June 2026 blend of links
Some links don’t call for a full blog post, but sometimes I still want to share the good stuff I encounter on the web.
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Fancy Man Enjoys Tea (The Onion) – “Instead of simply heating a mug of water in the microwave, Baumer used a hoity-toity copper-bottomed tea kettle, which His Lordship reportedly purchased at Pier One Imports in 2003 for the express purpose of tea-making.”
Here is why Vim uses HJKL keys as arrow keys (Peteris Krumins) – Now, this is a great conversation starter if you happen to be around Vim users. (via 82MHz)
Still City (Takaaki Yagi 八木崇晶) – “Imaginary architecture from old copy paper noise”: I really love these. (via Dense Discovery)
PeerTube – I discovered this by chance, and I wonder why this isn’t a more popular alternative to YouTube, or at least a backup option for channel owners (I refuse to use the term ‘creators’).
Flip-Phone (Commodore) – I think this not-so-dumb flip phone is far too expensive to become a commercial success, and I personally find the retro look a bit ugly, but I wish it would inspire more companies to produce phones like this: basically dumb phones, but capable of running apps like WhatsApp and a few others, say, the main banking apps. For me, the appeal of these devices isn’t really about avoiding distractions and the doomscrolling temptation from smartphones; it’s about the smaller, different, and interesting form factor. Enough of the 6-inch glass slabs.
We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World (Om Malik) – “Everyone from Jensen Huang to Sam Altman to Elon Musk spent a decade accumulating what I have called symbolic capital, the reputation, the prestige, the weight of being seen as someone who understands the future better than the rest of us. Now each of them seems to be running some version of the Field of Miracles, with promises that keep not arriving, timelines that dissolve, products that exist primarily as announcements, and platforms run as machines for generating more reputation regardless of what they actually do. They don’t need to be right. They need to be believed.”
Trying to use ChatGPT (Ryan O'Flanagan) – “This is my art, this is what I do, and I’m proud of it, and it uses a lot of water.”
Walking the Brooklyn Bridge (Craig Mod) – “Holy foot traffic. Just: Obscene crowds, all jostling for selfies. The world, one giant selfie jostle. Eventually, right before the machines turn off our light of meat-based consciousness, we’ll do some Borgesian space selfie and be done with it all. But for now, we selfie on the ground, with great desperation, preening for the screen, to be uploaded to god only knows where for god only knows what audience. The volume of media captured defies comprehension. It is empyrean in volume, flip-flopping beyond theory into the theology of bytes, for how could so many selfies be contained within the physics of our world?”
Now that your newsletter is AI-generated, I've Unsubscribed (Ibrahim Diallo) – “If you're just going to present me with prompt-generated content, I hate to break it to you but I have access to ChatGPT, and I can do that myself.”
Typewriter habits (Matthew Butterick) – Precious, accurate list here from Matthew Butterick. Most of these drive me a bit mad when encountered in the wild, and it really is surprising how common many of these bad habits still are in 2026. In France for instance, many people assume — incorrectly — that uppercase letters don’t have to carry accents. This is why Kylian Mbappé’s jersey with the France team wrongly lacks the accent on the E, when his Real Madrid jersey does not.