Wikipedia’s almost 23! Happy birthday you crazy girl!

I’m giving a talk this weekend for Wikipedia Day (It’s at Columbia on Sunday, if you want to come!). To prepare, I’ve been reading a lot of the early emails and comments from its first month of existence, and I find it oddly inspirational that no one, literally no one, not one soul, though it would succeed. It was more of a “here’s this idea that’s probably awful, but we’re going to try it because it seems kind of interesting” situation. Perhaps you should follow through with your questionable ideas

Are you in the doldrums? Here are some things that might snap you out of the doldrums!

You can vote on the hottest member of the Senate (and see the rankings). List of unusual anniversaries on Wikipedia. Database of jump scares in horror movies. Listen To The Cloud, a site which lets you listen in to the chatter of airport communications over ambient beats! The CIA’s map collection on Flickr is full of cartographical curiosities like a map of Africa’s administrations in 1950, which I could stare at for a very long time (I don’t know nearly enough about the colonization). Vampire bats ‘French kiss with blood’ to form lasting bonds. In 1986, McDonalds released a 10-minute scat cassette called “Takin' Breakfast By The Hand” and it’s finally digitized! You need to see the flag of Brown County, Nebraska, you really really do. Who decides which countries get which Lays flavors? by the always-great Amelia Tait in The Guardian. Dogs of Geocities, which is is one of those videos that I only really use when I need something to project on the wall at my house party. Geoguessr but for NYC Subway stations. Glorious Trainwrecks is an online community collecting videogames that are extremely janky but somehow work.

I livestream myself reading now lol

I’ve always meant to read The Power Broker, and since the podcast 99% Invisible is teaming up with Conan O’Brien to do a series about it soon, I’ve resolved to finally read all 1161 pages and 3.55 pounds of it. This month, I’ve been live streaming myself reading aloud on YouTube every morning at 10am and I’ve been having the time of my life!!!!!!!!!!! I cannot recommend livestreaming reading enough. I’m about seven bazillion times worse at reading than professional audiobook narrators and I apologize in advance for the appalling sound quality. But sometimes my cat comes in the shot!

In other news, I wish I had annie.com

I am so incredibly obsessed with the 1990s technorati who snatched up perfect domains for their 1990s personal websites, and clicking through their old musings and grainy photo uploads itched scratches in my brain that I didn’t even know I had. The best is gail.com, owned and maintained by a former NASA employee named Gail who got the domain for her birthday in 1996 and refuses to sell it. The other ones, like peter.com and paul.com and jason.net and randy.com have been bought by big dumb companies and their glory days are over. But they live on on the Wayback Machine, of course!

doug.com (1999) — every website should be more like this

greg.com (1997)

vicky.com (1996)

lisa.com (1997)

suzanne.com (1996)

I love them! An old, lovingly-crafted personal website is like a perfect little pearl on the ocean floor. It’s fun to email you guys again. I missed you! Tell me what you’re up to these days in the comments? And send me good Wikipedia articles? I’ve been running a bit low.

Love,

Annie

P.S. I kinda want to revive the perpetual stew for a one-night-only stew bash! I’ve kept a container of it in my freezer. Maybe I could team up with an actual chef to make stew that’s actually tasty…….. (if you know someone or somewhere in NYC that’s down for a donation-based stew night, let me know)

P.P.S. I’ve turned off the option to pay for these emails since I hardly update it anymore. If you’re like, “ughhh but I wanted to give you $5 for your unfocused musings and pointless rambling,” might I suggest spending your money on delightful things with more value, such this candle that smells like the map division at New York Public Library ($30) or Strega Nona stamps from USPS ($13.20)?

There is a single NYC garbageman who spent decades building a collection of trash that was so beautiful that the city preserved it as a museum. Someone named Bob tirelessly maintains an online museum dedicated to vacuum cleaners, a guy called Alex curates a New England cider donut map, and a nameless hero made officemuseum.com, an HTML site about antique typewriters.

Gift guide

It is not Christmas yet, but here are some things to buy if you want a head start.

• Lego iconic yellow hand gloves ($12.99)

• Rosetta Stone shower curtain (~$40)

• William Howard Taft headphone stand ($53)

Wikipedia things I like

• Curse of the Colonel: on this day in 1985, Japanese baseball fans celebrated a win by throwing a Colonel Sanders statue in the river, prompting an 18-year-long losing streak

• I was recently in Sacramento where I happened to drive past the former home of serial killer Dorthea Puente, the little old lady who murdered nine people and buried them in her garden. I was delighted to discover that the house’s new owners have plastered the yard with campy signs like “KEEP OUT FROM UNDER THE GRASS”

• Some fun lists include the longest lived organisms (there are fish swimming around right now who lived in a world before Beethoven's ninth symphony!), list of people who disappeared (spooky), English obsolete terms (torchecul was a word for asswipe, and woggin might be an old term for penguin, but no one really knows!)

• I wrote an article called On Wikipedia, Anyone Can Be A Model about the Wikipedia editors whose real, living bodies appear in photos on the site!

• I finally met legendary Wikipedia administrator “Orange Mike” who only wears orange and has blocked 23,000 disruptive accounts! Another monochromatic Wikipedian is bluerasberry who only wears blue and writes extensively about things like HIV and hamsters (but not HIV in hamsters, which is not a thing, thank God, the world has enough pain already)

  

Complaining about the sound of trains for 600 words

I live underneath one of Brooklyn’s elevated trains, and when my dumb little ass moved into the apartment, I had naive thoughts like “this won’t be that bad” and “it’ll be so nice to be close to transit.” I was shocked to discover that hearing thunderous industrial clanging noises every eight minutes ruins your (my) sanity! I have been getting face fucked by Satan. Even with my ears plugged, I used to awake late into the night trying desperately to turn off my sense of hearing. My dreams consisted of clanging industrial disasters. Each morning, I’d wake up in panic as a 400-ton locomotive careened outside my window. My neighbors, who’d all gone numb to the eternal sonic horror, did not offer any practical advice, just flippant assurances that I’d “get used to it.” The problem got significantly worse in summer (it was too hot to leave the window closed). As I was reaching rock bottom in June, the New York Times released an article soothingly titled “Noise Pollution Could Take Years Off Your Life”, which didn’t worry me much because at least death would be relief.

To my surprise, the problem gradually went away. I could go hours without noticing the barreling steel tank even though it was still chugging past every 480 seconds! I still had to pause the TV every eight minutes, but I didn’t bolt up from sleep with fight-or-flight urgency. My brain had overcome my pesky evolutionary instincts to pay attention to quickly-approaching 100 decibel tumult. Life was beautiful again, anything was possible, I felt like Princess Diana might spring back to life, there are cathedrals everywhere for all who have eyes to see, etc.

Maybe you think you are, in the parlance of internet users, “built different,” and that you could tune out the chronic assault to the ears. Maybe you could. But for what it’s worth, loud periodic rumbling sounds have ruined many dreams, not just mine! In the fifties and sixties, people were like “we should build a supersonic jet,” which is a pretty exciting prospect for anyone who wants to get from New York to LA so fast that you land with an entire hour left in that new Scorsese movie. But there was a big problem! Even though supersonic jets seemed feasible from an engineering standpoint, they would be very loud.

Concerned executives were like, “people will go insane if they have to constantly hear sonic booms echoing from the heavens all the time!” and others were like “no it’ll be fine” and so before the US government to fork over hundreds of millions to make the supersonic jet, it decided to test it out with a six-month-long noise trial in Oklahoma City. The US Air Force subjected residents to eight sonic booms per day and sure enough, people lost their minds. A full 15,000 people complained. A hearing specialist said that by subjecting people to noise, the government workers were “executing their brethren,” that “with their thunder, the sonic boom, they were punishing all living creatures on earth." The testing was halted early. All practical hope for a supersonic jet died. (I learned this from a great book about Oklahoma City called Boom Town!)

There were elevated trains in Manhattan starting in the mid 1800s that operated until the landlords got pissed about how much the clamor had lowered property values and lobbied to put trains underground and demolish the elevated tracks (really good long article in Curbed about this, also a shorter one in Bloomberg). It’s not just me, living next to the train makes you insane!

I’m trying to spend the rest of my lease romanticizing the M train, so I’ve been reading up on its history on nycsubway.org. When the stretch near me debuted in 1889, Bushwick was so rural that the only crowds were “fields of waving corn” and tomatoes! That’s pretty much as far as I got in the research. Last month, when it was down for repairs, my best friend Hajin uploaded a 7-hour YouTube video of the train sounds with the title “Gentle sounds for sleep.” I hate that someday when I’m old and gray, it’ll make me very nostalgic!

Anyway, I hope you are having a good Monday. Let me know what is making you happy — or furious!

Annie

Things you might like

• The Rafting Hypothesis: Some scientists think monkeys legitimately took a raft to South America from Africa, which sounds ridiculous until you learn that 15 iguanas took a raft trip to the island of Anguilla as recently as 1995. The image of lizards having a tropical boat trip is enough to make me cry tears of joy!

• There’s a huge “what’s special about this number” page from Erich Friedman, the retired Florida math professor who keeps updating his personal webpage with Central Florida Mini-Golf Reviews and Movie Ratings and charming top 10 lists. I think this is what the internet was supposed to be, just single-operator HTML sites by web design-averse boomers. See also: Sheldonbrown.com, kleinbottle.com. This is my retirement plan!

• I am besotted with the new NYT Games release called Connections, but it’s really just a ripoff of 18-season BBC game show called Only Connect, a show that’s conveniently been uploaded to YouTube episode by episode. Also, Ken Jennings's original run from 2004 can be watched for free, on demand, on Pluto TV. In case you were wondering.

• You need to play metazooa.com, which is animal taxonomy with the Wordle-esque sheen. You use taxonomic rank (kingdom, phylum, class, order, etc.) to get closer to the correct answer but, crucially, you do not really need to be “good at animals” to win!

• Hawaii is soon retiring its iconic rainbow plate of McLovin fame. But if you want find other license plates to love, check out “LICENSE PLATES OF THE WORLD” HTML site by one guy named Michael Kustermann. There’s also another called “License Plate Mania”.

• Wikipedia’s list of unsolved problems will remind you that we’re all clueless. The field of linguistics doesn’t know what language is. No one knows the scientific origin of life or what the deal with dark matter is or how to define “disease.” The whole world just looks rosier when you remember that humanity cannot agree on the definition of “word.”

Links that are so goated in my eyes

What’s behind our drive to collect useless items? WikiVoyage has a travel guide for the moon. The Internet Archive has 6800 free Lego instructions. There’s a book of Antarctic slang. NYC restaurants by decibels. 69 as “funny number” dates back to 19th century! Flickr category “Stick figures in peril.” NYT article about The London Zoo weighing all 14,000 of its animals. The female politicians from Minnesota have all been posting with the shirtless State Fair firemen I cried laughing at this Normal Gossip podcast episode. Ed Droste from the indie band Grizzly Bear is second cousins with another guy named Ed Droste who founded Hooters. The world’s only giraffe without spots was just born at a zoo in Limestone, Tennessee.

Wiki wiki what

I just got back from Wikimania, the international convention of Wikipedians across the globe, which took place in a Singapore conference center that was also hosting conventions on coin collecting and cosplay. I had to weave through crowds of sixteen-year-olds dressed as Harley Quinn and numismatists carrying briefcases of rare money in order to get to the Wikimedia sessions and I had the time of my life. Now I’m back to spending most of my time writing the Wikipedia book at my desk alone (no cosplayers, no nurismatists, but still relatively enjoyable).

you are gettting sle e p y ꩜ and you want to buy tickets s o o b a d l y ꩜

Because I’m not ashamed to ride my fifteen minutes to the very end and I want to avoid getting a real job as long as possible, I’m doing a bunch of Depths of Wikipedia live shows all over the country. I think they’ll probably be fun. You should get tickets (if you want). Use depthsofwiki.com (if you want) so you don’t accidentally fund scalpers. And you should pass on the message (if you want) to your friends in Gainesville and Appleton and Cleveland and all 30 of the other cities I’m gonna visit. If you are a Wikipedia contributor, reply to this email and I will give you tickets for free!

