RE:FWD:FWD tug boats :)

also, look at this chainsmoking tabby cat from the 50s

It’s also the 405th anniversary of the Defenestration of Prague and the first day of a new Learned League and also the day that I discovered this website that turns your QR codes into custom shapes!!!

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.