Links from the Blog

At some point in my blogging I started including a few links to things I found interesting at the top of the post. I thought it would be nice to gather up all those links in one spot. Newest ones are at the bottom.

No, It’s Not Just You: Why time “speeds up” as we get older

My Wind Phone

Lucy Worsley Investigates: The Black Death - I watched this on my local PBS station. This is the 2nd episode in her Investigates series. Common folk didn't really leave written records back then so most of what we know has to be inferred from official records. It was fascinating watching her put together a profile of some of the people of this particular village, just from what could be sussed out from things like what judgements were made against them in court! She also goes into detail of when the Black Death hit England's shores the eventual progression to a particular village. She also spoke with an expert who described the different forms of the plague. Even though the general subject of the Black Death isn't new to me, I loved the details she presented.

Gochujang Cookies - OK, I made the note but not where I read about this. I follow a lot of RSS feeds and it probably came from one of those. The article I read didn't have a specific recipe but I Googled it and wow, they are out there! It just struck my fancy because can you just imagine the spiciness of Gochujang mixed with the sweetness of the cookie? Taste of Home describes it as a spicy Snickerdoodle and I think it sounds delightful. This is going on the "make it one day" list. If I do get around to making it, I will definitely let you all know if it lived up to my expectations.

Infrastructure and architecture fascinates me but I don't have any professional background in it. I just think it's cool. I follow a really neat channel on YouTube, DamiLee. She is an architect and I find her videos fascinating. Her latest one is titled "Are We Ready to Live in a Nuclear Silo" and in it she compares the Silo from the Apple TV series/Hugh Howey books with silos that people buy and plan to live in (you know, like people who are certain the end of things as we know them is imminent). The fictional Silo was created to contain a specific population. The way the living areas were designed fostered community. But she pointed out the immense depth of the structure and number of floors (and time it would take for a person to travel up and down stairs) effectively also served to limit the free flow of information (just another form of containment). Modern day silos function to isolate a group and it fosters more of a "Me against the world" kind of feeling with no real community between other silos.

How Massive Feral Goldfish Are Threatening the Great Lakes Ecosystem - that video came up in my suggestions and the term "feral goldfish" caught my eye. I never thought of goldfish as being feral! This is all about how the fish find their way into the lakes and what's being done to mitigate their effects. It was a lot more interesting than I would have thought.

The Lost Apple Project: The Great Fruit Hunt of the Pacific Northwest - I've read before about people who hunt for lost apple varieties. It sounds really cool and adventuresome, in a botanical way, to look through old records and journals, interview oldtimers and explore remnants of old orchards to look for an apple variety that may have been forgotten.

I follow a site called MessyNessyChic and every week she posts a list of the "13 Things I Found on the Internet." A few weeks ago, the second item on her weekly list was a couple pictures of a woman's reading journal - that she kept for 80 years. I have a hard time keeping up with doing things - I can't even imagine doing it for 8 decades!

Another site I follow is Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. One of theie featurs is a Wednesday links section. At the beginning of the month, their entry had 2 links I found interesting: a deep dive into Amish romances and a really cool article on rewilding the Internet using lessons learned from ecology.

The Microsoft Excel superstars throw down in Vegas - Did you know there was a yearly competition for Excel users - in Vegas? I find this absolutely fascinating. I can use Excel, sort of. I can make the simplest of spreadsheets. Competitive Excel-ing, to me, is just bananas. Super interesting read, even if you aren't into spreadsheets.

Lost in the Backrooms: Exploring the Internet's Creepiest Liminal Space - This is a YouTube video about liminal spaces and the digital folklore surrounding them. I was not familiar with the Backrooms until I saw this video.

This first one is a link to a very short video of eyes projected on cooling towers. I don't know why but the operators of the Temelín Nuclear Power Station in the Czech Republic decided at one point to project eyes on the cooling towers which blink and gaze about. Weird but kind of cool!

Taco Bell art heist - This is such a wild story. An artist, who has made paintings for other corporations, created 3 for Taco Bell. The originals were in their corporate offices but they made prints to be put in the restaurants. It's fast food restaurant art - how valuable can it be? Hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars! Often when restaurants are being renovated, this art just gets thrown out. But people have saved some art pieces and they are apparently a hot item. In the article, the artist also goes over his thought process of what he wanted to represent with the paintings and what restrictions he had to work with.

