“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.”
“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.”
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.
Watch: a summer without algorithms.
Look: Polaroid celebrates the analogue way of life in Flip camera campaign
Sites I like: Artemis, a calm web reader.
Read: Get Your Kids A Landline
“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.”
“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.”