cool thing of the whenever

Janaury 2024

last updated: 25th
  • Michael Wolf's Street View photos.
  • have you played Disco Elysium go play Disco Elysium I'm obsessed!!! (and take a look at the artbook!)
  • haven't found this recently but I want to share it now: netnet studio! I really like the CSS art lessons with some net art history in the mix!

July 2023

last updated: 2nd

June 2023
  • this incredible story about how a traditional song passed by generations of mothers helped a black american woman find the african village her ancestors came from (the site also has a recording) wow that was a long phrase
  • thank you tumblr for teaching me about the delightful Mini frog genus and its three know species: Mini ature, Mini mum, and Mini scule (and thank you to Dr Mark D. Scherz and colleagues!)
  • animating one single frame of the new Chicken Run movie,
    and a 1912 stop motion short film with real dead insects
  • watch this guy learn how to make VR game in Power Point. I didn't even know you could make normal games with it, it's so ingenious
  • go watch Reddit die live! I'm laughing but reddit crumbling means losing one of the very few easy to find websites that still answer your questions...
  • SILVIO BERLUSCONI DIED 12/06/2023 GOOD RIDDANCE
  • the guy who made Fruit Ninja has a youtube channel and made a video about how he created the game!
  • so uhh an italian youtuber has (probably) accidentally found the original 1974 cut of the movie Coonskin by Ralph Bakshi, which shown at the MoMA once and nowhere else, because he bought it from some guy thinking it was the 1975 one.
    but it's an unauthorised italian dub. (link to expleination (in italian))
  • why did I learn that fish make noises only now!!
  • translating is a hard job but the nonsense poem Jabberwock in particular must be a struggle for translators! it still has quite a few adaptations (idk if it's all of them)
    this article talks about the 1921 chinese one by Y. R. Chao

March-May 2023
  • currently obsessed with iNaturalist, a site and app for uploading photos of flora and fauna you see to get help identify it and help scientists with your data :)
  • why does spranga.xyz exist lol. I didn't know there were memes about Barbero

Febraury 2023 & December 2022
  • Look at the helmet Valentino Rossi wore at Mugello in 2008 lol
    He's famous for his creative helmet designs, this one takes the cake tho
  • I just found out that user Albrithr is doing an infinite game on Drawception! very cool part 1

November & October 2022
  • Turnspit dog, a dog breed used until the middle of the 19th century to turn meat on an open fire. It ran on a wheel connected to the roasting jack. I'm speechless lol
  • TIL about Jára Cimrman, one of the greatest Czech playwrights, poets, composers, teachers, travellers, philosophers, inventors, detectives, mathematicians, sportsmen... of the 19th and early 20th century.
    He's the czech Leonardo da Vinci, or dare I say it, even better than him. He helped inventing so much stuff it' take too long to write here (he invented yogurt! And a kind of primitive internet using telephones!!!) I can't believe I've never heard of such an influential historical figure!
  • Reckless Ben's Youtube channel. These guys are fucking crazy. Right now they're posting videos of when they infiltrated the Yellow Deli cult. They also tried to infiltrade Scientology, and snuck into the Super Bowl. I love the clash between the serious and reckless content, and the fastpaced editing with added jokes. Popular youtuber energy but with a lack of self-preservation and clickbait.
  • TIL about Napoléon, a 1927 movie by Abel Gance which I'm afraid to watch because it's almost 6 hours long (and it was supposed to be the first of six movies!).
    The final sequence was made to be projected on three screens! They're used both for extra wide shots and to show three different images, and right at the end the scenes are coloured like the french flag (tinted film was normal, old movies aren't always black and white).
    Gance also used a variety of innovative techniques like fast cutting, superimposition, hand-held camera... go read the wikipedia page if you want to read more about it

    Someone uploaded it on ok.ru, the Polyvision shot starts at 5:10, but the lateral screens are cut in half :(
    (now I'm imagining a cinephile with a 3 screens pc setup who put the final blue-red-white shots as desktop backgrounds. someone must have done it)

July & July 2022
  • You know those weird Kadabra pokédex entries that mention a psychic boy transforming into a Kadabra? The Pocket Monsters Encyclopedia says about Kadabra:

    "'As a psychic boy awoke one morning, he found himself transformed in his bed into a Kadabra.' The crowning of the Kadabra-themed short story 'The Transofmation' as the 2nd pokémon literary award winner is still fresh in our memory. If Pikachu is the Pokémon idol, Kadabra can be considered a favorite among those in the know."

    Yes, that's the Metamorphosis! Yes I'll never stop thinking about it. I love that it still doesn't explain anything like why a Kadabra???
    (source: DidYouKnowGaming video. this whole series is very interesting)
  • The failure of the Morbous movie is hilarious! copy-paste of what happened from Wikipedia:
    Nobody watch Morbious!!!
    Due to its lackluster box office performance and sour critical reception, Morbius inspired various Internet memes. Polygon wrote that the film became "a kind of collective internet hate watch", with fans sharing meme shitposts which ironically praised it. Following its release, the hashtag #MorbiusSweep, which jokingly claimed Morbius was the most financially and critically successful film of all time, began trending. Claims included the film becoming the first to sell over a trillion tickets, the first to make over a "morbillion" dollars, receiving an impossible 200% or higher approval rating (and similarly-impossible 142% or higher audience rating) from Rotten Tomatoes, and a screenshot of the Wikipedia page covering the highest grossing films of all time being edited with inspect element claiming Morbius had earned $352.9 trillion. One such post made the claim that Martin Scorsese, who had previously declared that superhero movies were not cinema, had changed his mind after seeing the film. Morbius actor Tyrese Gibson, who apparently did not understand the joke, shared the quote on Instagram believing that it was real. He deleted it shortly after commenters told him it was fake.