That’s all I have to say. Please tell me what you’ve been up to lately or if there’s anything I should see on my big fall road trip. The tour still feels a little crazy but I’m trying to lap up life’s joys!

Love,

Annie

Stewing

You may know me as “the girl who runs that gimmick account Depths of Wikipedia.” Well, I’m here to tell you that last month I started cooking a perpetual stew and suddenly every part of my life suddenly felt more exciting. It’s been going for 38 days now. Have I been “over-stew-ing” it? Maybe. But it’s Stew York City and anything is possible here. You can print posters and post online and buy the domain perpetualstew.club and New York Magazine will call you "Our Lady of Perpetual Stew" and the Washington Post will quote you saying “what are we if not perpetual stews, hot sacks of organs contained by layers of flimsy flesh?” The whole thing is silly. It’s very, very stupid. But I’ve met a lot of people, which is my favorite part. My second favorite part is putting daily updates on the website!

June 7, 2023: I've got a potato leek simmering in the Crockpot and it feels like the first day of the rest of my life

June 8, 2023: "No YOU live in a society. I live in a Crockpot" - my stew. 

June 9, 2023: I've added lentils and carrots, now, which drown out the potato leek from two days ago. As I ate, I contemplated my "Stew of Theseus" dilemma

June 10, 2023: All the people who say it's not "stew season" (a term I emphatically reject) haven't woken up on a Saturday morning in June to such hearty aromas wafting through their apartment.

(and 34 more)

My biggest inspiration is “A Month Without a Fork,” a site where Darius Kazemi wrote disarmingly passionate daily logs about a fork-free month, extolling the virtues of a fork-free lifestyle with just enough diligence to make you think wait, is this guy serious? Like, he quoted an 11th century Venetian clergyman who wrote “God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks—his fingers” and spent three paragraphs debating whether he could eat peanut butter cookies with a cross-hatched pattern.

I’ll probably stop stewing soon, but it will have been a good run. I wrote more about it on the stew website.

Things to click that will make you remember, if only for a brief moment, that the world is interesting and rather huge

George Santos or Barbie? Who (supposedly) had this job? from the Pulitzer-winning Buzzfeed News (RIP). David Lynch cooks quinoa. Extensive Wiktionary list of synonyms for “wow.” A man who witnessed Lincoln's assassination appeared on the TV game show "I've Got a Secret" in 1956 when he was 95 and the  7 min clip is on Youtube. You can get a replica of slam-dunking skeleton shirts worn by the 1992 Lithuanian Olympic basketball team and the site is amazing. Really funny long read in The Guardian about the guy in charge of Durex condoms. 200k unique “get well soon” messages scraped from Gofundme. Joke book from the fifth century!

Non-stew updates

I’m going to a bunch of different cities in the US this fall for Wikipedia-themed comedy shows. You can get tickets if you want. I’m very excited ᶦ'ᵐ ᵃᶜᵗᵘᵃˡˡʸ ⁿᵉʳᵛᵒᵘˢ. But I’m trying to say “yup” to life. These days I’ve been writing a book, playing a lot of two-person poker with my boyfriend, and aimlessly walking around the neighborhood sipping smoothies. I’m pretty happy, I think. A couple weeks ago I was on Lateral, Tom Scott’s trivia podcast, which was really fun. Trying to say yup, yup, yup.

Hope you’ve been having a good summer. Tell me what you’ve been up to, anonymous email friend! Tell me everything. Your pets and your parents and the books you’re reading and your fears and secrets and mother’s maiden name and the street you grew up on. Oh, and let me know if you have any delicious meatless recipes that don’t heat up the house (for when I’m not eating stew). Then we can stare into each other’s eyes and recite our social security numbers!

Anyway, thanks for reading. It’s fun to hear from you all.

Love,

Annie

Hello to all friends, foes, lurkers, losers, suckers, lovers, fighters, fans, enemies, comrades, cool cats, kittens, etc

Wikipedia proponents love to proclaim “aNyOnE cAn EdIt” from the hilltops, usually referring to Wikipedia’s contents, but you can also edit your Wikipedia layout if you so desire. Wikipedia lets you inject your own arbitrary Javascript into the site to change it according to your preferences, so the customization options are endless (like, someone once made a script to display IP addresses as emoji). As an avid Wikipedia reader, editor, and arguably “influencer,” I have collected some favorite tools and customizations from the bazillions that are out there. So please, feast on these mushrooms and berries that I, a stone age woman, have carefully gathered from the fields.

Customize your layout!

Article stats up top: I'm always interested in pageviews and I like this Wikipedia gadget that shows you page info. I love seeing who wrote different articles. The former executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation is the one who created the article Dave rule, the “inside joke in Silicon Valley startup culture that posits that if a work team includes as many women as it does people named Dave, it has achieved acceptable gender balance.” The stats often create more questions than they answer. Like, who are the 2,914 people reading about toilet gods every month? preferences —> gadgets —> xtools

Dark mode: one of the easiest ways to get Wikipedia dark mode is preferences —> gadgets —> dark mode toggle. Even better, you can feel like an evil 80s hacker if you go do preferences —> gadgets —> green text with black background

• Wanna know if the article you're reading is good quality? You can make the article's title color can correspond to the article's quality rating if you go to preferences —> gadgets —> display an assessment of an article's quality in its page header

• Citation hover: I love to hover over the little [1] citation marker and see more details on the source! Why click when you could hover? You can add this in preferences —> beta features —> reference previews

  

• "Who Wrote That?" is a browser extension that lets you mouse over text to see the author. Sometimes it's helpful if you're wondering if, like, the entire "reception" section for the Maggie Simpson article was written by the one random person (it was)

• CiteHighlighter colors some citations based on their reliability (as determined by public discussions by contributors). It's not perfect and doesn't understand context — it's just a tool! Useful for new page patrollers.

• I don't know about you but I never want the mobile version of the site when I'm on my desktop, so I use NeverUseMobileVersion

Tools for contributing:

Find more at toolhub.wikimedia.org!

• Wiki shoot me: Find landmarks nearby that need pictures! This is very fun to browse roadtrips but you can also just explore your own neighborhood. I recently went on a walk around Brooklyn and took pictures of parks to upload to Wikimedia commons

• WikiNav: Because clickstream data is public, you can see where people click to from different Wikipedia articles! Some rabbit holes are bizarrely well-trodden. The most common article people click to from “Uwu” is “United States war crimes.”

• Wikifeedme: a German-language site that shows you food Wikipedia articles that need photos. This doesn’t always work very well for me (mostly because the photos needed on German Wikipedia are different from those for English) but I love the idea of getting dinner ideas and contributing to Wikipedia at the same time

• Depictor by Hay Kranen: check if photos depict what Wikidata says they depict! I wouldn’t say it’s fun, but it’s definitely more gamified than other Wikidata editing I’ve done. Since its August 2021, Depictor has helped ~500 users make 800,000 edits!!!

• Structured Search by Hay Kranen: This is similar but you improve search capabilities of Wikimedia Commons photos by tagging pics with descriptors

• Copyvio Detector for checking Wikipedia articles for close paraphrasing or 1:1 copying of text from all kinds of online sources

Random stuff

• Wikipedia advanced search has endless applications. I tried to see if any page had all these seemingly-disparate words. the only one that did was "List of paw patrol episodes"

• Listen to Wikipedia: my incredible friend Mahmoud made a site that not only vizualizes recent Wikipedia edits but also turns them into music!!! it sounds like happy windchimes. There’s also a map display that shows where anonymous edits are coming from.

• Check out pageviews on pageviews.wmcloud.org (the official site with normal-looking graphs) or on Wikipulse (interesting circular visualizations). As you might expect, pageviews for a public figure’s article spike when they die and pageviews for Rebecca Black are higher on Fridays than any other day of the week

Stuff you should know already:

• If you're sick of scrolling past donation banners, you just make an account (logged-in users don't see them)

• You can change the skin in settings! “Timeless” is a cult favorite (here’s an article I wrote about the redesign earlier this year, if you’re curious)

Stuff I’ve been up to

If you’re curious about me, I’ve been spending a lot of time writing my little Wikipedia book. Luckily I still have time for the important things in life, such as the NYT Games beta“Connections” and watching my cat watch birds. I started making perpetual stew in a Crock Pot and I’m gonna keep it up for another week at least (reply to this email if you wanna come try some), and I just started the new season of I Think You Should Leave. If you’d like a rabbit hole, I’ve spent a few hours poring over a 1973-1999 Boston LGBT newspaper, mostly because the April Fools Day satire issues are sublime. I can’t recommend it enough.

That’s all! Hope you’re having a good week. Let me know of good online archives to browse or what tools/customizations/scripts I missed

<3,

Annie

P.S. Do you ever listen to a podcast so good that you’re like, “wow, I’m so glad I have ears”? That’s how I felt about Belt Buckle episode of Mystery Show (the fully dead podcast from Gimlet Media, a network that was proclaimed “basically dead” this week). I’m like seven years late, but you gotta listen if you haven’t already

I’m in Athens for the Wikimedia Hackathon, where I met people doing cool things like building a database of Wikipedia references and using large language models to generate section summaries of Wikipedia articles (here’s a demo) and also lots of other things. It was all very exciting and I met bazillions of bona fide flesh people who I’d previously only seen as bubbles within windows within browsers within screens. One of them was Hay, the guy who made the “Citation Hunt” site that makes a game of removing [citation needed] tags (it is very cool if you want to edit Wikipedia but don’t know where to start).

I have been browsing old newsreels a lot —

UCLA has a bunch of 20th century newsreel clips that are short and goofy and perfect, like tobacco tabby, dog gives hula hoop a whirl, police in 1933 New York limiting commuters’ goodbye kisses to three seconds to clear up traffic, and terrifying 1946 ski jump the length of a football field (in front of an audience of 20,000! This is what the internet was supposed to be, you know? Videos from 1956 of ostriches running around a racetrack

Shrimps is bugs —

Last week, a guy asked reddit for ways to cover up the thigh tattoo that says “shrimps is bugs” in lowercase san serif font and everyone was immediately like “why would you cover that up?” and now, as I read in Today in Tabs, more than 1.5k people have joined a brand new r/shrimpsisbugs subreddit and have honored the shrimps is bugs tattoo with shrimps is bugs embroidery, stickers, art and even a shrimps is bugs tribute tattoo.

Tug boats and non-fillet frozen fish —

I don’t care if Wordle variations are “played out” because I’m having the time of my life playing Tradle by Alexander Simoes, where you have five chances to guess a country based on its exports. How can you be a hater when you see the exports of Tuvalu.

How’s everyone doing?

Me first, a little bad! For no real reason. I’m in Europe for two and a half weeks to go to three conferences, which is extremely cool except that I’m so lonely that I would probably join a pack of wolves. Feeling homesick is very middle-schooler-at-sleepaway-camp of me and extremely dumb considering I’m romping past wonders of the ancient world in a coveted tourist destination that I didn’t even have to pay to travel to but here I am being a total baby. Trying a new strategy where instead of being sad I do crossword puzzles and think about New Yorker snail cartoons. I think it’s working. Soon I will be as content and unbothered as tobacco tabby

Six things I have learned about Athens during my visit to Athens (feel free to skip this section if you hate awesome and hand-picked fun facts)

1) There’s an ancient sling bullet discovered in Athens that’s inscribed with the word "ΔΕΞΑΙ" (dexai), which means “catch!" 2) When just 324 households in Athens' northern suburbs declared ownership of a swimming pool on their tax form, Greek authorities investigated with satellite imagery. They discovered a total of 16,974 swimming pools. 3) The Parthenon was mostly intact for over 2000 years. The reason it’s so damaged now is a massive explosion in 1687 (maybe everyone knows this but I didn’t!!!) 4) The mayors of Athens and Sparta didn’t sign a Peloponnesian War peace treaty until 1996 (the conflict was 2500 years ago). 5) Some of competitors at the first modern Olympic games in 1896 were tourists who just happened to be in Athens. 6) A hundred years later, Athens really wanted to host the centennial Olympics but Atlanta won. Greeks were so mad at Atlanta that people dumped bottles of coke bottles into the sewers and Coke's Greek market share didn’t recover for years

That’s all! Let me know what you’re up to. Or what I should do in Belgrade next week. Or a good podcast episode. Or your custom QR codes. Or your secrets!!!!

