Hello.

Quite a lot has changed since Roo’s Letter #199 (imagine reaching #199 and leaving it there!). In the last one, we were waiting for Article 50 to be invoked. I can’t bear to talk about it. 

Things I can bear to talk about:

Dan Hon’s newsletter - which some of you will remember I linked to in #154 to give a bright eager young thing a bit of a leg up - is back! Dan’s typing will (partly) be going behind a paywall with an exciting payment model that sounds weird at first but actually makes perfect sense. I’m excited for him. Sign up! Pay him money for regular helpings of his brain!
danhon.substack.com

DCMS has published its report in to ‘Immersive and addictive technologies’. If you make games for a living, you’ll definitely want to have a look at this. Short version: don’t make games aimed at kids which use loot boxes as a game dynamic. Obviously. Nice to see the evidence from Jo Twist getting lots of mentions here. 
publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/1846/1846.pdf

These high-vis Chicken Jackets ensure your hens are safe and visible in the dark, apparently. But having kept chickens I’m not sure that chickens really want to be out in the dark. I’d love to know if it’s off-putting to foxes though.
www.omlet.us/shop/gifts/chicken_clothing/

If we terraformed Mars and the Moon, what would the continents/oceans would look like? 
vizual-statistix.tumblr.com/post/110268185576/terraforming-other-planets-is-a-common-theme-of

@nicprice, building on a Sketch version by @charles_rt, has published a Google Drawings template for flow diagrams of government services. I can see myself using this quite a bit.
docs.google.com/drawings/d/15txoABMNSpjT6gTL2GXvCbgdpR2qb3w837-yGhxfFNc

For World Suicide Prevention Day, James Whatley published this absolute punch to the stomach of a Twitter thread. I’m glad he was brave enough to share this. It’s a difficult but important read.
twitter.com/Whatleydude/status/1171512562854199300

This short video is silly and funny and requires sound. I think I’ve watched it about 8 times today
twitter.com/post_prufrock/status/1165069258449137665?s=12


Yours sincerely  
Roo

Roo Reynolds  
@rooreynolds  
tinyletter.com/rooreynolds


P.S. You’ve probably forgotten this existed, let alone why you signed up for it, so permit me a brief recap. Between January 2012 (‘Roo’s News’) and June 2016 (‘Roo’s Letter 199, Article 50’) I sent a short email newsletter with some hopefully-interesting links. It initially started as a daily (!) list of things that caught the eye of someone newly starting out in a (short lived) career in advertising, not entirely sure what his job should involve but knowing for sure that it included keeping an eye on what the internet was doing - and quickly morphed into a weekly newsletter. I then changed jobs, twice, and had a child, one. For some reason I ran out of time/energy/brain. 

At least some of that cognitive surplus has gradually returned, so I propose to continue to email you around 5-10 interesting links once per week. Probably on a Friday. 

If receiving a short list of links now sounds like an awful idea, please don’t feel bad about unsubscribing immediately, or just replying to this letting me know you made a terrible mistake many years ago.