the only thing I like more than cycling

is cyclopedias

As the proverbs have written, nothing lasts forever. My writing job at Input, which I applied for in the back of a college lecture a year ago, ended last week after Bustle Digital Group execs (including CEO Bryan Goldberg who literally bought Napolean’s hat) decided to shut down the site. Goodnight sweet prince. Gonna keep myself busy exploring the Grand Canyon on Google Street View (which is a thing you can do), staring at this tweet where Madonna calling Hillary Clinton a “GIRL GONE WILD”, finishing up a bunch of projects, and doing the following events:
+ 9/26: Ann Arbor book tour stop with Randall Munroe of xkcd
+ 10/1: Chicago book tour stop with Randall Munroe of xkcd
+ 10/10: NYC Depths of Wikipedia show
+ 10/11: NYC Depths of Wikipedia show
+ 10/14: San Francisco Depths of Wikipedia show
+ 10/18: Austin Depths of Wikipedia show

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