<3
Annie

P.S. learnrecursion.com. You can get certified in “rat tickling” online from Purdue University. NYT obit for a guy with a 37 million word long diary. Kinda funny but also bleak baby boomer countdown death clock. On country radio stations, it takes an average of nine hours and sixteen minutes before you hear back-to-back songs by women. New York Zoological Society’s very cute announcement in 1958 of its three new platypuses. NYT story about women who were named after Connie Chung, which was written and photographed by women also named after Connie Chung! queermaps, an online archive of gay bars. Cool viz of longest lamest edit wars on Information is Beautiful.

I’m writing a book with Little Brown! If you like the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, just wait for the printed not-encyclopedia that you pay money for — coming soon (but not that soon. but kinda soon)! It’ll be cultural history of Wikipedia with as much of its goofy content as possible. I can’t believe they’re letting me do this. Do you have any fun Wikipedia-related stories? If so, let me know.

Cool stuff I like

• Things with trademarked exclamation points like Oklahoma! and Jeopardy!

• This article: Claire McNear, the leading journalist consistently on the Jeopardy! beat (which I follow closely), wrote about Barbara Lowe, the undefeated champ whose 1986 winning streak disappeared from the archives. Turns out she… may have gotten diarrhea mid-game and angered Alex Trebek? Just read the article! It’s great! I learned that a “National Archives of Game Show History” exists, which excites me deeply. Also, in 2003, Barbara went on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and even though her stomach “began to stage World War III,” she won $32,000. I love my problematic IBS game show queen so much!

• Zoom social events: This is soooo 2020 of me, but I do love a quickie Zoom hangout with long distance friends. You can play Quiplash! Or this free Jeopardy! game!

• Command + shift + v to paste without formatting. I didn’t learn this til last year. I’ve been thinking about keyboard commands a lot lately because a very cute Kenyan 8-year-old named Elvis (and his sister Megan) are all over my TikTok FYP posting tech tips

• Jeopardy! audio as a podcast: I’m a fiend and about once a week, I express my desire for easy-access audio from Jeopardy! games for me to listen to as a podcast. Turns out there’s been 24/7 online Jeopardy! radio this whole time. My cup runneth over.

• Twin films, movies with nearly-identical plots that are made at the same time by two different studios. Like No Strings Attached and Friends with Benefits. And Antz and A Bug’s Life. Here is a cool twitter thread of them.

• This plaque I saw in Toronto which made me realize that you can just print a custom sign and put it whenever you want.

• Fake reviews of history: Inflated Amazon reviews? Hate! Walt Whitman writing fawning anonymous reviews of his own work? Incredible! I was reading about the person who gave so many fake five star reviews to their backyard shed that it was the top restaurant on TripAdvisor London and I stumbled upon this this New Yorker article that taught me that in 1855, Walt Whitman wrote a three-thousand-word tribute to his work that applauded everything from his dress sense to his compassion to his voice (‘bringing hope and prophecy to the generous races of young and old’).

• Events at the library: I sometimes forget that the library is constantly having events? This week, there was a special NYPL event by a guy whose only description is “collage enthusiast.” There’s also “Friday Crafternoon” and language conversation groups and free classes on hydroponics or python container datatypes or guitar or mobile app development. You can play bridge and do origami and discuss ecopoetry. You can go to Coney Island, you can learn Argentine tango. I have always wanted to stop by the ESL conversation group to see if they realize I’m a native speaker or if they just think I’m a really good learner.

• Being in a book: My friend Jamie Loftus wrote a book about hot dogs and her publisher let her call it Raw Dog (iconic) and look, I’m briefly mentioned!

• The goth Duolingo girl: This summer, I’m going to the Wikimedia Hackathon in Athens (which is, apparently, a business expense now?!) and then to Berlin for the re:publica conference. Es wird so viel Spaß machen. I’ve been trying to brush up on German, mostly because I love the way Duolingo’s celebratory sound effects whenever I correctly write “the horse goes to the supermarket” or whatever dumb sentence they give me. A tenuously-related but rather interesting bit of info is that Duolingo was founded by the guy who invented captcha along with some technical help from a guy who is literally named Severin Hacker. Another tenuously-related but rather interesting bit of info is that there’s a record of people with the longest Duolingo streak. The winner, “christi3,” has been doing it daily for 10.3 years

• Spectating hyperlocal sporting events: Ever since I moved to Bushwick in March, I’ve been trying to casually watch the amateur volleyball league in Maria Hernandez Park without being weird or creepy

I still can’t believe they’re letting me write a book. I feel like I’m getting away with something, and you know what? It feels great. You know what else I can’t believe they let me do? A bizarre event where people all read poetry from a boxing ring last weekend. I can’t believe they let me have an extension on my taxes. They let me order takeout Indian like three times a week, if I want. They let me even get a rose lassi! They let me check out dusty CDs of the 1993 version of Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia from the downtown library. They let me buy ten pairs of my favorite socks so that I can wear my favorites every day. They let me learn two songs on guitar and then play them six million times. They let me listen to archived Jeopardy! episodes in my airpods while I go bouldering. I can’t believe I’m getting away with this stuff. I hope that you, too, can indulge in some quotidian scheming.

That is all. Before you go, please enjoy the Wiktionary category of obsolete English words and the David Rumsey map collection on the Internet Archive.

Love,

Annie

P.S. Gretchen McCullough’s list of good pop linguistics books. How rectangular is your state? Meta AI made this site where you can upload a drawing and then instantly animate it doing movements. Someone got a version of GPT-3.5 to run on a TI-84 calculator. Shrimp Week on Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Instagram. Possibly the worst Super Bowl commercial I’ve ever seen from Brittanica.com in 2000. NYC released the most popular 311 calls over years and included some memorable calls such as“A goat is tied to the stairwell in my building.” Timeline of Wikipedia edits that go back and forth on whether or not there are rats in Alberta.

• It seems today that all you see is violence in movies and sex on TV but luckily there’s a “Discontinued Foods!” Twitter account that posts about short-lived snacks. There’s something deeply satisfying about a single-operator gimmick account administered by someone with intense passion for inconsequential trivia like the Smokey Robinson Frozen Dinners (2004-circa 2009) and McDonalds “Hula burgers,” (1963 - 1963).

• I know Amazon sucks for a variety of reasons, clearly delineated in an 18,000 word Wikipedia article dedicated specifically to criticism of the company, but I re-started Prime because I’m furnishing my new apartment (I’m in Bushwick now) and sometimes the corner store doesn’t have, like, sage green mixing bowls. Anyway, I learned from Twitter that you can append &emi=ATVPDKIKX0DER to your Amazon search URL to hide resellers and only see first-party stuff.

• I stumbled upon this New Yorker article about second mentions, a charming discussion of how far out of their way people will go to avoid lexical repetition. My favorite example: “The Guardian describing a fox who ran onto a soccer field as “the four-legged interloper.” Microplastics . . . “the ubiquitous particles”, a swan that blocked a police car was “the feathered obstacle”, Will Smith . . . “the former Fresh Prince.” I think it’s cute!

• A few months ago, I tweeted that the Oakland Library maintains a website of notes found in library books, which spurred a tiny, wholesome media cycle for librarian Sharon McKellar. Anyway, she mentioned that she was inspired by Found Magazine, a website that compiles scraps of paper that people find on the street. I think they are very charming. “If you ‘love’ me so much, then why haven’t I heard from you in forever??” is one.

• Would you look at the time, it’s dudes rock o’clock. Someone named Jurgen in Durham, North Carolina set up camera at a short bridge and posts videos on YouTube of trucks getting their roofs sliced off. The bridge, which is just eleven feet and eight inches, is nicknamed “the can opener.” For fifteen years, he has recorded and documented the collisions on a dedicated site, 11foot8.com, where he sells scrap metal (“crash art”) and also advertises an Etsy shop for (you will not expect this) bird-shaped mosaic window decals.

• Buzzfeed interviewed the guy who made a 102,040,171,200,000 pixel dick pic (it’s the largest digital image OF ALL TIME, 290 times bigger than the previous record-holder, a snap of a zebrafish embryo). It’s 250 terabytes. It’s on a website called the World’s Biggest Penis, which takes 41 days to scroll, and a Twitter bot that is set up to share a tiny portion of the picture every day for the next 134,819 years. This story is extremely dumb yet inspiring, and I like it when people perform bizarre, labor-intensive feats for no real reason.

• Tumblr went to town with a Venn diagram I put on Twitter and it makes me really happy. If I still lived in Chicago, I would probably print it onto a coaster or something

  

What else? I’m rather inspired by Muji’s inspiring design philosophy in which “good enough” is a triumph, I’m lapping up Yellowjackets season 2 like a parched puppy, and The Drift let me write a thing about Wikipedia’s bikini-clad beginnings.

If you only subscribed to this newsletter for Wikipedia stuff, might I suggest curling up on the couch and devouring unbuilt NYC subway lines, this African-American creole spoken in coastal pockets from South Carolina to Florida (it was Clarence Thomas’s first language!), Hawaiian lava sledding.

Thanks for reading! I feel like you’re my friend, whoever you are. I hope you are having a good day. Perhaps let me know in the comments.

Annie

How I became a comedian by accident:

May 2021: I was sitting in my Bed Stuy apartment on the day I turned twenty-one and a half when I got a DM on my depthsofwikipedia Instagram account from an account called aspiecomedians which asked me to be in a live comedy show in Manhattan: “Perhaps you could read some of the more interesting obscure bits you’ve found?” wrote Noah Britton, a member of the Aspergers Are Us comedy group, which has a great Netflix special in 2016. This message instantly made me want to barf, because a) stand-up comedy is one of the most embarrassing things that people electively do and b) I knew I would forever regret turning down the opportunity (I had to say yes).

The idea terrified me. I had pretty much no experience being on a stage save for high school band concerts and the one time I played Jesus in an Easter play in third grade (I was cast — no joke — because I could hold my arms out longer than anyone else). Sure, whatever, I’d read some Wikipedia articles or whatever. I sent a reply to clarify that I do not have an autism diagnosis but was totally willing to perform in the Aspergers Are Us show. Sure! What the heck! I figured it was scary but doable — like, of all the audience to bomb in front of, the one with a condition characterized by difficulty interpreting the nuances of social interaction seemed like one that wouldn’t be intimidatingly judgemental. Trying out standup comedy seemed like one of those things that’s extremely unpleasant but sort of interesting, like getting a Brazilian wax.

Noah then informed me that the event wasn’t just for people with autism and it wasn’t a small event — the other performers were Joe Pera (whose TV show I love) and Please Don’t Destroy (a sketch group that is on SNL now) and that there’d be an audience of hundreds. I realized that I was completely out of my depths. I was a random woman with a small gimmick account and I was going to be surrounded by up-and-coming faces of alt comedy. I spent the next month preparing a presentation of goofy Wikipedia articles that I practiced to my friends on Zoom. On the day of the show, I called off work and I dry heaved. I showed up to the venue several hours too early and while I waited, I incessantly chatted (nervous coping mechanism) with the woman taking tickets, who had a college class with my childhood neighbor, it turned out. Cool! The event started, I took awkward selfies with my fellow performers slash my heroes, recognized the NPR Planet Money TikTok guy and my favorite artist Sidney Gish in the audience (more heroes), and then gave an adequate 10-minute set. I made it out alive!

Fall 2021: One thing led to another. A very cool guy named Reed Kavner, who is on the first google image page when you search “white guy” and has done a bunch of interesting projects like mapping New Yorker restaurant reviews, invited me to do a set in his show. Sure! What the heck! After that, he teased the idea of an entire show about Wikipedia, and I was like, “Sure! What the heck!” We set a date for January, which we then postponed to March due to a Covid spike.

