🔗 Finds #20

Hello everyone, and welcome to issue #20 of Finds — the articles, sites, and corners of the web I bookmarked this week:

📄 Articles

bbc.comThe weird aliens of early science fictionZaria Gorvett traces the little grey alien back to one 1961 abduction story from a New Hampshire couple, which Hollywood then copied for sixty years. Before that the aliens were stranger: the Xipéhuz of 1887 were transparent blue cones that spoke by tracing symbols on each other.

🌐 Websites / blogs

foodsubs.comFoodSubsA cooking encyclopedia of thousands of ingredients and tools across 17 groups — 733 flavourings, 260 dairy entries, 161 pieces of equipment. Every entry carries synonyms, pronunciation, and a substitution with the ratio worked out: a teaspoon of Tabasco for an ounce of adobo sauce.

tofugu.comLearn Japanese: A Ridiculously Detailed GuideTofugu sequences the whole beginner path in order: hiragana, pronunciation, then 300+ kanji and about 1,000 words before you open a grammar textbook. Its rule for what to study next is that you should already know 80% of it.

learnmorsecode.comLearn Morse CodeOne page, one idea: print the binary tree and trace it with a pencil while you listen — right for a dit, left for a dah. DAH DIT DIT walks you down to D. There are MP3s for every letter and digit, and the whole method is ten minutes a day.

📚 From Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.orgFemoral ring — The 1.25 cm opening where the abdomen gives onto the thigh, walled by the inguinal ligament in front and the lacunar ligament on the inside. It's plugged with fat — and it's the gap a loop of intestine slips through to become a femoral hernia.

📺 From YouTube

youtube.commocha — Anime video essays with an unusual specialism: sports anime. 181 videos running 20 to 45 minutes, on why Kuroko no Basket isn't a sports anime, what makes the greatest tournament arc, and how Dandadan saved shounen.

youtube.comWhy wanting it too badly ruins everything — Eight minutes from Verse Creates on desire: how gripping an outcome too tightly is often the thing that costs you it. The line viewers keep quoting back at it — “when you expect nothing, everything becomes a gift.”

🌱 Promoted to the wiki: these now live on their topic pages — Literature, Food, Languages, Morse Code, Anatomy, Anime, and Philosophy — so they’re easy to find later. 🗂️ Catch up on past issues.