Here's another video link, this one about an art project on a large scale. There was a housing estate in London that was going to be torn down. Prior to that happening, the artist took one of the rooms (these were all bedsits or what Americans would know as studios or single room occupency units), sealed it and injected 75,000 liters (20,000-ish gallons if you use freedom units) of boiling copper sulphate solution into the room. The solution evaporated, leaving behind beautiful blue crystals. They managed to save the room and take it out of the building. Right now, it's on display at the Yorkshire Sculptural Park until September of this year.

And just to round out this little selection of links, have a listen to ACDC's Thunderstruck but played on pots, pans, a freezer door and other unusual instruments. Thunderstruck - Les Fo'Plafonds.

Church bells speak again in Spain thanks to effort to recover the lost ‘language’ of ringing by hand

Beluga cams - I love belugas - they seem to be such chill little dudes. You can watch live cams streaming from Churchill River and Hudson Bay. 2/3 of the world's beluga population spend their time in these waters during the summer months. There are 2 cameras - one on the boat and one underwater. When there isn't live filming they run highlight videos. I have yet to catch the belugas in real time but I'm trying!

Rogue sign maker - How often have you seen something that should be fixed and then proceeded to undergo a stealth mission to do just that? CalTrans (California's Department of Transportation) for some reason did not adequately sign the left hand exit from the 110 freeway to I5. If you didn't know it was coming up then it was Whoomp! There it goes! One of the many drivers caught short by this just happened to be a sign maker in real life and he underwent a journey to surreptiously do what the department of transportation should have done, namely, create some signage. He went so far as to scope out other freeway signs to get measurements and paint samples and even sourced reflectors from the same place the transportation department did. There's a short YouTube video in this article that explains it all and is well worth a watch. Rogue artwork making the world a better place - I love it.

The bizarre secrets I found investigating corrupt Winamp skins - This was the coolest link I came across this week. The person who runs the Winamp Skin Museum details the strange things he found hidden inside Winamp skin files. Passwords, games, skins within skins, all kinds of stuff!

The Internet Phone Book is a project one of the users of the 32-Bit Cafe Discourse posted about this week. An actual, physical phone book of websites is being created and, if you have a website, you are invited to add yours to the directory! What a neat little project! Not sure how it's going to pan out - the physical book is not going to be in wide release - but it's a cool idea.

Evolution of the Italian pasta ripiena: the first steps towards a scientific classification

Trees hold their breath during wildfires - I think we all knew trees "breathed" carbon dioxide in and oxygen out but did you know they could stop the respiration process? Researchers happened to find this out when their study area was engulfed by wildfire smoke.

Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates - Ants are pretty amazing. These Florida carpenter ants will amputate another ant's leg but only if the injury is in a spot where the ant is likely to heal.

What the internet looked like in 1994, according to 15 webpages born that year - neat article on early websites, the start of e-commerce and some firsts like first webportal, banner ads and webcams.

Mushroom Color Atlas - I knew you could make dyes out of plant materials but I had no idea you could do the same with mushrooms! This is a fascinating atlas of mushroom pigments and dyes with beautiful line drawings of the mushroom used, information on the process to achieve each, color swatches and occasionally more extensive notes on the batch process. If you poke around the website, you'll find information on the mushroom atlas book that is going to be published in September. I'm not a fabric dyer but I could sit and look at these color swatches all day. Amazing.

45 record adapters - This site was last updated in 2016 so I think it's been forgotten. But, it is a blast from the past for me. Back in the olden days, we used to buy our music on various sized vinyl disks. The smaller ones usually needed an adapter to fit on your record player's spindle. The usual ones were yellow but apparently they came in all sorts of shapes! This site catalogs adapter shapes, from the usual to the unusual, gives a history on records, showcases adapter packaging. Just a really cool site, chock full of information.

Karen's Whimsy - Paper Crafts - This is part of an artist's personal site. She has free pdf downloads available of vintage paper crafts. There are all sorts of vintage paper dolls, both colored and black and white so you can color your own as well as some other pages with circus, holiday and other themes. Many of the images are taken from magazines like Ladie's Home Journal from the early 1900s.

Saving Desert Tortoises from Extinction - Desert tortoises are facing a threat from growing numbers of ravens in the Mojave desert. Why so many ravens? They follow people, who provide things like dumpsters with delicious (to a raven) offerings. But the ravens also enjoy eating tortoises and that's putting these little guys in danger. A man has made it his life's mission to protect the tortoises, not by harming the ravens but by using "aversive training" - making the environment so unpleasant they choose to move on elsewhere. Tools in his arsenal include artifical grape flavoring (which ravens apparently hate), green laser lights and 3D printed decoy turtles. Interesting short documentary (16 minutes) and I appreciate how it shows you don't have to kill one species to save another species - you can achieve that objective by merely annoying the crap out of it.

