I think I speak for all of us who are avid internet users that, over the years, we’ve all found shipping containers of interesting things—maybe creepy, maybe fascinating, maybe informative, so here’s a collection of some that I’ve saved over this and last year, plus some recent news I feel would be fun to share!

Everything from news to research papers to facts to websites—here they are!

• Over in Argentina, palaeontologists apparently just discovered fossils of the world’s first known armoured dinosaur!
• Especially where I currently live, the projected effects of climate change are apocalyptic, to say the least, but articles like this offer a great deal of hope from the experts themselves!
• I think we’ve all seen what words in the Greenlandic look like, but a related, lesser-known language, Inuktitut, uses a really-different script that’s, for me anyways, pretty clever in its design and look!
• For a few years in the late 60s to early 70s, David Bowie practiced and performed as an actual mime under Lindsay Kemp, during which he recorded quite a few obscure songs that have somehow survived—like Threepenny Pierrot, the titular character being one he played during that time!
• He also starred in a few videos like The Mask, and I think the story depicted here speaks for itself… You know, knowing his eventual stardom, gotta wonder sometimes if prophecies do come true~
• There’s a website that tracks broken McDonalds Ice Cream machines in the USA, Canada, the UK, and Germany—and it’s live too-!
• Among Vincent Van Gogh’s greatest inspirations was Japanese Ukiyo-e (浮世絵) woodblock art, which he apparently collected a lot of in his time! The 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō (東海道五十三次) by Hiroshige (広重) was one such collection he had a copy of, and you can see all these paintings online here!

• In a really-cool feat of engineering I’m nowhere near qualified to talk about, some researchers managed to locate a meteorite through nothing but machine learning and drones! I was linked the paper before, so if you wanna read it, here it is~!
• One of my favourite resources on linguistics is a comprehensive introductory book that’s fully open-access, so you can check out the whole thing online here!
• I came across this post a while back—“The World’s Deadliest Thing,” goes the title, and I have a habit of dismissing these as clickbait, but I gave it a shot… and I bet you’ll be just as fascinated as I was with the actual topic at hand!
• And last but not least, this article from last year which found that a good chunk of Gen Z doesn’t really get computer files and folders… and it does make me wonder: is this a sign that my generation’s just not been familiarised in something like this, or is it a sign that files and folders have become outdated tech?

It’s a bit small of a list, but I hope you’ve found something interesting in here—it’s been fun looking back through my bookmarks and subscribed newsletters to assemble this! Really made me remember how much I love learning about things that don’t really matter much in the end…

In the meantime, have a good weekend, and hopefully I’ll see you again next week~! ٩(^‿^)۶