• 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