At least Steve Ballmer is trying to reinforce the “twin pillars” of democracy and capitalism through his continued investment in USAFacts.org. What good it does is up to news organizations and government, fortunately/unfortunately — prime example:
Ballmer has taken his just-the-facts pitch to Capitol Hill, trying to convince Congress to ground its legislation in facts and to sign a document saying it believes in government data. “I don’t feel like I got much traction,” he admitted.
How endemic will AI feeds and content become? Sounds like this is the plan for Meta, at any rate, according to Jason Koebler:
Both Facebook and Instagram are already going this way, with the rise of AI spam, AI influencers, and armies of people copy-pasting and clipping content from other social media networks to build their accounts.
Save us all, humans + RSS.
Exactly like it sounds: The humble tape dispenser, rebooted with industrial integrity › The M.R. Tape Dispenser.
That is, after all, CW&T’s styling.
This cropped up a few months ago as a Kickstarter, a vessel for endeavors with which the design duo is intimately familiar, dating back to the release of their original Type-A metal pen (which, more or less, gave the go-ahead for a whole new generation of industrial pen designs and brands).
So I backed this thing with full confidence, and a few short months later, received the heavy metal object. It’s a beauty.
Let’s talk about that tape. It comes with Japanese-branded MT, a wonderful roll of lightweight masking tape that leaves no sticky residue and applies/detaches with ease. It takes Sharpie well, but not other more soluble inks. It’s the perfect accessory to the actual dispenser, and I’m so glad CW&T introduced me to the brand, because I’m not using anything else moving forward.
I’ve found the ease of pulling the tape and tearing it a pleasure, and using it on notebooks, on paper as a highlighter of sorts, and other objects around the house (adhering things to the fridge, countertop, etc. in lieu of a sticky note or some such thing), has been a delight.
Buy it at your own discretion, but my mileage varies towards an enjoyable distance. As with any kind of specially crafted, intentionally designed object, it’s about the joy and detail more than the face price value.
At this point, what industry hasn’t been upended by private equity.
Lastly, a behind-the-statue view of the new Loon sculpture (in b&w) that was added outside Allianz Field in St Paul.
I’ve stayed away from Ridge wallets for years — they always looked bulky, too hard (literally made of metals), and too popular (in mainstream product categories, most of the time that’s a concern).
But… they recently released a soft leather and band variant called Biflex, much in the vein of the slimmest wallet currently available (Trove), and had me curious on their take. They have massive scale to do this well, and from the design approach they took, it’s a copy of the way their hard materials wallet works (thumb hole/cut-out for flipping out your cards) while adhering to a slimmer enclosure.
I like this wallet. The materials are elegant and the form factor is superbly minimal. It’s a very slim profile with leather accents to make it more than merely an elastic band wallet, and protects itself contents well.
Their decisions on card extractions aside, it’s a usable, slick object for your pocket. Just don’t anticipate using it for a ton of cash and more than a few cards because its format gets cramped quickly.
Finding out about this UK publication for the first time – Delayed Gratification. Purposefully slow journalism reflecting on prior months. Obviously, my kind of periodical.
And a good interview with its Editor, Rob Orchard, on Monocle’s The Stack podcast, too.
An intriguing idea, as I for one am interested in seeing Submerged but am not buying a Vision Pro to do it:
Apple should sell tickets to go sit and experience these special Vision Pro events.
Ben Thompson has a thorough, future-gazing interview with Hugo Barra about Orion and Meta’s AR initiative, spanning the hardware strategy, the Luxottica partnership, why not bother with a smartphone as part of the ecosystem, and the impetus for developers to get on board. Exciting new epoch.
Studio Neat starts a patch club concept with the focus on simple designs within the confines of embroidery — first up is a whimsical take on the NASA worm logo.
A few weeks into using the new Reeder app. Still enjoying it. Some interim thoughts:
The martini is special. I respect the craft.
