“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.”

BTW № 3: Analog Edition

By William Mackinnon.

“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.”

How to stay hopeful

“There’s nothing at all wrong with honing in, developing your craft, making variations of things you’re good at, and getting better each time. Nothing small about it. Nothing unfulfilling about it.”

Knives and battleships

“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.”

vague, inchoate feeling

Bunker hallway 3

Rain by Lea Ignatius

The wave building

Some things to click for your Friday.

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.

The last box of books from my dad.

Photos of Baltimore at Night.

BS 2000 a Beastie Boy adjacent project.

Good advice from Chris Glass: Send the Card.

The Amazing Art of the Video Game Marquee.

From Found Way, an amazing are.na collection of wayfinding, signs, etc.

Great sky last night.

Look: The art of Sebastian Foster

Look: The art of Kristin Moore

Watch: a summer without algorithms.

Read: The sound of inevitability: “These are some big names in the tech world, all framing the [AI] conversation in a very specific way. Rather than “is this the future you want?”, the question is instead “how will you adapt to this inevitable future?”. Note also the threatening tone present, a healthy psychological undercurrent encouraging you to go with the flow, because you’d otherwise be messing with scary powers way beyond your understanding.”

Sites I like: The HTML Review, Issue 04

Look: Polaroid celebrates the analogue way of life in Flip camera campaign

Read: what “creative magnet” means to me

Read: I’m Pretty Sure I Would Remember That

Sites I like: ambient.garden

Podcast: Breaking the Internet, 30 years of web history to answer the bewildering question many ask when they go online today: “How did we get here?”

Words: Petrichor, the smell of rain.

Sites I like: Artemis, a calm web reader.