Fun Friday Resources

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Fun Friday Resources returns!

Cecil the Pest™ having “ideas”

The World Map of Human Ideas is a bit sparse, but perhaps it will grow as time goes by and its designer has time to add more to it, but it’s still a neat idea: Where in the world did ideas that the whole world knows about originate? (I would quibble with the concept of “human” ideas — as opposed to what, the ideas of Cecil the Pest™?)

For those of you who are actually writing and are considering worrying about publishing, check out Authors Publish and their list of free books about getting that done. If you click on the site title in the upper left, the main page lets you sign up for a free subscription to their magazine alerting you to opportunities.

And lastly, something to make you laugh with incredulous rage: The Bad UX World Cup, in which designers from all over the world compete to design the worst user interface for common computer tasks. This year, the challenge was to design a date picker would drive the average human insane. And the winner… just click through and go insane.

Over on social media, like Mastodon or Bluesky, it’s been a thing where people will post parodies of William Carlos Williams’s poem “This Is Just To Say,” the one about the plums in the icebox. And suddenly last month, somehow everyone’s attention shifted to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and the results were astonishingly funny. Here are links to a few:

And herewith is my contribution:

Ozy had a little land
but that was long ago.
It’s all been vanished by the sand,
a tale of pride and woe.

Everywhere the traveler went
he saw two legs of stone,
and wondered what the sand dunes meant,
so level and so lone.

Cultural literacy: It’s a thing!