Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar

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After playing his own game and feeling like a villain, Richard Garriott scrapped Ultima III's kill-everything model and invented a new goal: becoming a moral exemplar across eight virtues, with no final boss to slay.

Paul Pelliot read 6,000 manuscripts by candlelight in the Dunhuang cave over three weeks in 1908, selecting the best 10,000 pages for France. The monk who sold them was paid £130.

The quokka, Australia's smiling marsupial, ejects its pouch joey directly into a predator's path — a muscular contraction, not a choice — then flees while the infant screams.

Thomas Paine dismantled the Bible verse by verse from a Paris prison cell in 1793, fully expecting the guillotine. The chalk mark on his cell door was drawn on the wrong side by accident.

Custer split his 700-man 7th Cavalry into three columns at Little Bighorn, then led 210 men in a direct charge against a Lakota-Cheyenne encampment later estimated at 1,500–2,000 warriors. Not one of his column survived.

Monique Wittig's 1980 essay declared that 'woman' only exists in relation to 'man' — and that lesbians, escaping that relation, are therefore not women at all. The room reportedly went silent when she read it aloud.

In 1971 Burden asked an assistant to shoot him in the left arm with a .22 rifle inside a Santa Ana garage. The bullet grazed the bone. The event lasted five seconds and was witnessed by a handful of people.

North Korea's 105-story pyramid hotel has been under construction since 1987, was capped in 1992, and has never hosted a single guest — its empty windows visible from Pyongyang for 30 years like a concrete tombstone.

In 1951, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins took a biopsy from Henrietta Lacks's cervix without telling her; her cells, labeled HeLa, became the first immortal human cell line, now totaling over 20 metric tons grown worldwide.