Happy Halloween everyone! If you’re looking for something to get you through the day, here is an ongoing collection of spooky art, podcast episodes, videos, and articles.
Personal Business. “The type of business that both sustains and is sustained by a community.” (are.na)
The not-so-spooky origins of ‘ghost’ — and why the word still haunts our language (npr.org)
Bookmarklets, a small selection of premade bookmarklets you can try.
Secondhand Embarrassment. (robinsloan.com)
Some things I liked this week:
These chair friends
This bit on finishing things, I added it to my collection of endings
This cute video: Beastie Boys through the years
This site: LOADMORE that “collects distinctive mobile experiences” worth the click just for the little mascot
Read: This company is turning empty offices across America into farms / via SC 2.4.4
Watch: In Search Of… Ghosts - Season 1 Episode 18 (23:24)
Subscribe: 31 Days of Halloween
Watch: Ghost Waltz (2:04)
Listen: Flow State: Okonski. A nice listen to go gently into your weekend.
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
Haunted Words, Part 4
A collection of ghost words …
🆕 Ghost Newspapers: “Most towns still have a local newspaper, but they don’t cover their communities any more.”
Ghost Forests: “The haunting remains of what were once stands of cedar and pine. Since the late 19th century, an ever-widening swath of these trees have died along the shore. These arboreal graveyards are showing up in places where the land slopes gently into the ocean and where salty water increasingly encroaches. Along the United States’ east coast, in pockets of the west coast and elsewhere, saltier soils have killed hundreds of thousands of acres of trees, leaving behind woody skeletons typically surrounded by marsh.”
Ghost Artists: “Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts.” /via pixel envy
Ghost Hotels: “The “ghost hotel” nomenclature refers to an entire apartment building which is functionally a hotel because most or all units are short-term rentals instead of tenant-occupied.”
Ghost Network Healthcare: “…he, like millions of Americans, was trapped in a “ghost network.” As some of those people have discovered, the providers listed in an insurer’s network have either retired or died. Many other providers have stopped accepting insurance — often because the companies made it excessively difficult for them to do so. Some just aren’t taking new patients. Insurers are often slow to remove them from directories, if they do so at all. It adds up to a bait and switch by insurance companies that leads customers to believe there are more options for care than actually exist.”
Ghost Network Television: “Now MTV is a ghost. Its average prime-time audience of 256,000 people in 2023 was down from 807,000 in 2014, the Nielsen company said. One recent evening MTV aired reruns of “Ridiculousness” from 5 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.”
Ghost Kitchen: “A virtual restaurant, also known as a ghost kitchen, cloud kitchen or dark kitchen, is a food service business that serves customers exclusively by delivery and pick-up based on phone and online ordering.[1] Virtual restaurants are stand-alone businesses that either operate out of an existing restaurant’s kitchen or from a separate kitchen set-up away from a restaurant.”
See also: American Suburbs Are a Horror Movie and We’re the Protagonists “That’s how I feel when I walk through the bare, people-less parking lots of my neighborhood to get to the grocery store. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen other pedestrians while making this trip. If not for the moving cars nearby, it would be like walking through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It’s an isolating experience, one that makes me feel very small and vulnerable.”
This week I:
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Crawled the unhinged, but enjoyable Things you might find in a dungeon are.na board.
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Watched Why everyone is quitting social media … on a social media platform, with an ad in the middle, but it still rings true.
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Enjoyed the Geronimo Stilton style caption creator and the interactive eye-following card.
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Really dug J. Marshall Smith’s art. Especially these two.
I am currently:
Really into this mural painted by Ariel Lee.
Listening to Rain Country by John Swanke.
Coveting these pocket notebooks from Big I Design.
Liking these “humble phantoms” carved from wood.
Nodding along to this definition of the night feeling h/t Jack Cheng.
Glass Window by Brett Allen Johnson
grug.design “grug make design. grug not know much. but grug know pain. grug try to avoid pain. grug learn over many fire-cycles.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”