The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age - We are creating more data than ever before but it's also more ephemeral than what we produced in the past. From the digital media the data is stored on becoming obsolete to corporations wiping out massive amounts of information (Yahoo killing GeoCities, MTV taking 20 years worth of music news offline, MySpace deleting everything prior to 2016 are just a few examples) our data can disappear in a blink of an eye. This article goes into what we should save, how it should be saved and why we need to save it in the first place.

109 Love Letters - Kind of tying into the idea of data we create being saved, this website was created to catalog letters that a woman found at a flea market. She bought one bundle, realized that some were from the same person writing to another, and went back to see if the seller had any more. They did and she ended up buying 109 letters which were found in an old trunk. They were written between 1905-1910 from Daisy to John (unfortunately, there are no copies of letters from John back to Daisy). The letters give an interesting look into what life was like at the turn of the last century. I'm not sure if all the letters have been posted and it's been several years since the site owner posted.

Bladerunner Aquarelle - I found out about this on a Metafilter post recently but it's actually from 2012. A quote from the Mastodon post, where the Metafilter user found this: "twelve years ago, a painter by the name of anders ramsell painted 12,597 aquarelle paintings of blade runner, shot by shot, of the entire film edited down to ~35 minutes. it took two years of painstaking work, all done in his spare time after work each night. This is wild and beautiful. I also love how things on the Internet bubble up time and again.

Move Posters Perfected - here's another cool thing I found through Metafilter. One of the users is a fan of movie posters and an art director by trade. He curated a collection of over 3,000 movie poster images with the intention of using an old TV to display them. He edited the posters to remove imperfections and even adjusted the black coloring to look good OLED tvs. All of this is cloud-based so when he adds a new poster to his collection, it's available to you, too! His site has an interesting Before/After section showing some of the touch up work he did on the posters, he's got a great DIY explanation of how you can create your own set-up. He does ask for a one time fee of $20 to cover his hosting costs. I think this is such a cool idea. I just happen to have an old TV I was going to get rid of but maybe I will repurpose it.

Godzilla, the Official Cookbook - Oh my gosh, how can you NOT want this? If you look this up on Amazon they have pictures of a couple of the dishes like Guaczilla (which uses the avocado shell to make a Godzilla head) and Godzilla Loaf (meatloaf in the shape of a Godzilla foot). This would be such a fun thing to have on hand for a watch party. It's on preorder right now and I am highly tempted to get it.

An Abundance of Beasts - medieval bestiary generator created using twine.

The Pentium as a Navajo weaving - Really neat blog post about a man who recognized a Pentium computer chip in a Navajo rug weaving.

Miss Navajo Nation talks about highlights of yearlong reign, passing on the crown - I've read about the Miss Navajo competition before and I find it absolutely fascinating. Instead of parading around in evening gowns and putting on a talent show, competitors in this event display their sheep butchering skills and fluency in the Diné language and culture.

Carpentopod: A walking table project - Detailed blog post on the creation of a wooden walking table. If you just want to see what one looks like, here's a short video clip of the table in action. Have you ever read Terry Pratchett's Discworld books? This table reminds me of The Luggage.

Chromeography - "In praise of the chrome logos and lettering affixed to vintage automobiles and electric appliances — those unsung metal emblems and badges that are overlooked, forgotten, damaged, lost to time or the dump." Chrome script is so beautiful!

Dookie Demastered - I have Warning on my iPod but I'm not a huge Green Day fan. However, I just love what they've done with this. They rerecorded their album, Dookie, onto obsolete (and sometimes just weird) formats. Floppy disk, x-ray record, electric toothbrush, a doorbell. It's such an inventive thing to do!

Only Visit Once - Meet a fellow wanderer taking shelter under a tree during a stormy night. He asks you a question: What is one piece of advice you would give your past self? You can write your advice or read what others have written. Or both. But once you leave, you can't go back!

PhyloPic - Massive collection of silhouette images of plants, animals and other life forms. If you can think of it, it's probably here. I'm not sure what you would use the silhouettes for but they are free for reuse under the Creative Commons licenses.

Going Medieval - On Side Hustles - Interesting blog post on how people were side-hustling in medieval times.

