Top10-JuneJulyAug2024
- Official Stick Reviews - I read somewhere to really connect to people, in this case you Dear Reader, I should be vulnerable. So here it is. I have a confession to make. I fucking love sticks. I like picking them up. I like snapping them. I like swooshing them through the air or through tall grass. So then of course someone finally made a place for reviews of sticks. Get ready for an entire day, if not about three joyful minutes, of unadulterated fulfilment by watching videos of people talking about sticks they found.
- Lonnie Smith - What do you need in your life right now? Badass jazz organ. Listen to Lonnie Smith now.
- Endnotes - Geoff Manaugh, the brute architectural force (if that’s even a thing or possible), and brains behind the amazing BLDGBLG (RIP) blog way back when is back with this astute and approachable intellectualism on design, the built environment and just awesome stuff like borders and heists.
- The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (David Grann) - Like it says on the tin, you got everything here. While there’s boatloads (pun intended) of direct quotes from those involved in the shipwreck, mutiny and murder, and mad respect for going to “the sources” because we all love “the sources,” the whole bits like “I said nothing of sort dear sir, one would think me dishonourable and a blah, blah, blah…” become slightly tedious. Regardless, it’s a historical tragic blast of humanity driven to severely messed up stuff with nice bits about attitudes of the day and historical mistreatment of various peoples. Pretty damn good read.
- Something Good #100: Professor Crisps - In Internet amaze, Mark Slutsky [SIC] manages to elevate the English language to stratospheric levels by managing to combine memoir, travelogue, review of a show of a pretty damn obscure English experimental music and comparative review of various crisps he ate along the way.
- Three Songs for Benazir (Netflix) - Absolute tearjerker of a Netflix doc about poverty, family, tragedy and love. All in 22 minutes.
- Chad Kohalyk’s newsletter - Imagine calm, dweb musings and button-up shirt musing that you could just wrap around you on cool, hungover Sunday morning. Or make that a Monday morning, because it’s about tech things generally so it sort of counts as work, but then you learn about Japan and that as well.
- Hudson Yards Video game - Conner O’Malley’s insano anti-comedy(?) rips apart our tech-addled lives better than any Guardian article ever could with this IRL acting like a game acting like real life.
- Remember defragging? Miss it? I do, and don’t worry, I’ll tell you why. There was once a time and place where you seriously could do nothing. You had to defrag with the misplaced hope that it would make the computer go faster and stop crashing. So you sat there and you watched a grid fill up with red and then turquoise. And you sat. And you sat. Maybe you went and made yourself a delightful sandwich. Maybe you chatted with your colleague about the weather. The point was you couldn’t use the computer and because this was before everyone had backup computers in their pockets eating their souls, you just weren’t doing any computering. The Windows 98 Disk Defrag Simulator is the balm for our troubled minds.
- Why Chris and Dan Didn’t Get into Berghain? Part 1 and part 2 are a fascinating bit of investigative journalism into not just trying to get into an exclusive Berlin nightclub that even refused Elon Musk, but about the collapse of East Germany, gentrification, property law and how all of that fits together with what you’re wearing while you go and queue for 8 hours.