People's behaviour at music gigs is getting worse. I have three rules to solve that. "Most of these conventions simply fall under the catch-all rubric of Don't Be a Selfish Idiot. Being a selfish idiot, however, is very on-trend."
From the Bergen Public Library Norway, a collection of antique book patterns from front or end papers. The books in question are from 1890-1930. Lovely.
Of course, this reminds of one of my favorite videos I've posted: a 1970 short film on how to make marbled paper.
At some point in the 1970s, Lego included the following letter to parents in its sets:
The text reads:
The urge to create is equally strong in all children. Boys and girls.
It's imagination that counts. Not skill. You build whatever comes into your head, the way you want it. A bed or a truck. A dolls house or a spaceship.
A lot of boys like dolls houses. They're more human than spaceships. A lot of girls prefer spaceships. They're more exciting than dolls houses.
The most important thing is to the put the right material in the their hands and let them create whatever appeals to them.
The letter seems like the sort of thing that might be fake, but Robbie Gonzalez of io9 presents the case for its authenticity.
In our home, Lego currently rules the roost...the kids (a boy and a girl) spend more time building with Lego than doing anything else. This weekend, they worked together to build a beach scene, with a house, pool, lifeguard station, car, pond (for skimboarding), and surfers. Dollhouse stuff basically. Then they raced around the house with Lego spaceships and race cars. Nailed it, 1970s Lego.
Update: QZ confirms, the letter is genuine.
Every year at Burning Man (pandemic years aside), Tycho does a ~2hr DJ set around sunrise and then releases it on Soundcloud — here's the 2023 version.
I've been listening to this for the past week and while I don't like it quite as much as the sets from previous years, it's definitely something to add to the rotation of chill work music.
See Tycho's BM sets from 2022, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014. Pretty much the only reason I'd ever want to go to Burning Man (esp after this year) is to catch this set in person sometime.
Talk to anyone who lives near the flight path of Burlington, Vermont's airport and it won't be too long until they are complaining to you about the F-35 jets that routinely disrupt their lives. The loud, expensive weaponry arrived in the state in 2019 and have upset and angered residents ever since.
A sudden roar announced that the military jets were taking to the sky again.
Julia Parise's son had developed a routine for whenever this happened: He would look to his mother and assess whether it was "one of them" — the F-35 fighter jets that had become such a constant presence in his young life — before asking her to cover his ears. He might do it himself, recalling aloud her reassurances as he did: "They won't hurt me. They won't hurt me."
To capture the community unrest created by what one resident calls "Lockheed Martin's welfare program" (the jet program will cost taxpayers $1.7 trillion over its lifetime), filmmakers Patrick McCormack and Duane Peterson III made a short film called Jet Line: Voicemails from the Flight Path featuring residents' concerns from a complaints hotline the pair set up.
This short film employs an anonymous hotline to elevate the voices beneath Vermont's F-35 flight path, the first urban residents to live with one of the military's most controversial weapons systems overhead.
Tranquil scenes of unassuming neighborhoods near Burlington International Airport are juxtaposed with voicemails of the unheard, those drowned out by the ear-shattering "sound of freedom." Exploring the relationship between picturesque residential areas and the deafening fighter jets overhead, Jet Line is a poetic portrait of a community plagued by war machines, documenting untenable conditions in a small city once voted one of the best places to live in America.
I hear the F-35s almost every time I am up in the Burlington area and they are very loud. I hear them when I'm on the phone with friends who live in Winooski. I hear them during my weekly Zoom session w/ my Burlington-based therapist and we have to pause for a few seconds so everyone can hear again. I live 30 miles away and they flew loudly over my house earlier today, as they do at least once a week. Over the weekend, the Marine Corps tweeted that they'd lost an F-35 somewhere in South Carolina and — yes, you heard right: they lost a whole-ass $100 million lethal weapon over a populated area. (They found the wreckage yesterday.) Hopefully when one of VT's F-35s decides to drop out of the sky someday, it somehow misses everyone.
When you start something new, how do you know where you're going to end up? Most of the time, you don't — you stumble around for awhile, exploring uncertainly until, slowly, things start to make sense. That messy journey is all part of the process. Designer Damien Newman and I have teamed up with Cotton Bureau to make some t-shirts featuring his Design Squiggle that illustrate this untidy pattern of creativity. The Process Tee is available in two varieties — light design on dark fabric and dark design on light fabric — and 50% of the profits will be donated to a charitable organization (more on that below).
Newman originally came up with the Design Squiggle (aka The Process of Design Squiggle) more than 20 years ago to explain how design worked to some of his clients. Here's his description:
The Design Squiggle is a simple illustration of the design process. The journey of researching, uncovering insights, generating creative concepts, iteration of prototypes and eventually concluding in one single designed solution. It is intended to convey the feeling of the journey. Beginning on the left with mess and uncertainty and ending on the right in a single point of focus: the design.
Although it originated in the design world, the Squiggle is handy for understanding or describing the process of many different creative endeavors. If you asked a chef, a scientist, a writer, a programmer, or an artist to describe how they got from their starting point to an end result, I think it would look a lot like the Squiggle. So what's this shirt about? The Process of Design. The Process of Writing. Cooking. Art-making. Science. Learning a New Skill. Creativity. The Messy Process of Becoming a Better Human.
The Process Tee is short-sleeved and available in unisex, fitted, and youth sizes in several light (white, heather white, heather gray, banana, banana cream, pink, gold) and dark colors (black, royal blue, red, green, purple, orange) with sizes ranging from S to 5X, which I hope will work for almost everyone. I ordered a few test shirts to figure out the sizing and placement of the Squiggle and I think they turned out really well: sharp, simple, and even a little enigmatic.
50% of the profits from these tees will be donated to the National Network of Abortion Funds. Access to safe, legal abortion is essential health care and we're supporting the NNAF in their mission to work towards a world "where all reproductive options, including abortion, are valued and free of coercion".
And much more in the archives...