Prehistoric Pulp - This blog, which has been around for a decade or more, is dedicated to fiction about dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. You'll find reviews, cover blurbs and news about upcoming works. Games and comics are also reviewed here but you will not find television or movie reviews. This blog posts sporadically because, well, this is kind of a niche topic! If you loved dinosaurs as a kid and never outgrew that love, you might want to check this out.

Too Much Love - This artist takes pictures of dolls and stuffed animals that have been loved to pieces and compares them with new versions. She says the old items, even though they are worn, have a lot of soul. Does anyone have a childhood stuffie or doll? In my cedar chest there is a rabbit stuffie that I had when I as a baby. It was definitely loved a lot!

AI Audiobook Narrators in OverDrive and the Issue of Library AI Circulation Policy - So that's kind of a weighty title that looks like some stodgy reading but it was actually interesting and also infuriating. I would like to choose whether or not to interact with AI, not have it take over everything in my life. Anyway, a librarian was upset at the quality of an AI-narrated book she had purchased for her library and, while looking into the author, discovered that not only were several authors using AI narration- the books appear to have actually been created by AI and no human authors were involved! It's a crazy read. Does this kind of thing make you mad?

NIH BioArt Source - collection of over 2000 science and medical art visuals. There is such a variety of images - animals, cells, medical equipment, anatomy, plants. From the National Institutes of Health.

Want bug or squid facts texted to you? Of course you do! Who wouldn't? Text either "bugs" or "squid" to 833-724-8398. This is a neat service from Skype a Scientist, an organization that connects students with scientists.

Close Knit - This was created for the Safe In Our World Mental Health Game Dev Champions 2024 game jam. The devs describe it as,
"we wrote about impostor syndrome, returning to a place you once knew, and learning to create out of love and not for validation."
I haven't played this myself, only watched the trailer, but it looks really cute and cozy.

The Quilt Index - From the site's About section:
The Quilt Index, originally launched in 2003, is an open access, digital repository of thousands of images, stories and information about quilts and their makers drawn from hundreds of public and private collections around the world.
There is an incredible amount of information in the quilt entries plus it's just really cool to look at all the different patterns and colors.

Narby Pompom Cat Hat - Catventurous Crochet - I found out about this from reading this article, Why Scientists Are Crocheting Adorable Wool Hats for Cats. I actually have a link to another set of cat hat crochet instructions in case you get motivated and want to crochet all the cat hats.

A Daily Animation Project Flows Through 10,946 Post-It Notes - Did you ever make a flip book? Over the course of a year, this artist drew 30 post-it notes a day. It's really cool watching each sketch morph into something else. There is a soundtrack, of sorts. The audio is taken from what was recorded on his phone while he was drawing. Sometimes it dovetails nicely with the images!

Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song in Old Norse and bardcore style - I've heard a few bardcore things and ehh .. it's interesting. But this! This is a banger. If you like this, check out his channel because he does all sorts of renditions in all sorts of languages. Another one from his channel I really like is House of the Rising Sun covered in Old French.

Sample Breakdown: The Most Iconic Electronic Music Sample of Every Year (1990-2024) - This is something the YouTube algorithm threw at me today while I was watching my usual Sunday cooking and history videos. I'm just absolutely wowed when an artist takes a sample and changes the speed/pitch/tone whatever to get a new sound. I am absolutely not musical but I'm guessing it must be like when I'm cooking but instead of adding more salt and knowing in my head how that will change the taste, they manipulate the sounds to get at what they have in their head. I am endlessly amazed at this skill.

Neon will never die: Inside the Bay Area movement devoted to the glowing art - This article is specific to the San Francisco Bay area but I love reading about efforts to keep old art forms alive. I think neon is beautiful, I love the aesthetic of the old signs and I hope neon continues to hang in there. I haven't been to them yet but there are TWO neon museums south of me, one in Tucson (Ignite Sign Art Museum) and one in Casa Grande (Neon Sign Park).

The Flying Serpent Who Battled a Train and Other American Dragons - Who knew? Apparently in the American Old West there was a scourge of dragons attacking trains and people. Why was this a thing during that time? Probably a combination of the state of journalism back then, the recent discovery of Pteranodon and possibly both European dragon legends and Native American beliefs. Interesting blog post, well sourced, with lots of examples of "dragons" terrorizing the Wild West.

High Fashion Typography - ok, this is a pretty clever idea! Disclaimer - I don't do the TikToks and I have no idea who this person is. Thanks to Tom Scott for bringing this to my attention. Anyway, this person has dressed himself to represent various fonts. Clever! There's even a follow-up with more fonts, including Wingdings!

