I am righting a book

email full of cool other stuff too!

On the verge of a nervous breakthrough…

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.