The original Blog Links page was getting unwieldy so I figured the start of a new year was a good time to start a new listing of blog links and archive the old one.
January
- May Day Mystery - Since 1981, yearly cryptic full-page ads have been published in a university newspaper by an unknown group. What is the mystery behind the May Day ads? I found out about this through a youTube video from Curiosity Crusades. It's just under 5 minutes. I would check that out first and then go to the link, which is the website set up by the student mentioned in the video. Site is old school but still maintained. There are scans of the pages and you can enter comments if you have any ideas on any of the clues.
- How the World's Most Famous Code was Cracked - Outside the CIA headquarters there is a sculpture with encrypted messages, Kryptos. The first 3 codes were cracked early on but it wasn't until last September that the 4th one was deciphered.
- 52 Things I Learned in 2025 - I found this through one of the sites I follow but I didn't note which one. I have feelings about Substack, which this is hosted on, but it's a free article with lots of cool factoids. Even better, the author has noted where she got the factoids from so this could lead to a lovely round of rabbit-holing.
- Making ‘Food Out Of Thin Air’ - Article from 2024 about a Finnish company exploring an idea that's been around since the 1960s - using microbes to convert waste into edible proteins. You can search "solar foods finland" and see that the company has grown since this article - they were really onto something! Although, I think the trade name "Solein" sounds a little too close to "Soylent Green."
- Be My Eyes - "Be My Eyes connects people who are blind or have low vision with volunteers and companies worldwide through live video and artificial intelligence." This sounds like a really neat way to help people. This app connects you with a blind/low vision person who needs your eyesight. I was reading through the stories and the reasons people need help range from confirming what color a piece of clothing is, to figuring out instructions to descale a washing machine and one person couldn't find her cat in her apartment and had someone be her eyes while she searched for the kitty (who was found!).
- The Vintage News - I think this may be on its way to becoming a dead site as it hasn't been updated since April of last year. However, that's kind of ok because it's all about vintage news anyway. The stories may be old but it looks like there's lots of rabbit-holing that can be done here. Some topics covered are news stories, history, pop culture, vintage Hollywood and mysteries.
- New Caledonia imposed a 50-year ban on deep-sea mining across its entire maritime zone
- The key to safer neighborhoods - the taco stand.
- one of the DOGE team members involved in gutting our government. Not sure how I feel about this post which details his time in that department - he seemed to want to do good (?) by coding a new UX for filing veteran disability claims but he also does not seem at all regretful that his actions also led to so many unnecessary and possibly illegal employee terminations. The term "banality of evil" comes to mind.
- The woman in this story became an evolutionary scientist because she used to not believe in evolution. Interesting story on how her beliefs changed.
- The 89 Percent Project "is a year-long global media collaboration aimed at highlighting the fact that the vast majority of people in the world care about climate change and want their governments to do something about it."
- Trying to find out what the lives of girls were like in ancient Egypt.
- sweet story about the slowly developing friendship between a woodworker and a feral cat.
- Bluesky post from a college professor and how she encourages reading stamina by giving her students different reading scenarios to do and reflect on (read by candlelight, read a chapter aloud to someone, read with a sketchpad and draw characters, scenes or another element from the story).
- the death of 24 hour america - why nothing stays open late "In this video essay, we will talk about the loss of late night businesses in the USA and the slow death of the 24 hour city and the effect it has had on society and culture through criminalizing existing at night. (YouTube link)
- Beer from Victorian Arctic expedition to be opened
- Reading Behind Bars, and Beyond Barriers - Essay from a journalist who spent time with a volunteer program that sends books to prisoners. She learned about the prison system and how it makes reading difficult (and sometimes impossible) for prisoners, she learned how to judge whether or not a book might pass through the prison mail-room and not get confiscated, she read books outside her usual genres to better serve the people sending in book requests.
- American - Kieran Healy is a professor of sociology at Princeton but he is also an immigrant. This essay is a reflection about the day of his naturalization ceremony.
- Why I Gave the World Wide Web Away for Free - Tim Berners-Lee explains how the world wide web was born and why it was made free to all, where we've gone wrong with it and what we can do about it, specifically in regards to AI.
- The Secret Trial of the General Who Refused to Attack Tiananmen Square (archive link)
- Golden-eye and the Burnt City: The earliest known ocular prosthesis from the city of Shahr-i Sokhta - first known prosthetic eye in the archaeological record, from 2900-2800 BC.
- The stories we admired most this year - The editors and writers at Bloomberg each picked what they thought was the one piece of journalism from 2025 that should not be missed. (archive link)
- Tiny Mario - someone made a ridiculous Mario game that you play in the URL bar of your web browser. Open source, so you can add levels if you want!
- Betelgeuse’s long-predicted stellar companion may have been found at last
- How was the wheel invented? Computer simulations reveal the unlikely birth of a world-changing technology nearly 6,000 years ago
- New Deep Sea Creatures ‘Challenge Current Models of Life,’ Scientists Say
- Zim&Zou’s ’80s-Inspired Paper Cassettes and Boombox Radiate with Color
- The Influence of Middle Schoolers on Our Language
- What was food like before the FDA?
- We Pitched a Museum a 1993 Game Hint Line (And They Actually Said Yes) - Just going to quote the intro from the website here:
Early 2025, ACMI, the Australian museum of screen culture, put out a call for comissions for Game Worlds. They wanted to commission microgames from Australian developers, and the brief was deliberately open: make something playable for a museum context, 5-10 minutes of experience, ready in two months. The games were to feature compelling world-building, interesting relationships between player and maker, be easily understood by a wide variety of visitors in terms of game design, playability and mechanics, and be a playful, and thoughtful response to the context of ACMI as a museum of screen culture.
We were excited to pitch, but after brainstorming a few ideas, we realised that we wanted to do something that was a bit different. Something that would be a bit of a surprise.
So we pitched a ridiculous idea Paris had: a hint line simulator with a 300-page physical binder.
- Cosmic Voyage - Writing collaborative set in a science fiction universe. Pretty sure I heard about this from the 32-Bit Cafe.
- The End - Directory of audio dramas that have either reached a season finale or a series conclusion. I found 2 science fiction shows to try out - Celeritas and Cosmiko Neon night. I found this link on Azure's bookmarks page.
- CreepyLink - URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible.
- Stand up for Science: 31 Days of Action - this was started last year when the US Congress was still cutting the budget for, well, everything good but this group is still promoting calls to action for things happening now.
- Deciphering urban disaster codes
- Getting down and medieval: the sex lives of the Middle Ages
- NETWORK OF TIME - Six degrees of separation but with photos
- Jump the Paywalls and Help Others Over the Top
- Blogging with Messages - CSS to mimic a text conversation on your blog
- Windows 95 Calming Icon Pack - Vaporwave parody on the original Windows 95 icons.
- How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Writing System in the World: A Short Introduction
- Cats and butterflies - Scenes featuring cats and butterflies by Japanese artists.