March 2022: I don’t really have very many memories of that first show, except that I a) survived and b) made like a thousand dollars, which is more money than I had ever made in a single night. It was at Caveat, a ~130-person venue in the Lower East Side that was founded by a former physicist a few years ago. People always ask, “what do you do in your show?” and the answer is that I give a silly slideshow about Wikipedia culture and content and lead a few audience-participation games. Sometimes I have cool guests. It’s 70-90 minutes, and based on the consistent sellouts and positive reviews, people seem to generally have fun (I think?). I’ve always been pretty adamant about keeping ticket prices relatively reasonable (at first it was $15ish I think, and now it’s like $20 or $25ish) I still find the whole concept of charging money to listen to my goofy thoughts is extremely delusional but not too deranged for me to be above it.

Anyway, I did this first show, and it was fine, I think. Probably? A story about that first show is in The New Yorker (which is extremely cool to me!!!!!!!!!) and it repeatedly mentions me assuaging my feat with this Simpsons line: “Why would they come to our concert just to boo us?” Like an embattled post-race marathoner or a new mom just out of labor, I finished the show and said “never again” but promptly forgot all the pain and agreed to do it all again.

Around this time (February - April 2022), a few things happened:

• I’d been writing part-time at a tech publication called Input for a few months, and I had a few banger articles about Wikipedia that got shared a lot (high five couple, Russian Wikipedia downloads). It was really exciting to transcend the “hey look at this dumb thing” to “hey look at this interesting data trend that sheds insight on international relations and our collective relationship to free information.” I was no longer just a curator of goofy screenshots — I was a curator of goofy screenshots with occasional thoughts!

• The New Yorker’s ~1000 word story about the first show ran and it attracted attention from a few people in the comedy world, who encouraged me to keep going. This is a bit beside the point, but I gained a deep respect for the magazine’s fact checking when I was asked twice to say the name of the species I was dissecting in my genetics lab so that they could include this line: “The other day, after Rauwerda finished a class in which she dissected the brain of a fly, she joined the Google Meet call, with her cat, to discuss ‘Depths of Wikipedia live!,’ the first in-person event for this inherently online community.”

• The New York Times Styles section ran a story about Depths of Wikipedia (slow news day, I guess?)

• I did really poorly on one of my university biology exams (not the first time that happened) but I didn’t even care (the first time that happened!!) which made me realize how much my sense of purpose had shifted away from school performance

May 2022: All of this, in combination, did such a number on me that I reached out to Union Stage in Washington DC and asked if I could do a Depths of Wikipedia show there. A staff member responded instantly, and in the span of a few minutes it was all set in stone: I was going to do another show. I recruited Paul O’Sullivan Band (a band made up of four guys, each named Paul O’Sullivan) to sing some songs. I also recruited two Wikipedians: Andrew Lih, who wrote an excellent book on Wikipedia in 2009, and Steven Pruitt, the most-active Wikipedian ever ( >5 million edits). I went to DC, crashed with a friend from high school who lived near the venue (thanks, Seth), and did the show. Was it amazing? Probably not. Did it change any lives in a meaningful way? Probably not. Am I being too hard on myself? Maybe. I, once again, survived it! I still was not very excited to be in front of an audience, but I did appreciate finally making money off of this gimmick account that I had obsessively maintained for two years. I’m pretty nervous to monetize at all. It’s not lost on me that volunteers are writing Wikipedia’s content for free, and I don’t want to profit on their backs. When I talk about this, people sometimes ask if I give proceeds to Wikimedia Foundation and the answer, as of right now, is no. Based on the size of their endowment (huge! and growing rapidly!), they’re not particularly desperate for funds. I personally have a recurring monthly donation, and I contribute to the encyclopedia in other ways, namely editing and hosting edit-a-thons to encourage old and new editors. But I digress!

Fall 2022: My part-time job at Input, a fledging tech blog where I’d been working ~20 hours/week for about a year (starting when I was in college), shuttered. I decided not to get another job and to instead do more shows. I’d ripped the Band Aid; I’d fallen into the depths. I was, officially, no longer afraid of doing shows and I also had venues proactively reaching out to me. I did a show in LA (with Jamie Loftus, my favorite podcaster!), and another in NYC, and then one in Seattle. At this point, I was living on the road and crashing with friends. I felt alive! I don’t know about you, but I was feeling 22. I did shows in San Francisco and Austin. Both were fine (I survived). At this point, I got an agent to book shows for me, and I started magically getting much higher percentages of door sales from venues (thanks Ben!). In December, I did shows in Philly, Boston, Pittsburgh, NYC, and another one in DC. Were they life-changing, incredible, world-shattering? Probably not. But it was really damn cool to constantly be meeting Wikipedians and Wikipedia-enthusiasts from around the country.

That brings us to the present. I never really wanted to be a comedian, and now I’m going around the country doing like eight shows a month, but I’m having fun, I think! What a happy accident. What a weird life. It’s been nine months since I graduated college and I’m totally able to live on money from shows and freelance writing (mostly in publications, but occasionally people do paid subscriptions to this unfrequent newsletter which is very sweet). I also bit the bullet and agreed to a paid ad last month for Netflix. I’m doing it! I’m living life as “a creator”! I’ll probably get a real job sometime soon, whenever being a Wikipedia influencer on the road stops being fun or sustainable. But I think I have a few more months left in me. We’ll see!

Some highlights from 2022 live shows:

• A few seconds from of the NYC shows was broadcast nationally on ABC News. An entire TV news whole film crew showed up to the show.

• Jesse Eisenberg emailed me to say he likes Depths of Wikipedia and that he was willing to be involved. He came to a show in New York and acted out a Wikipedia article

• Over the summer, as Corn Kid swept the internet I got Julian from Recess Therapy (Corn Kid’s interviewer) and the Gregory Brothers/shmoyoho (the guys who made the song) to perform at a NYC Depths of Wikipedia live show. They extended the “It’s Corn!” song with a few verses, one for each different “Corn” on Wikiepdia’s disambiguation page, like the small municipality in Oklahoma called “Corn” and the ingrown foot callus.

• In Washington DC, the biggest venue I’d ever done (550!) the screen stopped working which is VERY BAD because I show a lot of Wikipedia screenshots. The horror, the horror! Anyway, I spotted a woman in the crowd that looked a lot like the former CEO of Wikipedia and invited her on the stage to chat while the tech team figured things out. To my delight, it was in fact the former CEO and she was in fact down to have a little chat while the tech team figured things out. Thank you, Katherine Maher!!!!!!

• The iconic guy from the Wikipedia article for shrug (see below) did a live-reenactment of the iconic shrug. It got covered in Axios lol.

  

• In Philadelphia, I got the guy who ate 40 rotisserie chickens to do his first live interview. Also, I randomly hired a bagpiper (thought it would be interesting?) and the crowd really liked it, so I hired bagpipers in a few more cities. At first, I would mention Wikipedia’s “List of nontraditional bagpipes usage,” but then some editors deleted the article because it was full of non-notable and unsourced trivia, so there was really no great bagpipes tie-in. I just like bagpipes.

• I try to bring random, weird people on stage. Sometimes I find them on Craigslist. In Boston, for example, I saw a Craigslist ad from a poet who’s also a WWE fan, and he really wanted to form a group to perform poetry in the style of WWE announcements. I couldn’t not call him. He told me that he had a group together and I told him that he was welcome to have his first performance in Boston. It was…. truly incredible. My expectations were pretty low — I mean (it was a random person from Craigslist) and this blew them out of the water. I wish I had a video

• I met Melissa Franklin, the Harvard physicist who dared a guy to put the word “penguin” in his quantum paper, which led to the penguin diagram (the story is told better on Wikipedia)

• Other cool past and upcoming guests: my favorite musician Sidney Gish, Birds Aren’t Real, Lyle the Therapy Gecko, the woman who inadvertently spread a huge rumor that Amelia Bedelia was based on a maid in Camaroon, a bunch of Jeopardy! contestants I idolize, Jamie Loftus, the podcaster who joined Mensa as a joke and wrote a book about hot dogs, tons more I’m forgetting

Here’s what I’d love from you!!!

I have shows coming up and I desperately need goofy guests. Who are some niche viral people? Like the busker who spent decades dressed up as a bush in San Francisco. Or the researcher who carried a bunch of model kidneys around Disney World to see if roller coasters help you pass kidney stones (the verdict: yes, maybe, probably?!). Or the guy who raised the world’s oldest cat and gave her wine every day. An eye-witness of the Dave Matthews Band Chicago River incident. The guy who filled out a bunch of paperwork to name an island after Busta Rhymes. Or someone with a really unique story about Wikipedia (please not Wikipedia vandalism, though; I try not to promote that sort of thing!)

I have shows coming up in these cities:

1/22 San Diego
1/24 Salt Lake City
2/2 LA (Brea)

2/23 Detroit
2/24 Minneapolis
2/25 Bloomington
2/26 Chicago

3/4 Atlanta
3/5 Nashville

Please let me know if there are any niche celebs (… or real celebs) that I should reach out to. I love making people play little Wikipedia-themed games on stage. Oh! And buy tickets, if you’d like (if you’re a really active Wikipedia editor, I’ll give you tickets for free — just ask). I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be doing live shows. You can become a touring comedian by accident, it turns out. What a funny world.

If you made it to the end, thanks for reading. Hope you’re doing well! Leave a comment!

Love,

Annie

2022 in review:

Number of beers: 107. Number of bears: 0. Number of books: 23; that I loved: 4. Number of times I had an idea: 298. Number of times I had no idea: 94. Number of times I fell for a scam: 1. Number of times I fell out of love: 1. Number of times I fell in love: 1. Number of times I fell down the stairs: 1. Number of times I graduated college: 1. Number of people I kissed: 9. Number of times I felt like I was on top of things: 45. Number of times I felt like things were on top of me: 129. Number of times I cheated on vegetarianism: 11. Number of Depths of Wikipedia live shows: 28. Number of Depths of Wikipedia live shows that I left thinking “Hm, I hope people liked that. If only there were a feedback form”: 28. Number of articles I published online: 74; that I’m proud of: 6. Number of weeks I spent in Berlin catsitting: 6. Number of times I cried: 13. Number of times I called my mom: 98; while crying: 2. Number of credit cards I opened: 2. Number of times I called my credit card’s customer service line: 9; while crying: 1. Number of beds I slept in: 65. Number of exclamation points sent: 36,039; recieved: 12,034. Number of times I forgot to cancel a subscription: 3. Number of times I forgot to drink coffee: 0. Number of days in a row that I left my Crockpot on one time: 7. Number of times my car got towed: 1. Number of dollars I spent to get it back: 500. Number of dollars I sold the entire car for a few months later: 1000. Number of hours I spent sulking after my car got towed: 4. Number of roommates I had, cumulatively: 8. Number of kids I would like someday: 2. Number of TikTok “likes” recieved: 5,400,000. Number of times I watched Jeopardy!: 196. Number of times I watched Jeopardy! as a studio audience member at Sony Pictures Studios: 1. Number of times I asked Ken Jennings if he eats a chocolate bar and soda for breakfast like Alex Trebek did, to which he replied “no I don’t really like breakfast but today I had a banana”: 1. Number of times I listened to my favorite podcast episode: 6. Number of times I tracked down the person who made my favorite podcast episode, begged him to make a followup, realized we were both living in West Michigan, hung out for like six hours, kissed kind of randomly, and then I accepted the devastating news that he would not make a followup, but stayed in touch and remained friends: 1. Number of times I went rock climbing: 24. Number of tattoos received: 3. Number of times I got covid: 1. Number of people who owe me money: 1. Number of people whom I owe a big apology: 3. Number of times I wrote about a niche website dedicated to taxonomizing plastic bread tags: 1. Number of miles I ran: 376. Number of cavities I had filled: <1 (dentist said it was a “really small one”). Number of minutes I can plank: 7. Number of minutes I spent planking, cumulatively: 302. Number of times I was really jealous of someone else: 4. Number of times I stayed up late enough to see the sun rise: 13. Number of times I slept in my contact lenses: 19. Number of times I layed down in the grass: 14. Number of times a butterfly landed on me: 0. Number of years old I am: 23. Number of years the US Social Security Administration predicts I have left to live: 62.7. Things are pretty good, all things considered.

