💥BLAST! - a newsletter
Collective paranoia and architectural entropy
BLAST header

Hello lovely email friends, hope everything is tickety-boo with you. I’ve been writing a lot recently, but not for any audience besides myself. Just as a means of organising my thoughts. When we convey ideas to other people we tell stories; when we do the same for ourselves we write lists. So I’m experimenting with applying the former approach to the latter situation—if you don’t try, how can you know?

  • 🗣 How to Talk About Your Mental Health with Your Employer: Well now. Up to 80% of people will experience a diagnosable mental health condition over the course of their lifetime. The prevalence is the same from the boardroom to the shop floor, but almost 60% of employees have never spoken to anyone at work about their mental health. This article presents four strategies for disclosing your own mental health challenges at work.

  • 🕵️‍♀️ Apple’s photo scanning and our state of forced collective paranoia: This is the smartest thing on the state of technology and society I’ve read for a while. Matt Webb ponders the implications of tech vendors trawling through the contents of devices that have essentially become a part of ourselves.

  • 🧊 We’d Rather Have the Iceberg Than the Ship: A really interesting study of churn and entropy in the American designed landscape. See also: Visitors to Titanic museum visitors hurt by iceberg because of course they were; you could almost have charged them extra.

  • 🥳 The Brain-Changing Magic of New Experiences: The psychological reasons why novelty—from visiting new places to socialising—makes us happier and healthier people.

  • 🛸 The slow collapse of Amazon’s drone delivery dream: Five years ago, Prime Air was the chorus of a frenzied public relations campaign, with Amazon executives claiming that drones would be delivering packages across the UK within a few years. Even with the hype it looked like magical nonsense. Now, has triggered mass redundancies and transfers as it winds down a huge part of its drone business.

  • 🏰 Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate: Keeping it light and bright, this blog post explores the historical inaccuracy of linear medieval city-builder video games. Medieval villagers were often living on the edge of subsistence. Agricultural surpluses were skimmed by the church and the feudal lords. Bad harvests, banditry, warfare and disease might decimate a village community at any time. So the gameplay of city builders thereby strays far from what actually happened.

  • 🧓 Get off my lawn. Ageism in advertising. A giant pain in my ass. Despite the fact that people older than 50 have double the discretionary spending power of any other age group. And regardless of the fact the average head of household is 52. And the average new car buyer is 56. And the average Mac user is 54. Despite all that. The average age of an advertising creative is 28.

  • 🤑 Listen up: why indie podcasts are in peril: A story that has played out before on the web. As big spenders such as Amazon and Spotify fill our ears with more commercial, celebrity-driven fare, can grassroots, diverse shows survive?

The crisis

This week’s sobering report from the IPCC has pushed the human impact upon earth’s climate to the top of the news agenda. It’d be possible to fill the whole of this week’s email—if not every week’s—with articles derived from some aspect of that report. So while good climate science is front of our minds, here are some more strong examples of solid climate thinking.