Shortly after NASA released the Artemis II photos, I vibecoded a little tool to allow me see a new image of the Moon (or Earth) every day.

John D. Boswell decided to make a short film of them instead.

I’m glad he did.

Colossal

Twenty plus years ago, I was deep in the world of web standards. The work felt important, but was a very niche calling.

The effort itself was the definition of grassroots. A bunch of like-minded people getting together to make the place they congregated better. In hindsight, it’s hard to see the influence we had because those ideas championed are now a ubiquitous part of the modern landscape.

Reading that history, reflected back to the world in a whole new context was both oddly dissonant and inspiring.

The story told, while true, is burnished with the language of a legend. Still, if this story-myth can help energize a new generation to make their — our — world a better place, too, then I know Zeldman will be pleased.

Another AI- and typography post (and again, another day, another coincidental pair post!), this time in defence, from Brian Phillips, of my second-favourite punctation:

The em dash is a tool that lets writers expand their ideas without making them inaccessible. It’s almost always easy to follow in use, and the rules that govern it aren’t as ironclad as the rules that govern parentheses or semicolons; you’re able to deploy the em dash in more discretionary ways. It lets you break up sentences into parts that rub up against each other, challenge each other, give each other new inflections, or change each other’s meanings in ways that resemble the flow of human thought.

Phillips spends many words explaining how grand piece of punctuation’s apparent favour by AI is side effect of better writers everywhere using it. for much longer. We had, he suggests, just become less familiar with it in the past decades because brevity in written communication was favoured over complexity.

It all makes sense, but I still hesitate for knee jerk reactions to include it any my more professional writing.

But maybe, just maybe, it’s time to reset my habit and embrace the em dash once again.

Idea Surplus Disorder

The anti-AI design aesthetics is the vibe of the moment. The choice is most apparent in in announced practical effects in movies or the use of watercolour-coded illustrations. For a typographic take on the style, take a look at this from, Overview:

Overview: Human by Zandland, 2026

The feel calls back to 1337 (and hints at contemporary algospeak) but also aspires to be physical artifacts from the turn of the century.

This intentional analogue glitchiness isn’t for every brand, or for that matter most digital interfaces, but it’ll be fun to watch as it gets smoothed and adopted in the next couple of years.

Kevin Kelly has published 88 prompts for long-term thinking he wrote while at the aforementioned Long Now Foundation. Not coincidentally, they read like a series os more serious Oblique Strategies. There’s also a hint of corporate sloganeering, which is what they kind of were meant to be.

Regardless, here are a few that caught my eye:

Finite games focus on how they end; infinite games focus on how they continue.

Our job is to keep the process of progress going.

Thinking about the future is a way to think about the systems.

Nearly all predictions are wrong. But some are useful.

A key advantage to taking the long view is that you will have few competitors there.

Things that have never happened before happen all the time.

With any luck, today will mark the 18th sound change in a piece of music begun 25 years ago and that’s not scheduled to end for another six centuries.

The music itself was composed by the master of minimalism, Mr. John Cage, and is itself an adoption of a piece he wrote for piano and is appropriately known as “As Slow as Possible” (the piano version only lasts about an hour or so). The last time the custom-built organ in the German town of Halberstadt change the sound it was playing was 912 days ago.

Amazingly, there’s an even longer piece of music being performed: “Longplayer”, composed by a founding member of the Pogues, is scheduled to end Dec. 31, 2999. Not coincidentally, one of the places can this millennium-long performance is at the San Francisco headquarters of the Long Now Foundation

For the first time in my life, I’m meal planning.

Nothing elaborate, just notes jotted down in Things to help me keep up my habit of cooking a new meal (as in a new mix of ingredients) every day.

Sparked by a change of working locations, meal portions, and some unfortunately wasted ingredients, it’s been a surprisingly helpful “future favour” to myself these past couple of weeks. So much so it might become a new post-market shop routine.

(And, yes, the minor tweaks to my little produce calendar has also helped spur my creative cooking along, especially since Toronto’s in the height of the season now, too.)