Other things I feel like sharing

• The magazine The Believer resurrected from the dead this month and I wrote a page about my favorite 13th century six-year-old

• You know the “and they were roommates…” Vine? According to this TikTok, the now-iconic roommates started a business and then one of them committed fraud and fled the country. And they were roommates! Learning this new information feels like a deleted scene of my favorite movie or something.

• I just found out about Shattered, a one-season show that was on UK Channel 4 in 2004 that gave people 100,000 GBP if they stayed awake for A WEEK. This is literally a torture technique. People were hallucinating. The premise for this show is as bad as that of Heil Honey I’m Home, the sitcom that imagines Hitler as a mid-century family man (canceled after one episode). I need to watch it

• Lately I’ve been feeling a little bit more listless than usual. I don’t really know what I should be doing! Do you? Okay anyway! I liked this project by The Pudding where you label your feelings — almost as much as I enjoyed the previous month’s project about upward mobility in the US (a lot).

• You should buy the picture book I Want To Be A Vase, a story about a plunger with big dreams, which was written by Julio Torres (the guy who made Los Espookys on HBO) and illustrated by my new friend Julian Glander, who I watched on Jeopardy! and met at a Pittsburgh Depths of Wikipedia show!

• Flickr announced a Foundation to preserve its 50 million photos and they’re hiring soon. You should work there! I bet it would be cool

• My favorite Twitter account right now is @mondomascots which posts goofy Japanese mascots

I like writing these occasional newsletters and I like reading your replies and comments, so thanks for sticking around. This is all I have for now because I’m starting to get very y s l e e p y ꩜.

Love, Annie

P.S. Give me book recommendations!! I just read (and loved) “Answers in the Form of Questions,” a book about Jeopardy! by Claire McNear, and “You Could Look It Up,” a history of reference books by Jack Lynch

1. Get a world map shower curtain and learn where every country is

2. If you’re not sure if you should buy a clothing item, ask yourself if you would like to wear it that exact day. If you don’t want to immediately put it on, you should hold off.

3. Everyone in the entire world is an expert on something. The challenge is finding out what it is.

4. Learning any new skill — guitar, chess, SQL, snowboarding, Adobe Premiere Pro, calculus, whatever — requires you to first be very very bad at it. There’s no way this was tricky for anyone else!!!! I must be an idiot!!!!!, you’ll think every single time

5. Next time you want to catch up with a pal, ask them if you can join them on their errands. I think it’s a really wholesome way to hang

6. I talk to strangers in public a lot and I think we went way too hard on the “stranger danger” thing in the 90s. The whole world is full of friends you have yet to meet.

7. If you feel viscerally upset, you should wait a day until you send a message or start the conversation. You never regret not sending a snarky text!!!

9. One time I read that you should find the smartest person in the class, sit next to them, study with them, and mimic their best habits. I tried it in a college chemistry class and it totally worked (I got an A and a really close friend)

10. You can take community college classes for a few hundred dollars per semester, which is a mind-blowingly reasonable price to pay for community, quality teaching, and an organized jaunt through a new subject. I recently took African American literature and I’m thinking about doing night class in animation. Or maybe world history

11. Before every semester in college, I’d get a pit in my stomach and think that I was going to have too much on my plate but it was always fine. Sometimes when you feel a little stuck, you can add a new commitment to your schedule to make you even more intentional about your leisure time

12. I like having lists in my notes app for words I didn’t know, good phrases I read, fun facts, inside jokes with certain friends. They always say the sharpest pencil remembers better than the dullest mind

13. I don’t know about you, but I practically never feel truly ready for new projects, which is why I have to start before I’m ready and learn on my feet. Start it! Start it today!

14. Dumpster diving is usually legal and sometimes very fruitful. Check behind grocery stores and drug stores (CVS is known to be a jackpot) for packaged items that didn’t survive the store’s regular shelf cleanout. You tap into the hunter-gatherer instinct and cut down on waste, a win-win!

15. The internet is the most fun when you upload as much as you download, when you post and comment instead of just endlessly scrolling. Sometimes you forget you’re a person when all you do is consume consume consume

16. If you’re at a crossroads in life and you have the option to move somewhere cool, I think you should try it. Especially if you can move back

17. I don’t know how to practically apply the oft-prescribed advice to “be myself” or to “follow my dreams” because I am both constantly changing and perpetually unsure of what I want. But I do really like this quote I heard a few years ago on the Casually Explained Youtube channel: “Oftentimes it seems like there are a million things you could be doing but nothing is just right. You have to get started before you know exactly where you’re going. The goals that you set aren’t always destinations, but they are directions. You can never know what you’ll find if you’re only looking from where you are right now. If anything, try something new if only to prove that it’s not the right choice.”

18. If you have a task you’re absolutely dreading, set time goals instead of achievement goals. “Today I’ll spend 40 minutes on my project” is more palatable than “today I’ll finish the first page.”

19. Being an unapologetic internet reply guy for people you professionally admire will get you so far

20. This is rather obvious, but sometimes I forget that stepping outside and taking deep breaths is the most surefire way to calm down. A mile run snaps me out of any bad mood

21. Your neighbors are some of the most important people to have on your side and usually all you have to do to win them over is bring them a snack and a nice little note

22. Ten years ago, I read on Tumblr that you can snap yourself out of a funk by creating your own holiday and since then I’ve planned an Annie day once a year or so… whenever I’m feeling weird. Spend a few minutes imagining the perfect day you could possibly have and then pick an upcoming date (ideally 3-7 days in the future). For me, the holiday involves a short-ish morning run to good music, a productive workday, fun beverages like boba and kombucha, dinner or trivia with friends, beer tasting, learning a new board game, maybe working on personal projects). You spend a few days preparing for the day and then you make it happen, milking your sixteen waking hours for all they’re worth. Every time I do this, I realize that I already know what lifestyle tweaks will make my life demonstrably better, and most of them are things I can implement more often

23. Keep your eyes open for cool Craigslist gigs. Some of the best memories of my entire life are from the year I lived in Chicago doing Americorps with practically no disposable income or social obligations. Every weekend I would scour Craigslist for interesting gigs and I felt like I really got to know the city in an odd, beautiful, John Wilson-y way. I was the witness at a courthouse wedding, I gave away free energy drink samples outside yoga classes, I helped (so many) people move, I walked dogs, and I read poker cards for a blind guy who liked to gamble.

24. The thing you’ve been putting off for two months always takes like nine minutes. I recently opened a Roth IRA through Charles Schwab because someone hotasked me about my retirement savings and I didn’t want to seem like a complete idiot in front of this financially literate love interest

25. Oops, I’m already past 23. I might as well remind you to have good dental hygiene

I still live in LA for the winter and I’ve been filling my life with various great things, including (but not limited to) the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions, breakfast burritos, homemade kombucha, Wikipedia editing evenings, Bob Dylan’s 2004 Victoria’s Secret ad, morning walks at my new treadmill desk, Chessguessr (it’s like Wordle but for chess moves), an audiobook about the life of Einstein (I’m at the part where he falls in love with his cousin… juicy!), this Calvin and Hobbes search engine that lets you search by keywords, vintage cocktail recipe books, the weird conversation starters on Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tumblr, and my cat.

Anyway, thanks for subscribing. I smile whenever I see your comments and likes and replies. I should mention that I still have upcoming Depths of Wikipedia comedy shows in Philly (12/8), Boston (12/9), Washington DC (12/11), NYC (12/13 and 12/14), Pittsburgh (12/16) and Salt Lake City 1/24 and I’d love to see you there <3

Love, Annie

• Philly 12/8

• Washington DC 12/11

• NYC 12/14

• Pittsburgh 12/16

• Salt Lake City 1/24

• Omaha 1/28

Things I’ve done in the six weeks since I sent one of these newsletters:

I made Jesse Eisenberg improvise a one-man one-act play of the 1904 Olympic men’s marathon at my NYC show. I wrote for Defector about the hot pink bitch named Breakfast (he is living out his golden years in Western Massachusetts and doggie diapers). I watched Wayne’s World for the first time and liked it so much that I immediately watched it again. I ate probably 40 breakfast sandwiches. I posted a YouTube video with 8 minutes of spinning food gifs (you can play it when you want to fall asleep or you can project it on the wall at parties!). I went to the dentist for the first time since before covid (I know this is very bad, and I am ashamed). I got my first cavity. I got a tiny section of one of the world’s 486 underwater fiber optic internet cables and then I got several million TikTok views for posting about it. I got questioned by TSA about why I had cable, and I had to explain that I bought it because I thought it would be a cool thing to have. I visited my best friend Hajin in Seoul! I visited the Seoul “Discovery” store, which is an outlet in the mall that sells merch for the Discovery TV network. I bought a sweatshirt from the Discovery store that said “THE WORLD IS JUST AWESOME. LIFE IS AN EXPERIENCE.” I accidentally left the sweatshirt on the subway and stopped believing that the world is awesome. I joined Randall Munroe, of the brilliant web comic xkcd, for two of his Midwest book tour stops (I was a BIT of a downgrade from Conan O’Brian, who joined him on his LA stop). I posted a thread of funny Amazon reviews for pet-safe hair dye. I started doing this new thing where I quiz my friends and family on world capitals when there are lulls in conversation (I love to be annoying!). I ate a ton of tteokpokki. I met the Gregory Brothers, the audiovisual meme dynasty also known as shmoyoho behind the ubiquitous earworm“It’s Corn” (and Bed Intruder) when they performed various Wikipedia songs at my last NYC show. It rocked. I spent some time staring out the window and thought about that Lebron James Instagram story that says “Smiling through it all: Can’t believe this is my life.”

Links that are AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!

It’s a great day to revisit that Lourde/Jack Antanoff slideshow, especially paired with Defector’s interview with Jack Antanoff’s biggest hater. It’s also a great day to test your skill as an umpire in this interactive New York Times article. It’s also a great day to read the Bloomberg article about Citi Bike Angels who make as much as $3000 a month moving bikes from full docking stations to busy ones. It’s a great day to snitch (since 2019, New York City’s Citizens Air Complaint Program has compensated people who send a video showing a commercial vehicle idling for more than three minutes, paying a 25% cut of the $350+ fine collected. One guy has made more than 36k!). It’s a great day to read the surprisingly wholesome September 2020 NYT article titled “This 84-Year-Old Gamer Has More Than 900,000 ‘Grandkids’” the Vice retrospective on the batshit 2010 TV show “Fat Familes” by Amelia Tait, a features writer I really like who buys random film on eBay and develops it. It’s a great day to spend 10 minutes or maybe three hours on the Audobon Bird Migration Explorer, which will prepare you to play the Wordle-esque game “Birdie” where you identify North American bird species (“birdle” was right there, I know!!!!). Speaking of birds, I really enjoyed this delightful newsletter about how the bluebird (New York’s state bird) avoids NYC like the plague. Still speaking of birds, I am now roommates with my brilliant friend Peter McIndoe of Birds Aren’t Real fame whom I first met on an eventful Instagram livestream (he choked on a Saltine cracker).

I moved to Los Angeles yesterday

I moved to Los Angeles yesterday for no real reason and I’m cobbling together a separate newsletter about the 33-hour drive (I hit a deer! I ran out of gas and hitchhiked in Utah! I reached nirvana!). So far, LA is great in terms of breakfast burritos and bad in terms of I miss biking everywhere (although Sony Pictures Studios, where I’m seeing a live Jeopardy! taping on November 14th, is within walking distance of my house.) I don’t think I’ll stay here for more than a few months, so let me know if you’ve got any LA-area recommendations that I must see before I leave.

