civic
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“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
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Japan runs out of robot wolves in fight against bears (not a sci-fi story). popsci.com/environment/japan-robot-wolf-army/
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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.
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The Four Rules for a Good Walk:
useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting
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Personal Business. “The type of business that both sustains and is sustained by a community.” (are.na)
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Mangos. Manuals. Media.: librarians, heroes of the apocalypse.
Science Fiction Movie Lettering: “Glowing letters were a big trend that started in the late 80s, most likely set off by the Alien franchise. And I can never get enough of the 3D type in early films.” /via The Future is Like Pie
Examples of Good and Bad UX in Improvised Signage in Movie Theaters: answering is there an end or mid-credit scene?
Blackboard Bold: “a style of writing bold symbols on a blackboard by doubling certain strokes” /via SC 2.4.4
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“Dystopia is easy. You take what people are afraid of and tell them it’s right outside their door. The cure is to open the door and see the truth for yourself. What’s on the other side of the door is your neighbors, and some of them brought donuts.”
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From Found Way, an amazing are.na collection of wayfinding, signs, etc.
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“We’re getting to the point where ghosts are real. The future is here, valuing magic and mystery over reality. Not only are we aware of the difference, but we’re at peace with it.”
Louis Rosenfeld in reference to this.
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“Covey’s take was “an abundance mentality springs from internal security, not from external rankings, comparisons, opinion, possessions, or associations.” In my experience, that internal security overflows into their inner circle and wider community, believing that more for the people around them doesn’t equal less for them personally, but precisely the opposite — the more people succeed, the greater chance I will as well. Which fuels my desire to go on the offensive, helping my peers and strangers alike.”
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Sites I like: 18f.org. “But we came to the government to fix things. And we’re not done with this work yet.” Fuck yeah ❤️🔥
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Some Things, Week 6, 2025
Photo by Yama Bato.
You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism: “Trusted information networks have existed since long before the internet and mass media. These networks are in every town and city, and at their core are real relationships between neighbors—not their online, parasocial simulacra.”
Simulacrum: “a representation or imitation of a person or thing.”
90’s Hip-Hop: A 45 plus minutes mix of Golden Era Classics + Rarities.
Makara Peak Mountain Bike Park Wayfinding: Cool signs.
Ghimli Sans: A font with “a nice ol’ boozer vibe.”
Marginalia Search: “Find lost old websites.”
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AI Bureaucrats
You know, the world is being filled with AI bureaucrats that in the armies, in the banks, in the universities, in the governments, more and more decisions, which house to bomb, who is a terrorist, whether to give you a loan, whether to give you a job, whether to give you a place in a university. These decisions are increasingly made by AI. And these decisions are becoming opaque to us.
Yuval Noah Harari on the Hard Fork podcast.
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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.
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Doing good versus doing nothing
In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn’t been good versus evil. It’s hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.
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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
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Log of the Bay is a LOG of radio traffic received on Marine VHF channels form a basement window in Oakland, California.
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Akiya (vacant houses in Japan) “are becoming less like financial assets and more akin to natural resources, available to be harvested by those who wish put in the time and substantial effort to reclaim one from natural decay.”
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A far-right attack on a community college reveals a blueprint for destroying higher ed
The problem goes far beyond a three-person majority on the trustee board of a small community college. NIC and many other institutions are in danger because, over the last decade and a half, a core group of extremists has slowly taken over the Idaho Republican Party in the same way that a parasitic wasp slowly takes over its host. This required no astroturfing or Koch-fueled cash infusions, just a regular, everyday indifference to hyperlocal politics. The tactic is underway elsewhere, but Idaho got a head start. This crisis is what happens when insurgency bears fruit.
Emphasis mine. Currently looking for more ways to be involved in my community.
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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.
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IKEA Catalog from a Near Future
Some design fiction on the " …possible evolutions of home life, consumer trends and needs, and related topics in the categories of domestic life, food, urban life, travel, leisure, and entertainment."
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Forums Are Still Alive, Active, And A Treasure Trove Of Information
Forums Are Still Alive, Active, And A Treasure Trove Of Information:
Here are the Internet forums that are still alive and kicking and full of information and interesting people.
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The networks we use to communicate across fields and distances, to find our friends and learn from people unlike ourselves—and to organize ourselves to respond to acute crises and long, grinding institutional failures—are the same networks that are making so many of us miserable and/or deranged.
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Not Built For This is a 6-part series from 99% Invisible. It explores how climate change is laying bare the vulnerabilities in the American built environment and how communities across the country have been left to bootstrap their own survival.
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American suburbs are full of ugly, empty, liminal spaces: spaces you are not meant to linger in or enjoy. They’re the creepy hallways of the built environment, and you can’t feel comfortable traversing them unless you’re zooming past them in a car.
American Suburbs Are a Horror Movie and We’re the Protagonists
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America’s 7-Elevens to become ‘Japanese style’: “Japan’s 7-Eleven locations – referred to as konbini – have a different vibe. There, they put a focus on “tantalizing food,” according to TODAY. Items found at Japanese 7-Eleven stores include onigiri (rice balls), fried chicken, sushi, egg sandwiches, fresh pastries, mochi and hot bar items”
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The internet isn’t for humans anymore. Bots use the internet more than we do; use shapes design.
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If the web is now a metaphorical barren wasteland, pillaged by commercial interests and growth-at-all-costs management consultants, then I’m all the more motivated to keep my little patch of land lush, and green, and filled with rainbow flowers.
— My own little patch - Rach Smith
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The scale of the algorithm exceeds even our own understanding; its returns benefit only its owners and leave the rest of us awash in noise and bereft of understanding.
— Unscalable, Hand-Crafted Lists of Links - Christopher Butler
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Every place I’m from is gone because it’s not just a place, it’s a place at a certain time. It would take a time machine to go back.
— Should I move back to France? - Mike Monteiro
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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.
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They Didn’t Just Want to Build a Housing Shelter. They Wanted to Shift Public Perception:
Changing the way the public perceives shelters informed the design. From the nearby highway, the first glimpse you get of the structure includes an impressive mural by Australian artist Guido van Helten stretched across its 3,000-square-foot facade. A passerby might think this is an art museum, a shop, or possibly a school.
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What I learned from taking a train across the US. “Here’s how US train travel went from excellent to mediocre.” A Vox video.