Some Wikipedia lists

Joan of Arc and her mythological sword

Last week I asked both Twitter and Cohost for their favorite Wikipedia lists. I have gathered my favorites of the responses below.

Finally, these three were suggested by basically everyone:

Public domain 2023, bearded dragon wigs, etc

Sorry I haven’t been updating much lately! I’m going to try to do these weekly in 2023, even if I don’t have a lot of things to link.

Opening image from Goodnight Moon.
  • New year means new works entering the public domain! This year’s big get is Sherlock Holmes, which has been under the thumb of a shitty estate for ages. Other works that stood out to me looking at the list include Goodnight Moon, The Jazz Singer, and Metropolis. Also, the designs of the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge are now in the public domain, so I guess you can, uh, make more of those?
  • Sometimes I just go through the Wikimedia Commons Pictures of the Day and look at good pictures.
  • I cannot vouch for the quality of these because I don’t have a bearded dragon to test them on, but this is a website that sells tiny hats, wigs and other costumes for bearded dragons and other pet reptiles. You’re welcome.

Space photos, Partizan and Defunctland

View of Ecuador taken during ISS Expedition 7

Sorry I’ve not been posting Monday updates for a bit! Preparing for Black Friday and then having Black Friday was a lot.

  • Defunctland has a great new video out about the Disney Channel 4-note sting that plays at the end of their self-promo commercials. This, like most Defunctland videos, sounds kind of boring. It’s actually extremely interesting. I know it’s hard to sell a 1 and a half hour YouTube documentary about the Disney channel but I swear to god this is worth it.
  • I finally caught up with Friends at the Table. Now is a good time to jump in with Partizan, since the sequel season, Palisade, is starting soon. It’s a mech anime actual play podcast, meaning they play a Dungeons and Dragons style game that tells a story. If you like giant robots, drama and feelings, it’s a great jumping in point.
  • I found a whole bunch of public domain photos of Earth taken from on board the ISS space station. They’re all public domain, so you can use them for whatever.

I don’t have anything else, I’ve been super busy! Hope everyone’s having a great December so far.

Musopen, Eli Lilly impersonation, and more

Illustrations of several butterfly varieties. From Transactions of the Zoological Society of London. Archived by the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
  • The Biodiversity Heritage Library has an AMAZING Flickr page. I recommend viewing it by albums.
  • I started playing Odd Giants, a fan remake of Tiny Speck’s Glitch, my favorite game of all time. I haven’t done a ton in it yet but it looks really promising.
  • Last week Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff did two episodes on Baba Yaga, which was really interesting.
  • Kate Compton is running a Tracery bot donation drive, if you want to donate your bot’s code to be used by researchers and other good actors.
  • If you are on Twitter, you saw this already, but if you aren’t Eli Lilly was forced to issue a correction after an impersonator claimed that insulin would be free now.
  • I decided not to let Elon Musk ruin Iain Banks books for me and reread Player of Games. I was surprised at how affecting it was, and how relevant.
  • I found Musopen a while back while looking for background music for some of my streams. There’s some nice royalty free recordings of various public domain classical music pieces. (Most classical music is in the public domain, but recordings aren’t.)
  • Jenny Nicholson has a new video out. It’s 4 hours and it’s about a Utah theme park you’ve never heard of but it’s great.
  • Here’s an economics professor saying the word “beef” 125 times.

Fancy Chickens, Barghests, etc

Gallus domesticus – Gallus gallus domesticus – an illustration of a very fancy chicken

Happy Monday! Let’s get to it!

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Nora’s Monday Roundup: Sunday Edition

Welcome to Nora’s Monday Roundup! My goal for this blog/newsletter is that every Monday, I’ll post a bunch of things that I thought were cool, interesting, or worth looking at. Some will be new, some will have been on the internet for a while.

Why am I doing this? Well, I miss going to websites. I miss having blogs that were mostly links to other blogs. I think the web right now has enormous accessibility for ordinary people making things, but there’s a discoverability problem; almost every social media platform is a walled garden that makes it hard to link out to interesting offsite content.

I don’t think that I can solve that problem on my own, obviously, but I can find a bunch of cool stuff and share it with you.

The first real post will come tomorrow. I’m still in the process of setting up the site, so expect it to change in appearance a fair bit.