That’s about all I have to report. Thanks for sticking around! I have a few cool newsletters in the works that I’ll send out in the next ~week that are a little more involved, and I added a “paid” option where you can pay me $30/year for the exact same thing. If you want another way to support my life as a part time niche internet Wikipedia microinfluencer, you can buy a beach towel of “a cow lying on her side is not immobilized; she can rise whenever she chooses,” which would allow you to lie on your side on a cow lying on her side and arise whenever you choose!!!

Subscribe now

Anyway, I hope you’re surviving, eating breakfast burritos, lying on your side, arising whenever you choose, snitching on idling commercial vehicles, mixing metaphors (it’s not rocket surgery), sitting on benches and eating berries, calling your friends and reading books aloud, smiling through it all (can’t believe this is my life), and being hot pink bitch named Breakfast. If you’re new here (or not new here), leave a comment with a little introduction!

Love, Annie

Here are some things

• Whisper is a new and free audio transcription tool from OpenAI! If you’ve coded a little, the process seems pretty simple, but if you’re afraid of the terminal or have never pip installed anything, you should do the Google Colab

• The CIA, which invented “can neither confirm nor deny,” can confirm that it has a new podcast called The Langley Files. I can personally confirm that 18-minute first episode, which has 3.1 star Spotify rating, is sooooooo boring. I can also confirm that there was not even one mention of the hentai on Bin Laden’s hard drive. I can confirm that a better CIA-related podcast is Wind of Change, a rousing 8-episode quest to figure out if a hair-metal-band hit single was actually a CIA psyop to finish off the Soviet Union.

• In trypophobia news: The Cyrillic character "ꙮ" (U+A66E) is being updated in version 15.0.0 to get three more eyes. I like it because it looks like a little flower. Or seven Os. This is your last chance to spell it potꙮo

• The new science of wrinkling: guys did you know that seemingly random wrinkles contain orderly domains (which have a repeating, identifiable pattern)? There are wrinkle experts that study wrinkle patterns. You can spend your career analyzing the physics of wrinkles. Can’t believe nobody told me this before

• Uhhh ohh: American Airlines' in-flight announcement system has been plagued with moaning and grunting noises and nobody knows why

• Gawker says… ellipses are “a brave act of punctuational defiance, nothing boomerish about it … I am a rebel, a keyboard subversive … do Minions have genitals …”

• Floppy disk guy is genuinely inspiring to me: the guy who maintains floppydisk.com and calls himself the “last man standing in the floppy disk business” did this interview a few years ago: I’m not exactly a person with great vision. I just follow what our customers want us to do. When people ask me: “Why are you into floppy disks today?” the answer is: “Because I forgot to get out of the business.”…. there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me.”

• Etymology guy rocks too: one single guy named Douglas Harper maintains etymonline.com, the beloved and reliable online one-stop corpus of English etymology. In his bio, he calls his work “The accidental production of an irritated oyster… If I did this right, I can say at the end of life I bundled up my worst qualities — obsessiveness, impudence, narcissism — and made something vaguely useful with them.” Inspiring words, truly!!!

• Something cool I learned recently: half of all service dogs fail their training, so South Korea started cloning successful service dogs. The resulting clones started passing at higher rates. Reply or comment with something cool and if I like it I’ll give you a shoutout in the next newsletter

• Maybe some things last forever: Paul Fairie, the University of Calgary political science professor whose LinkedIn includes the title “19th-century beverage revivalist”— and who previously brought us brief histories of “kids today are too soft” and “nobody wants to work these days”— is back with a series of historic newspaper articles about “men are too feminine and women too masculine.” He’s the best. I would read a book of all his Twitter threads

Date ideas (you can do them with friends too)

Couples therapy (as a bit). Play chess for like five hours. Call the other person’s parents and compete for who can stay on the phone the longest. Go to a live taping of The View. Sneak into a university and pass notes in a lecture hall. Watch the 1994 Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults. Dig a hole. Go to a random place (like a high school robotics tournament) with a notebook/computer and write a fanfic about all the characters you observe. Go to the new Tinder convenience store in Tokyo called “Swipe Mart.” Go to a live taping of The Kelly Clarkson Show. Learn more about the Punic Wars or Iran Contra or Confucius. 36 questions. Get canvases and paints and switch every 10 minutes. Go to space (it’s like $450k). Visit a local seal colony (you have to live near seals).

Affirmations

Remember that hanging out on the computer and clicking your mouse for a bit is valid. Going to a live taping of The View is valid. Getting a PhD in wrinkles is valid. Smoking is NOT valid. Being 22 is valid. Spending a lot of money on a cool bike is valid. Making this recipe for Korean spicy rice cakes (without the fish) is valid. Putting fake tears on your eyes to see if it makes you feel something? Valid. Farting is NOT valid. Being annoying about grammar is NOT valid. Going to bar trivia with your parents is valid. Watching Wayne’s World for the seventh time is valid. Waking up early to go mountain biking? You already know. It rhymes with salad, which is valid. Writing a Google review of a pothole is valid.

That’s it for this dispatch. You’ll probably see me around posting Wikipedia articles. Don’t forget to send me cool things you’ve learned lately — I always like hearing from you <3. If you want, you can also send me 2000s reality TV show recommendations (I recently watched Drake Bell get a concussion and two black eyes on ABC’s “Splash,” a bizarre one-season 2013 show where D-list celebrities learn competitive diving).

Happy decorative gourd season, you filthy animals!

Annie

More things:

• Lately I’ve been really into ʷʳᶦᵗᶦⁿᵍ ᶦⁿ ˢᵘᵖᵉʳˢᶜʳᶦᵖᵗ ˢᵒ ᶦᵗ ˡᵒᵒᵏˢ ˡᶦᵏᵉ ᶦ'ᵐ ʷʰᶦˢᵖᵉʳᶦⁿᵍ!

• I started “Depths of Internet Archive” on Twitter and have been spending a lot of time on archive.org, particularly in collections of digitized VHS tapes. So many of them would be so cool to project on the wall at a party: the introduction to Windows 95 with Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry, Sex and Dating (1997), How to Spot Counterfeit Beanie Babies (1998), Surfing for Seniors (1997), Payton Manning’s Nutrition Odessey (2000), Now You’re Talking! A Drug Free Family (1991), and so so so many more. You can do the 1993 Abs of Steel at a slumber party! Also, this 30-second Internet Explorer 1995 ad goes unbelievably hard.

• Joe Pera Talks With You, the only show (for adults) where nothing bad every happens, was canceled and I am bummed. Its 11-minute episodes had titles like “Joe Pera Shows You His Second Fridge,” “Joe Pera Helps You Write,” and “Joe Pera Talks to You About the Rat Wars of Alberta, Canada, 1950-Present Day.” I liked this obituary-type article in The Ringer. I think I’m gonna fill the void by watching Bluey even though it was made for 7 year olds.

• I keep coming back to this New Yorker article about lives not lived: “We seem to find meaning in what’s never happened. Our self-portraits use a lot of negative space”

• 1997 quizzes: if you like the Rice Purity Test, you’ll like this metasite with TONS of purity tests. The Internet Archive has also preserved a very extensive 1997 “Nerdiness Test”. It takes a while (maybe like 10 or 15 min) but could be fun to do with a friend. 

• Things I’ve written lately that might be work reading: the website horg.com where people meticulously taxonomize plastic bread tags (it’s so wholesome!!!!!), the “it ain’t much but it’s honest work” guy, and those “fish fear me” hats

• In 2015, the blog Strong Language covered preferred curse words by US region, which is based on geo-coded tweets that were analyzed Jack Grieve. The coasts love “fuck”; the South doesn’t say “asshole” but definitely says “pussy” and “bitch” and “shit” and “hell.”

  

• I stumbled upon linguist John M. Lawler's incredible personal web page (now I'm in a linguistics rabbit hole (really sad he retired before I got to umich (would have loved to take one of his classes (anyway, the site introduced me to the following mind-blowing paragraph)))).

  

• The Rumpelstiltskin Principle: knowing the name of something (or someone) gives you power over it (or them).

Even more things: the winner of the $1.34B Mega Millions jackpot still hasn't claimed their prize after nearly a month. Alaska has nine genders. The Rock loved his marketing meeting so much that he posted about it on his Instagram grid five times. In 2013, the New Yorker reviewed Edward Snowden’s (hot) gf’s (now wife!) blog. There Are Holes on the Ocean Floor. Scientists Don’t Know Why. Cool article about political ads on those annoying gas station TVs. The University of Michigan’s alumni newspaper published an article “Neuroscience grad plumbs Wikipedia’s looniest realms” which includes the nearly perfect line “[she] has ‘very, very low anxiety,’ about what the future holds, though cancel culture troubles her” which is somewhat true (I guess?) and also hilarious. This tweet from @chunkbardey made me so glad I’m done with school. LinkedIn post generator. This free shuttle will take you to a taping of Maury in Stamford, CT.

ᵒᵏᵃʸ ᴵ'ᵐ ᵍᵉᵗᵗᶦⁿᵍ ˢˡᵉᵉᵖʸ ᵃⁿᵈ ᴵ ⁿᵉᵉᵈ ᵗᵒ ʷʳᵃᵖ ᵗʰᶦˢ ᵘᵖ. I love you and I love to hear from you!!! Respond or comment with your favorite rabbit holes and maybe I’ll put them in the next newsletter. You may also tell me what you’ve been up to lately, or how what you’re excited about, or what you plan to do with your one wild and precious Labor Day weekend

ᵗᶦˡ ⁿᵉˣᵗ ᵗᶦᵐᵉ

Annie

I think I’m starting to enjoy doing these comedy shows. They gets easier and easier. If the y axis is how much I want to escape to the Alaskan wilderness on the day of a show and the x axis is time, I think the graph looks kinda like f(x)=1/x (a nice horizontal asymptote). Come see me in Seattle (August 18) or NYC (August 23)!

Links and things

• The newsletter “Embedded” interviewed me about what things I like on the internet. I mentioned Martha Stewart’s recent Instagram post, which is a tribute to her six pet peacocks who were brutally murdered by coyotes and had the sultry “Let’s Get It On” by Marvin Gaye playing in the background. I also mentioned that the fraction 666/212 is approximately pi (kinda neat, huh!)

• You can Google search “cat” (or “dog”) and click the paw button. you can also search “cha cha slide” and press the microphone. it’s just something you can do

• I quite enjoy these Twitter accounts that that post excerpts of author diaries. There’s the Franz Kafka one (my favorite post says “7 June. Bad. Wrote nothing today.”) and the Sylvia Plath food one (my favorite post says “I find myself particularly sensitive now & yearn for a full fridge & marvelous snacks. 1/24/60”).

• Ex-Vox writer Terry Nguyen writes for the Dirt newsletter now and I liked reading her post about cool girls gone Catholic and the whole overblown ironic piety moment. “To cite an oft-quoted line from the poet Ben Fama: ‘Prayer is whatever you say on your knees.’” This is the blood of Christ, shed for you. Thanks be to God

• The golden age of DALLE mini and SHIRTS THAT GO HARD has passed and IMO the rising star of gimmick accounts is “weird howmanyofme.com names.” There are 19 people in the US named Jesus Burger, 52 named Joe Brandon, and just one special American legally named Dick Rider (I want to meet Dick Rider sooooo badly)

• window-swap.com shows you a random window from around the world. If you want to submit yours, you can send a 10 minute, horizontal HD video of your view.

• My friend David Shi mentioned in the Depths of Wikipedia Discord that Buzz Aldrin's mother's maiden name was... Moon.

• Riveting forum post from someone who claims to have worked the on the boat that was victim of the Dave Matthews Band Chicago River incident

• New Tingler called “The Sentient Lesbian Em Dash — My Favorite Punctuation Mark — Gets Me Off”

• Gotta say that one of my favorite wikis to browse on a lonely evening is explainxkcd.com. I learn so much.

