Here are the links that set my heart a-flutter in the month of March 2026. I hope you enjoy them, as well!
Chance Brush
A font where the letters are dissolving. Pay what you want:
Check out Kontravoid‘s animator Alec McKenzie (@badblueprints on Instagram and on badblueprints.tumblr.com). I like “Club Void”:
Just a little too late. Never enough to swallow those pills – now I’m sick. And always will be.
Curve – Coast is Clear
Leaky Websites
Melonking’s leaky webring – I was on a site, and it started filling up with water 😕. But fortunately it gave me a chance to bail the site and lower the level of water. That’s how I found out about Melonking’s super creative Leaky Ring:
(If you’ve never experienced Melonking’s site, he’s on the very far end of the Indieweb spectrum. You can even get a gif pet for your site from MK.)
Huffin’ it
This is one of those egregious examples where academics are huffing their own perfume so hard that they forgot what a real flower smells like:
The article proposes archival thinking as an analytical framework for studying Facebook. Following recent debates on data colonialism, it argues that Facebook dialectically assumes a role of a new archon of public records, while being unarchivable by design. It then puts forward counter-archiving – a practice developed to resist the epistemic hegemony of colonial archives – as a method that allows the critical study of the social media platform, after it had shut down researcher’s access to public data through its application programming interface. After defining and justifying counter-archiving as a method for studying datafied platforms, two counter-archives are presented as proof of concept. The article concludes by discussing the shifting boundaries between the archivist, the activist and the scholar, as the imperative of research methods after datafication.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0267323120922069
… and this is from a cool academic who’s writing about a topic I’m passionate about (archiving Facebook despite its archive-hostile design). All this talk about decolonializing the datafied infospace to counter the neocolonial antiarchives of Zuck- and Zuck-adjacent Bergs reminds me of the World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide.
Cukak Remixes
Yooooo, did you know that Vietnam is friggin’ rocking it on the music front?
If you want to listen to fantastic “put a donk on it” remixes of Vietnamse songs, that’ll have you going “ting ting ting ting ting” mentally for days, then check out Cukak:
You know what, let’s throw in a Korean artist too – Minsu. There’s so much going on musically in Korea, even aside from K-Pop:
On her channel, there are English lyric sheets for all the songs in this album.
Snackbonmination
Frankly, reading this article had my physiognomy contorted in distaste:
Just… the awful crossovers, the amount of slop that is being produced. Some poor suckers had to formulate these abominations, procure and install the factory tooling to produce this ick, create and print the packaging. Nobody wants this. It’s sick.
I can’t quite articulate what makes these snacks so much worse than the weirdly-named ones that I like to try. I think it’s the low-effort mashup nature of it: let’s combine Cinnamon Toast Crunch and El Paso! Let’s put marsmallows into instant noodles!
Let’s… let’s make a Central Perk cereal!
Codex Seraphinianus
The Codex Seraphinianus is a big art book written in a fake language, describing a faraway fantasy land. You can see it at: https://archive.org/details/codex-seraphinianus_1981/mode/2up
Cool textiles
Textile Designer Abeer Kayani makes really cool one-off fabrics:
Veggie creatures
Of course there is a guy who masterfully carves sculptures from veggies:
A life I never lived
I was playing around on the cool “pictures by geography, back in time” site PastVu. And these looked like transmissions from an alternative life not lived:
The trick is to go to the “Gallery” view on the top right, set the geography to one of the capitals of the Muslim/steppe republics of the former Soviet Union and the date range to 1986-1996 and just … bodysurf through the waves of history.
PXL2000
The PXL2000 – A toy video camera that recorded onto audio cassettes.
Cherkizovsky Market
It was fascinating to read this article about a Moscow market that functioned, essentially, as it’s own fiefdom. In the racist hellhole that is Russia, this was a rare place where multiple cultures could coexist.
And here’s footage of 450 illegal Vietnamese migrants who were found living in a subterranean warren under the market. The complex included a factory, cinema, casino and cafe.
And there’s a fascinating analysis of how the vast, vast market was constructed. It was made of storage containers that were piled in 2 storeys. The bottom container was the shop, and the top was living quarters. The path between the containers was covered with a lightweight canopy to protect shoppers from the weather.
Lobsang Rampa
Lobsang Rampa – from prosthesis fitter in Devon, to hosting the spirit of a Tibetan Lama, then becoming a bestselling author, and finally retiring in Calgary.
A.I. Corner
Good thoughts on what the Maker loses when using AI to build things, from Christopher Butler:
Making art by hand teaches my daughter—and me—things that cannot be learned by prompting:
Material constraints. What do we have to work with? How do these pieces fit together? What can we make from what we have?
Physical manipulation. How does this paper feel? How does it tear? How does glue behave? How do colors interact when they’re actually touching? How does the physicality of a material affect what we later see?
Aesthetic judgment. Does this feel right here? What happens if I move it? What does this composition need?
The satisfaction of making something exist that didn’t before. Of putting yourself into it. Of leaving traces of your decisions in the final object.
It just struck me: when the AI mania passes, after the awful way in which AI is being forced down our throats there’s going to be a PTSD period when people will want nothing to do with AI even in cases where it’s genuinely useful.
Dealing with suffering:
Shinzen Young’s – The Power of “Gone”:
Old-school Japanese Zen hits all those buttons: physical discomfort (from sitting), emotional distress (you’re yelled at, humiliated, infuriated, intimidated), mental confusion (koans), perceptual disorientation (mastering the protocol takes years).
Meanwhile in Mississauga…