But I also dig this new age shit in NYC attempting to perfect temperature retention. Sure, no one historically drinks a martini like this (unless you slam it after good preparation), but the concept is chef’s kiss. And olives… they’ve addressed them:
Just about everything, in fact, is the enemy of a Martini’s coldness. You might call the drink’s historical companion, the olive, a frenemy. “The olive definitely does change the temperature,” said Hubbard. “It’s going to move it up.” For that reason, at Hawksmoor olives are served not in the cocktail glass, but on the side in a small dish
I’d try this, but never make it the norm. Martini prep is part of the enjoyment, and while batching cocktails is economically clever, it’s bankrupt of authenticity. And the cocktail is about, if nothing else, authenticity.
Unless… there’s no going back after drinking a martini like this.
A list. Of things. Of interest.
Photo: new rug, in the living room.
Green Day de-masters their landmark Dookie album into 15 inconvenient, throwback musical formats in a brilliant audio experiment. The big mouth Billie bass is neat, but the answering machine? Divine. (Via Kottke. )
Movie theater popcorn solved: refined coconut oil and Flavacol.
Butter has nothing to do with it.
A reminder of the rationale for investment capital into corporate imperialism companies:
Companies were encouraged to seek growth at all costs and worry about profitability later, not an unheard-of strategy but one that could now be pushed to new extremes. Uber could burn through billions in cash for about 15 years, bending the market, smashing local regulations and monopolies, altering consumer behavior in the process, and then go public at an $82.4 billion valuation while losing $800 million a quarter.
The article links back to a similliarly damning piece from 2021 that hints at this entire ecosystem subsidizing millennial and gen z lifestyles whereby all of our behaviors and monetary attitudes towards expectations from companies like Uber, Netflix, etc. shift indefinitely.
Where do we go from here? It’s not like this line of thinking has changed in any material way over the past two decades; if anything, this is the norm, and the gambles are ever more macro in nature.
Anyway, there are a few other nuggets to glean from NYT’s assessment of the vast Netflix’s library, including commentary of the long tail of hours viewership and why certain titles may or may not have benefited from inter-country licensing and the inclusion in popular algorithmic groupings of streamable video. A question for Netflix is whether its model is actually similar to Uber’s or not: has it truly changed our video watching behavior beyond the initial SVOD (streaming video on demand) model shift with its immense library of choice in a “traditional” video format, or… are behaviors fundamentally changing again with the verticalization of video and hours spent on platforms like TikTok? Usage is almost the same between younger generations, so perhaps it’s a combination of time spent across the two complementary platforms.
Behaviorally, you could argue there is less friction to tap open TikTok and scroll (most similar to the early days of linear, live TV) than parsing through millions of titles deciding on what to watch (the Netflix model).
Am I alone in preferring an offline, analogue, tactile reading experience? Is there something here, or is the future of media entirely, irrevocably digital?
Sitting back and reading paper is magnificent.
The hype is on point for Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. 📚
Really digging the vibes of this hulking skeleton yard decor — saw this before dipping into Halftime Rec for a beer.
Sometimes the Economist’s book reviews are (probably) a just-as-good reading of the book’s primary thesis and subsequent chapters. And while I’m curious about the topic, I get the idea behind Infantalised:
You may say that 1+1=2, but “my truth” is that it makes three. Post-modernists deem this way of thinking sophisticated. Keith Hayward calls it childish. He is right.
This Strib article really should have linked to my pull-tab library, but alas, at least it’s a good deep dive on the culture and history of the game.
Hey there.
Olga Tchepikova-Treon’s piece about Bong Joon-ho’s ‘The Host’, intersecting with the Coen brothers’ misanthropic tendencies, is a good read. After all, “who is more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?”
Thank you for writing this, Kevin (from @overkillwtf@overkill.social). My partner and I feel the same way. There are lots of DINCs out here trying to find each other amongst the populace, and it’s a difficult needle to thread in many circles.