• I’ve been binging Geography Now on YouTube which is kind of like reading the Wikipedia article for a country but a bit more palatable because you don’t even have to read

• In 2019, cows mooved into a new house in Montana

• my90stv.com is a TV simulator that shows 90s shows, music videos, trailers, and ads. It would be cool to project on the wall at a small party. Creator @joeycato has made loads of other nostalgic web projects that you will love. This one, in particular, is never going to let you down

• If you need me I will be staring at the internet live stats and trying to fathom how the underwater internet cables can possibly work. Update 5 minutes after writing that first sentence: I made this meme about this exact feeling and I believe it is “going viral”

  

Let’s talk BUSINESS

I’m thinking about doing ads because I eventually have to get off my parents’ health insurance and I don’t have the most reliable income right now. I have ~7000 subscribers for this newsletter and ~1.07 million on the @depthsofwikipedia Instagram. If you’re a marketing person for a company that’s cool and reasonably ethical, hit me up (annierau at umich dot edu).

Let’s talk PLEASURE

Other things that have been bringing me joy: the word “hankering,” mango pastries from Porto’s Bakery (LA people get it), saying “mother may I” when I’m at a restaurant and the food comes, learning the capitals of Africa (training for pub trivia), calling my mom every 8 hours to see how she’s been, burrata, telling friends to meet in the backyard instead of the bar, the LA metro, pulling out a pen and paper and drawing little cartoons, saying “I’ll pay this time if you pay next time” instead of Venmoing, going to coffee with a smart friend and having so many ideas that I have to pull out a notebook, cycling, cyclopedias, Cher, your Substack likes and comments, and the Sisyphean endeavor of tracking down Breakfast (better known as “hot pink bitch called breakfast”). Let me know if you have any leads.

That’s it for now! Remember to like, comment, subscribe, eat your veggies, call your grandparents, go fruit picking while things are in season near you, start things before you feel ready, and get a nice cross-breeze going xoxoxo

<3,

Annie Rauwerda

Instagram: @annierau; Twitter: @anniierau

Good distractions

• In Amsterdam, I tried to meet up with paleontologist Jan Smit (who reached shocking peaks of virality for his photo looking at rocks) but he’s in Italy working as a visiting professor. His son-in-law told me that he “nearly fell of my chair laughing when I saw your original tweet” because Jan “really does spend a lot of his time looking at rocks.” What’s better than that.

• I implore you to read the secret history of “Basketball (so funny you’ll pee your pants).avi.” by Brian Feldman in Defector

• Calvin and Hobbes search engine! Search a word and it pulls up a comic with the word. If you want to search for other comics, use this site.

  

• You know this viral photo of a 1970s hippie teaching students the “physics of surfing”? I interviewed the teacher, Mr. Degen, who spent forty years as a math teacher and surf coach in SoCal and confessed that the reason he hopped on the table for the photo was to impress the yearbook teacher (six years later, they got married, so he did something right). The article is pretty cute and not that long.

• I quite like Jay Foreman’s fast-paced YouTube videos about geography

• I would risk it all for chess Grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky (6 foot 2, as the venerable Times mentions in the first sentence of his profile) who makes chess videos and writes chess puzzles for the NYT. I’m dipping my toes into this online world of hot chess streamers and I’m obsessed

• A really cool tool that converts any scientific jargon to plain English built on GPT-3. Try it out! It actually works!

• NYT interviews kid behind the I voted sticker

• I’ve been procrastinating by learning Hangul, the Korean alphabet, which was developed by King Sejong in the 1440s. It’s phonetic and this 30 minute video by someone named “Miss Vicky” makes it so easy to learn

• Whenever I learn anything new about climate change I feel like I need to go outside now and hold onto grass as tight as I can so I don’t fall off the Earth. This is “really one of those hard Life lessons,” as they say. By the way, did you know that the whole thing about ostriches burying their heads in the sand is a myth?

• “Everything is everything,” a startlingly comprehensive map of NYC bagels (now I have Lauryn Hill stuck in my head)

• I’ve been Baader Meinhof’ed so hard by the book Gödel Escher Bach…. seems like everyone’s reading it. I’m 20 pages in which means I have like 700 to go

• Website that yells at you for touching your face

• Woman gets catfished by guy using pics of a Turkish model. Woman starts dating said model and they fall in love

• I wish I had the purpose of NASA engineer Judith Love Cohen, who successfully troubleshot the guidance system for Apollo 13 while she was giving birth to… Jack Black

• In 2017, Alabama inmates used peanut butter to tamper with the exit's door number (the last three bullet points were sent by David Shi in the Depths of Wikipedia Discord)

Things you’re allowed to do: take a community college class about something you know nothing about (oil painting or Linux or cell biology or medieval history), dress up like a human statue and stand in public, copyedit a Wikipedia article, join this NYC dumpster diving club, walk into a blood drive, write a letter to the editor, buy a buttery pastry and eat it flake by flake so it lasts an hour, read a book on the train and get off whenever you feel like it, pay to put some random shit on a rural billboard, enroll yourself in a clinical trial, cold-contact a famous-ish person with a tangible request and respectfully follow up a few times, spend an entire day visiting every single public beach in a 10 mile radius (my dad once did this with me as a kid), read archived newspapers at the public library

Thanks for all your Substack “likes” and comments and replies last time. They made me very happy and I hope to see you in the comments again. If you feel unusually generous, you can Venmo @annierau. If you feel a little silly, you can dress up like a human statue and tell me how it goes. If you feel like you need a pick-me-up, I recommend this TikTok

Annie

If you are like, “why is this in my inbox,” I am the depths of wikipedia girl and perhaps you signed up for this email because you wanted Wikipedia facts. Best I can do today is some unfettered rambling with a few good Wikipedia links. I spent June catsitting in Berlin and now I am staying in Amsterdam for a few days to investigate my great-great-great-great grandpa’s niece Jurjentje Rauwerda. She was a 19th century brothel owner rumored to have had an illegitimate child with King William III. Juicy! Then I’ll be in London and Dublin (for the Wikipedia+Libraries conference) then Barcelona and Paris. I am doing a show in Los Angeles on Monday, August 8th and the tickets are on sale. I’m also doing a show in Seattle on Tuesday, August 16th. You should come. Let me know if you’re around and want to hang out (or if you have a room I could rent for a few days to avoid airbnb).

So far my silly season has been pretty boozy (1 euro beers) and exciting (Debbie Ryan of Disney Channel fame said in an interview “I never went to college but I follow Depths Of Wikipedia on Instagram”). Life is good. I have no needs. I have no wants. I should mention that yesterday, Gizmodo included @depthsofwiki in its“10 Delightful Twitter Bots to Cleanse Your Timeline of Elon Musk” listicle which made me furious because I am not a bot!

Good stuff

• MEL wrote about the time the official Twitter account for the country of Sweden let random citizens run its account for a week at a time

• the inimitable Matt Levine sent a Saturday newsletter about Elon trying to pull out of the Twitter deal. He also did a nice interview on the Longform podcast a month ago and his LinkedIn makes me laugh — it includes “gardening leave at Goldman as well as the time he “was an M&A lawyer” and “did M, and sometimes A. All of the time. Also shareholder proxy proposal defense.”

• The dude from the “the worst person you know” memes speaks out and he’s some random guy from a town outside Barcelona who didn’t really know he was a meme

• A website called “literature clock” finds a sentence from the literature that mentions the exact time it is. It’s delightfully impractical unless you’re hosting a literature festival without clocks and need to project the time onto the wall, in which case it would be very useful

• This Quanta profile of Fields Medal-winning mathematician June Huh made me laugh and nearly cry. He dropped out of high school to become a poet; he once stapled squares of fabric together from the Ann Arbor CVS because buying a blanket felt like too much work; he works for three hours a day; he is getting “better and better at ignoring deadlines”; he works in the noisy children’s section of the library so he doens’t get sleepy; he is a fellow Wolverine (go blue). I always find these Quanta profiles of academics so moving — such earnest curiosity, such ordinary excellence. Here’s another one I loved

• Computer engineering pioneer (he’s the co-inventor the ENIAC machine!) J. Presper Eckert said “Nothing is trivial. Life is made of a whole concentration of trivial matters. Certainly a computer is nothing but a huge concentration of trivial matters.” I read this in the book The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

• Neal Agarwal (who has a few dozen goofy games on his website) made an “absurd trolley problem” game with increasingly bizarre trolley dilemmas. By the end, my kill count was 69. The question that was hardest for me to answer was the one that asked if I’d rather kill 5 people now or send the trolley 100 years in the future to kill 5 people then.

• I’m getting reallllly into the 1 minute speed games on chess dot com

• I’m not a very good programmer: I just took a few classes in college and occasionally attempt hobby projects. But I sometimes use regex to find certain strings text from data files. This godsend of a website uses natural language processing AI to translate English (a phrase like “all words starting with the letter n and ending with g, case insensitive”) to the gnarly regex that’ll get you what you need (“/nw*g/i”)

• I’ve been Baader Meinhof-ed so much by the Habsburgs lately. Not sure why everyone in my life keeps mentioning this medieval Austrian and Spanish dynasty

• I love fellow Annies (Annes and Annas too, to a lesser extent) so I was excited when Annie Hamilton wrote a cheeky tribute to fake tears for NYMag

• I like everything by Maggie Koerth and I want to be her when I grow up. Here’s her article about synesthesia and alphabet fridge magnets in National Geographic

• bot that replaces the text from Garfield comics with song lyrics

• bot that replaces the text from Heathcliff comics with random text from Pornhub comments

All your Substack “likes” and comments and replies made my inbox such a delight last time (thank you!). I am sorry if I did not respond to you — a few slipped through the cracks. But I still want your emails and comments! I want to know what I should do in Barcelona, your tips for learning chess strategy, your favorite audiobook, what you want to name your children, whether you think it’s unethical to take a sneaky photo of a love interest you meet on a train and put it in the subscription facial recognition website Pimeyes to learn their name, your favorite law of nature, whether you’d like to try a little bit of human flesh given the opportunity, your favorite magazine (I just subscribed to The Economist and love it), something that recently devestated you, something that recently delighted you, whatever else is on your mind.

After the last newsletter, a few of you asked if I allow money tips as thanks for cluttering your feed with Wikipedia screenshots. I’ve never expected a dime but it doesn’t feel right to refuse, so Venmo @annierau or Paypal annierau@umich.edu if you feel generous. You can also donate to Wikipedia or — better yet — start editing!

I am in Berlin for the next month sitting a cat named Olga who is recovering from a stroke. Send me your Berlin recommendations, or whatever is on your mind (I love your emails). In an odd struck of luck, I made it into Berghain on Friday and now I can’t shut up about it. Also, the second to last episode of Reply All (the podcast that brought you The Case of the Missing Hit and that multi-part series about its host befriending and visiting a scammer from a call center in India) is a Wikipedia deep dive called “Into the Depths” that is inspired by Depths of Wikipedia! The episode came out on Friday.

Good distractions:

• My friend Max Bittker who has made a lot of cool things (like the New NYT Twitter bot and Sandspiel) made a web toy where you write fridge-magnet style poetry with word suggestions based on Markov chain analysis of famous poets

• Institute for Y2K Aesthetics Tumblr itched a scratch in my brain

• The Sopranos apparently had a cameo on Arthur

• Fact that could save your life: you can go to the store and buy a nectarine and sit on a bench and eat it while you watch the birds. You can do it right now! Maybe you should!

• Fact that could save your life: you can right-click on a tab and press “Close Tabs to the Right”

• The actual C.V. of human rights activist and physicist Yuri Orlov… imagine how good his answer to “please explain any gaps in your resume?” would be

• Nobel laureates reveal the things they do not understand:

  David Macmillan (Chemistry, 2021)
  ”Honestly, I couldn’t understand theoretical chemistry if my life depended on it.”
  
  Frances Arnold (Chemistry, 2018)
  ”I've never fully grasped how enzymes do what they do. If you understand it, please explain it to me.”
  
  Sir Anthony Leggett (Physics, 2003)
  When asked if he can do long division: “No, I can't do arithmetic at all, which is why I thank my lucky stars that I never had to take our qual. exam – I would certainly have failed miserably.”

