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Thank you for the many responses to my evolving views on climate action. Lots of readers shared their own thinking and approach with me. Some of you felt that my previous comments sounded dismissive of your personal efforts. That’s exactly how I felt when this discussion about individual vs systemic climate action started.
Rather than making these newsletter intros verbose essays and potentially putting off some readers who are here for the app recommendations and funny GIFs, I published some more elaborate thoughts here for those who are interested.
The many email and face-to-face conversations I had about this in the last couple of weeks have been really enlightening. I feel less personally guilty and more determined to point my finger at the real villains. And that’s exactly what we need to do right now: to shake off that personal guilt and that overwhelming sense of responsibility that we put on each other.
There is a tradition in comedy that says: ‘Always punch up, never punch down.’ That is to say, don’t attack people who are already marginalised. We’re all victims of this unjust, destructive system. Let’s unite, gather our strength, and start punching up!
– Kai
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Apps & Sites
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Kapwing combines a ton of different tools for editing visual content: whether it’s creating or editing GIFs, resizing or reformatting videos, adding or trimming audio – Kapwing comes with a long list of powerful features, all browser-based.
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A scheduling app (again, Google only so far) that helps you avoid calendar conflicts and “optimises your calendar to free up blocks of uninterrupted time”.
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All-in-one ‘business management’
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Plutio sells itself as a one stop “business management platform” that includes things like time tracking, creating proposals and invoices, task management, CRM, and even a team chat.
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A simple Twitter plugin that will post your tweets at a time of your choosing. Kinda like a light version of Buffer. (Ok, very light).
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Indie Mag of the Week
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Klima is a print magazine dedicated to academic research and contemporary creation. It gives a voice to creative, singular, and conscious individuals by relating art, activism, and academia.
– Latest Issue: 2
– Frequency: 1 issue/year
– Formats: print
– Origin: France
Every week we’re giving away five copies to randomly selected DD readers. Keep an eye on your inbox to find out if you’re among them!
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Design by and for the People
We need fewer books promoting design as aesthetics ‘crafted by experts’ and more books telling us that useful design can come from, and is for, everyone: “Improving lives is no longer the role only of governments and experts: enabled by the latest technologies, anyone can help to design and create products for the social and environmental good. Part manual, part manifesto, part call-to-arms, Futurekind presents more than 60 world-changing projects that, through a process of collaboration between communities and designers, are shaping a better future for us all.”
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‘Unplug’ distracting apps
Still fills like a workaround, but it’s an interesting concept (for Android phones): “By detaching the Unpluq key from your phone, the launcher switches to Unplug mode. In Unplug mode, only apps of your choice will be available and notifications of all other apps will be blocked. Yet when you make the conscious decision to plug the Unpluq key back in, you will have the functionality of your entire phone, and your missed notifications will be shown to you.”
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Overheard on Twitter
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Panic buying is a symptom of a dysfunctional society diseased with individualism. To those with litres of soap at home – do you realise that to slow the transmission of COVID-19 you need other people to be cleaning their hands too?! A fortress of toilet paper will not protect you.
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Food For Thought
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I really enjoyed this piece about how pervasive and malevolent corporate gibberish is. And, yes, tech startups are some of the worst offenders. “Do CEOs act like jerks because they are jerks, or because the language of management will create a jerk of anyone eventually? If garbage language is a form of self-marketing, then a CEO must find it especially tempting to conceal the unpleasant parts of his or her job – the necessary whip-cracking – in a pile of verbal fluff. ”
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Maddening, saddening, consoling – all at once. And beautifully written: “I have been told all my life to compare the present to the past. If we compare it to the future, we can imagine that later generations may look back on us alive in 2020 as the lucky ones.”
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Workplace activism can help pressure executives to commit to strong corporate climate action. It’s been effective in tech, but can it work in other industries with less job security? “If our world is going to make the huge changes in our energy and agricultural systems needed to limit global warming, it’s going to need pressure not just from shareholders, activists and regulators, but from every side. With more and more businesses waking up to the need to do more in the years ahead, those who speak up may well find they’re pushing at an open door.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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An Instagram account showcasing Thai fruit carvings: ‘a traditional Thai art that requires neatness, precision, meditation, and personal ability.’
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I love these compositions of rendered, three-dimensional objects and sceneries by Peter Tarka. Loads more on his website.
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Whyte and Whyte Inktrap are both sans serif typefaces in 40 individually accessible font styles with a range of lovely alternative characters.
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Classifieds
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Knowsi manages consent for user research. Send and track participant consent with custom forms and GDPR-focused tools. Join Knowsi today for free!
Adelphi is an approachable geometric sans-serif influenced by the British modernist tradition. Available as a variable font for Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek.
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Mixkit Music is a curated library of unique music tracks that are all completely free and ready to use in your next video project.
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The Week in a GIF
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Email us the URL to your favourite GIF and we might feature it here in a future issue.
[email protected]
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