Not sure if this actually counts as urban sketching or simply watercoloring, but I made an attempt at capturing the vibe of a truly escapist pull-tab we ripped through a few weeks ago (Bank Roll). And yeah… that $50 win simply subsidized the investment it took to get to it.
The Simplebits team rolled out a whimsically experimental club today called Simple Type Club. It comes with all their fonts plus whatever they release in 2024, secret meetings, and some merch. Love what they’re doing. For context, my blog proudly licenses their Free Lunch font. Worth checking out.
Joan Westenberg wrote an impeccably-tuned condemnation of the injustices of societal engineering inflicted by elites via technological chasms across society. The entire essay is quotable, but here’s the gist of her observations on a roaring discontent across the globe:
That damage is the result of the elite in every sector, in every corner of society who have been content to grind down the general populace for their own selfish — and intractably large — gains. For too long, technology has sat alongside other mechanisms and failures of power, from financial instruments, political lobbying and careerism to wealth hoarding and environmental betrayal. These elements are always interconnected. And it has created a growing chasm between the elite and the general populace.
This clear and pronounced economic divide is a testament to a systemic imbalance that has long been brewing. The ever-widening gulf between the wealthy and the struggling masses is not a matter of numbers on a balance sheet; it shows a tear in the very fabric of our societies. The concentration of wealth and opportunity in the hands of a select minority has not only deepened the chasm between the rich and the poor but has also ignited a simmering sense of injustice and resentment across the broader population.
More of this, please — using AI to literally unravel the writing from a two centuries’ old papyrus. There’s not a full translate yet, but thus far it remarks about “music, food, pleasure. Basically, how to lead a happy life.”
Crisp, clean, and clear product landing page for the new, standalone, pay-one-time-only Campfire by Once (aka 37signals). If anything, they’re very good at getting the point across, albeit in their cheekily pontifical way.
End of an era… Google drops cached pages from its results pages. Their ‘rationale’ is weak:
But it was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.
Sites can still be brutally slow, so…
Savvy tome that Actual Source just put out (Shoplifters 10: New Type Design Vol 2). Looks fabulously zealous in its breadth of type design.
Coffee bean production is in a difficult spot, and Arabica beans in particular will face harvesting challenges over the next 2-3 decades. The Economist has hope that scientists find ways to cultivate in warmer climate.🤞fingers crossed.
Really dig this concept and its content — Low-tech Magazine is a solar-powered website, mostly themed on sustainability, that features server stats and sometimes even goes down due to low battery status.
Another good essay on the slowly disappearing internet and the dwindling skill of curation.
And the curators— the tenders, aggregators, collectors, and connectors— can bring us back to something better. Because it’s still out there, we just have to find it.
Not only is the origin of this shirt a mystery, but the iconography is also excellent. I hope one of Perfect Duluth’s readers figures it out.
Loving overview of the incredibly-focused German furniture maker, Vitsœ. They’re famous for the continued manufacture of Dieter Rams-designed 606 Universal Shelving System, among other terrific items.
The NYT has a huge article with curated restaurant menus that dissects trends across menu design, fonts, iconography, and the food itself. Love this.
It seems like credit card spending and delinquency rates could be heading heading towards a minor catastrophe, no?
[Google News] ultimately does not focus on whether a news article was written by an AI or a human
This probably won’t end well.
Egg on ball.
Finished ‘North Woods’. Lumbering exercise in cross-genre short stories woven together across time but confined to a single location in upper New England. 📚
Succinct retrospective on The Sopranos, exemplifying its radical impact on television and storytelling, as well as its enduring theme of social change. Likely why it found new (and re-found old) audiences over the last few years. Magnificent show.
Look, I know this superlative isn’t entirely true, but in the circles I follow online, which tend toward enthusiastic pontificating about the best setups for hardware, software, and every day use items, no one seems to be talking about one of the most important pieces of hardware we all use every single day.
The toilet.
And in particular, toilets with bidets.
Now there are some publications out there doing the good work of reviewing these — namely outdoors/camping enthusiasts like Outdoorsy Nomad (thanks for the recommendations!), Wired (naturally), and of course in Reddit (r/bidets), but I rarely see anyone else talking shop. Sure, you may say that I live in the US and we don’t have a history or culture around bidets, but we’ve been wrong. For many years.
I mean just look at some these things — Toto and Kohls have spectacular full hardware options. There’s a Bidet King specialty shop. And if you aren’t ready to take the hybrid toil/bidet dive (they can be expensive investments), there are plenty of add-on options for literally any toilet.
Washlets. Wand-only. Portable.
No matter the context, your special parts can be cleaned hygienically with minimal expenditure.
And since I haven’t invested in anything more than entry-level items, let’s talk briefly about two items to get things rolling.
If anyone has heard of a budget bidet, it’s probably Tushy. Great direct-to-consumer brand, and easily accessible as an entry-level (but most certainly solid mainstay) for any bathroom.
Once you’re regularly using bidets, I guarantee anywhere you visit that doesn’t have one will feel woefully inadequate. While not a perfect solve, there are plenty of portable options (the aforementioned Outdoorsy Nomad has a great round-up) of varying designs — the simplest constituting a nozzle attachment wand to squeeze a plastic bottle’s volume through, with the more functional being a battery-operated mini-bidet wand.
The VIKKEN Go+ represents the latter, and for $39, its slim profile and ability to use its included bottle or attach to almost any other bottle makes it an obvious choice for flexibility. It also packs small (sort of the size of a 6-8oz seltzer can).
Does it work?
Well enough. It has two pressure options (activated by a button that is revealed once the bidet wand is flipped out for usage). You can hold and use this thing one of two ways when mounting the toilet — I won’t get into graphic detail — and it provides a fairly controlled experience.
Improved hygiene, moderately better eco-friendliness, and far more rewarding experiences await your manifest lifestyle change when you decide to transition to using a bidet (or bidets plural!).
Highly recommended. Just try.
🫡
This Ezra Klein Show episode is stellar — “How to Discover Your Own Taste”. Discussion with Kyle Chayka spans curation, taste, and aesthetics, particularly in the context of the Internet, and as an important resistance against The Algorithm that can deter true individuality.
Transcript link for the readers out there.
The Mobis e-Cornering system on the wheels of this future Ioniq 5 is the dream.
Another great generative AI perspective (this one from John Siracusa) about the coming foibles of creative ownership and the relationship between those creating and those consuming. Very astute approach to thinking towards the right way to frame the big question of “who made this”.
Digging Chuck Wendig’s rant about generative AI and the creative arts, notably that the timing isn’t right yet for relying heavily on it (at all).
I think there is a use case for streamlining creative (in marketing, et al), but only to assist, never to replace.
Heavenly headline — Gartner predicts that half of consumers will abandon or limit use of social media interactions by 2025. Plenty of reasons that could catalyze this.
But… anyone’s guess if it’s an accurate prediction. I bet we’ll see a decline, mainly due to mental health, but nowhere near 50%.
Matthew Panzarino joined the startup TipTop (posted about it on The Obsessor). A more modern, integrated approach to selling electronics seems neat, yet I couldn’t get through setup — it requires a Google sign-in and Gmail scraping. Alas, it’s a red flag and a very poor UX for non-Gmail folks.