Ukraine's Radio ROKS: Heavy metal (and hackers) for brothers in arms - Click Here is one of the podcasts I listen to and one of their recent episodes was on the role a particular rock radio station is taking in the war. It pivoted from being solely a music station to helping out with the war effort. They became a source of information, worked with fundraising for soldiers and civilians, let people know what kinds of skills the military was looking for. And they take calls from soldiers in the field, who dedicate songs to their loved ones. Music is powerful - it can be a political statement, it can bring people together. This is an excellent piece and if you don't have the time to listen, there is a transcript available. Slava Ukraini!

The Rise of the Dinosaurs, Written in Poop - The Abstract is a section of 404 media that has small, bite-size cool articles. This week's description is, "This week, we explore the digestive products of dinosaurs, the sartorial skills of prehistoric peoples, the superpowers of a supreme squirter, and the effects of “repeated social defeat” in fish." The dino poop lead story was pretty interesting! TIL - I knew about coprolites but I didn't know they were part of a bigger family, bromalites.

You can now download over 33,000 sound effects from the BBC archive - Do you need a sound clip? You can probably find it here. From the article, "Indexed into categories, the sounds span everything from footsteps and transport to nature and machines. Among the plethora of sounds covered are reindeer grunts, rain, clocks, horses walking in mud, common frog calls and crowds at the 1989 FA Cup Final. And that barely scratches the surface."

The Big Wait - this is a 15 minute documentary about the Forrest Airport in Australia and its caretakers. This is an emergency airport so there isn't regular air traffic. If your plane is running low on fuel or having a mechanical issue, then you might end up there. The caretakers spend their days caring for the airport, the runway and the 6 cabins that are always ready for unexpected guests. This is a slow film. I would suggest not rushing through it. Get comfortable, grab a drink and settle in and listen to Kate and Greg talk about their life waiting for people who might never come.

From Silicon to Slime - I've had this link sitting in my list of links to share on the blog forever, mainly because I'm crap at summarizing things and this is such an interesting interview and topic, I didn't want my poor word skills to turn someone off. Just go read the article if you're interested in the intersection of nature and technology. It is super cool.

How France uncovered the mystery of the forbidden photos of Nazi-occupied Paris - The story of a woman who found an old photo album in a flea market that contained World War 2 photos of occupied France and a note that said, "If you find this album take care of it and have the courage to look at it." The story behind the album and the search for the photographer.

Sanborn Fire Maps - Do you like typography? How about old maps? This website is a passion project - the author has dedicated the past 10 years to collecting images of fire insurance maps produced by the Sanborn Map Company and, as a result, his site has 3,500 images published before 1923 of almost all the art found in the Sanborn maps. The title page typography is beautiful and the maps are really interesting, too.

Traffic Cam Photo Booth - I really appreciate this artistic activism. From the About section:
Traffic Cam Photobooth is a website that allows anybody to locate their nearest publicly available traffic camera and use it to take pictures of themselves. While these cameras are ostensibly intended for traffic, they also serve to acclimate us to the idea that constant monitoring is an everyday part life in the city. No matter the target of this surveillance, it's clear from looking at the map that most New Yorkers get unconsentingly captured by the lens of at least one camera - if not several - every day. TCP offers visitors an engaging and lighthearted way to engage with this very serious topic by drawing attention to these easily ignored cameras. People can use their feeds, which their tax dollars help fund, to take pictures of themselves, spreading the knowledge of this sprawling surveillance apparatus through fun self-portraits designed to be sharable online.

Living happily ever after? The hidden health risks of Disney princesses - Apparently at the end of the year the BMJ (British Medical Journal) likes to have some fun and publish some lighter articles. This one discusses health risks faced by Disney princessess - for example, Cinderella is exposed to dust, leading to a heightened risk of Occupational Lung Disease.

The Unbelievable Story of the Carol of the Bells (12tone) - I love Carol of the Bells - it's one of my favorite holiday songs. 12tone talks about the song's origins (based on a Ukrainian folk song - I had no idea!) and goes into some technical detail. Super interesting!

Then Comes the Body - This is a short (15 minutes) documentary film about a man who taught himself ballet by watching YouTube tutorials and subsequently opened Nigeria's first ballet school in Lagos. Really cool, inspiring film!

