I have discovered The SCP Foundation Archives, a group writing project that sums itself up this way in its own wiki: “The SCP Wiki is a collaborative speculative fiction website about the SCP Foundation, a secretive organization that contains anomalous or supernatural items and entities away from the eyes of the public.” It is nuts, over 10,000 articles deep at this point, across a wide variety of genres and some truly brilliant stories. I have been diving in intermittently. Here is the first story in my favorite sequence of stories so far, with a horror-ish thriller vibe. They accept submissions and I am determined to submit some day.
If you have ever wanted to know more about philosophy without having to slog through thousands of pages of source material, here’s your web site. An amazingly, almost unbelievably, excellent spreadsheet, with explanations, of the major branches of Western Philosophy.
A bunch of Carmelite monks in Wyoming are building a gothic monastery out of marble using AutoCad to design it and giant computer-controlled stone-milling machines to build it. Besides being rad, this unironically seems to me like what monks should be doing. They are using the maximum possible human power to erect monuments to God. This has fallen out of fashion but it seems like a natural reaction to believing that there’s literally an all-powerful deity out there who will decide your eternal fate.
This presentation of "Rabbit”, a new AI-powered operating system and consumer device, really made me laugh when it made the rounds, because it’s 25 minutes long and I still have no idea what it’s actually selling! Every time someone tries to pitch new products like Steve Jobs did, it’s a reminder that just because he made it look easy doesn’t mean it is! That said, this could be totally revolutionary, it just depends on where the tech goes. Does seem a bit conceptually muddled at this point though!
Young me would have been absolutely torqued on this guide to making paper airplanes, as I was a connoisseur from a young age and got more than one detention for throwing them. I’m mostly sharing this with you so that I will always have a place to reference it, so that I can find it in a few years and try to get my son interested.
Another month, another major scientific breakthrough made by A.I. search tools. Ho Hum.
Oh look, another breakthrough on a vital and underdiscussed topic—antibiotic resistance. The same month. Weird.
Atlas Obscura: The Definitive Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders. Exactly what it sounds like, and a wonderful reminder of how large and rich and complex and deep this planet is.
A file-sharing service that offers end-to-end encryption and automatic deleting after a set period. More and more, who you are on the internet is a real part of who you are, except there’s no privacy and everything is searchable unless you take steps to make it otherwise. Act accordingly.
I took an amazing selfie with my wife on our honeymoon, with the Eiffel Tower in the background. It was perfect except that there was one awkwardly-placed boat that looked like it was coming out of the side of her head. I paid a Redditor $10 to remove it and it now sits framed on the sideboard in our bedroom. Today, I would just use this tool. Lots of the pictures I see could be a lot better than they are!
I hope you found something fun to engage with in the preceding list! Have a great day, a great week, and I will be back next Sunday with another original story.
Lots of food for thought here, Owen. My favorites were the paper airplanes (I remember your "phase" very well) and the World's hidden wonders.