This scene hits harder and darker.

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.

• Do you need this high-caliber of a tape dispenser? Probably not.
• Do I use tape all that much? Not really.
• Is it a joy to use? Yes, as long as the object is pinned to something, either nailed into a wall or 3M Commanded onto a desk.
• What about that tape?

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.

• Joan Westenberg builds a summarized, paywall-less news feed highlighting the news atop the Micro.blog platform: The Index
• I alluded to a phenomenal periodical earlier in the week (‘Delayed Gratification’), which reflects slow journalism, but two other new periodicals cropped up on my radar as well — ‘AFM’ (a new title on sex and relationships that seems interesting since it’s print, a more private/intimate environment for connecting with readers), and ‘Open Tennis’ (a lifestyle/travel publication revolving around tennis, a pairing that usually has historically only been represented by golf)
• I miss delightful touches from Apple, but when they happen, it makes an impression. I’ve noticed only recently that my AirPods Pro will detect when I’m grinding coffee beans (or any other slightly prolonged loud noise), and it soft-cancels the noise so I can keep listening to my podcast. Really nice touch.

Lastly, a behind-the-statue view of the new Loon sculpture (in b&w) that was added outside Allianz Field in St Paul.

Ridge Biflex Wallet Review

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.

The Great

• Materials and construction are solid
• Dimensions are 87 x 57 x 12 mm, which means this is the size of a credit card with no excess materials hanging off
• The leather sides cover more surface area against the card length than Trove (Trove’s is square with more of the band and tip top of the cards exposed). This is actually a nice counterpoint.
• Material, stitching, and overall construction feel great in the hand and robust in usage
• Claims to hold eight cards plus cash with RFID blocking

The Not-So-Great

• Fitting eight cards with mobility is generous. I have six + a single bill and it’s a tight fit.
• There are two openings for fingers to slide out or fan out the contents: the half-circle opening against the end of the wallet is easy to use (push), but the hole-cut out in the middle of the side of the wallet on the other side is abysmal to use if the wallet is packed tight.
• The wallets are inexplicably loaded and unloaded at two different ends of the wallet (e.g., opposite exits for the cards), which requires minor mental stress as I’m still not used to them being extracted from the same side. Why.

Overall

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.

• If only I was collecting and listening to vinyl… The Lost Recordings does such incredible work mining through long forgotten tracks and recordings of jazz artists. (via SimpleBits, who also released a new typeface)
• Speaking of studios, Studio Neat tries their hand at a patch club concept with the focus on simple designs within the confines of embroidery — first up is a whimsically self-indulgent take on the NASA worm logo. This’ll be fun, though I wish they had a hook and loop option vs adhesive since these would look great attached to bags/accessories.
• There is an evaporation of shame in politics, and it’s a problem. Bringing in anecdotes about Veep to explain this reinforce how far from the bell curve midpoint our political environment has become.
• The Heavy Table does an updated run through Central Avenue in northeast Minneapolis, a particularly favorite drag of mine for food. Always love seeing the WACSO illustrations casting spots in a hand drawn style.

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:

• You have to set it up for success… but don’t over-engineer it: the core experience is reading your RSS feeds via a macro timeline, and that habit has to form
• Folders are superb for dropping feeds that have been de-activated in Home for manual checks (like a traditional RSS reader paradigm) since there are some feeds that update way too frequently on a daily basis and jam up the main feed
• Log in sparingly to other platforms (e.g., not logging into your Mastodon account; however, I’ve added some developer accounts to follow in Reeder vs on my own Mastodon account
• Workflow is better than other RSS apps/previous Reeder incarnations for interacting with content — if you are reading a Mastodon post in Reeder, for instance, you can fast swipe into your app of choice to interact further with it. Same goes with Micro.blog, Glass, etc.
• It’s great for glancing through favorite subreddits — even though it doesn’t pull in the full thread, you can manually follow various subreddits and drop them into a folder, and easily swipe to jump into the thread itself

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.

• Podcast interview from Scratching the Surface with Taylor Levy & Che-Wei Wang of CW&T. Nice dive into their recent tape dispenser product and the rest of their design process.
• Friendly reminder on the incredible Cabinland project that is coming along (succinct but outdated article) — a joint project from Jacob Witzling and Sarah Underwood. Latest updates on their architectural shenanigans: Instagram and YouTube.
• After years of fluctuating between Mac launching apps Launchbar and Alfred, I am trying Raycast (again). It’s definitely gotten better, and is free to use if you abstain from using AI and syncing accounts.
• Sober good news on Friday: “JPMorgan Chase said the U.S. economy remains strong for both consumers and big companies, a sign that the Federal Reserve may have achieved the much-discussed soft landing with lower inflation and healthy growth.”
• Lastly, I took a gamble on a new soft wallet from Ridge — I’ve been apprehensive in trying any of their wallets due to both popularity and the hard metal designs, but this new one looks well-executed and takes aim at Trove for the title of the slim/sleek wallet crown. I’ll be reviewing soon.

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).

You aren’t alone, Ben.

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?”