, link #1, complete. Here’s the rest!

• List animals until failure. I managed 217.
• An unlikely ally for open-source protein-folding models: Big Pharma
• Rural Nigeria’s solar-panel boom is lighting up the local economy
• Oculart is a website of strange interactive… things.
• An beautiful isometric map of New York, à la nineties and noughties city simulators. One of the more interesting applications of image-generation tech i’ve seen.
• The story of “Klieg eye”, silent Hollywood’s worst disease
• If You See Me Out in Quahog (Remastered)
• Aphex Twin has overtaken Taylor Swift in monthly listeners. Sure. Fuck it. Why not.
• DinoTracker, the machine-learning programme that can identify dinosaurs from their footprints
• Skijoring, or, what happens when rodeo meets the winter Olympics
• Tim Hortons introduces “moonbits”
• “Slow AI Manifesto”, from someone who’s been art-ing with ML tools since before ChatGPT was a twinkle in Sam Altman’s eye
• TrogTrogBlog, a blog about nature in Gosforth (featuring cute otter pics)
• Beloved walrus penis stolen from New Jersey cheesesteak icon
• An incredible online museum of tangible media formats
• 😺️ I do not fear you, mother
• AntiRender: “Upload an architectural render. Get back what it’ll actually look like on a random Tuesday in November.”
• Growing algæ with only the light from another star
• This semiconductor lab’s website consists entirely of a gallery of contextless pictures and i love it.
• Through the blind hole: the birth and death of autotrepanation
• I’m obsessed with this puppet squirrel
• Finally: London’s snail-farm mafia

• Claude is learning to garden. I’m glad the robots are taking up hobbies, at least.
• Poms.fun
• “What did we get stuck in our rectums last year?”
• The battle over New Brunswick’s mystery disease
• Marcin Wichary’s favourite tech museums
• Even More Very Good Music Facts, which, as you may be able to tell, is part three in a series
• The Shortest Longest Bus Trip, or, a pleasant holiday in Belarus
• The New Yörker’s Calvin Tomkins on becoming a centenarian. Everything about this makes me feel at once grateful for my unaching young bones and eager for how much i still have to learn.
• I was kidnapped by idiots
• The subcontrabass saxophone
• The tomb of Eurysaces the Baker, a striking ancient precursor to postmodern architecture
• An extremely good map involving King Arthur

• A very big fight over a very small language, or, the war for Romansh
• A fascinating profile of the Vatican’s official astronomer. Quoth: “Scientists at the observatory are liberated from the secular scholar’s pursuit of tenure, grant money, and commercial investment; moreover, the Jesuits, having taken a vow of poverty, have extremely low living costs.”
• The Gremlins Museum
• How museums decide what to save in a disaster
• “Miranda: the Movie”, a weird digital tour of the Uranian moon made soon after Voyager 2’s flyby
• Stimulating your inner ear to stop you from getting motion-sick in VR. God, i love living in the Near Future™.
• The thirteen-year quest to simulate an entire worm
• The Shot at Dawn Memorial
• Twelve tips to spot an otter in the wild
• James Cameron on Avatar 3, rat resuscitation, and VFX’s artificially intelligent future
• Legendary algorithm pull: Utopian Socialism Jeopardy!
• Live footage of an abandoned house taken over by raccoons
• Weasel war dance
• “Cæsar in the Kremlin”, or, the story of an unusual Latin compendium of Vladimir Putin’s speeches

• 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