i'm definitely one of the girls ever

everyone can agree on this

My name is Annie and I am okay. I post on the internet about Wikipedia and library notes (this squirrel can type!!!) and things like that. This past week, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales publicly declared he’s my “fanboy” and I arrived in Barcelona (a city that controls the pigeon population by mixing birth control chemicals with the birdseed). I am viviendo el sueño. I am fondly remembering the 6 years of Spanish I took in school. I am definitely one of the girls ever. I AM a woman. I am obligated to remind you of my live shows in LA (August 8), Seattle (August 16), and NYC (August 23). I am pleased to announce that I have normalized beer. I am in love with u. I am feeling a little weird right now (caffiene crash perhaps?) but them’s the breaks.

Good distractions

depths of wikipedia @depthsofwiki

obsessed with this photo and caption

• 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