A video game in a font (Spam Mail #14)

Hi there,

I’m completely blown away by how much the first two 💩 Cool Shit links push the boundaries for what they are. There’s also some great long reads too, but if you click one thing this week check out Fontemon.

See you next time.

💩 Cool Shit

Fontemon - A Pokémon inspired video game INSIDE A FONT. I don’t understand how this works, but it is incredible.

Seeing CO2 - A cross between data visualization and a video game to create one of the most unique ways to present data I’ve ever seen.

Messi Messages - A fun use of deepfakes to create personalized messages from Lionel Messi.

WebGL Wind Simulator - What the title says.

Dress David Rose - For the Schitt’s Creek fans, cycle through all of David’s outfits.

Online Culture Wars Map - A 2x2 map of political memes.

💎 Word gems

How the West Lost COVID (NYMag / David Wallace-Wells)

A year into the pandemic, this article puts a lens on why some countries’ response to COVID failed while others succeeded. From the poor and disorganized public health to the late response, somehow it doesn’t feel like we’ve learnt any lessons.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo, a cable-news hero in the spring, has already come in for reconsideration, and in his self-aggrandizing pandemic memoir, he is unintentionally revealing. “Most of all, I was concerned about public panic,” Cuomo writes, reflecting on the need to “socialize the notion of a shutdown,” ideally slowly, rather than simply imposing it. “Panic is the real enemy,” he adds. The coronavirus may not prove Cuomo’s ultimate political undoing, but his formulation may nevertheless provide the most fitting epitaph for the entire western response: that disruption was scarier and less tolerable than the disease.

Why YKK zippers are the brown M&Ms of product design: look at the little details to judge overall gear quality (The Prepared / Josh Centers)

The story of Yoshida Kōgyō Kabushikigaisha (YKK) zippers is fascinating. They are largely out of the public eye but make half of all zippers. This is a great piece on the business philosophy behind their quality and success:

Yoshida was inspired by Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth to create his own business philosophy, called the Cycle of Goodness. In short: no one prospers without rendering benefit to others. The Cycle of Goodness seeks to create what many of us in the United States would call a “360 win” where the company, its employees, its customers, and all of society benefits from what YKK does. While YKK avoids the media, the company takes the Cycle of Goodness so seriously that it produced a 10-issue manga series that explains it in detail. (YKK also made a zipper-themed anime.)

How to Put Out Democracy’s Dumpster Fire (The Atlantic / Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev)

This is a wide ranging article that spans the intertwine between democracy and the internet. It acknowledges one of the turning points was when the internet shifted to being a passive activity - it became easy to just scroll because information came to us (thanks to algorithms). Despite all the doom and gloom, one quote near the end stood out to me - "We often forget that the U.S. Constitution was the product of a decade of failure".

The buttons we press and the statements we make online are turned into data, which are then fed back into algorithms that can be used to profile and target us through advertising. Self-expression no longer necessarily leads to emancipation: The more we speak, click, and swipe online, the less powerful we are. Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emerita at Harvard Business School, coined the term surveillance capitalism to describe this system.

The edge of our existence: A particle physicist examines the architecture of society (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists / Dr. Yangyang Cheng)

I’ve always liked science - it’s structured, it has reason, and yet while I’ve always known in theory the idealism of the scientific method is flawed, this article paints everything so clearly by challenging our perception that science is apolitical.

Whether it is the measurement of a skull, the scrutiny of a face, the grading of skin tone, or the sequencing of DNA, science has, for centuries, been used to define groups of people as the other, prove them inferior, and justify their subjugation. What is happening in Xinjiang must be viewed through this historical lens and situated in a global context.

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