Mechanical Pencil, an illustrated celebration of the engineering around us.
“Bar-tabacs are part café, part shop. You can buy cigarettes, lottery tickets, or newspapers, and sit down for a coffee or a glass of wine. They’re not particularly glamorous, but they serve as everyday meeting points, especially in rural areas … when a new bar-tabac opens, the far-right vote share will decline over time.” europeancorrespondent.com
“Years ago in Brooklyn, a wine-fueled Friendsgiving led to discovering a mysterious secret cavern underneath a Brooklyn Heights historic mansion.” metafilter.com
Japan runs out of robot wolves in fight against bears (not a sci-fi story). popsci.com/environment/japan-robot-wolf-army/
A memorial gallery of useless websites that once lived on The Useless Web and have since gone offline, been squatted, or otherwise vanished. theuselessweb.com/sites-we-lost
“This is going to sound insane, but when I was a kid I found out my dad secretly recorded our phone calls.” emilyadel.lol/cassettes
Lines, Ranked from McSweeney’s is pretty funny. My favorite:
Under. A little bench for your letters.
Affluent families pay for the unbundled services and get something close to what civic infrastructure used to provide, except curated and selective and predictably high-quality. They aren’t just buying community. They’re buying social risk insurance: insulation from institutional failure, controlled peer environments, future opportunity pipelines. They’re also buying the option to never encounter the people whose lives are getting worse because the substrate they’re paying to replace has gone missing for everyone else.
Title Scream: Type + Graphic inspiration from 8/16bit game title screens.
Words per … words-per-sentence.netlify.app
Hell in Baltimore www.flickr.com/photos/pa…
A visual explorer for unicode charcuterie.elastiq.ch
“When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark” www.theatlantic.com/magazine/…
I have the previous version of this knife and use the little pry bar as much as the knife thejamesbrand.com/products/…
Maxwell Ito, maker of the useless maxwellito.com
“The practice economy is what keeps a community running. It’s knitted together through relationships, reputation, and service. It’s the most resilient form of work in human history, compressed by every economic revolution. It always comes back.” schoolofthepossible.substack.com/p/the-pra…
A hippo by Roger Duvoisin mltshp.com/p/1RNKZ
Drone video of polygon ice waves youtu.be/35S6IM_aQ…
Drone inspired art by Francisco Fonseca www.instagram.com/p/DWv0nB_…
“Impromptu meals with friends. Making memories with my family. Going to bed early instead of watching another episode. Amazingly waking up (earlier!) feeling rested. Walking in the woods. Making more room to eat, drink, and be merry. (And play Magic: the Gathering.) All of those things are, by nature, slow, unproductive (depending on who you ask), and, perhaps because of their inherent slowness, compounders of joy over time.” blankenship.substack.com/p/margina…