A running collection of things I’ve found interesting, well-made, or worth spreading—mostly from art, design, tech, photography, and film, with the occasional thought or two of my own.
Lux, the makers of the excellent iPhone camera app Halide, have penned a long piece on the camera module of the iPhone 13 and where (phone) photography is headed, with lots of pictures, too. Highly recommended reading if you too are thinking about the future of cameras.
via pixel envy
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Lisa Whittington-Hill likes biographies and memoirs and, having read a bunch of them, noticed that they tend to be gender-biased – all the dirty, spicy, private details are expected from women, at the same time, men can pretty much write about whatever.
Back, way way back, phones, the kind that are for making calls only were the electronic service. Hacking these telecom systems, be it with the help of electronics or social engineering, or both was called phreaking. This The Verge story is about one of the best phreakers of her time who suddenly pulled the disappearing act.
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While it undoubtedly helped spread some great ideas and inspired people with stories of human tenacity, the TED talk has also been rightfully mocked for being blind to its own hubris. Oscar Schwartz for the Drift mag on the history and legacy of the conference with notable moments, both good and bad.
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Held in the notorious Silivri prison, 90 kilometers from Istanbul, for the past six years, Fevzi Yazıcı designed a unique typeface. He drew it with a pencil in his dimly lit solitary-confinement cell and named it “Firdevs,” for his wife. - "Letters from a Turkish prison"
via Jeffrey Zeldman
The lead client blinked, cleared his throat, and finally said, in a thick Irish brogue:
“I’m afraid it’s far too clever for our needs. It calls too much attention to itself on the page,” he explained—as if getting a distracted newspaper reader to notice his company’s message was a bad thing.
The lead client asked us to set “Ireland $399” in bold type, stick a shamrock in one of the 9s, and call it a day.
Fear of getting noticed is a terrible thing. It’s also a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Skateboarding was banned in Norway for 11 years, from 1978 to 1989, which, obviously, made skaters build gnarly ramps like that one in the woods.
Japan is littered with vending machines, always beaming, always ready to (mostly) quench your thirst, or appetite for pretty much anything you can think of. And not just in the cities – I once came across one, very conveniently, halfway up the hill at the Fushimi Inari-Taisha.
See this odd-looking thing on top of the frontmost pillars in this 1858 photograph of the ruins of Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens? Paul Cooper does some detective work in this Twitter thread to find out what it is.
It is fascinating to trace the origins of these glitches of nothingness: inconsequential tweets that turned into inconsequential TikToks that turned into inconsequential news articles that somehow, suddenly seemed more consequential than anything else that day.
Nodding in agreement here. I've always watched these things mostly from the sidelines and lately, even the fads barely justify being called fads We seem to have collectively become so foggy and jaded and just so very done with this, whatever this is, that these sorts of cheap thrills have become the thing du jour because it’s the most effort we’re able to make. We just can't even anymore.
old man shaking his head in disappointment at the cloud.jpg
