Good afternoon lovely email friends. Hope you’re well. It’s a busy time of year, so I’m kicking 💥BLAST! into a slightly lighter format. Please feel free to reply with the best picture you’ve taken recently.

💩 On the moral obligation to stop shit-stirring: In the kind of shit-stirring this article examines, provocation or aggravation is carried out through speech acts that have the grammatical form of advice even though they’re not actually intended to help those to whom the purported advice is offered. When you offer sincere advice, you hope that it will be acted on. But this isn’t the case with shit-stirring.

🕵️‍♀️ My Phone Was Spying on Me, so I Tracked Down the Surveillants: This Norwegian journalist had 160 apps on his phone. He decided to find out what they’re up to without his knowing.

📚 Escape your literary echo chamber: This allows you to find out which books you are statistically unlikely to read. The more narrow your reading tastes are, the more you will be challenged by the results.

🌊 Hokusai’s Great Wave, Sculpted in Lego Blocks: Jumpei Mitsui, a certified professional LEGO builder, has completed what can only be described as a masterpiece: a LEGO replica of Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” one of Japan’s most iconic images. See also: Japanese synchronised walking competition.

🏡 The best tiny houses of 2020: A pick of the best, most innovative, and most unusual tiny houses seen this year. These towable homes run the gamut from a supersized tiny house that sleeps eight people to an unusual compact model based on an airplane fuselage.

🎤 64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney: I listened to Adam Buxton interviewing McCartney this week and it was delightfully dull. He likes the same lousy daytime television as the rest of us. Nevertheless there are a great many things to celebrate.

👾 Game UI Database: This reference tool for interface designers shows game design in the aggregate. Unlike other media, and for good practical reasons, games rely little on photography and instead straddle illustration and 3D render.