The Bizarre History of Dragonriders of Pern - I mention in my About Me section that McCaffrey's "Harper Hall" series was what started my love of science fiction/fantasy. So I was delighted to see Exits Examined do a video on this series! I knew I hadn't read every Pern book but I was surprised to see how many I *haven't* read. Pretty sure the last one was All the Weyrs of Pern and that's in the middle of the whole series. This is not a series without controversy (he goes into that in the video) but I think it's still worth reading.

Gingerbread Voyager Space Probe - This Neatorama entry has a great picture of a gingerbread space probe created by Claire Lamman, a grad student in astronomy who, each Christmas, creates a gingerbread rendering of an astronomical survey instrument (links to previous gingerbreads in the article). How cool is that? (note: the picture appears to be gone from this article but click on the links in the article to get to other pictures)

Microscopic Photo Jewellry - I love tiny things so of course I had to share this. In 1857 René Dagron created the stanhope, a tiny object with a tiny photo inside that could be viewed through a tiny lens. If you decide you need a stanhope in your life after reading this, there are many on eBay! Just saying ...

Eight Clams Control This Polish City’s Water Supply - a city in Poland uses a rotating cast of clams wearing sensors to monitor the water supply. It's a super cool system! There's a short 15 minute documentary video link in the article. In Polish but with subtitles and well worth a watch. It's very artsy as well as interesting!

"film’s wear and tear tells a story as important as the film’s content" - this is a MetaFIlter thread about Japanese paper films. I had no idea this was a thing! In the 1930s Japanese companies used paper instead of celluloid to make films. This is about the preservation of these films. Lots of cool links in the thread.

DOOM: The Gallery Experience - "DOOM: The Gallery Experience is a walking simulator that turns the classic E1M1 level of the original Doom from 1993 into a pretentious art gallery. Stroll through reimagined spaces, admire fine art, and indulge in wine and hors d'oeuvres as you explore this parody of highbrow exhibition culture." This is a 5-ish minute video of game play. You can play it for yourself on Newgrounds.

Where We Go From Here (2024) - This post was from right after election day and I've had it sitting in my list of links to share all this time. I think now is the time.

2025: Keep democracy alive. Our New Year's resolutions - I thought this article meshed nicely with the blog post above. There are a lot of good concrete positive suggestions for what YOU can do during this time.

Techno Music Made with a Sewing Machine - And electric toothbrushes, rubber ducks, AN ALPHORN. These are just clips but man, if this was a whole album I couldn't buy it fast enough. Courtesy of the German techno band, Klangphonics.

Saving a Fish from Dying of Loneliness - I thought this was a really sweet story. The aquarium where this sunfish lives was closed for renovations, which meant the crowds of people the fish would usually see weren't there. He got depressed! Check out the video and story to see how the staff made a "crowd" for the fish to look at.

Goodnight Moon stamps to be issued later this year - Are you familiar with the children's story Goodnight Moon? It's so lovely and gentle. The US postal service will be issuing stamps commemorating this book. So sweet!

Goodnight Dune - I really like Goodnight Moon, the original, but this riff on it is awesome. Instead of:

In the great green room
There was a telephone
And a red balloon
And a picture of
The cow jumping over the moon

you get

In the great no room
There was a floating baron
And a view of two moons
And a picture of —
Shai-Hulud bursting out of the dune

Check out the link for the rest of the Duneified story!

Nokia Design Archive - This is a really neat site, definitely a rabbit hole you could get lost in. From the site's about page:

The Nokia Design Archive is a graphic and interactive portal designed by researchers from Aalto University in Finland. It currently hosts over 700 entries, curated from thousands of items donated by Microsoft Mobile Oy and representing over 20 years of Nokia’s design history — both seen and unseen. You can freely explore the archive, learn about designers’ experiences working in Nokia and discover interesting topics surrounding design and mobile technologies.

Pitfall! This is a browser based version of the classic 1982 Atari game Pitfall. This isn't an emulation. This was developed in TypeScript "through careful observation of gameplay and in-depth analysis of the original’s 6507 assembly language source code." I played the original game on Atari back in the dark ages. This is very true to the original (with some changes as noted on the page). Have fun!

Video Game History Foundation's Magazine Library - If playing Pitfall has got you feeling nostalgic, check out this digital library of computer magazines from 1981-2015. Boy, these bring back memories!

Tiny Worlds in Flasks - Make a terrarium, sort of. Choose a flask shape, and then decorate with items like mushrooms, trees, ponds, various plants and rocks.

I’m obsessed with icebreaking: I was trained not to hit anything – now I drive my ship into ice 24/7 - Fun interview with a ship's captain who works for the British Antarctic Survey, piloting an icebreaker. I can only imagine how incredibly satisfying it must be to hear and feel the breaking ice.

