Hey lovely email chums, everything alright? This week, you can’t expect to take over the world sitting there in your jim-jams. But first…

🍫 How South Asian corner shop culture helped the UK survive Covid-19: As the nation was forced into lockdown, corner shops, the ailing bastion of an era gone-by, were suddenly given a new lease of life. This interesting piece introduces us to the lives of the South Asian families who often own them.

✨ Assisted Serendipity, Random Coffee and the power of the unstructured meeting: We have some of the best conversations when they happen by chance. That moment when you bump into someone when you are out and about, and they happen to mention something that really helps you. These serendipitous moments are where relationships are built, and magic can happen.

🏚 We Quit Our Jobs to Build a Cabin—Everything Went Wrong: the story of a passion project that led its protagonists succeeding through failure.

🔎 How to find anything on the Internet: Dorking is a pleasant market town in south east England with good links to London. It’s also a colloquial term given to the use of Google syntax to retrieve very specific data. If you can commit this syntax to memory, congratulations: you’re now a qualified software engineer.

🏆 Ronnie O’Sullivan on controversy, comebacks and becoming a carer: This is a cracking interview with an evermore interesting character. The greatest, most charismatic snooker player of all time prefers long-distance running. He discusses drugs, breakdowns, victory and his unexpected new career path.

🦇 Flashback 1995: batmanforever.com Screens: With talk of another Batperson film (who knew we needed another?), I was reminded that the website for Batman Forever was a big fish, proportionally, on the early web. Sites don’t get made like this anymore, nor will the ones made today still be made 25 years from now.

🥱 Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing: It’s going to change everything: the shipping industry, the financial system, government… in fact, what won’t it change? But enthusiasm for it mainly stems from a lack of knowledge and understanding. The blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.

🔥 On Losing Everything to the Climate Crisis, except for Hope: Environmentalist Diego Saez-Gil lost his home and its contents to the Californian forest fires. “The consequences of climate change will not be an abstract idea in a distant future, but the biggest disaster of my life. This, of course, renews my determination to give my all, for the rest of my life, to work on this purpose.”

Getting good at being bad

If you’re serious about bringing the world to its knees, then you’ve got to have a lair. A villain’s lair can’t just be cobbled together in the garage or box room; it needs to be substantial. An extinct volcano makes for a perfect clandestine missile silo, or maybe the clean living of a remote Scandinavian-style hideout is more to your taste. If cinema has taught us anything, it’s that proper acts of tyranny can only be plotted from a modernist dominion.

So why do the bad guys all get such good pads? This question is posed in Lair: Radical Homes and Hideouts of Movie Villains by American architect Chad Oppenheim, which considers several iconic villains’ lairs from recent film history. The architectural splendor that surrounds big-screen villains is a character unto itself: an enviable expression of the warped desires of its occupant.

But before you rush out to buy a supervillain’s lair, or an atmospheric abandoned site to convert into one, think carefully. For a start you’d need very deep pockets. More pressingly, that ostentatious Sixties modernism is so well-trodden it’s now synonymous with villainy. If your home is all concrete and chrome then people will expect a tank of piranhas.

A contemporary lair should be clean and light, with concentric corridors and blinkenlights. Try treating heavy plant to some bright climbing-frame colours. Because fun couldn’t be evil, right?