things, week 33, 2024
This edition covers 8-bit lens, community connection, research as fun, suburbs' horror movie, and more - all jam-packed!
Hi!
Sorry I haven’t sent a message in a while. I've been doing all the Summer things. To make it up to you I have an early jammed pack edition today!
An 8-bit lens
This Crystal Fragment turns everything you see into 8-bit Pixel Art:
The wearable Pixel Mirror, developed by Hakusi Katei aka Monoli, a Japanese material designer and Ph.D. in engineering, is a crystal that reduces the resolution of what’s behind it – regardless of distance and movement – leaving you with a pixel art of what you are looking at.
An antidote to disconnection
Lisa Maria Marquis writes about her feeling of disconnection from her community of work peers in the wake of Twitter’s cesspoolification (aside, I feel like Twitter is in a worse state than Enshittification) and professional conferences dying out. Her antidote? Roll your own community:
Talking to people. No, shut up, listen: If the problem is disconnection, the answer is to make deliberate connections. Wild, I know. So that’s what I’ve been doing: just talking. Having conversations. Asking friends to hop on a Zoom. Reaching out to colleagues I haven’t caught up with lately. Chitchatting! Connecting.
Research = fun
The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and interest. It’s not about the formal credentials. It’s fundamentally about play. It seems to describe a life where it’s just fun to be reading, learning, writing, and collaborating on ideas.
Suburbs are cursed with liminal spaces
American Suburbs Are a Horror Movie and We’re the Protagonists is an argument for walkable neighborhoods and against this …
American suburbs are full of ugly, empty, liminal spaces: spaces you are not meant to linger in or enjoy. They’re the creepy hallways of the built environment, and you can’t feel comfortable traversing them unless you’re zooming past them in a car.
Speed round!
- Tokyo’s oldest train line – in pictures, worth the click just to see the design of the lead train’s grill (if that is what you call those?).
- Two sites for inspiration: Site of Sites and Desigeist.
- Two Reddit communities of note: r/BenignExistence and r/BooksThatFeelLikeThis.
- Mundango, a game about normal things.
- Mushroom Color Atlas.
Bye!
My kids are going back to school soon. The season is turning to Autumn here. Another turn of the dial. I hope you are well in whatever season you find yourself going into.
If you ever want to say hi you can find me on Mastodon or Bluesky.
Until next time!
~ Guy