Hello lovely email friends. This week I made a supremely important and transformative purchase. Maybe you already knew about this and I’m late to it, but I can honestly say the discovery of this simple thing has made a dramatic improvement to my life.
🚶♀️ Slow Ways - a network of walking routes connecting Great Britain: A timely pedestrian-first mapping project, creating a network of walking routes that connect Britain’s towns and cities.
😱 The 5 Worst Netflix Original Movies Of 2020 So Far: Quantity is so often at odds with quality, as this shonky movies from Netflix show. But now more than ever, we’ve got time for bad movies. See also: The True Story Behind the Worst Video Game Ever.
☎️ Telephone therapy is convenient and it works. Let’s use it more: Making time for psychotherapy, plus getting to and from the therapist’s office, including organising childcare and time off work, is arduous. It would be much easier just to stage therapy at home, via a highly-available technology: the telephone. See also: I Feel Better Now, an exploration of apps tackling mental health.
📚 Reading - The Gratification of Watching Others Absorbed: There is a certain kind of gratification found in watching other people read. This photo essay from Magnum asserts that to read is to exist in two places at once - and to observe others doing so offers a very particular sort of satisfaction.
👩💻 The Internet Should Be More Like Wikipedia: The reputation of Wikipedia is enviable. What could other websites learn from that?
📸 Photographer ‘Devastated’ After Her Unsplash Photo Was Used in ‘Crass’ UK Ad Campaign: Unsplash offers royalty-free photos, including to this here email, but photographers don’t get to choose how their work is ultimately used. A portrait by Krys Alex posted to Unsplash was used in a ad campaign by the UK government campaign that has been criticised for devaluing artists, and she’s devastated her photo was at its core.
🥪 Pret A Manger Will Try Anything to Survive: Pret’s great strength is its hundreds of stores in central London. The pandemic made this its biggest weakness overnight. Can’t say I miss it.
A shot in the dark
My dentist, while charging me for rebuilding a bothersome tooth, recommended I go and buy a specific toothbrush. I bought two, so that one could charge while the other is in use. This has worked well, with only two niggles. First, that expensively-reconstructed tooth was ultimately pulled out during lockdown, so the rebuild was probably a waste of money. Second, this toothbrush blinks while charging, and it’s so bright it could almost light a room.
The blinking toothbrush is not alone. Seemingly everything I own with a plug on it has an irritating LED on it. Not just routers and hard-drives but chargers, power-supplies and smoke alarms… I did a quick tot-up of blinkenlights in a single room and found twenty of the blighters.
That’s when I found, and bought, self-adhesive near-opaque stickers to be placed over LEDs and bring their luminosity down to domestically-acceptable levels. Since then, when night falls, I’m bathed in darkness. It’s wonderful. No longer am I sleeping amongst a fairground attraction.
