Total: 50 posts
Posts in: slow
- An illustrated guide to science-backed mood boosters.
- A zine about reclaiming your life from digital technology.
- A tool for searching independent websites.
- A collection of the “best” marketing headlines on the internet.
- Over the Garden Wall’s 10th anniversary stop motion short.
- Max Vogel Gonzalez’s illustrations.
- An experiment with giving out potatoes to trick or treaters.
- A concept to break procrastination.
- Some objects I covet: Nike C1TY “Surplus” shoes, El Oso Bear Tee, the Kobo Clara Colour, and the book Assembling Tomorrow.
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Anyone else enjoy looking at the tracking details of a package. Watching an item wend it’s way through a system of warehouses, trucks / trains, and multiple states. Maybe I’m the only shipping infrastructure nerd out here.
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“And yet, making observations is a good starting point for giving feedback. The trouble arises when we assume that those observations are both the start and the end, that we’re walking along a very short track.” From What you see by Mandy Brown. Can I say how much I appreciate everything changes? Lot’s of thoughtful writing!
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The website for the restaurant, Madeline’s is just so great. I was thinking the receipt concept would break down with deeper navigation, but nope!
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Lake Superior should really be considered an inland sea that is “wild, masterful, and dreaded.”
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Ok, I want this van.
tech
slow
Read: Secondhand Embarrassment
tools
slow
“What I love about pencils is the balance they strike: you can geek out on materials, production, or mark-making, and yet some of the best pencils being made will only run you a dollar or two. So you don’t have to sweat lending one out or losing one.”
work
Life
slow
“There seems to be a certain essence in us that we must allow to guide us through life. If we defy this compass, we can end up in places we don’t belong. But if we trust it, follow it, we might do something as grand as fulfilling our purpose.”
books
design
tech
slow
architecture
On Additive and Extractive Technologies, “an extractive technology seeks to extract value from you instead of providing it.” Avoid.
Seer, “the built environment itself is, for all intents and purposes, becoming a gigantic archive, at all scales, forensically recording every event that occurs within it, with few or no options for opting out.” Also, BLDGBLOG is still alive.
Google Fonts organized by vibe, even if fonts aren’t your thing, visit to see all the little cursors flying around the Figma canvas.
Alistair Smith’s personal site is pretty neat.
slow
Watch: a summer without algorithms.
words
slow
sites i like
slow
rss
Sites I like: Artemis, a calm web reader.
slow
Read: Get Your Kids A Landline
slow
“In many ways the Light Phone III is a more mellow act of defiance, because it can pass as a regular smartphone, when in the hand. The camera lens peeks out in a recognizable way right above the palm, and the foreshortened size isn’t obvious at first. Whereas the Light Phone II was a clear if meek middle finger stuck up at smartphone addiction, the Light Phone III is more like the bird that you slowly crank up out of your fist—it takes a second to get it.”
Life
tech
slow
“I often wonder about the costs of the “digital echo.” What is the psychological cost of knowing that your actions aren’t just your own, but create information that can be observed and analyzed by others? As more aspects of our lives generate digital echoes, they force an ambient awareness of being perpetually witnessed rather than simply existing.”
tech
slow
“Meanwhile, my little home-cooked apps each do the one thing they are supposed to do, sparkle-free. These apps are substantially finished the day I “launch” them, and, unlike modern commercial software, they are allowed to just: be finished.”
Life
slow
Watch: Little Joys (2 minutes)
look book
slow
Look: Living seasonally
tech
slow
The return of the Pebble watch
The new watch we’re building basically has the same specs and features as Pebble, though with some fun new stuff as well 😉 It runs open source PebbleOS, and it’s compatible with all Pebble apps and watchfaces. If you had a Pebble and loved it…this is the smartwatch for you.
Why We’re Bringing Pebble Back
I’m so in!
Life
civic
slow
Solitude changes us
The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality.
From The Anti-Social Century. Emphasis mine.
books
slow
Fiction resists summary
It is an interesting feature of stories and fiction that they resist summary. You cannot read a summary of Anna Karenina and somehow stockpile its pleasures and charms. Narrative resists compression.
slow
the internet
a recurrent theme is a fatigue with the style of self-narration that the platforms encourage — which, whether we realize it or not, has been heavily influenced by brand storytelling logics. We talk about ourselves like we’re products.
Life
civic
slow
the best defense, the most meaningful work, the best preparation you can do at the level of an individual life is to boost your local resilience. To become a person of place. To connect with the people and land where you live. This is what we’re built to do.
How I became ‘collapse aware’. This is not a depressing read (or listen, the author read option was great)! /via Dense Discovery
design
slow
How (and why) filmmakers like Wes Anderson and Christopher Nolan are using miniatures in their movies.
look book
slow
From the Paynter Jacket Co. in 2020, but may be just as useful “care” guidelines for now. I’d add “Spend time with old friends” to the list as well. I was lucky enough to do that this past weekend and can say it recharges the batteries.
slow
it’s okay if you just pick one thing you really care about, and it’s okay if that thing is “being a good friend” instead of “maximizing your potential”
slow
This is a recent development in the history of human civilization: To wake up with the whole world in your bed
art
tools
books
links
Life
design
slow
the internet
Links for Week 45, 2024
civic
slow
architecture
Any code I’ve written, any glib digital creation, disappears into the infinite feed. But a playground will stubbornly stand for the next twenty years, pointing to big ideas in computer science. It’s something I think about often.
slow
the internet
Enumerating all the ways the internet currently sucks. Example:
You buy a microwave and receive ads for microwaves. You buy a mattress and receive ads for mattresses.