Saving One Screen At A Time - Screensavers! Remember those? Well, maybe not a lot of you and that's a shame. My favorite After Dark version was one where marbles would fall from the top of the screen, hitting pegs on the way down. Sometimes the marble was a smiley face and it would make squeaky noises instead of plinking sounds. The article is pretty cool as it takes you through the history of screen savers.

Subpixel Text Encoding - Did you know that each pixel on your computer monitor is really 3 sub-pixels? One red, one blue, one green. Someone used this knowledge to encode text within the pixels. Pretty neat!

What the fuck just happened today? - This is a once-a-day newsletter that details what happened that day and includes links to news sources if you want to read further. I hate what's going on but I feel like I should stay informed. If you can keep from doomscrolling news all day, then this is a way to keep up with current events without getting overwhelmed. If you don't want to sign up for the newsletter, you can read it directly on the site.

5 Calls - The best way to get your elected officials to take note of how you feel is to call them. Social media comments go nowhere, there's no guarantee that emails or letters are even read. However, when you call them, the office staff make a note of what you're calling about and the officials get a daily tally sheet stating what was on their constituents' minds. This site makes it super easy for you to call. Enter your ZIP code and it will find out who the appropriate people are for the issue you are concerned with. I just checked and there are now 25 issues you can choose from the site. Once you choose an issue, you will get a page with a script you can use when calling. I absolutely hate calling people on the phone for any reason and this makes it so much easier. You should especially call your representatives who are on the other side. They probably don't give a damn what you think but you deserve to be heard and the time and space your call takes up is one less call from a constituent who totally agrees with how things are going these days.

What can I do to fight this coup? - Great article listing 3 main ideas and the actions you can take to achieve them. Doing an action won't solve anything on its own but this is a starting point.

How to Stop the Power Grab - An article that I think is worth reading. It details that the person allegedly in charge, while seeming to have all the power, is actually weak and points out what makes that so. The article highlights an important point, which is that Democrats are hobbled in what they can do because they are in the minority. They can do more than they have so far but the major point is that we need to stop looking to them to fix this. They can't. Increasingly, it seems that the most effective way to accomplish something will be society mobilizing as a whole. Strikes and protests! Join them and let them see our numbers!

50 Protests, 50 States, 1 Movement - The first protest organized by this movement resulted in 80 protests throughout all 50 states. There is a whole calendar of events listed on the website, from more protests to buy-nothing-except-local days.

Know Your Rights - Protesters Rights - If you do decide to join a protest, make sure you know your rights before you go!

The Dice - 35 - Really good article on how to take in all the information that you're being bombarded with these days without getting sucked in and spiralling.

Birch Bark Biting - "...an Indigenous artform made by Anishinaabeg, including Ojibwe people, Potawatomi, and Odawa, as well as Cree and other Algonquian peoples of the Subarctic and Great Lakes regions of Canada and the United States. Artists bite on small pieces of folded birch bark to form intricate designs". This was fascinating - I had never heard about this form of art. There is both a video and a couple of examples of birchbark biting at the link.

This Paris Apartment Could Change Urban Living Forever - This is an episode from the channel Living Big in a Tiny House. This is a bit different from the usual tiny homes they feature. From the episode description, "This innovative space grows its own food—including crickets!—and integrates sustainable, low-tech solutions to reduce waste, conserve energy, and create a self-sustaining ecosystem in the middle of the city. From ingenious water-saving methods to growing food and natural climate control, the Urban Biosphere is redefining what’s possible in small-space urban design." Fascinating!

Anglerfish Trap: Amazing Street Art - I am fascinated with angler fish so this really caught my eye. A street artist was tasked by an art collective to paint something on a wall that had a staircase and two lamps. The lamps became the anglerfish's eye and lure. So cool!

I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and I don't know what to do with them - In 1974 the BBC started Ceefax, a teletext service. Before the Internet was born, you could access news, on-screen magazines and even proto-message boards using your TV. This was apparently wide spread in Britain (I don't think there was a similar service here in the States but please let me know if I'm wrong!). But technology advanced and teletext became a thing of the past. Neither the BBC nor the company which operated the service kept anything archival so it was thought that teletext was lost to the ages. However! Someone found out that there were fragments of the teletext on old VHS tapes that had been used to record TV shows. This isn't visible on the recording itself and a program had to be written to extract the code fragments from the tapes and stitch them back together. There are a group of enthusiasts who work to save teletext from old tapes and the author of this article got involved, too. He ended up "lucking" into a hoard of VHS tapes and thought he could really do his part to save teletext examples. However, when he wrote this article he had only managed to go through 40 of the 2000 tapes and is now looking for a new home for the remainder. As of February, it doesn't look like he's found a new home for them. Neat article on old tech formats and getting in over your head on a project is very relatable, at least to me!

