This to That

It is feeling, increasingly, like the internet is no longer for humans.

AI software is scouring the web for information and aggregating the data for quick and easy consumption by humans. We can now buy the descaled, deboned fish wrapped in plastic instead of trawling the ocean ourselves.

If you were wondering, say, what glue to use to attach a pane of glass to a wooden frame, you’d just ask Claude.

You would probably do that. I would use ThisToThat.com.

Many years ago, I was googling what glue to use to attach metal to plastic for a craft project, and found a Reddit thread that looked helpful (this is going to be my generation’s version of the “I walked seventeen miles to school barefoot” stories of our grandparents). On that thread, someone suggested that the OP consult ThisToThat.com. I clicked, curiously, and found a veritable eden for those of us who routinely use adhesives.

The site is very simple. You select what materials you’re looking to adhere from a drop-down menu, click “Let’s Glue!” and it gives you a list of glue recommendations. Absolutely fucking terrific.

I genuinely do use this site about once a year, and it warms my heart every time, because it feels like the internet that I remember using in the 2000s, once upon a December. One must imagine the logo has not changed at all since its birth in 1999:

As I’m sure you can see from the first image, the site is absolutely hideous. The background is a stock photo of flowers in a blurry field, the logo is off-center to make space for an ad that sometimes drifts out of the header, and the bottom of the page is taken up by an even larger ad. It’s really horrendous.

And yet… glorious. I keep thinking of the bite wallet I included in this essay, which the artisan described as “imperfect so as not to offend god.”

Everything AI is so… neat. Its purpose is to mainline information to you, to take the ugly grey tunnel straight to the destination instead of the scenic route.

I’m gonna end my AI rant here, because the definitive take on AI has already been delivered by Jacob Elordi:

But we are losing the scenic route, we are losing the whimsy that comes with what is made by people. AI doesn’t add features that are funny, or weird, or because it has a specific thorn in its side it wants to vent about.

And that is what is so lovely about ThisToThat.com. It is simple, clean, and the glue suggestions are (nobly!) unmarred by sponsorship. But while the path to information is clear and straight, there are wildflowers pushing up through the cracks in the pavement. Take another look at the navigation bar:

It is my sincere recommendation that you click through to the site and peruse on your own. But since Substack shows me the data on link-clicking, I know that most of you will not do that. So for your reading pleasure, here are some highlights.

First up is the Philosophy section. I positively love that an informational glue website has a mission statement:

The Philosophy section ends with a wish:

There is something so wonderfully human about four exclamation points in a row. I was once chastised by a boss for using too many exclamation points, and I am so glad that I did not take that email to heart. God forbid I feel joy in this one life! Heaven forfend I share said joy through punctuation!!!!

Now, it goes without saying that the trivia section is fantastic. I did wonder if some of the fun facts no longer hold muster due to the enshittification of nearly everything since (I assume) they were originally posted.

I combed through Reddit to check on these, and it seems like cardboard is definitely still made with plant starches. It was harder to figure out of hair sprays are still made of cellulose (or if this factoid was correct to begin with). Ah well. Some mysteries are not for us (read: me, specifically) to unravel.

Now we navigate to the Q&A, which contains many wonders, but probably none so wondrous as this:

What about crayfish?

I clicked the above link (no punctuation, obviously, so as not to offend god) and it took me not to a separate site, but to a new sub-page of ThisToThat with a distinct URL:

On this page, they have the full question, asked by a lab at Georgia State University, and advise on how they might glue crayfish. Fucking phenomenal. Go read it.

Then we have the Glue of the Month page.

Glue of the Month was last updated in 2003, which is a bummer, but it’s hard to be mad since they begin the page with an apology.

The next time you apply to a job, get far in the process, then never hear from them again, I recommend sending an email that says: “ThisToThat.com apologized for being inconsistent with updating their Glue of the Month page, but you couldn’t find the time to formally reject me from this job after I did four rounds of interviews?”

Bring back etiquette!!!

Lastly, an exciting and invigorating discovery: the Glues in the News page (god bless that little icon) was updated in March of 2025!!

I’d already decided to send a link to this Substack through the feedback page of the website (I always think it’s nice to let people know you’re talking lovingly about them) but I was kind of operating under the assumption that my letter would fall on deaf ears. Now I have hope that they may actually see this Substack, so here’s a little note just for them:

Dearest ThisToThat,

If you’re reading this, please know that I love your site very much, and I felt it was my duty to share the joy it brings me with my newsletter subscribers. That said, I want you to know that if at some point you become unable to continue its operations, I will understand and forgive you. Until then, my humble request is that you please never change or modernize your logo, which I have a great deal of fondness for. Also, if you ever make merchandise, please know that I would buy a shirt immediately.

With great fondness,
Johnny

Addendum

I hope you enjoyed this little jaunt into a nostalgic corner of the internet. I was contemplating following this post with a deep dive into another favorite site of mine, HowToCutAPineapple.com, but was sad to find that it is now defunct.

Crazily, in looking it up for inclusion in this essay, I found out that Google posted a video two years ago about HowToCutAPineapple.com.

It is slightly sad to me that - while this video does memorialize HowToCutAPineapple.com - it did not make an effort to preserve that site. Instead, there is a tone of derision in this video; Google laughs at HowToCutAPineapple.com. Now, I agree that there is a great deal of humor to be found in HowToCutAPineapple.com, but I would argue that the best skewerings/roasts (two things you can do to a cut pineapple) are born from love, and I feel that if they truly appreciated HowToCutAPineapple.com, they would have resurrected the site.

Unfortunately, the tone of the video is “thank god we’ve come so far,” with “so far” being AI search results. I suppose I should be happy that the video ends with the AI suggesting a man-made video of a guy cutting a pineapple, but one cannot help but mourn that we have gone from hideously, gloriously human to cold, perfect streamlining.

Or, in other words, we have gone from This to That.

Always use the least toxic material that meets your bonding requirements,
Johnny