March 2024 blend of links
Some links don’t call for a full blog post, but sometimes I still want to share some of the good stuff I encounter on the web.
A Willy Wonka-inspired experience ‘scam’ was so bad that people called the cops・The kind of story that either makes you laugh or cry. I can’t seem to stop searching for more information about it.
How the most expensive swords in the world are made・The best 25 minutes I spent watching YouTube in a long time.
‘Very few have balls’: How American news lost its nerve・An acute painting of the journalism landscape, particularly in the production and publication of investigations within major media companies. This is largely due to financial ramifications and the pervasive influence of large corporations and billionaires (via Dan Gilmor).
Daft Social, the anti-social social network for minimalists・I really like this, and the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. Maybe it would have gained more traction in the early days of Twitter’s dramatic descent into darkness (via Dense Discovery).
A list of 100 blog post topics to write about・You can bet I’ll be bookmarking this and using it for my blog. I currently have a couple of drafts that would fit perfectly into this list (via Om Malik).
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs from early 20th-century Imperial Russia・It’s mind-boggling to think that these pictures are over a century old. As written on Wikipedia: “His photographs offer a vivid portrait of a lost world—the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming Russian Civil War” (via David Merfield).
Wikifunction: a free library of functions that anyone can edit.・Kind of surprising that this didn’t exist before, and hopefully a viable alternative to the overwhelming and potentially problematic dominance of Microsoft-owned Github.
In Praise of Buttons – Part Two・Second part of the great first post, and this one is exactly on point when it comes to cooking stove buttons (the most frustrating kind).
Growth is a mind cancer・A refreshing read from Manu Moreale: if a company is already making a comfortable profit, why can’t they be content with steady, stable revenues? Why do they always strive for “growth”? When did “growth” become the sine qua non condition for a company to be considered successful? When did “not growing” become synonymous with failure?
Seven little pieces of my heart・Merlin Mann shares this idea of highly curated playlists, each composed of only seven songs. As a big fan of playlists myself, I’ve started giving it a go with a few of my favourite artists, including Prince — of course — and Frank Ocean, and I may add those new Gentle Introductions playlists somewhere on the site. They’re not necessarily the artist’s top seven songs or your personal favourites, but, as Merlin writes “Just seven really good songs that might help you fall in love too.” Not so easy to make, but I love the concept.
More “Blend of links” posts here