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Thursday, February 03, 2022

Internet Redditors reveal the most useful websites nobody seems to know about

My father was a Catholic, a coal miner in the Big Pit. My mother a Jew. A charwoman, when she could find the work. They didn’t fit in Wales. Nor in the U.K., either. They didn’t fit with each other all that well, for that matter. They fought every day for as long as I can remember and loved each other more than anyone I’ve ever known. At least they did right up till a night when he looked right and not left at a train crossing in Chepstow and ended up half a mile from where he’d started, dead as the Ghost. Looking for a job, he was. Turned out he didn’t need one.


In 2005 Kevin Berthia went to the Golden Gate Bridge to end his life. He ended up talking about his life with officer Kevin Briggs for 92 min while on the edge of the bridge. 10 years later they meet at that same bridge under much better circumstances.


My sympathies, Gladys. I once sent a screenshot of a conversation about a horrible, horrible person to that horrible, horrible person


Internet Redditors reveal the most useful websites nobody seems to know about - KnowTechie Redditors reveal the most useful websites nobody seems to know about. Really upset no one mentioned KnowTechie, though. It’s been thirty years since the first “website” on the World Wide Web (W3). In that time, the number of websites has grown exponentially, to a staggering 1.88 billion. With so many options out there, how do you find truly useful websites that are lesser-known? Well, you turn to the “front page of the internet,” Reddit, and the r/AskReddit subreddit. Redditor u/SauloJr requested the hive mind’s help a few months back, asking, “What useful unknown website do you wish more people knew about? We dove into the replies to surface the lesser-known gems that you really should know about. Here’s hoping that they can weather all the additional traffic they’re about to receive. The most useful websites nobody seems to know about. Whether you are looking for dinner suggestions or need some free photo editing tools, Redditors have you covered with some genuinely fantastic suggestions. Check out some of our favorites below…”



Can People Tell When You’ve Blocked Them on Texting or Social Media Messaging Apps? Consumer Reports: “Here’s what they’ll see on text messaging, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, LinkedIn, Signal, Twitter, and WhatsApp. If you’ve ever been bombarded with incessant messages on your phone or favorite social media app, or received even just one message from someone you’d rather not hear from, blocking the sendermight seem like the obvious decision.


Paula Bolyard: My ‘Free’ Covid Tests From the Government Arrived in Record Time… But There’s a Problem.“My tests sat in my mailbox all day in frigid temperatures—well below the required minimum 36°.” (Same here.)

Rick Moran: In Minneapolis, Robbery Arrests Plummet as Stores are Hit Multiple Times. “This has apparently emboldened the thieves to rob some stores multiple times.”

And a James Bond 60th Anniversary twofer…

Chris Queen: 60 Years of James Bond Theme Songs: Part 002. “We’ll start with the worst of the worst. These range from cringeworthy to truly bizarre.”

Yours Truly: Ranking the Bond Movies: Part 002 (The Ones That Really Blofeld). “It’s true that the franchise has been uneven over the decades, but there have been only five genuine stinkers.”


  1. “Maybe we are so enmeshed in contradictions in our day-to-day lives, so constantly pulled in multiple conflicting directions at once, that we don’t even notice, except when the inconsistency becomes so insistent that it can’t be ignored” — if philosophy is going to makes sense of the world and our lives, argues Zach Weber (Otago), it will be with paraconsistent logics
  2. “It is a joy to play with this ontological uncertainty. It is the magic of movies” — that we see actors along with their characters and a film’s production along with its fiction is relevant to the metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics of the medium, argues Francey Russell (Barnard)
  3. The Last Days of Socrates: The Musical — written by the Lebanese composer Mansour Rahbani (1998), it’s in Arabic, with over 100 dancers and actors, and it is quite the spectacle
  4. How does the meaning of a word (or symbol, or gesture…) first arise? — Brian Skyrms (UCI) used simulations as part of his work on this puzzle; now Mike Deigan (Rutgers) has made online versions of these simulations for anyone to run
  5. “The solace of Platonism is purchased at a large cost. Is there some less evasive and less contorted way to face our end?” — Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) on disgust, death, and not hating the body
  6. “The colors, shapes, and other sensible properties entering my experience are all imagined… [but] what’s imagined… is the overall past appearance common to previous encounters with that property” — “perceiving is imagining the past,” argues Michael Barkasi (Toronto)
  7. “Philosophers should welcome opportunities in academic leadership” — four philosophers with experience as chairs or deans explain why


Artists To “Meta”: We Don’t Trust You

Many have begun fleeing Instagram... They expressed skepticism that Meta, a social-media behemoth, could develop, launch and manage a marketplace where they weren’t looking over their shoulders. - Forbes