I find this segment to be particularly insightful:
That's the one I was gonna post! I think the text file containing ASCII 0s and 1s for an image of the Mona Lisa comes second.
I think this is relevant: https://news.cs.washington.edu/2013/08/14/chicken-chicken-chicken-chicken-chicken/
The technical plans for the Death Star.
Are there any vulnerabilities? Asking for a friend
Ooh! Link? ^^
I cannot find the actual file I was talking about, but I did find my WEG Death Star Technical Manual. I am still trying to find the laptop that has the technical readouts of the Death Star.
A copy of Man after Man:
This is such a weird book. It has leech people, underwater people, blind psychic baby people, meat mountain people, etc.I’ll need more details on this
It's a speculative evolution book from 1990 about how mankind might evolve in the next 5 million years. Basically the premise is that due to climate change, new species of humans are engineered to survive in a more hostile world. And then it follows these new species and their further evolutions.
The creatures in the picture above are both descended from humans.
It's weird, bleak and very far fetched.A small gallery of the various species:
Kenshi mentioned!
This feels pretty niche...
I have the working draft of this year's List of Items for the Official University of Chicago Official Scavenger Hunt, the world's largest -and probably weirdest- annual scavenger hunt.
That sounds fun!
I didn't know they did this. Where can I learn more?
The Death report for Kurt Cobain. Mostly from morbid curiosity and a love for Nirvana. I don’t do that for everyone or anything like that. That’s the weirdest one. 😅
Let's see, The CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual, some paper on MKultra, some paper about The Hum, Some scientific paper on the longevity of recordable optical media, and a paper about crows.
The graphics alone make this look worth reading
I have a key to tree identification in winter. It's surprisingly useful
Depends on your weird.
I write, so there's a ton of stuff on decomposition, forensics, and related subject matter that are weird by some standards.
I've got stuff on niche mythology too, for the same reason. Along with that is stuff on modern paganism, syncretic religions, and related subjects. Again, weird by some standards.
But I tend to think the morbid stuff is what would catch most people by surprise.
Nice.
I came in here to post about having a copy of Titus Burkhardt's Alchemy tome and DKMU Assault On Reality but I think yours might take the cake instead, as well as possibly including both of those texts.
Where do you usually find it at? I'm a horror writer and that sort of thing would be handy to have for my work.
It used to be Google scholar. It was pretty easy to find good stuff when I was digging into it. Not sure if it's still a reliable place though
What's a pdf that most surprised you?
Ahh, probably the one that gave visuals of bloat and skin slippage.
I've seen plenty of dead bodies (did some hospice work, ran across a suicide in the woods, and a few accidents), but I'd never seen that segment of decomp.
It's both worse than I expected, and somehow not as bad.
I just cleaned up my downloads so I no longer have it, but a couple weeks ago it was a copy of Maid: The Role-Playing Game
My mom's death certificate. That's weird.
RIP. This is up there with the arrest warrant
CIA sabotage handbook.
Should add the poor man's James bond. The anarchist cookbook. The army survival manual. There is an old army improvised munitions manual.
There are lots of fun reads that should probably be held onto.
Ooh could you link me to the above?
Pdf version of doom from hackernews not so long ago.
Mine is this report by the central bank where they tested the insurance sector at-large for resillience to financial shocks. ^(Although after reading some books by nassim nicholas taleb, I realize that testing using the worst imaginable shocks isn't sufficient as black swan events are by their nature unpredictable)
A mock dictionary of Portuguese gay slang and vocabulary. It's pretty fun.
Lol
An older text, reinterpreted by Meaty McMeat.
Guidelines for a Space Propulsion Device Based on Heim’s Quantum Theory
I thought it sounded interesting, but the mathematics was beyond me.
Hmm, it probably depends what you think is weird, but I have one in their on the feasibility of extracting ammonia from biomass. There's also one on early steam turbines by a fellow named Geoff Horseman, which is a fun name.
Edit: Oh, I also have a professional critique of my dating profile photos. That's weird in a different way, since I actually got that done, and it unexpectedly came as a PDF.
Ok, the second one is definitely a wierd(ly specific) PDF and I dig it!
It's a beast too - 202 pages. From the part I read, I could probably make one that kinda works, but that's it. Unfortunately the author didn't go into the details I was hoping for, like why exactly steam turbine airfoils are hook-shaped. One neat thing is that they have a nice little formula for comparing totally different turbines over time to show how they gradually do more with less.
The ammonia paper is weird because it's a super impractical and difficult idea - normally you fix nitrogen in a big Haber-Bosch plant and turn it into biomass. Both came up because they're applicable to primitive tech stuff.
I have more and probably weirder, but the things I care about tend to be moved out of the download folder.
You got your dating photos critiqued? And it exists as a paid service?? You fascinate me Sir.
Yeah, it came with ghostwriting for the text section.
Man, I have no idea what people are looking for from dating profiles, and what I got back from the seasoned pros just reinforces that. Left to my own devices, I went terse and impartial. What they wrote seems cheesy and boastful to me, but I guess comes across as confidence to others. Which just means it's money well spent, I suppose, because I haven't gotten any complaints since.
The Airplane Flying Handbook, I guess.
I think if i dig through my records I can find a federal subpoena from 2016. A LEO had to formally come to my door to confirm I received it but the prosecutor sent it to me via email.
Probably Grontar: The Frutang, circa 2003.
This looks legendary
Boringly, the only thing in there currently is the guide from the dmv (mvc, sorry) for nj to review cause I'm feeling old and need a refresher.
I've got the Pokemon Quartz pokedex. It's pretty cursed.
(1984) Reflections of Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson
It's a really short PDF and it's not as technical as it seems, but gives a good lesson on how programs evolve, and what exactly trust means in the software world
Nothing too weird. Multiple manuals of objects that I own, probably the weirdest of which is a German manual for my Canon EOS 300 (I'm not German). And some machine learning papers, among which a paper from 1987, by Quinlan & Rivest, about decision trees (which is older than I am).
EDIT: Oh and another document older than me, a manual for the Minolta XG-9 that I'm lending from my dad.
I agree it feels weird to come across files that've been around for longer than you have.
Hercolobus Or Red Planet, by V. M. Rabolou... it's 'interesting'.
It’s an interesting concept and seems plausible enough (same as with Planet X, Nemesis.. ok some of that Nibiru stuff is ridiculous) but like, the evidence just isn’t there to support it. Feels like we should have found SOME evidence for this kind of interstellar disaster by now. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong.
260 pages!??
Acute toxins fact sheet, guide to identifying snipe flies, several issues of Computer Gaming World from 1987, and 2 separate copies of the schematics for a Kenmore 148-1937.1 sewing machine.
