Hello lovely Blasters, following on from last week here’s a look back at more emails from the first year of 💥BLAST! together with interesting things that I’ve collected thereafter.

17. Moon: 👨‍🚀 Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin & Michael Collins Return Through Customs and Immigration: Returning from the first moon landing, the three astronauts were taken to Honolulu to sign an immigration form an declaring a cargo of moon rocks and dust. 🌜 Soar around the Moon, carried by the music of Debussy, in this breathtaking space flight: The video traces the flow of sunlight over the Moon’s surface.

18. Cassettes: 🎞 Quentin Tarantino Is As Proud Of His Soundtracks As He Is Of His Films: “I still love making mixtapes. I can still play tapes in my car. As I was finalizing the track list, I would put it together, and I would make a tape of it. And for the next few days, I would play the tape in my car and listen to how the songs flew. How they went from one tune to another. And then I’d change it around for a little bit.”
📼 Cassette Tapes Are Back—But It’s Not About the Music: The technology may be obsolete, but it’s associated with attractive stories that the streaming generation wants to try on.
🎚 60 of the Best Hip-Hop Mixtapes Since 2000: What started as a way for DJs to showcase their mixes has become a huge part of the industry.
🎧 What is Lorem? Inside One of Spotify’s Best New Playlists: Since emerging quietly last year, Lorem has become one of Spotify’s most unique new playlists. Its curator shares how and why it works.
🚗 The Car Cassette Adapter—A Legend of Technology: The car cassette adapter is one of the most underrated pieces of technology ever devised.

19. Generalists:🦄 Unicorns don’t exist. Generalists do: Should product designers learn to code or focus on design? Should they generalise or specialise? These debates distract us from the real issue: specific skill sets are merely a means to an end. 🤹‍♀️ What Specifically Do Generalists Do? They tend not to focus, they don’t often travel in groups and their shape-shifting versatility changes them frequently. But they are definable and there most certainly are essential traits and skills inherent to them.

20. Cable Cars: 🚠 Cable Cars Are Changing the World: The ability of cable car systems to easily link up with existing transport infrastructure is a key reason for their third modern renaissance—this time as mass transit. 🚡 Urban cable cars: from transport solution to tourist attraction: Cities from Africa to Latin America—by way of Cardiff—are turning to cable cars as an answer to traffic congestion. And tourists love them, too. ⛰ After Cable Cars Got Stuck In The Alps, Dozens Spent Night Suspended In Midair: A series of cable cars traveling over the Mont Blanc Alpine Massif stopped working, leaving more than 100 tourists stranded. 🌏 10 of the world’s best cable car rides: Higher, longer, danglier… these cable cars often break world records as they take passengers soaring over remote wilderness and iconic city settings.

21. Argument: 🗣 I think, therefore I make mistakes and change my mind: Assuming that another person’s opinions are immune from criticism is not a marker of respect. It is, in fact, dehumanising. 📮 Letter is a platform for thoughtful conversation via an exchange of written letters. Once a conversation has started only the writer and recipient can participate. If Twitter is the town square where conversations start, Letter is the cafe where conversation has time and space to flourish. 🥊 The Internet of Beefs: A beef-only thinker is someone you cannot simply talk to. Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect, and a provocation to conflict. Online public spaces are now being slowly taken over by beef-only thinkers, as the global culture wars evolve into a stable, endemic, background societal condition of continuous conflict.

22. Retro On Screen: 🎮 Video Game Console Logos: This list covers the second (1976) through eighth (present) generation consoles.
👾 8bitworkshop: Write 8-bit code in your browser: Ever wanted to be an old-school game programmer? Learn how classic game hardware worked. Write code and see it run instantly. See also: PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other programs.
🤖 What future artificial intelligence will think of our puny human video games: If and when the AI revolution happens, Homo sapiens is not going to be the protagonist of that story. In fact, there’s no reason to think it will resemble a story at all.
📺 Teletext’s creative legacy—It lives on in the internet: Not only was Teletext a revolutionary technology in its prime, its creative legacy lives on with a new generation of artists who love its creative limits.
🕹 ‘Randomizers’ Are Breathing New Life Into Old Games: A small but growing community in the retro emulation scene is using a class of mods and hacks to revamp the classics.

23. Rave Resurgence: 🕺🏾 Austerity, gentrification and big tunes: why illegal raves are flourishing: Amid disillusionment with mainstream clubbing, illegal events are harking back to the original spirit of rave—but police maintain they are as dangerous and criminal as ever. 🇫🇷 France’s Senate has adopted an “anti-rave” law: The law is threatening the survival of the underground dance community.