No one wants this.
The article does end on a positive note:
You read the Wikipedia entry and there is a lot of useful information supplied by a community. One of the sources cited is a non-fiction book. You go to your local library’s website and although they don’t have the exact book, they do have others by the same author. You place a hold on two of them, then go get your shoes on.
/via Chris Glass
civic
tech
slow
How a Connecticut middle school won the battle against cellphones (🎁 link)
Gabe Silver, another eighth-grader, echoed that sentiment. When the pouches first arrived, “everyone was miserable and no one was talking to each other,” he said. Now he can hear the difference at lunch and in the hallways. It’s louder. Students are chatting more “face to face, in person,” Gabe said. “And that’s a crucial part of growing up.”
I know there has been pushback against The Anxious Generation’s use of research, but I tend to agree with Zoë Schiffer from Platformer. Too much phone time (for kids or adults) just feels bad:
At the same time, we shouldn’t set aside the lived experiences of so many everyday smartphone users. For many of us, constant connectivity feels bad, and doomscrolling can heighten feelings of anxiety and depression. Meanwhile, getting outside and spending time with loved ones face to face can be the antidote to despair. I’m sympathetic to researchers who call attention to that dynamic, even if disputes remain about which claims are grounded in unassailable evidence.
blogging
sites i like
slow
the internet
Is the kottke.org comment section the best community on the web? I’m not a member yet, but I have been a lurker and it seems like a great place to hang out digitally.
work
links
design
sites i like
slow
Some things for week 16 of 2024.
blogging
slow
the internet
The Analog Web: “Owning your own piece of the Internet (to borrow a recent phrase from Anil Dash) is itself a radical act. Linking to others at will is subversive all on its own.”
tools
slow
Paper and pencil: “The tool which allows you to plan, record, create, schedule, sketch, brainstorm and write a love note. Never be without the pair.”
slow
the internet
The Death of the Follower: “Something that’s not contorting our online personas in the image of the algorithm to reach ~10% more strangers who probably don’t care, and won’t stick around.”
work
slow
We Need More Calm Companies: “The path to success isn’t to “grind harder” but to build products that people want that you can sell with healthy profit margins.”
tech
slow
The truth is that whether or not AI determines our future will be decided by a confoundingly small minority of humans who nevertheless control a counfoundingly vast majority of the world’s wealth. This is not a technology issue, really, but one of structural inequality.
From Out Random the AI.
See also, Jon Stewart on the False Promises of AI
slow
“Night Driving” for Volkswagen. Man, I forgot ads used to have the capacity to be amazing. See “Milky Way” also for Volkswagen. Via @genmon on accessing something other: “escape time, escape selfhood, whether that’s driving in the dark or sitting in a hotel lobby or walking.”
Life
slow
No joke, loveless grilled cheese sandwiches suck.
slow
Walden Pond “is a little paper zine that comes once a month in the mail. It’s full of a selection of the articles you’ve saved to Pocket.”
slow
I miss human curation. Same, I’m doing my best at thingstoclick.com!
slow
the internet
"Humans weren’t designed for this level of omniscience"
Source: @technicallymims on threads.net
work
slow
Recommended dosage of work: “to get the mental wellbeing benefits of paid work, the most “effective dose” is only around one day a week – as anything more makes little difference.” Not an Onion article.
slow
Deepening a relationship. Visiting a sick friend. Serving at a soup kitchen. Andreessen’s “techno-optimist” mindset is confounded by acts of love. They don’t make money, they don’t supercharge a market, and perhaps most heretically, they’re typically low-tech or even involve no technology at all. What is a techno-optimist supposed to do with this “love” idea, this thing that keeps people out of markets and off the internet? It literally doesn’t compute.
tech
slow
There were devices that simply did what they were for, without demanding attention. For their makers, they had some real problems. They had moving parts, which meant that they required more factory tooling and had more warranty returns. They were terrible for displaying advertisements. Without always-on internet connections, they were really bad for buying other things with.
From Glow by Tom MacWright.
Some of my favorite non-glowing devices that are still in use:
slow
They talk about you, gurgling sugar through their roots …
Source: Root Words
design
slow
A touchscreen, then, operates as a digital platform where features can be locked or unlocked by the company at will, depending on customers’ rent payments. Physical buttons, on the other hand, can’t be turned into rent. They only serve the customer, so they’re less attractive.
Source: Creative Good: Why car companies (still) ignore customers
blogging
slow
Rad Reader by Alexander Cobleigh. “It’s like a pokedex for personal websites, and designed to surface the latest posts for you to view rather than juggle an ever-increasing inbox.”
tech
slow
If your concept of “progress” doesn’t put people at the center of it, is it even progress?
Source: I’m a Ludite (and so can you!)