Metostopholes

I was a penguin. I was waiting in line at the Harold Washington library in Chicago to get an autograph from Neal Stephenson. I had to keep looking over my shoulder, because there were wanted posters up everywhere with my penguin face on them, because I was being hunted for a crime I didn’t commit.

You mean Ada didn’t love lace?

What if I want to put my π-hole on your σ-hole

The real question is if he’s singing all the songs.

When I was a kid, maybe 13 years old, I heard about a Halloween costume contest at a natural history museum.

I wanted a costume somehow science related, so I decided to dress as a mosquito (seems weird to me now, but whatever). My mom sewed together a black felty fabric into a proboscis that went out over my head and a sort of cloak down my back with legs coming off it. We cut a Styrofoam ball in half and painted it yellow for the eyes. The wings were a white mesh fabric on a frame of drinking straws that we taped together.

I won the contest for my age bracket, and the prize was some Star Trek: Deep Space 9 refrigerator magnets. I don’t think I have the magnets anymore, but I still have the costume, though it’s falling apart a little.

Okay, I have to go text my mom and tell her she’s awesome.

This is a fairly niche answer, but Noah Caldwell-Gervais.

He does very smart critical analysis of video games as a medium, often in multi-hour long retrospectives of entire franchises. They are all split into chapters, so it’s easy to watch in parts. The visuals and editing are not very flashy, pretty much just footage of the game he’s talking about, but they are so well written and thoughtful I find them extremely compelling. There’s also road trip travelogues, but I’m not as into those.

Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice-skate uphill.

Aww, tiny armadillos!

Leisure Town

A comic, made with photos of posed bendy figurines. Was very influential in certain circles (like other, more obscure websites I won’t name). Still up, but hasn’t been updated in 20 years.

Shit, as long as I’m posting websites from the 1900’s that are still up, there’s also Zombo.com.

I also have a Ducky keyboard.

Tried it, but the gameplay is painfully slow.

Back during prohibition in the US, there was a product called Vine-Glo that was a brick of grape concentrate. It came with a warning: “After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn into wine.”

Relevant XKCD:

Title text: Sure, we could stop dictators and pandemics, but we could also make the signs on every damn diagram make sense.