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Posted on September 11, 2024 Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, FreeSoftWear I’ve been influenced again into feeling the need for a garment. It was again a case of multiple sources conspiring in the same direction for unrelated reasons, but I decided I absolutely needed a linen hood, made from the heavy white linen I knew I had in my stash. Why? I don’t know. I do like the feeling of wearing a …

Back in August 2022, I read the novelette, "Fire Watch," by Connie Willis. It was published in a collection with the same title, and was part of the same universe as Willis's Oxford Time Travel series: Doomsday Book (1992), To Say Nothing of the Dog (1995), Blackout (2010), and All Clear (2010). I liked "Fire Watch" a lot but I did think that it might not be too clear if …

'No One at All' by 'New Cross' was released on New Cross Skyline records, 133 New Cross Road SE14 c1981. Written and produced by Tony Messenger. Anybody know any more?Update:Tony Messenger was seemingly producer of South London troubador Billy Jenkins. Here's a picture of Tony from the Billy Jenkins Listening Club site

In his 2015 shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos talks about two types of decisions - those that are best represented as one-way doors, and those that are more like two-way doors.This thought process about how reversible a decision is applies anywhere in business, and it's no different when it comes to software development.Bezos describes the difference himself quite succinctly in that shareholder letter: Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly …

"So that story sounds like bullshit." I remember saying that to Akilah Hughes early in our first production meeting about the podcast that would become Rebel Spirit, which launched last week and released its second episode today. Akilah had just relayed the story she'd been told of how her high school got its name "the Rebels": the students of the founding class in the mid-1950s were so enamored with the …

Sony has officially unveiled the PlayStation 5 Pro, a beefier version of their four-year-old console that boasts the ability to play games at both a higher graphical fidelity and a higher frame rate. It costs £699. Fuck me. I don’t love my PlayStation 5. It is the most boring game console I have ever owned by a wide margin, offering little in the way of notable features or exciting quirks. …

Matt dropped me a line to show me this video that he had made, digging through every documentary source the he could find to clip footage of Charles Schulz drawing, including Schulz’s own commentary. It does get a bit mesmerizing. I kinda prefer that there was more strip work than stand-alone images, as so much more goes into that, but it’s still fascinating to see how he can clearly already …

Fewer than 300 US federal websites in late 1994 I’ve just added a mention a mention of the Federal Internet Source to my Magforum page about the history of digital magazines. It struck me what a ridiculous idea this would seem today – a spiral-bound directory of US federal websites. The copy of the directory I have from autumn 1994 proudly lists ‘nearly 300 sources of government information on the …

I've watched Saturday Night Live from a frighteningly early age—I bet I've seen almost every episode live from about 1979 onwards, when I was barely 7 years old staying up late on Saturday nights to see some comedy.Before NBC launches into their 50th season of SNL in a couple weeks, I wanted to highlight my favorite sketches from the past season that I still think about months later. #3 DetectivesMy …

I was born in 1980, which technically makes me a part of Generation X; there is at least one data point, though, that makes me a millennial. In 2021 Fast Company conducted a survey about what constituted middle age; millennials defined it as 35 to 50, while Generation X said 45 to 55 (Baby Boomers said 45 to 60). For my part, I wrote that Apple was in its middle …

An Airbus 380 and Boeing 747, from Tom Hagen’s Lockdown Series, later a book called simply Airports:During the lockdown time in March, April and May, I took photographs of the largest German Airports and their resting runways. It was a historic moment and a unique opportunity to get these images.

Joan Myers, as she prepared to embark on writing her own revisionist history of the Arbuckle trials, saw that the primary sources, as of 2013, would be newspaper accounts.* At the time, searchable databases provided by the Library of Congress, Newspapers.com, the California Digital Newspaper Collection, and so on were game-changers for researchers. Nevertheless, Ms. Myers warned against relying on the reportage of the early 1920s, meaning, of course, that …

The whole idea behind “Tuesday Tune Two-Fer” was to find unexpected connections between songs, and then ride that train of thought into something else. And I thought this would be the perfect, quintessential example: “Hold Up” from Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and “Maps” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs from Fever to Tell. As it turns out, it’s not-at-all tangential, and not really much of a story: The guy from Vampire Weekend riffed on …

"Check your ego at the door. No gods, no rockstars. Only n00bs." --thegibson I try to go off the grid every couple of months to get away from everything and free up compute cycles for messing around with stuff. For whatever reason I find it helpful to go off to someplace quiet, possibly because it means that I can be nonverbal for a while. It definitely helps with my ADD. …

Sasha & The Bear We’re The Only Following on from their celluloid-soaked epic, Something You Said, from September last year, duo Sasha & The Bear are back with new single We’re The Only. Last time we checked in with Sasha & The Bear, the pair had been brought back together despite being divided by geography. With Dov having moved to Tel Aviv, the death of his mother brought him even …