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I’ve been chatting with other newsletter publishers about our setups and workflows, and many of them react surprised when I share Dense Discovery’s manual process and the almost makeshift structure that powers it all. (If you are interested, here’s a lengthy post about the many steps and apps involved in running DD.)
At first, I wasn’t sure if sharing how the sausage is made would be such a good idea. We’re all trying to look pRoFeSsIoNaL, right? But then I realised that the unromantic, homespun modus operandi of creating this newsletter is very much in line with what I’m advocating for in the newsletter.
Having to tinker with HTML and CSS on a weekly basis is a fun reminder of why/how I got into this work in the first place. It’s reassuring to know that more than twenty years after first discovering ‘View Source’, the same skills (though outdated for any heavy lifting) are still sufficient for assembling a website that supports my livelihood.
DD wouldn’t be possible, however, without a hotchpotch of apps that simplify, automate, and connect various steps. Although things are more technically sophisticated today, I’m still merely mixing and matching other people’s ideas and skills to create something new – just like I did with my first ever website two decades ago.
– Kai
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Apps & Sites
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This looks fun: on Reslash you can create fully customisable rooms with up to 100 people. Add GIFs, videos and background images. My favourite feature: “As you move closer to someone, you can hear them. As you move away, they fade away. Multiple conversations happen at the same time, within the same space. Just like in real life.”
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One inbox for all messages
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This macOS app combines many different messaging services like iMessage, Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram, FB Messenger, and others under one interface. It’s a free (?), Mac-based alternative to the previously featured Beeper.
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Smart, interactive spreadsheets
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Rows appears to be a less complex alternative to Airtable, allowing you to build forms and spreadsheets using imported data from apps like Google, Twitter, Stripe, Slack and many more.
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Tokyo’s trains in real time
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Hypnotic to watch: a real-time digital map of Tokyo’s public train system. Click on a train and follow its journey through the megalopolis.
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Worthy Five: Satchell Drakes
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Five recommendations by product designer, photographer, and LEGO builder Satchell Drakes
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A video worth watching:
Bravado is a candid, queer exploration of the question ‘Why do men punch the wall?’ This particular course deconstructs masculinity at an intersection of class identity.
An activity worth doing:
Identify when you’ve entered a doom scroll and go outside instead. I’ve found healing in bringing a folding chair out to a shallow river and reading in it.
A book worth reading:
Ramblings of a Wannabe Painter by Paul Gauguin is a timeless exploration of art criticism and the sacred nature of an artist’s anarchy. He interrogates the role of the art critic and academic institution while offering an ethic in preserving oneself by disregarding both.
An Instagram account worth following:
Computer Love Records is an archived nostalgia trip through the oddities and less commodified moments in technology from the 80’s to the early 2000’s.
A question worth asking:
‘If I had high self-esteem, how would I look, talk, act, and behave?’ Write it out and begin everything now. You don’t need to frack your trauma in order to find the worthiness to be better. You’re already worthy.
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Realness, meaning, and belonging online
A new book that explores what ‘being authentic’ means in the digital age: “IRL shines a light on how age-old notions of realness – who we are and where we fit in the world – can be freshly understood in our increasingly online lives. IRL invites readers to consider how we use the internet to fulfil the essential human need to feel real – a need many of us once met in institutions, but now seek to do on our own, online – as well as the ways we edit or curate ourselves for digital audiences.”
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At the frontier of birth, food, sex & death
A book investigating the edges of ‘innovation’ and the people behind them: “What kind of person devotes their life to building a death machine? What kind of customer is desperate to buy an artificially intelligent sex doll – and why? Who is campaigning against these advances, and how are they trying to stop them? And what about the many unintended consequences such inventions will inevitably unleash? Sex Robots & Vegan Meat is not science fiction. It’s not about what might happen one day – it’s about what is happening right now, and who is making it happen.”
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Overheard on Twitter
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If any person behaved like an app – rifled through your address book, fitted a tracking device to your car, obsessively logged what books and TV shows you watched, and wanted to disturb you at any moment of the day or night – you’d throw them out of your house and call the police.
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Food for Thought
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The eye of internet hype cycle is currently on cryptoart (using so-called NFTs, non-fungible tokens). Before you spend time trying to understand the hype, here’s the most important, terrifying bit you need to know: “[Computational artist Memo Akten] analysed 18,000 of these tokens, finding that the average NFT has a footprint of around 211 kg of CO2 equivalent. That’s the same as an EU resident’s electric power consumption for more than a month, driving for 1000km, or a return flight from London to Rome.” A much longer, comprehensive read on why cryptoart is bad beyond being a disaster for the environment here. Meanwhile Bitcoin just overtook Argentina and the Ukraine in energy use.
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What a great title for an excellent, funny piece on the distorted, unnatural body image epitomised by today’s movie heroes. “And speaking of Christopher Nolan’s inexplicably sexless oeuvre – did anyone else think it odd how Inception enters the deepest level of a rich man’s subconscious and finds not a psychosexual Oedipal nightmare of staggering depravity, but… a ski patrol? ... A body is no longer a holistic system. It is not the vehicle through which we experience joy and pleasure during our brief time in the land of the living. It is not a home to live in and be happy. It, too, is a collection of features: six pack, thigh gap, cum gutters. And these features exist not to make our lives more comfortable, but to increase the value of our assets. Our bodies are investments, which must always be optimized to bring us… what, exactly? Some vague sense of better living?”
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Before reading this piece I had never heard of ‘money manifestation’ – a weird, dubious new sub-section of ‘social media finance mentors’ preying on people desperate to turn their fortunes around. “Coaches – many of whom have no traditional financial advisement background or certifications – describe money manifestation, at its core, as a process, a practice, that’s built on using good vibes to attract good things. It’s about using your intentions to influence your reality, thereby conjuring your rich(er) dreams into existence.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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Not sure how useful this is in practice, but a nice concept nevertheless: SOAPBOTTLE is a container with liquid soap or shampoo that is made from solid soap. “Once the liquid content is finished, the empty container can be used as hand soap and ‘washes away’ over time. The soap is made from natural and biodegradable ingredients.”
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The work of Atlanta-based filmmaker and photographer Braylen Dion has a uniquely ‘warm’ quality that draws in its viewers. “My purpose is to capture blackness in a more soft or calming way.”
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Ooh, how cozy! “The Nook in Swannanoa, North Carolina, manages to meld Japanese tranquility, Scandinavian simplicity, and a handmade, Appalachian sensibility.” Available for rent on Airbnb.
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One of the most real-looking typefaces to imitate handwriting I’ve ever seen: “LiebeHeide is a digital script font that authentically reproduces the writing of a ballpoint pen.”
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Classifieds
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply or tweet at DD with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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