What Internet rabbit holes have you found yourself down?

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I just spent 20 minutes reading about the history of the metre.

Prompted by a question for DS asking "how do they know how long a metre is?"

[quote Makedo]**@inmyownlittlecorner* and @neotraditional*

Ooh ooh ooh- similar Internet rabbit hole- fundiesnark on reddit. Is it Jill Rodrigues by any chance? I can't stop reading about them all. Used to enjoy freejinger, but the threads started getting so off topic.[/quote]
Jaysus I was just coming on to mention that place 😂 Great sub!

Tom Mahood's write-up of his hunt for the Death Valley Germans is so compelling. I've read the whole thing at least four times and get sucked in every time! www.otherhand.org/

Also /r/hobbydrama on reddit is great for those who like weird rabbit holes.

Not strictly a rabbit hole but I was mesmerised by this butt-clenchingly slow website that compares the size of countries/cities/theGermanEmpirein1914 against each other.

Spent far too long comparing the size of Scotland to pretty much everywhere on earth

mapfight.appspot.com/jp-vs-scotland/japan-scotland-size-comparison

A couple of weeks ago I found myself spending several hours down the Tristan da Cunha rabbit hole.

@turkeyboots

The life and times of Typhoid Mary.

Me too - Have been fascinated by Typhoid Mary since hearing a Radio 4 programme about her early in lockdown. In fact it is now our nickname for our teenage daughter as we try to manage her socialising.

Cellular automata, after DS started asking me questions about Conway's Game of Life a few months ago.

@shivermetimbers77 I did that but with Harold Ramis a while back. I do it with Rik Mayall too. They were both objects of childhood crushes that never went away!

This Wiki page on a group of Pioneers absolutely fascinated me. I don’t know how I got I. To the page, I think after looking at the Dyatlov Pass Incident and one page led to another and another.

I’d never given it much thought bug imagined the Pioneers just travelled serenely across the plains. I only had Little House on the Prairie as a reference point. I had no idea of things like this and if fascinated me.

Donner Party

Oh and my unease at the idea of landfill just existing sent me off on a journey learning about a... venture? Experiment? Where they were digging it up and recycling it in Holland. That made me feel better. For a bit.

@allthesharks what WAS Saddam Hussein's last meal?

One that fascinated me was reading about weird unexplained deaths and coming to a very long detailed story about the woman found dead in her locked room at the Oslo Plaza hotel who had apparently killed herself three days after arriving, but with all sorts of suspicious things that undermined it being suicide. I can't find that exact piece now though there are many others.

@user1494055864

I also got sucked into the tattooed eyeballs, I could believe people do that, literally wasted an hour

My rabbit holes tend to be alternative lifestyles such as people who live, or extensively tour in motorhomes they have built themselves, or live on narrowboats, or buy land and build a house and live self sustainably. Its such a different way of life to my own, and i would love to live on a narrowboat .

I've been doing alot of reading and watching about the black plague lately, I found Samuel Pepyes diary to be a fascinating read.

Tonight's rabbit hole is all things Princess Diana.

Mumsnet

Unsolved murder mysteries
Sightings of big cats
Sightings of mythical animals
Sightings of ghosts
Missing people
People who have been kidnapped and tortured to death

Honestly, I really shouldn't because some of them have kept me awake for nights on end, and the horrific ones stay with me forever and play on my mind.

Prams. I’m mid 40s, single, and my youngest DC is almost 15. It’s unlikely I’ll be needing one any time soon.

Also, the finer workings of my facet joints.

@MillyA me too; I’m currently reading Daniel Defoe’s Journal of The Plague Year and that sent me down a rabbit hole of reading all about bubonic plague, places, years, death rates etc.

What’s been most fascinating is that there’s nothing new under the sun. There were plague deniers, people who thought it was a disease of “others” and wouldn’t happen to them, people who found any way to circumvent the rules, distancing, lockdowns, the poor losing everything while the rich were largely protected, the better off fleeing to their relatives and second homes in the country - you name it, if it’s happened during Covid it happened all back then. I keep reading bits out to (largely disinterested) family members because I’m so stunned by the similarities. Made me think we should all learn better from history!

After learning about the Summerland disaster following a documentary comparing it to Grenville Tower, I spent hours on the internet reading about it. I even found someone's doctoral thesis on the subject.

the profiles of the police dogs of Gwent Police
I've just had a look. Would recommend!

John Daniel, the Uley gorilla
Peter the wild boy
I think I've got a bit of dust in my eye...

@NC4Now not that long ago I spent ages googling baby feeding bottle makes and design and reading reviews.

a) my youngest is at uni
b) I’m menopausal
c) I breastfed anyway.

Utterly pointless waste of at least half an hour!

@musicposy yep, totally get that!

Videos - from a channel that does a lot of similar well-presented quirky little videos on London topics. I really enjoyed just finding out about loads of stuff I never knew about where I live.

Spent a whole day reading about MLMs and Ponzi schemes after seeing a thread on here about them last week.

Circassian dancing- mesmerising

20 minutes! You're an amateur! 

I have learned (and mostly forgotten subsequently) all about Scots royalty (prompted by watching the tudors at the time and wanting to delve back into the full ancestry and events before James vi and Mary Queen of Scots which I already knew a fair bit about.

Recently it's been history of board games, history of card games (but I STILL don't know how to play poker and I'd love to), history of make up....

History is a big thing with me but I'm also a huge film and tv fan and recently been watching west wing so been delving into not only that shows history and production and personnel (it's not just the cast I get interested in it's crew members) but also generally American politics and presidents and chiefs of staff and press secretaries etc

@HotPatootiebootie was just about to say that admittedly I have dx ocd and can obsess about the most random things and lose hours without realising - I have to set multiple alarms on phone and Alexa to tell me to stop reading/researching and eat/do chores etc

Your train of thought description is SO similar to mine! I know wiki isn't necessarily a reliable source of info but it's an easy starting point for many things and I'll start on one page...an hour later and I'm on my 50th page!

I even "play" connections in my head when doing stressful things "how did I end up researching z? Ah that's cos I started researching a and that led me to be interested or wanting to check on b which mentioned something weird about c..." and so on and so forth!

I don't retain all of it but I do a fair amount and I love quizzes. I'm housebound at the moment so can't go pub quizzes so I have to make do with my fixes of tv quizzes and trivia apps etc

I sometimes wonder myself how the hell I know a thing!

I once won a prize on holiday for remembering a random fact about a singers heritage, the act was a "tribute act" of the artist and said free drinks all night to the person who could answer which Native American tribe the main artist claimed to have heritage of and I knew! Only because I'd been reading about them in an ancestry magazine! Wasn't even an article on the singer but on the psychology of claiming certain ancestries and being in denial of others!

Mumsnet is especially bad for sending me off down a rabbit hole

Now I'm wondering if there's a particular name/pathology for this type of thought process I'm even half thinking I'll ask my therapist (she gets asked some really odd questions bless her )

Mumsnet costs me so much in time (this) and money (products recommended, bargains etc)