Niche articles
End of 2012, a link went around to a post on a forum I'd never heard of: the International Guild of Knot Tyers Forum. The link was to a forum post about knots on Mars, specifically about cable lacing on the Curiosity Rover.
It was so wonderfully hyper-specific and passionate about a topic I didn't realise I ever wanted to know about. I was intrigued and delighted by phrases like: knot history buffs might find it interesting that a "Spot Tie"-like knot, with opposite Clove Hitch end orientation and topped only with a single half-knot was illustrated in 1917 by A. Hyatt Verrill under the name "Gunner's Knot" or: I did some tests tying the knot incorrectly in different ways. While these forms generally seemed inferior to the specified knot, they were not obviously destined to fail. Using these two basic knots in a compound form seems to be a reasonable way to make errors of tying less detrimental to the resulting knot.
Some of the comments were equally passionate, such as: until I see something that would really justify the use of the primordial two-half-hitches or two superimposed overhand knots solution to the wire binding and attaching problem, I will continue to see what I see: a so-so, quick and dirty way of dealing with a secondary non-critical problem.
Ten years later, in 2022, I read Finding Deceit in the Chambers of Xenobia on the Computer Gaming World Museum website, and an article on reverse engineering the idiosyncratic Sinclair Scientific calculator. They gave me similar joy, and I remembered a blog article I'd loved about the UX of Lego computer bricks. They seemed like perfect examples of a certain type of longread in which a passionate hobbyist with in-depth knowledge talks about a niche topic. I decided to collect these. I put them in my GitHub as a simple Markdown file in a public repo.
No idea if anyone ever came across it.
In any case, I've now given it a home that's a bit more appealing to look at and use. Have a look!