Curios

Lockdowns may have the odd silver lining but are still very much experienced as dark clouds. Restrictions are necessary but burdensom. They reduce the risk of death by reducing our ability to live our lives. This Coronavirus feels like a lose-lose scenario if ever there was one. I'm coping okay in part because I have long been a semi-loner who can occupy himself (despite loving the right kind of company).

The company I keep is often now my interests - every tiny fact or fancy that amuses or enlightens me. I have also been sharing these at times with Belinda. For much of the longest Melbourne lockdown I emailed her something I called Midweek Curios as another way of connecting and compensating for the dullness of our predicament. Some content is for reading, some for watching or listening, and many are for doing. Here I will catalogue a bunch of them and sometimes, rather than provide links, simply name them, knowing that links are more ephemeral than names.

Things To Read

- Seems every Aussie family made use of the recipes from this birthday cake book.

- The furthest I have travelled of late was to this Dingo Sanctuary which you can read about even while stuck within a few miles of home.

- A facscinating true story about women military staff who took on the task of war-gaming scenarios to inform Allied strategy during World War II.

- The Messy Nessy website reports on someone who refurbished their basement to look like a station platform complete with train carriage becasue they are obsessed with such a setting.

- A recipe for cripsy roasted chickpeas.

- The ruined Sutro Baths in San Fransisco are an example of how sometimes, it seems to me anyway, they had wonderfully big public facilities in the recent past, that would impress us today.

- London was to have a network of walkways in the sky and sometimes they talk of reviving it. To me they look like fantastic places for Leela and K9 to fight hapless futuristic guards.

- I Fucking Love Science tells us that chilli can improve your solar panels.

Things To Watch or Listen To

- The Terran Trade Authority was a fictional frame story for a bunch of science fiction pulp art collections and somebody turned all the wonderful space ship scenes in them into a music video.

- I've mostly resisted the online trend of watching cute animal antics but I sometimes return to this one - Bella the dog who whines and protests on knowing it's home time.

- One of my favourite busking scenes of two musos playing sitar and hang (hand-pan) on the rooftops of Berlin. Incidentally these two resonant instruments are of very different ages and origins. The sitar is close to a thousand years old and comes from India (but was possibly descended from older Persian instruments) while the hang was only invented by a Swiss company in 2000 (while taking inspiration from Caribbean steel drums).

- The Drolet Starship Museum is a great site to look at Star Trek ships in scale strewn around a desert junkyard.

- That most astounding and amazing of British inventions - The Hovercraft! Hooray! Thanks to I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again for that line and to Pathé Newsreels for the nostalgic content.

- Name-dropping one of my favourite YouTubers - Tim Traveller specializes in finding charm and intrigue in some of the more mundane of travel destinations - things like finding the hightest point of elevation in the Netherlands.

- Another favourite YouTuber - Seth Skorkowsky - provides advice and reviews for role-players and I recommend his content as both informative and amusing.

- Ray Harryhausen made a host of amazing claymation creatures last century and this video showcases them to some cool percussive music.

- Lots and lots of ant faces.

- An online map that allows you to compare Melbourne in 1945 with now.

- BBC Archive presents a segment of Tomorrow's World featuring cassette-based car navigation.

- During lockdowns many cat-owners have made cardboard fortresses for their pets.

- I never did get around to watching all of the Strongbad emails...

Things To Do

- Super Planet Crash lets you make solar systems till they get too crowded.

- Plaid Stallions retro pop-culture site has a great archive of old colouring books.

- Design and colour Daleks at the Doctor Who Site.

- Donjon is a website of role-play game online tools and one I particularly enjoy is this random world generator.

- One Monk Miniatures offers a huge selection of amatuer-designed card paper models to make.

- Colorforms were stickery things you could stick and re-stick to cardpaper dioramas to produce your own dynamic action scenes. Here is a Planet Of The Apes example but there were many many more in the long golden childhood of Gen-X.

- Townscaper is the only game-like activty I have purchased in ever and it gave me several very late nights during some of our lockdowns.

- Right now, there is something enticing in the notion of getting stuck in a remote location as long as it comes complete with community and so, I enjoyed using this virtual tour of a British Antarctic base.

- Wikipedia is so comprehensive that its entry on stereoscopic images includes examples which work with those old red-blue 3D glasses you surely still have stashed in a draw at home.

- This website analyses samples of your writing to somehow determine its Arc of Narrative.

- If you ever wanted to 'dig to China' like an American cartoon character, this site will tell you where you will in fact come out.

- You can make a robot picture with this online thingy.

- A quiz asking whether you're a nerd, geek or dork. Original link gone, yet to look for a repalcement test of any worth, even if it is just silly...

Some of these websites may well have other interesting content in them but I just focus on particular pages. Feel free to browse beyond. These links were curated by an individual nerd for another individual nerd and so the subject matter is rather scattered. Hopefully those links will continue to work for a while.