  Soooooo true guys! relatable!

• The world’s top minds came together to determine the world’s longest palindrome sequence

• Random request but if you or someone you know gives their dad the same gift every year, can you let me know? I might interview you for a project.

• This perfect research paper studied the gender, age, and emotions of pareidolia.

  

• A couple weeks ago, I wrote a brief article about the cat whose embarrassment is not printed in physics textbooks all over the world. Her name is Cooper and she had a happy life.

• I am very excited for Ed Yong, the guy who wrote those Atlantic articles about Covid, to publish his book about silly animals later this month (here’s a Mother Jones interview he did recently)

• Campaign Fowl, an interview in Harper’s with a small town Georgia mayor who “lost his 2021 bid for reelection after spending almost $300,000 to build a sixty-four-foot-tall topiary chicken.” Article best enjoyed as a dramatic read-aloud with a friend after two (2) beers

• Now that I’m in Europe for a few weeks I can’t stop quoting this 1-minute Kroll Show video about Europe… “for breakfast we’ll do something cool like have a cigarette or a bar of chocolate, and then go to work for like one half hour, two half hour, and then we’ll go for lunch and lunch is usually something cool like a cigarette and like 2, 3 bottles red wine and a bowl of heavy cream….”

that’s all for now. tell me what you’ve been reading lately? what snacks you’re obsessed with? what I should do in Berlin? where rats sleep? why it’s called the of in when you of in the cold food of out hot eat the food? the meaning of life? the most underrated mid-2000s reality tv that I should binge? why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch? how many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? who’s on first? should I be afraid of the undersea internet cables breaking? the thing you’re most proud of? why does human hair grow so long? how your day is going?

Click clack moo

• It’s a good day to read about the Fermi paradox

• Every single day at noon I play Redactle, the Wordle variation where you guess words one by one from a heavily-censored Wikipedia article until you can eventually guess the article’s title. 

• Stanford computer science professor and father of analysis of algorithms Donald Knuth wrote about why he hates email: “I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.”

• Pretty much all I listen to now is NTS radio for live online DJ sets

• On April 1st, some astronomy researchers released a paper on arxiv called “COWS all tHE way Down (COWSHED) I: Could cow based planetoids support methane atmospheres?” which made me smile

• The Infamous ‘Worst Roommate Ever’ Was My Dad’s Childhood Nemesis from Gawker is very funny

• Oldestsearch.com reverse orders search results so that you see the oldest webpages first

• By popular demand, I made a Depths of Wikipedia Discord a few weeks ago for discussing trivia. Come on in, the water’s great.

• I wrote an article about “jubyla.com” a few months ago and never really promoted it. But I probably should have because it’s a cute story and only takes ~2.5 minutes to read! 

• Maybe a fun project would be to detect bird sounds with a Raspberry Pi using BirdNetPI

• Lucas made this 17-minute documentary about the sounds of Star Wars in honor of May the 4th!

• My favorite Instagram follows right now is @left4rat, a post-cringe gallery of the 2010s internet from an intrepid anonymous admin who shares my age (22). But overall, I’ve been scrolling Instagram less and less as it deteriorates into a TikTok knockoff, you know?

• I talk about this a lot, but The Pudding’s map of the US by each city’s most Wikipedia-searched resident could occupy me for days

• I really love gail.com, the last good website. There’s no better place to land when you misspell gmail! According to this archived version of the site, Gail was a NASA engineer who worked on Mars rovers. And her husband Kevin owns kevin.org. Love them

Other things

• I have been trying to read about the economy more and have been having a lot of anti-eureka moments where I realize how stupid I am. I have been tumbling off the peak of Mount Stupid daily

• “Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog!” is a palindrome

• I’m going to Berlin for the month of June

• Ciabatta was invented in 1982 by Italian bakers who wanted to rival French baguettes. Maybe you already knew this

• Depths of Wikipedia had a bizarre media blitz this spring— New York Times, New Yorker, NPR… and it got its own Wikipedia article. Some day everyone is going to figure out that all I do is take screenshots!

• I graduated from college

• I’m in New York for a week and I only brought one tote bag. I feel like a minimalist; I feel like Johnny Appleseed carrying around his little behind-the-shoulder knapsack on a stick thing; I feel so free

• This reminds me of a page in Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire about how the catchphrase “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” sprung up in the late 1800s as temperance-associated agribusiness propaganda. At the time, temperance activists would literally chop down apple trees to combat the evils of drinking and were keen on shifting public perception of apples from hard cider to health food

• I’m in a coffee shop sitting next to a really cute group of friends and suddenly I’m so lonely I would join a pack of stray dogs. Reply to this email with your mid-day musings or favorite links or current clipboard! Or just say hi!

I interviewed the creator of my favorite Twitter bot, @ResNeXtGuesser! Here's my favorite quote from our conversation: "In my opinion, the funniest and best projects are those where you take some highly professional, advanced, or academic subject/technology and throw in a great deal of immaturity."

First, some AI-related links I like!

• A man in Japan was arrested for using AI to unblur porn.

• For more of this sort of AI weirdness, check out the aptly-named aiweirdness.com. It's a fantastic blog that Janelle Shane updates every few days. 

• This metasite gathers all the “___ does not exist” AI projects. There are so many— like this foot does not exist, this meme does not exist, this map does not exist, and  more).

• A Google AI helps you write a poem in the style of famous poets. 

• "All-Star" by Smash Mouth, but an AI attempts to finish the song after the first verse.

• Can’t remember what movie featured an iconic scene? Try drawing it, and this AI will match your creation to a movie image. If you need to first practice your drawing skills, head to paint.wtf, draw the site’s prompt, and let AI judge your submission.

• AI Generated Garfield

• An AI with the sole purpose of turning your drawings into penises (try it here!).

• OpenAI realized that if you write “iPod” on an apple, it thinks the apple is an iPod.

Bots you like! 

You're about to meet my favorite twitter bot, so here are the bots that you recommended in my Instagram story question box.

• @NYT_first_said was the most requested, which makes me so happy. It was created by my friend Max. The bot tweets when a word is published in the NYT for the first time. Some notable recents are ‘cleanfluencer,’ ‘momcore,’ and ‘sl*ts.’

• @wiki_tmnt posts Wikipedia titles that can be sung to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song. The bot has been defunct for a few months, but you can scroll through the old posts. 

• @deletedwiki posts ridiculous deleted Wikipedia titles 

• @NFL_Scorigami is my boyfriend's favorite, and even though I don't love watching football, I can appreciate the enthusiasm over first-ever final scores in the NFL!! 

• @JoelDongsteen tweets about dongs in the style of celebrity pastor Joel Osteen. For some reason, almost 40k people follow it.  

• Emote! At the Location. Go mad! At the grocery store. Dissociate! At the chess tournament. @EelectricMiguel is an electric eel at the Tennessee Aquarium who can trigger tweets, which say things like ZAP!!! and ZING!!! 

• @aceCourtBot exploded to 386,000 followers for animating Twitter conversations into Ace Attorney court cases.

ICYMI

• List of animal sounds reads like a shitpost, and people loved this so much that I turned the snail sound (munch, crunch) into a mug, which you can buy here. 

• In another top-performing Instagram post, I rounded up images inspired by the listof internet phenomena. 

• Zenzizenzizenzic:

Interview with neural net guesses memes

The account's creator is a 23-year-old embedded computer engineer in San Francisco. He prefers to keep his professional life separate from his online life, so I'm using Dave in place of his real name (nod to the Dave Rule). 

A few days ago, I discovered the delightful @ResNeXtGuesser bot, which tries its hardest to make sense of memes. When given bizarre, cursed images, the bot labels the photo's contents — sometimes with hysterical inaccuracy. When I scanned the Github code (available at this link), I realized that the program only gives 1,000 categories of images, which explains why the bot seems so creative with its classifications. 

 I asked the account's creator to answer a few questions about his internet masterpiece, and in the few days since I first reached out, the account's following has EXPLODED. In the past day alone, it has gained 20k followers, and it's almost to 100k. I'm so excited to share the interview.

Annie: When did you start @ResNeXtGuesser? What inspired you to create it? 

Dave: I launched the account in June of this year. I recently graduated college, and although AI and machine learning weren't my main area of focus, I was really interested in the subjects and had taken a handful of classes on them. I now work as an embedded computer engineer, so I never even come close to dealing with machine learning. I wanted to do a project that gave me a chance to play with neural networks (NNs) again.

In my opinion, the funniest and best projects are those where you take some highly professional, advanced, or academic subject/technology and throw in a great deal of immaturity. In college, I had various AI/ML assignments that dealt with classifying images, and it was so funny to me to see what happened when I sent through bizarre or random memes. What was particularly interesting was that even though the NN got it wrong 99% of the time, you could often see/understand what the NN was thinking or why it came up with its prediction.

I recently learned about the ImageNet competition, and how neural nets are already better than humans at predicting the contents of an image. But the problem is that those NN's are tested using boring images, such as cats, dogs, cars, pencils, etc. I made a video on my youtube account putting random memes through the ResNeXt NN to see what happened. In my opinion, the results were really funny. A couple months later, I thought that running memes through a NN would make for a really entertaining Twitter bot, so I got to work on it.

Annie: How long was the programming process? What were the main steps of the project? 

Dave: The programming process was actually quite quick — I'd say it took me maybe a month of half-hearted, over-the-weekend type work. There are a lot of pre-existing Python libraries that make interfacing with the twitter API a lot easier. Besides the Twitter stuff, the Python library PyTorch provides a bunch of pre-trained, ready-to-use NN models that are super easy to get up-and-running. Ironically, for a bot about neural networks, the neural network code was the easiest part.

The real pain was automating grabbing submissions through the DMs. Twitter's documentation on the subject is quite sparse, and the libraries I was using to interface with Twitter had even worse documentation. But I got it in a usable state, albeit with a handful of bugs. But now, the account has exploded in popularity, which I am so happy to see. However, the high volume of DMs causes my code to send so many API requests that I hit the request limit and Twitter times me out, which breaks my code.

Annie: You work in embedded computer systems, you create Twitter bots and Youtube videos, and you like memes. Do you have any other hobbies?

Dave: I love working on personal projects. Right now, I'm working on getting a website up and running. It's fun! I like learning new things, and it gives me a chance to make neat stuff. I love cooking and photography (possibly the only two "artistically creative" things at which I'm somewhat competent). And I'm really into stocks & finance — I'm a huge math nerd, and quantitative finance is neat to me.

Annie: What are some things on the internet you’ve enjoyed lately and would recommend to others? 

Dave:

• I used to be really big into OS development, and the OS Dev Wiki is such a massive treasure trove of information for anyone interested in the subject. Every now and then, I'll get lost going down rabbit holes on the site.

• Cat-v.org is another interesting site. It's a group dedicated to preserving and supporting the old Plan 9 Operating system. Their website has a lot of fun stuff to look through. It's a lot of really old-school, UNIX-purist type content, and I love it.

• Pointlesssites.com is such a favorite of mine. It's a site that aggregates pointless websites. There's some fun stuff on there!

Annie: Do you have any favorite Wikipedia pages? 

Dave: Absolutely! I'm a Wikipedia junkie which is why I love your account. Here are four in particular:

1.  Dishwasher Salmon: It's funny

2. Toast Sandwich: The British equivalent to dishwasher salmon

3. Complaint tablet to Ea-naser: Possibly my favorite random piece of trivia. It's an ancient clay tablet from 1750 BC that is the oldest known customer complaint, directed towards a merchant whose copper was low quality.
   

4. Tabun (nerve agent): I don't think the topic of chemical weapons is humorous, but Wikipedia describes this nerve agent as "tasteless with a faint fruity odor". I found this funny because of the implication that some psycho drank it and lived (long enough) to describe its taste and smell.
   

Annie: Thanks again for answering these questions, and best of luck as you keep working on computers, working on bots, and collecting cursed images!! 

That's all for today! As always, feel free to forward this to a friend and send your thoughts to hey@depthsof.com. I really like your emails!