Curated chaos - vol.2
More weird and interesting things I recently found online.
Oh hi! Welcome to volume 2 of my semi-regular link-dumps.
Since publishing my long read on AI companions, my girlfriend and I have been up to the North Yorkshire coast for the 20th Scarborough Jazz Festival (highlights included Graham Costello’s STRATA and the Emma Rawicz Quintet, if you’re into that sort of thing), and then down to Portugal for a week exploring Braga and Porto.
So yeah, I’ve been happily away from desk for a bit. But it feels good to be loudly bashing my mechanical keys again this afternoon. And lovely to have seen some new subscribers joining over the last couple of weeks 😊
Anyway, that’s quite enough preamble.
Clicky clicky tappy tappy 👇
Weird, rare, and everywhere
“Novice naturalist” Arno Kopecky joins field biologists in British Colombia cataloguing flora and fauna across the region, from bryophytes to badgers. Lovely, descriptive writing, beautiful photography, and some fun details about the lives and customs of the researchers working on this multi-year mission.
Fungi, folklore, and fairyland
Now that you’ve got a mind full of moss, here’s a fascinating piece from Mike Jay exploring how mushrooms have shown up in art and literature through history, and what that might reveal about submerged psychedelic knowledge.
50 of the weirdest, most wonderful corners of the web
Just in case you’ve not come across this already, Emma Beddington’s survey of the weird-web is a nice, eclectic list of online oddities. Many I was familiar with (e.g. Weird Medieval Guys), others new to me (like Kingdom of Loathing, which I’ve yet to play). A few were disappointingly not that weird (like Forvo - a guide to pronouncing anything), but I suppose if I want to be some sort of weirdness arbiter, I should publish a very robust and definitive model for evaluating the weirdness of things. Did I just add that idea to Trello? Of course.
What are dreams for?
Amanda Gefter’s piece explores the findings of neuroscientist Mark Blumberg, which show that dreams respond to muscle twitches during sleep, rather than the other way round. Why does this matter? What does it, weirdly, mean for the future of robotics? I started trying to summarise here, but you should really just read the article.
Six documentaries about eccentric individuals
Darcy Jimenez shares six films - some free to watch on YouTube - that “explore the unique individuals and communities that make this planet such an interesting place”. Thoth is going straight on my watchlist.
That’s it for today.
This weekend, I’ll be going on a bushcraft course with my nephew, and also watching Goldie celebrate 30 years of the Metalheadz record label with a DJ set at my favourite tiny subterranean nightclub.
Have you read something great? Share it with me! Working on something cool? Tell me about it!