    The film received a resurgence in internet memes following its release to video on demand, with many involving the fake Morbius catchphrase "it's Morbin' time",a play on the Power Rangers catchphrase "it's Morphin' time". Users on the film's official Discord server call themselves "Morbheads", and users engaged in "Morbin'" on various Discord servers by distributing pirated copies. A large number of channels on the live-streaming service Twitch began illegally hosting the entire film on repeat;one channel, Morbius247, was banned after acquiring thousands of followers. Morbius piracy spread to other platforms, including Twitter, where the entire film was posted in a series of 52 two-minute long videos, compressed into a 30-second long video, and the entire script copy-and-pasted into individual tweets. On Tumblr, the entire film was compressed into a tiny GIF file and widely spread. Additionally, viral fake news posts claiming that a Morbius sequel had been greenlit as a result of the internet memes spread on Twitter, leading to "Morbius 2" to trend on the website, in addition to the phrase "it's Morbin' time" trending on Twitter for a week.

    Leto, in response to the memes, tweeted "What time is it?" and a 19-second video where he was "caught" reading a script titled Morbius 2: It's Morbin' Time "written" by himself under the pseudonym Bartholomew Cubbins. Following the financial failure of the rerelease, a petition was started on Change.org to put the film back in theaters for a third time with the claim that "we were busy that weekend".

May 2022
  • This guy really, really loves liquid crystals displays link
  • Technology Connections is a cool channel all around, but his recent video on Autochromes really blew my mind! The "analoge pixels" method is incredible!

    Speaking of photos, I found out that embrodery on old photos is something people do. I especially like this man with pretty flowers ("In Bloom") by Han Cao. simple but effective
  • Dracula Daily!! "Bram Stoker's Dracula is an epistolary novel - it's made up of letters, diaries, telegrams, newspaper clippings - and every part of it has a date. The whole story happens between May 3 and November 10. So: Dracula Daily will post a newsletter each day that something happens to the characters, in the same timeline that it happens to them." The novel ISN'T in chronological order, this is a different way of reading it, and I think it's really cool. A big chink of tumblr users, including me, is currently obsessed with this, come join the club if you want!

    Speaking of things that tumblr made me do... have you watched Quinton Rewiev's stupidly long videos about Victorious, iCarly, and general Nickeloden series? They're more retelling of most episodes' plot than reviews, but I still enjoyed them (as background while doing chores). I like how seriously invested he is in this ridiculous task

    Speaking of long videos... watch Folding Idea's video about NFTs. and his lukewarm defense of Fifty Shades of Grey too. I think they're really good

January 2022 & October 2021
  • Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfeschlegel­steinhausen­bergerdorff­welche­vor­altern­waren­gewissenhaft­schafers­wessen­schafe­waren­wohl­gepflege­und­sorgfaltigkeit­beschutzen­vor­angreifen­durch­ihr­raubgierig­feinde­welche­vor­altern­zwolfhundert­tausend­jahres­voran­die­erscheinen­von­der­erste­erdemensch­der­raumschiff­genacht­mit­tungstein­und­sieben­iridium­elektrisch­motors­gebrauch­licht­als­sein­ursprung­von­kraft­gestart­sein­lange­fahrt­hinzwischen­sternartig­raum­auf­der­suchen­nachbarschaft­der­stern­welche­gehabt­bewohnbar­planeten­kreise­drehen­sich­und­wohin­der­neue­rasse­von­verstandig­menschlichkeit­konnte­fortpflanzen­und­sich­erfreuen­an­lebenslanglich­freude­und­ruhe­mit­nicht­ein­furcht­vor­angreifen­vor­anderer­intelligent­geschopfs­von­hinzwischen­sternartig­raum Sr.

    What a name (wikipedia expleination)
  • r/AnarchyChess Top comment picks the next move, legal or not.
    Day 38: 19. pass
    The game so far (imgur)

September 2021
  • The first TV image of Mars was hand coloured! link
  • CGP Grey goes crazy searching the source of an old poem. I love everything about this link
  • John Dillermand (John Penisman), a real Danish children's cartoon about a man with a very long prehensile penis, lol

August 2021
  • Watched this video and learned some stuff
    1. Jewish people (idk if today only the more orthodox do it or not) bury their worn-out texts on religious topics instead of destroying them to not disrespect God's name. Before burial they're placed in a Genizah;
    2. The "Italian Genizah". When printed paper became popular, sheepskin manuscripts were reused for book binding (XVI XVII centuries). The inquisition was sequestring a lot of hebrew texts to burn them (especially the Talmud after Pope Giulio III ordered to destroy all of them*), but lots were sold to book binders by some sly smartasses who were supposed to destroy them. Today we're finding these fragments in old archives;
    3. Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Italian jewish manuscripts have different character styles. The first was influenced by gothic letters so it's pointier, the second by arabic characters (so much that in cursive it's difficult to read if you're not familiar with it), the third one by Carolingian minuscule so it's rounder. They start to be really distinct around XIII XIV centuries;
    4. apparently in the 1500s half of the european jewish population lived in Italy? cool!
    *wow was this really the reason it was ordered? Not what I expected
  • Microraptors are so cool, look 'em up! I never realized feathery dinosaurs could be completely black
  • Ever wondered what a castrato sounded like? here you go
  • This is the best thing that came out of TikTok the app can shut down now nothing will ever top it
  • "Пустити мозак на пашу"
    Literal translation: Let your brain go grazing (the grass).
    Meaning: zero thoughts, elevator music. Serbian idiom (tumblr)