24. Past Futures: 🚀 List of stories set in a future now past: This is a list of fictional stories that, when written, were set in the future, but the future they predicted is now present or past. 📺 What are going to be the biggest changes in our homes by 2020? Classic Tomorrow’s World episode from 1989.

25. Repair: 🛠 Can we fix it? The repair cafes waging war on throwaway culture: When fixing items is actively discouraged by manufacturers, recycling becomes a political act, say Repair Cafe volunteers. 👟 Repair the Tip of a Shoelace with Melted Candle Wax: Next time your shoelace aglet breaks, don’t rush out to replace; fix it a with a candle.

26. Slow Fashion: 👠 Fashion Week Is Simply Not Sustainable: This season, we have a sense of how much CO2 is emitted annually by fashion people and clothing collections moving around the planet: about 241,000 tons, or enough to power Times Square for 58 years.
👗 Rework Podcast: Slow Fashion: Hiut Denim founder David Hieatt talks about his efforts to reduce the environmental impact of a ubiquitous item of clothing.
🌿 Cotton on: the staggering potential of switching to organic clothes: Buying an organic cotton T-shirt would save 2,457 litres of water, according to a new report from the Soil Association.
♻️ Hangers are ‘fashion industry’s plastic straw’, says designer: A recyclable clothes hanger has been developed by a fashion designer in an attempt to end the use of plastic ones.
👢 The newest shopping trend isn’t new at all: The rental and resale markets are booming for products as diverse as fashion and camping gear—an opening for brands to reinvent their business model.

27. Post Meat: 🍔 McDonald’s debuts new plant-based burger: Small-market test rolls out months after rival Burger King began testing the plant-based Impossible Foods burger. 🔥 Can a Burger Help Solve Climate Change? Eating meat creates huge environmental costs. Impossible Foods thinks it has a solution. 🥦 What Would Happen If the World Suddenly Went Vegetarian? Eliminating meat from our diets would bring a bounty of benefits to both our own health and the planet’s—but it could also harm millions of people. 🌱 The Not-Future of Meat: The Blend is made using pea protein, just like Beyond Meat’s burger. There is one notable difference, however, between the two products. The Blend contains beef.

28. Hotdesking: 👩‍🚀 The Future of Work: This report examines two actionable trends that are reshaping work, to enhance internal culture and ultimately serve consumers better. 👩‍💻 Say Goodbye to Your Desk: Sensor-studded office desks and chairs will monitor your every move—and alert your boss when you no longer need a permanent workspace. 💼 It’s Official: Open-Plan Offices Are Now the Dumbest Management Fad of All Time: A new study from Harvard reveals that open-plan offices decrease rather than increase face-to-face collaboration. 🏢 How to design an office that actually supports employees’ well-being: Here are six strategies to create well-being at work and avoid the adverse effects of an open office.

29. Loneliness: 👩‍👩‍👧‍👧 Why we can only maintain 150 relationships: The theory of Dunbar’s number holds that we can only really maintain about 150 connections at once. But is the rule true in today’s world of social media? 🤓 The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News: Can a human touch make Silicon Valley’s biggest discussion forum a more thoughtful place? 🙍‍♀️ Loneliness Is Instagram’s Hottest Trend: All the cool girls talk about staying home nowadays, and the look of 2019 was the e-girl aesthetic, the first fashion trend to develop solely online, photographed almost entirely in bedrooms.🚶‍♀️ How Do You Learn to Be Happy Alone?: Sit alone on the couch and let your body tell you what it wants. It doesn’t want words scrolling on a screen. It wants a peaceful time to reflect.

30. Drink: 🥛 11 Ways to Make Friends Without Drinking Alcohol: There are lots of good reasons not to drink, and most of us would probably like to diversify our social lives. Here’s a collection of ideas for alternative friend-making plans.

31. Attention: 🕹 Nir Eyal on how to beat tech addiction: ‘We need a new skill set’: The behavioural scientist has advised tech companies on how to get people hooked—now he’s telling us how to break the habit. 👓 Stanford psychology expert: The No. 1 work skill of the future: The workplace is rapidly changing, and in the near future, there will be two kinds of people in the world: those who let their attention and lives be controlled and coerced by others and those who proudly call themselves “indistractable”.

32. Work Healthy: 🏡 We lock our employees out of the office for one week each year: There’s plenty of research out there around the benefits of remote work, but this company wanted to prove how trust and flexibility are more important than an employee’s physical location to yield results. 📝 Plus Minus Next journaling: a write-up of a journaling method intended to be fast, flexible and future-focused. 🕘 New Office Hours Aim for Well Rested, More Productive Workers: A growing number of businesses are encouraging their employees to work when their bodies are most awake.