u/Mastbubbles

I make data pages for a living, I made a page where you can hear 1-10 in 73 languages. Tap a number, a voice says it. Ten numbers, and it tells you one true story about itself as a reward. Every word was checked against two independent sources before it went in, and the checking was where the goosebumps were. Hindi's एक, German's eins, English's one, Spanish's uno, Russian's один: they are all the same word, thousands of years old, worn differently by different weather.

The detail that actually got me: one language is missing. Chichewa. I could not verify its numbers twice, so it stays out until a native speaker helps me, because wrong felt worse than missing.

If it says your language wrong, tell me in the comments or through the page, and I will fix it.

Here you go, if you want to play with it.

(TL)

I make charts for a living, and this is the one that got me this year.

Both frames are the same neighbourhood in Kahramanmaraş, Türkiye. Every shape is one building on OpenStreetMap, the free map of the world that anyone can edit. The top frame is the morning of the earthquake: 961 buildings, the rest blank paper. Rescue teams can't search a neighbourhood, without a proper map, so ordinary people anywhere on earth open a satellite photo in their browser and trace what they see.

The bottom frame is the same place one month later. Twenty thousand buildings. Green is everything strangers drew, unpaid, from their couches, for people they will never meet.

The detail that actually got me is in the logs. On the first morning, seven people were tracing at 11am. By dinner there were 176, and for the next thirty days the drawing never stopped. Not for a single hour. Someone was always awake, somewhere, drawing someone else's town.

And it isn't history. As I'm typing this, volunteers are doing the same thing for a town in Venezuela (I drew a few buildings). The count updates live on the page.

Please remember, we're kinder than we look.

Interactive Version - If anyone wants to learn more

I make charts for a living, and this is the one that got me this year.

Both frames are the same neighbourhood in Kahramanmaraş, Türkiye. Every shape is one building on OpenStreetMap, the free map of the world that anyone can edit. The top frame is the morning of the earthquake: 961 buildings, the rest blank paper. Rescue teams can't search a neighbourhood, without a proper map, so ordinary people anywhere on earth open a satellite photo in their browser and trace what they see.

The bottom frame is the same place one month later. Twenty thousand buildings. Green is everything strangers drew, unpaid, from their couches, for people they will never meet.

The detail that actually got me is in the logs. On the first morning, seven people were tracing at 11am. By dinner there were 176, and for the next thirty days the drawing never stopped. Not for a single hour. Someone was always awake, somewhere, drawing someone else's town.

And it isn't history. As I'm typing this, volunteers are doing the same thing for a town in Venezuela (I drew a few buildings). The count updates live on the page.

Please remember, we're kinder than we look.

Interactive Version - If anyone wants to learn more

When the iPad showed up in 2010, nobody quite knew what to do with it. It was a big glass rectangle that couldn't make calls and wasn't a real computer. People literally called it a big iPhone. And honestly, for years, they were kind of right - it was the thing you watched Netflix on in bed (I still do), the thing your mum used for recipes. Every autumn Apple would launch a new one and everyone would ask the same question: is this the one that finally replaces my laptop? And every year the answer was, eh, not really.

Then it slowly started growing up. It got a pencil, then a keyboard, then it lost its home button and started charging with the same cable as a MacBook. And in 2021 Apple did something a little absurd - they put the exact same chip from the MacBook inside it. Suddenly the question wasn't "can this replace a laptop" anymore. It was "wait, why is the tablet faster than the laptop?"

By 2024 it had become the thinnest thing Apple has ever made - 5.1mm, thinner than a pencil. Not bad for something people wrote off as a toy.

I still feel iPads are very underrated, the amount of stuff you can do on your iPad with that battery life, and the power!

Interactive Version with all of them.

I've stayed in a lot of Luxury properties for years and always had the feeling these buildings were sitting on stories the booking galleries never show. So I went digging. A few that stuck with me:

- Raffles Singapore, 1902 - a tiger that had escaped a nearby circus was found hiding under the raised floor of the hotel, and shot. The last tiger ever killed at Raffles.

- Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi, 1972 - Joan Baez sheltered here during the Christmas bombings and recorded the sound of war from inside the bomb shelter, which is still preserved beneath the lawn.

- Molitor, Paris, 1946 - when the modern bikini debuted at the poolside, no fashion model would wear it, so a dancer from the Casino de Paris had to.

- Le Royal Monceau, Paris - hotel lore holds that the founding of a nation was proclaimed inside these walls in 1948.

- The Savoy, 1897 - a scandal over wine vanishing from the cellars helped force out manager César Ritz and chef Auguste Escoffier, who left to build the Ritz and, arguably, the modern luxury hotel.

I got a bit obsessed and ended up doing this for 210 of Accor's luxury properties - finding the true story in each and rebuilding the hotel by hand as a little 3D clay model to go with it. Every claim is sourced.

Which Accor hotel do you think has the best hidden history? I'm sure I've missed some good ones and would love to add them.

Interactive Version

Have always wanted to do this, collect data for all the house plants I can think of, and put it in one place, how to take care of the, their origin, temperatures, air quality parameters and everything.

So this is exactly what I did - Made a house plant Atlas - here

Everything about house plants in one place.

Every time one of my plants started looking sad, I'd go down the same rabbit hole, half the care info locked behind a paywall, the other half scattered across ten blogs that all said something slightly different. It shouldn't be that hard to find out how to keep one plant alive.

What I actually wanted was one place that just told me the thing: where this plant is from, what that means for how it wants to be treated, and what's myth vs. real looking at you, "plants purify your air"). The where-it's-from part turned out to be the key, once I learned the snake plant comes from dry African scrubland, I finally stopped drowning it.

So I made it. 114 plants, each with its real wild home and how to keep it happy, each illustrated in a little pot from where it comes from. I mostly built it for myself, but it came out nicer than I expected, and the people who'd actually appreciate it are here.

Would love to know, what's a plant you only really understood once you learned where it's actually from.

Interactive Version

A while back I tried to remember the first character I ever was in a game. It turned into this: one character for every year games have existed, from the paddle in Pong to a teaser of GTA VI. 111 in total, all hand-pixeled by me.

The thing I couldn't stop noticing while making it is how the medium grows up right in front of you. It starts as a paddle, a white rectangle you nudge. Then a plumber, a hedgehog, a pink puffball, a space marine. By the end it's Arthur Morgan, a whole man with a conscience. Fifty years of the hero slowly turning from an abstraction into a person, and the whole time, whatever shape it took, it was me. I was not watching the hero. I was the hero.

Each one also has a true story behind it (the manual called Samus "he" for the entire game; the Space Invaders aliens speed up because the CPU had fewer of them left to draw) and its real theme music, full interactive version here - if you want to play all their sounds, and travel back down the memory lane.

Which one was your Player One?

full interactive version here