A role-playing game that can be played with stones in a bag. Perfect for long hikes in the mountains.

This annual award from Edinburgh’s Literary Review has a wealth of explicit excerpts that act as a kind of inverted zeitgeist—reaching around arousal to touch disgust—or horror, even. Awards like these, unintentional awards I suppose, are so valuable!

A thorough guide of how to master Uwe Rosenberg’s classic economic game Agricola.

“Can I help you?” I know, I know—this is terrible, yes. Feels like an unprecedented cinéma-vérité documentary as well.

I recall a line from these that went: The wendigo / The wendigo / I met you / Just a friend ago. It had me in stitches at the time. This is a collection preserved by someone monikered “Surly Teabag.” This feels like a kin to Over the Garden Wall.

I feel like this started the “haunted game cartridge” creepypastas. But I’m not a connoisseur. If not, whatever, I like it.

I come from ‘Mormon’ culture—I was raised on its tales and legends, I love it (the angel Moroni, The Three Nephites, brass and golden plates, peep stones, pioneer hair art, etc.) and this collection of documents is a favorite window into the mysterious emergence of The Book of Mormon. To me, this is emblematic of the Internet: a church having to come to terms with its origins publicly. (From this part of me stems a fascination with Homeric writings, scripture of any kind, The Mabinogion, the National Treasure scene where Diane Kruger and Nicholas Cage exhale romantically inches above a deglassed Declaration of Independence—and how the Internet might spread, enhance or warp them all.)

An attempt to recreate the notorious “Gumboots: Accordian Jive Hits, Vol. 2” cassette that once mesmerized Paul Simon. This certainly mesmerizes! The sound of ‘groaner’ Mahlathini, alongside The Mahotella Queens or Dark City Sisters, is transporting. (To me, discarding the works of these musicians does make Simon’s appropriation a crime—if he had just introduced us to all of these artists.)

I have to agree that these folks are kings of the mixtape. If you can find it, I think the old “One World” mix was fantastic. I used to have to download these from hacked FTPs of medical companies.

Trains passing, animals breathing, a piano chord rings in a bathtub from years ago. Kind of like if a podcast host died and had a baby podcast with no talking left in it. Related: The Abandoned Playhouse.

DJ Hennessy Youngman + airhorn, for late nights at pharmacy

All the thrift store cassettes together in your ears at last. A good start is Christmas Midgets.

Could the Mouth Trilogy be the greatest accomplishment of all-time? Hey now. (See also: zuckr and maybe The Beatles Never Broke Up.)

Visual mixtapes that predate the rise of vaporwave and ‘outrun’. (Channel. See also: Soda_Jerk.)

This is a somewhat technical talk, but it opened my eyes to the possibility opened by a peer-to-peer Web. I don’t know—this talk feels like an achievement. And I like that such a tremendous advance could be so understated.