November 11, 2025

NESTED! Spaghetti siege, baby windows, goon squad, making friends

Hey pals! Here are some links I thought were worth sharing this month.

I’ve been very lazy sending this newsletter this year but I have now built a backlog of links so I promise I will try to get back to a more regular cadence 💝

Wikipedia is the best website

• Disemvoweling is an amazing portmanteau describing process of removing or substituting vowels from words while keeping them readable, as in SMS speak (or “txt msgs”), moderation (“f*ck”) or looking cool (Mstrkrft, MGMT)
• The Spaghetti House siege took place in 1975, when robbers entered the Spaghetti House restaurant below Hyde Park in London and took employees hostage for six days.
• The murder of Liu Mengying is… peak lesbian drama from 1932? “The relationship was frequently marked by jealousy by Liu towards other girls, which intensified after Tao became close to a female instructor at the college” so she stabbed her???
• Time Cube was a “pseudoscientific” (aka crackpot) theory living on a 1997 personal web page, which hypothesises each day actually consists of four days occurring simultaneously. (It includes racist and homophobic tropes, somehow). It’s not much by today's standards, but the aesthetics of the rant are extremely 1997 GeoCities.
• Grimm's law is a description named after Jacob Grimm (of Fairy Tales fame) of a systematic sound change in Germanic languages, which established consistent links between Germanic (including English) and other European languages.

Zoop

Mildly interesting

• A truly gripping long read on “baby windows”, safe places to anonymously abandon a baby in a hatch, which still exist (or are newly created) in a few places in Europe.
• “It is therefore a fact of the world that virtually all the popular synthetic sweeteners were discovered accidentally by chemists randomly eating their research topic”: a fascinating micro-history of aspartame and similar compounds.
• Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa, an excellent explanation of the solar boom in poor, rural communities and the non-obvious technologies that made it possible (mobile payments!)
• A study has found that the safety performance of bike helmets does not meaningfully degrade with age: unless you’ve had an impact that broke it, you probably don’t need to change it every few years, like manufacturers recommend.
  • Cycling-related: great piece on bike designer Grant Petersen, who urges people to get slower bikes and take it slow.¹
• The Goon Squad is one of the wilder pieces about porn I’ve read recently. I recommend reading it for the WTF factor, but chase it with this critique, which takes a more skeptical and less sensationalistic view from a queer lens.

Everything is depressing

• Glass bottles found to contain more microplastics than plastic bottles because of plastic caps. Nothing is safe!!
• Long wait times for women’s toilets are a result of everyday, architectural sexism.
• “Out, proud and Republican”: a look into Donald Trump’s big gay government. The mental gymnastics of far-right gays will never cease to amaze me.
  • @ my few French readers: I recently learned about JMLP openly using « gestapette » about Florian Philippot, and ça me fume
• Tonga, in the Pacific, has been extremely offline since 2022 after a volcanic eruption destroyed its underwater cables connecting it to the internet.
• AI stuff in no particular order:
  • The majority AI view: the case for treating LLMs as a normal technology without undue hype
  • Cory Doctorow on the upcoming economic self-implosion of AI companies.
  • Don't feed me AI slop: very pertinent observations here on what feels wrong when seeing AI output in the wild. Roughly summed up as “no one wants to read someone else’s ChatGPT”, particularly if it makes the same content less dense.
  • Good point: if superproductive AI coding claims added up, we’d be swimming in shovelware.

Good to look at

• An existential guide to making friends (what a JOYFUL piece of writing)
  • More from the same writer: How I will help you and a guide to living the good life.
• Useful mental tools for thinking about censorship at scale.
• The product of the railways is the timetable: “a railway moves people around, not trains”.
• Adam Mastroianni asks if we’re in a crisis of deviance: are we culturally stagnating if there’s not much weirdness left?
  • And more from him on why everything seems doomed but we’re doing nothing about it.
• An peek into an intentional retirement community of 11 women, 9 dogs and no guys in Texas.
• 50 Cent, adjusted for inflation. Nobel Prize in Economics.
• Fun little daily word game: Omiword. It’s like Knotwords but jazzier.

Work! Design! Tech!

• I knew about the “document culture” at Amazon, but this insider look at what this means in practice is full of interesting ideas for good communication.
• Amen to this UI mantra: you’re animating more often than you should. I wish more designers had the taste to edit themselves down!
• Very cool visual introduction to Big O notation; as someone who hasn’t taken computer science this always mystified me a bit but this makes lots of sense!
• Useful concept to learn: the market for lemons explains information asymmetry in different contexts (hiring, dating, e-commerce, AI).

Not yours at all,

Victor