Teletext Archive - If the above link intrigued you at all, you can check out this searchable database of teletext pages.

Take a Nostalgic Dive Through a Visual Cassette Tape Archive - This is someone's passion project to document cassette tapes. You can search the archive by brand, color, running time and/or type. Do you have a cool cassette tape that isn't in the archive? You can send them a picture to have your example included!

How the Internet Invented Bread Clip Science - I was surprised when the YouTube algorithm threw this at me because it's such a weird niche thing but I've heard of this before! I came across the website for HORG (Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group) on dogfish99, one of the sites I follow. Someone jokingly decided to create a taxonomy structure for bread clips (you know, the plastic doohickeys that close your bags of bread) and, well, it became a thing! There was even a legitimate case study published in the BMJ (British Medical Journal) that has a table showing different orders of occlupanidae. If you think you've found a breadclip not in HORG's database, there is information on how to submit your finding to them.

Are Cats Actually Liquid? - A French physicist studied the fluid dynamics of cats (and won an Ig Nobel Prize for his efforts).

Octopuses are now punching fish in the face - I think octopuses are so cool. One particular species engages in cooperative hunting with different fish species. But if the fish try to catch prey without working with the group to hunt and flush them out, then the octopus will punish the fish by punching it. This is almost as cool as blanket octopuses ripping the tentacles off Portugese Man-o-War jellyfish and using the tentacles as weapons! Octopuses are so metal.
Resist List on Bluesky posts examples of ways people are protesting. There seems to be an impression, especially overseas, that Americans aren't doing anything about what's going on but we are! We're not at the level of the French as far as protesting. The movements are fairly small, sometimes only one person, and scattered throughout the country. But so many people and groups are taking actions that aren't being widely reported.

Not just people but even some government agencies are putting up a fight.

The Sugarbush Ski Resort's snow reporter used her daily snow report to send out a message of resistance.

The dean of Georgetown Law pushed back against the government's anti-DEI crusade.

There is a sense that Democrats are just rolling over and, well, I think that's a generally true assessment of many of the establishment Dems. But Reps Jamie Raskin (MD) and Melanie Stansbury (NM) held a Town Hall with members of the Women Forward organization and one of the attendees recapped what was discussed in the call. (Sorry, it's a Substack link and I am very anti-Substack but sometimes there's good stuff on there.)

No Small Act - this group's mission is to create systemic change through coordinated local action. This was started by one woman who wanted to make a change. Lots of good resource links and also a bingo card of small action items you can do daily. The idea is small changes make a ripple and lead to greater change.

things your mom should've told you - The creator is an ex-pat living in Spain and it seems like until about a month ago her video topics had to deal with living in Spain, things that were different between the US and Spain, typical kind of ex-pat stuff. But then she started posting videos relating more to current events in this country and her last 2 videos especially, No one's going to save the US and Don't Eat the Rich, Starve Them were fantastic. She gives a great breakdown of the situation and gives you action items.

Variable Fonts - This is a repository of OpenType variable fonts - currently there are 377 entries. Each entry has information on the font - a description, where it can be found on the web, what kind of licensing it has, etc. You can change each font's variable parameters (such as weight, width, optical size) on the site. You can search for fonts by tag. "Gimme Mechatron" which looks like Transformers is pretty cool!

'Faerie smut' is having a moment... - Fairy tales are my catnip but the title of this article is what really caught my eye. Not the kind of article I thought National Geographic would have! It discusses the ballad of Tam Lin and its many interpretations. It also briefly discusses what kind of role fairies played in the lives of medieval people. (Archive.today link as Nat. Geo. wants you to enter an email address to read the article.)

Taking an Internet Walk - This is very much geared towards those of us who love the small, independent web but also teaches people who are stuck on the corporate Internet how to get there.
The Internet is so much vaster than a single worldview. It is a sprawling galaxy of archipelagos, filled with more humanity and personal gestures than any man-made archive.
There are so many interesting and wonderful links in this article. I'm sure there will be delightful surprises even for those of us who regularly surf off the beaten path.