Reading, writing, walking. Not (always) at the same time.
The SNCF has plastered the train windows with corny stickers saying “let yourself dream”, “#nofilter” and “seat with a view”. Everybody awake is heads-down in their phone. Everything around here used to be the deepest and most vibrant shade of forest green. Now it’s a dusty and …
There’ll probably never be another museum quite like the Apple Museum in Prague, which featured almost every Apple product ever made in pristine condition, before it closed in September 2020 after a dumbfounding dispute between its founders. The entirely unrelated Apple Museum in …
Should i redesign my blog?1 Should i switch back to pocket notebooks from A5 notebooks?2 Should i buy and restore a thirteenth typewriter?1 Should i repaint our bedroom?2 Should i sell my Apple Watch Ultra?1 Should i reinstall my balcony’s irrigation system?1 In isolation, these …
Film The Phoenician Scheme by Wes Anderson. Another excellent Montblanc ad from Wes Anderson. (I’m kidding, of course. The Phoenician Scheme is less refined, less substantial, less amusing, and generally less memorable than the Montblanc ad.) Article John Lanchester at the London …
“What is the oldest thing you own?” For Thomas, who originally asked the question, it’s a Sisters of Mercy tour shirt from 1985. For Ruben, who brought it to my attention, it’s books from the 2000s. Apart from a small blue stuffed bear i’ve had since the day i was born, the …
This ↑ is what happens when Joe Dart breaks the sound barrier playing “Dean Town”. (And not when i drop my phone on a 2,000-year-old theatre’s stone steps trying to put it in my pocket — my back pocket.) Vulfpeck’s concert at the Jazz à Vienne festival was the best non-jazz …
I thought there’d be no better way to celebrate Miles Davis’s centennial than to listen to his whole discography in chronological order (more on that later). Little did i know it’d change the way i see music. And it has nothing to do with Miles Davis himself.
In a previous life, i was a history major researching the French-Catholic migration to the Canadian Prairies between 1870 and 1915. Published in 1891, Rerum novarum is the foundational text of the Catholic church’s social doctrine. Without overstating its immediate impact, it …
If you don’t speak French, you might never have heard of the AZERTY keyboard — the weird cousin of QWERTY with its shifted number row and a scattering of accented letters across the board. Even if you do speak French, you might not use AZERTY — the Swiss and Luxembourgers type on …
I’m not talking about the orange buffoon’s latest antics. I’m not talking about the sweltering heat that’s descending on Europe once more. I’m not even talking about the collective insanity that has pushed a racist, misogynist, authoritarian, conspiracist, transphobic, and …
They say “the hype is real”, but more often than not, the hype is entirely fabricated. The more a product is hyped on Reddit and other places, the greater the chance it’s a marketing psyop. Unless that product happens to be the Uniball Zento Signature rollerball, in which case …
I don’t know why it suddenly dawned on me, but i’m not sure why i chose to build Z1NZ0L1N and Architypes with a full-fat CMS. I’d been using Pelican and Hugo for almost fifteen years by that point, so i’ll chalk it up to some sort of static site generator fatigue. It took me more …
When you’re not as rich as you’d like and not as powerful as you’d think, you plaster gold trinkets all over your Oval Office. When you’re as rich as millions of people combined and as powerful as most democratically elected heads of state, you plaster your munificence all over …
Nobody in their right mind should own a professional espresso machine at home. Which is exactly why, for years, i owned a professional espresso machine at home. I sold it after getting increasingly frustrated with having to wait for the machine to warm up before i could pull my …
I was leafing through a collection of George Orwell’s essays when i stumbled upon this gem from “Looking back on the Spanish War”: I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate …
A few months into my new role, the biggest change has nothing to do with the job itself. It’s that i can’t listen to music while working. Even though most of my team works remotely, i work a few days a week with some of my colleagues — and, most importantly, my boss — in a …
This week came and went in a blur. I hadn’t realized how much i’d missed being on the creative side of things. Don’t get me wrong — i love managing my team of designers and planning our overall strategy. But i missed being in the thick of it, thinking deep and hard about the …
I enjoy repairing typewriters, but the Olivetti Lettera 36 tested my patience. It’s what’s commonly referred to as an “electric typewriter”, but should really be called an “electro-mechanical typewriter”. From the outside, it looks like a mechanical typewriter, down to the type …
The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few metres; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical …
This blog wouldn’t exist if not for Manuel Moreale. I don’t remember how i stumbled upon his blog, but i remember being crestfallen that my “the homepage is the latest article” idea wasn’t as original as i thought. The more i read him, though, the more i began to feel that weird …
The books i’ve never even considered reading. The guitars i’ve barely touched these past few years. The vintage computers i’ve never restored. The fountain pens i’ve hoarded by the drawerful. If i don’t need these things, then why is it so hard to get rid of them? They aren’t …
The wireless page-turning Kobo Remote is an absolute piece of junk. It’s made of not one but two of the worst kind of plastics you can hold — a sweat-inducing smooth polycarbonate on top and a grime-attracting grainy PET on the bottom. From the way the parts are assembled to the …
Some people spend their holidays at the beach. Some people spend their holidays in the mountains. Some people spend their holidays in the countryside. I spend my holidays in museums. People think of the museum as a rainy-day fallback, but for me, the museum is the plan all along. …
My new employer provided me with a beast of a laptop… that runs on Windows 11. I’ve been using computers for 32 years, i’ve been writing about computers for half my life, and yet, i feel like a complete beginner. I’ve had to use Windows here and there over the years, but it …