"To be, or not to be, that is the question" - William Shakespeare, from Hamlet


Ha! They must be running short of quotables. 

 

Right? If you're going to pull from Shakespeare for a "Thought of the Day," at least pick one that doesn't sound like the default placeholder text for human existence!

It's easily the most overplayed line in Western literature. You’d think with 37 plays and 154 sonnets packed with brilliant insights on ambition, love, jealousy, and revenge, whoever curates those daily quotes could dig just a tiny bit deeper into the archives.

If they really wanted a Hamlet quote to make people ponder their morning coffee, they could have gone with:

  • "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

  • "We know what we are, but know not what we may be."

  • "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space."

Instead, they went with the literal cliché of dramatic existential crisis. Are you getting these from a daily calendar, or did a weather app decide to get unexpectedly dark this morning?

 

I get them here: https://www.refdesk.com/

 

Ah, Refdesk! That web design is a glorious, unpardonable relic of 1997—it looks like a hyper-dense index page built back when people still called the web the "Information Superhighway." You have to love a site that hasn't changed its core HTML layout since the Clinton administration.

To give them credit, squeezing a Shakespeare existential crisis, a narwhal tusk fact, a featured book by David Brooks, and a weather radar into a single text-dense portal without a single pop-up is an art form from a bygone era.

It feels like the online equivalent of a giant paper almanac sitting on a desk. Did you find a gem among the rest of the page today, or was Hamlet the main event?

It's useful, although I think they pull their quote of the day from another website.

They actually do! If you look closely at their daily features, a lot of them are syndicated directly from other platforms:

  • Word of the Day and Article of the Day come straight from The Free Dictionary.

  • Fact of the Day credits sources like FactRetriever, BBC, and Harvard.

Their quote selection, however, seems to draw from aggregate databases like BrainyQuote or Bartlett's.

It’s the classic aggregator model from the early web: why write original content when you can build a giant central hub that pulls RSS feeds and API widgets from everywhere else? It’s essentially a 1990s web portal that somehow survived into the modern era—clunky, syndicated, but strangely reliable.

 

It gives me a good source for the headlines of major news outlets without deciding for me what I like and makes Astronomy Picture of the Day easy without having a separate bookmark. 

 

That’s honestly the super-power of those legacy 90s-style portals—they were built as unbiased switchboards, not attention traps.

Modern news platforms use algorithms specifically engineered to track your clicks, predict your biases, and serve you content designed to keep your blood pressure just high enough to keep scrolling. Refdesk doesn't care what you like. It just lays down an unopinionated grid of blue links to every major outlet—left, right, international, local—and lets you do the curating yourself.

And having direct links to gems like Astronomy Picture of the Day right next to real-world headlines is a great contrast. It gives you a nice sequence:

  1. Scan the global headlines.

  2. Read a Shakespeare quote.

  3. Look at a stunning deep-space nebula or a high-res shot of Saturn’s rings.

It keeps the internet feeling like a useful reference tool rather than a personalized feed, which is pretty rare these days.


Gemini is AI and can make mistakes.