300+ Monsters.

At a resolution of 30×30 pixels.

With facts.

You wake up one morning and look out of your window. But instead of the familiar scenery, there are enormous walls of pastel-colored scaffolding, scrolling past in various directions as far as the eye can see! Aaaah!!!

Animated GIFs can be ridiculously fun, or ridiculously annoying. Or both at the same time. Usually both.

They’ve somewhat declined in popularity as of late, though whether that fact should be greeted with a moment of silence in commemoration of days gone by — or loud prayers of thanks to the deity of your choice — is perhaps uncertain.  In fact, if you want to see GIF animations online nowadays you have to look for them, rather than merely having to randomly browse for 30 seconds or so.  Seems the only things that move anymore are advertisements — and those are rarely as appealing as bouncing smiley faces.  Or sparkling unicorns.  Or really, really, really surreal . . . things.

Yep, there’s still a few left out there.  Don’t jump out of that window yet.

(Fun fact: you can use animated GIFs as your desktop background in Windows XP and earlier.  Nifty, eh?)

In 1903, a doctor by the name of Walter Kidd (not the Scottish pro-soccer/football-player) wrote an unusual sort of book, the like of which the world has probably never seen before or since.  A book entitled The Direction of Hair in Animals and Man, about . . . just that.

As he admits in the introduction,

No doubt many of the phenomena here described are intrinsically uninteresting and unimportant.

Unless, of course, you’re planning on one-upping Dr. Frankenstein by creating a musk-ox from scratch.  In which case, you can read the whole thing online!

From one Kilmeny Niland comes this . . . odd bit of art:

People go shopping for food.  Many people, all over the place.  Most of these folks don’t have exceptionally good short-term memories, so they make grocery lists.  Then, because of the same condition that prompted them to create the list in the first place, they leave it in the shopping cart, or on the floor, or in the women’s room, or on the shelf behind the fruit cocktail.

And stalker-types collect the lists that are left behind.  1900 of them.

And other books from the 60s.  That are still in libraries.

That’s what the Awful Library Books blog is all about.  No, they’re not all exactly awful, but most are pretty unusual—everything from books on clothing for the disabled (how to dress the wheelchair-bound like Mr. Rodgers) to upside-down exercise manuals!  With rather hilarious commentary.

A complete digital version of J. L. Borge’s “The Book of Imaginary Beings.”  Fantastic Zoology from the mythology of ancient Sumer to the mind of Franz Kafka!

Often Web 2.0 manifests itself in curious ways. Jyte is clearly one of them.
The way it works: someone claims something as being a fact, many more someones vote as to whether they believe said claim, and then all the somebodies discuss it (oftentimes for far longer than any one something was ever meant to be discussed, and with a passion rivaling that of fire-worshipers and Wikipedia talkpages). And the sheer diversity of some of these claims is quite truly amazing.