Ask Lemmy

"Recursive islands and lakes."

Funny and weird and fascinating and all but it's meant seriously after all :-)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_islands_and_lakes

I'm just gonna ruin it for 90% of the replies here and drop the unusual articles page. It will have pretty much everything.

Also Chaos Magic is a wild ride.

This article about Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. who holds the world record for longest personal name.

His full name is

Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfeschlegel­steinhausen­bergerdorff­welche­vor­altern­waren­gewissenhaft­schafers­wessen­schafe­waren­wohl­gepflege­und­sorgfaltigkeit­beschutzen­vor­angreifen­durch­ihr­raubgierig­feinde­welche­vor­altern­zwolfhundert­tausend­jahres­voran­die­erscheinen­von­der­erste­erdemensch­der­raumschiff­genacht­mit­tungstein­und­sieben­iridium­elektrisch­motors­gebrauch­licht­als­sein­ursprung­von­kraft­gestart­sein­lange­fahrt­hinzwischen­sternartig­raum­auf­der­suchen­nachbarschaft­der­stern­welche­gehabt­bewohnbar­planeten­kreise­drehen­sich­und­wohin­der­neue­rasse­von­verstandig­menschlichkeit­konnte­fortpflanzen­und­sich­erfreuen­an­lebenslanglich­freude­und­ruhe­mit­nicht­ein­furcht­vor­angreifen­vor­anderer­intelligent­geschopfs­von­hinzwischen­sternartig­raum Sr.

It ends in a goddamn cliffhanger. Where TF is the golden fork!?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarrare

Nothing specific comes to mind but you might like [email protected]

The Sequel to 101 Damnations is called the Twilight Barking and it's weird as hell.

I have a number of Wikipedia tales that might be appropriate here:

Thought-terminating cliché is the incredible disappearing / reappearing article. During the aughts, Wikipedia had more interested in inclusion of the public rather that requiring Wikipedians to be super diligent about referencing a published source, and someone added Robert Jay Lifton's phrase. It turns out it was super useful, though there was not enough sourcing to elevate it up to proper levels of notoriety, so the article was removed, and missed by the public. Now it's back.

Freefall (Webcomic) by Mark Stanley, was removed from Wikipedia in the aughts for failing to have sufficient notoriety. It was / is regarded by some as a furry comic for featuring a genetically engineered sentient wolf as a primary character (the other two main characters are an alien in a habitat suit and a robot), though the comic itself explores space life, cosmology, robotics and AI topics. The comic is still ongoing, I think more than two decades old now, with fans who have made colorized versions of all the early ones. (Current ones are colored by George Peterson.) But since its Wikipedia policy not to recognize Freefall it still doesn't have its own Wikipedia article.

Weapons of Mass Destruction referring to nuclear ( "NOOK-you-lure" ) weapons that Iraq might or might not have which is why the United States has to invade Iraq immanently. Weapons of Mass Destruction shortened to WMDs became a common phrase, and the Wikipedia article discussed this as the primary term used by the United States to describe nuclear weapons. (Although, with the 2001 anthrax attacks fresh on our minds, we were also thinking of bioagents). During the cold war, the WMD phrase was not used often, but instead we referred to them as strategic weapons, based on the WWII notion of strategic attacks that bombed war-machine production and infrastructure in order to kill supply (and a whole lot of civilians). This developed into an edit-war between those who wanted Weapons of Mass Destruction to be about the payloads used in warfare and those who wanted it to be about the change of language that occurred depending on who was in control of such payloads.

Historicity and origin of the resurrection of Jesus had its own article for a long time which discussed how biblical scholarship scrutinized the event of Jesus' Resurrection, a mythical element of the Christian faith, with modern naturalist understanding of the world. One of the early phrases in the opening paragraph of this article was Post-Enlightenment historians work with methodological naturalism, and therefore reject miracles as objective historical facts. Needless to say, the article was unpopular. Normally it's not possible to just erase an article on Wikipedia. All historic versions of an article, including acts of vandalism, are archived and can be restored. (And Wikipedia has staff and volunteers who go about restoring articles to the most recent intact version.) So someone made the phrase Historicity and origin of the resurrection of Jesus link instead to the Resurrection of Jesus article which discusses really very little regarding its historicity. It turns out the Church has saboteurs everywhere to silence voices of reason.

The plot summary for A Serbian Film

not an article but i find this citation needed very funny

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potoooooooo He's a horse named pot-8-"o"s and I love it

Operation Gideon (2020)

"... Two boats were launched from eastern Colombia toward the Caribbean coast of Venezuela north of Caracas, carrying approximately 60 Venezuelan dissidents and two American former Green Berets employed as mercenaries by Silvercorp. Both boats were intercepted before they reached land. At least six Venezuelan dissidents in the first boat were killed, and all but four of the invaders were captured during the attempted landing or subsequent search operations, including the two Americans from the second boat, whose interrogations were broadcast on state television.

Venezuelan intelligence agencies and the Associated Press (AP) had prior knowledge of the operation. Commentators and observers described the operation as amateurish, underfunded, poorly organized, impossible, and a suicide mission, and divergent narratives led to questions about how the plot unfolded. Sources criticized the poor planning and execution, alternating between characterizing Operation Gideon as an attempted invasion, infiltration, raid, ambush, assassination or coup. 

I remember being surprised that Bralessness had such a long and detailed article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bralessness

There were none that were themselves bizarre that I remember, but I know there have been a few with sections where I'm like "huh, what". A number of ones I've seen for songs have the misheard lyrics instead of the actual lyrics and it often cracks me up.