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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

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.”

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.”

BTW № 3: Analog Edition

“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

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.

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.”