• That Dom Cummings blog post and only been one decent joke!

Rocking up to Downing St for my first day only to discover it’s actually the CCRU.

@Mr_Considerate on Twitter

• Although I’m probably skewed because it reminds me of this thing I instagrammed last week ¹.
• Ella got me a pair of these Ikea Symfonisk speakers ² for christmas. They’re really good! Compact, seemingly well built, impressive sound for their size, and the app is brilliant.
• Why don’t people talk about how good the Sonos software is! The setup is so straightforward and simple (even the bit where you wave your phone around to detect the acoustics of the room). I didn’t realise the standard was this high. If the Sonos Port was cheaper every other hifi manufacturer would be fucked.
• We’ve also been getting Gausto meals for a couple weeks now. If you’d told me a couple years ago about this I would have laughed my ass off, but yeah I’m converted. They don’t really cost more than buying the ingredients at a supermarket, the recipes are straightforward (and low-stress) and the food so far has all been fucking delicious and healthy.
• We’ve tried a few alternatives to get a sense of the market, but mostly their recipe instructions were really stressful and the food less good (plus I felt like the Riverford one was trying to neg me into getting a bigger kitchen). But they gave me a new appreciation of quite how much user testing must have gone into the Gausto ones.
• As Tana French says in The Likeness, “nothing takes as much work as simplicity”.
• Last week Fast Company chose GOV.UK as one of the most important design ideas of the decade, which was a nice thing to round off the decade.
• I was flicking through Zak Kyes Working With… and found this quote about Economic Design which I’d highlighted at some point around 2012 when it came out, then totally forgotten about;

Economic Design is maximum effect with minimal resources. Economic Design is intellectually and materially efficient. Economic Design acknowledges that so much great work has been done before and therefore takes the liberty to repurpose existing forms when appropriate. Economic Design is the ideology of unwritten manifesto. Economic Design is not minimalism. Economic Design is not functionalism. Economic Design is not appropriation. Economic Design is totally economic

Zak Kyes in conversation, cited in Zak Kyes Working With…

• Remember when we were all excited about trying to recreate complex print-style layouts in digital media? Didn’t really turn out that way did it. Turns out readers never really like complex print layouts in printed things, and if anything modern books look more like web content now than the other way around. Anyway, Google got rid of its newsprint replica magazine this week (Apple killed it’s version a couple years ago)
• Love the SSENSE garment retrospective of 2019, esp Greta Thunbug’ss tactical gear

To trace how the surge of tactical fashion maps onto helpless anxiety, picture Greta Thunberg in 2018 in her sunshine yellow raincoat, filled with hope for the future and the belief that she can change the world with her scribbled sign. And then picture Greta Thunberg in 2019, in an all-black tactical look grimacing into the wind aboard a solar-panelled racing yacht that says UNITE BEHIND THE SCIENCE all over it on her 15-day, carbon-neutral journey to America. Fashion trends do not lie: The increase in tactical fashion falls somewhere between fronting, flexing, and slow, careful preparation

SSENSE Editors on the Fashion That Defined The Year

• These took a long time to write this week. I read Octavia Butler’s Kindred for the first time while waiting around in the hospital last weekend (yeah I know, but give me a break I normally hate sci-fi). The book is fucking great and made me think a lot about a lot about all sort of things including recent elections, but I can’t fucking figure out how to talk about it all beyond wondering how someone from the future would feel about Dana’s attachment to her modern life of zero-hour contracts and financial insecurity.

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