Heart of Dark Chocolate Milk
After spending last week meticulously indexing corny behaviors and artifacts from modern culture, I was feeling like we could use a few current examples of the good things that are still proliferating across digital lines1.
The vast majority of the 2000s-era internet has sadly been lost in the digital ether. In a future edition I’ll probably talk about the fight for what remains and what may come next. But this Sunday isn’t for fightin’, it’s for lovin’.
Specifically, today’s edition is here for enjoying the labors of love and random demonstrations of creativity that show us the best of what’s possible on an open internet. 🦞🥞
GOOD FUN
Tapedeck.org
934 cassette tapes and counting. I recommend filtering by your old go-to brands first. These hit the 1990s chords just right:
GenType
GenType, which emerged out of Google Labs, is “an experiment built on the Imagen 2 API that helps users create custom alphabets based on their own themed descriptions and prompts.”
In layman’s terms: GenType is a simple A.I. tool to make a font out of anything you can describe. It might be easiest to understand with a few examples:
Give it a spin and share your outputs in the Sunday Bunch chat.
Infinite Craft
From the Neal.fun website by Neal Argawal, which is filled with random internet experiments and rabbit holes, comes Infinite Craft.
I don’t totally know how to describe this one, other than to say it is one of the most addictive ways I have played God on a computer since Sim City.
Afoolzzerrand
Perry James is on a quest: try every chocolate milk in the world. Just shy of 1,800 chocolate milk varieties, his site Afoolzzerand is both the Michelin of chocolate milk and the fascinating chronicle of a descent into lactose-induced madness.
One Minute Park
I found this one via the very cool Tiny Awards. Just like the name says, it plays one minute of a live video feed from park webcams around the world.
If you’re having a stressful day, spend a couple minutes teleporting to parks in other countries and feel that blood pressure drop.
What John Stuart Mill Knew About Happiness
Just four simple (but not necessarily easy) ingredients:
1. Desire to be happy.
2. Bring happiness to others.
3. Elevate your pleasures.
4. Do the work.
GOOD NEWS
The Three Day Weekend is Inevitable
As the article points out, Fridays were already shortening before 2023, where the average departure time dropped by 30 minutes in just over half a year.
We also have the convergence of several other related factors:
The number of companies that haven’t already ended remote working now increasingly pushing for some sort of return to office
Increased expectations for executive leaders to manage talent costs
A.I. advances making it easier to automate tasks that might have previously required five days of work per week
At some point, the four-day work week becomes a relic of peak white collar.
Tim Robinson's New Movie Friendship Is Extremely Funny and Extremely Tim
If you’re a fan of I Think You Should Leave, good news coming out of the Toronto International Film Festival, where Tim Robinson’s movie Friendship just premiered:
Robinson now has his first leading film role in Friendship, written and directed by Andrew DeYoung, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Here's the great news: It's ridiculously funny and extremely Tim Robinson.
The video below is not the trailer, rather some sort of AI slop that I can only assume was done by one of the fake trailer factories that have proliferated across YouTube. But it actually makes the perfect teaser for a Tim Robinson movie:
Lego plans to make half the plastic in bricks from renewable materials by 2026
Nice move by Lego, but what is the actual delta between bricks sitting around potentially recyclable and future brick demand?
GOOD READING
Beginning this week, I am going to try something new: A suggested pairing to go with your Sunday Bunch. These are other newsletters that:
I read regularly myself
I would recommend to anyone who enjoys the topics we cover here
I can’t imagine a better place to start than one of the Substack OGs, the newsletter that inspired me to get back in the game. Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s excellent Why is this interesting?
Out of the oven, the rolls are tender, light and crackling, with an unfashionably closegrained crumb. Buttered, toasted and smeared with a little mayonnaise, they’re piled with sliced roast beef almost pastel in its dawn-like rosiness.
The slices aren’t squashed, but cling to each other so that when you dip the sandwich in a ramekin of light, slightly wine-dazed jus, the sandwich holds. It saturates neatly, going from crisp to soggy at exactly the pace you set.
Tejal Rao on the Hillstone (aka Houston’s) french dip
Yes, I am aware that this too could be considered kind of corny by my own definition.