A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
There Oughta Be a Wooden Game Boy
“You made me create a wooden Game Boy shell. Yes, you made me do it. After I got myself a CNC machine a while back I just made a wooden Game Boy cartridge to get to know the machine, but social media wanted more. So, I made a Game Boy out of walnut wood.”
DAK and the Golden Age of Gadget Catalogs
“A friend of mine once remarked that the DAK catalogs, in some way, reminded them of TikTok videos, where people talk at length about products they love and why they love them. It’s just not written down and mailed to your house.
The gadget catalog may be no more, but our desire to share incredibly cool things with each other will never die.”
The 20 Farming Families Who Use More Water From the Colorado River Than Some Western States
“The river’s reservoirs cratered last year, with Lake Mead falling to its lowest level since it was filled in 1937. As the federal government weighs paying more than half a billion dollars to the irrigation district and its farmers to use less water, The Desert Sun and ProPublica sought to find out who was using the water and what they did with it.
The district refused to tell us and denied public record requests, saying that identifying individual customers would create “uncertainty, fear and turmoil.” So we used satellite data, combined with records on who owns and farms each field in the valley, to estimate for the first time exactly who benefits from the vast supply of water, and how they use it.”
The Nail Salon
“The nail salon once felt like it belonged to me, but by the time I was a teen, it didn’t anymore. It’s sad how quickly I went from being a child who loved glitter-shimmer polish on my fingers to being angry at my mother for making food that smelled “weird.” (It never smelled weird to me, though, just to everyone else around me.) I learned to become ashamed of my mother’s culture because it was “different.”
It wasn’t until a man assaulted my mother and told her to go back to her own country that I realized how little I had tried to learn about that country: the home she’d given up to raise a child in the United States.”
Real Play
“I played The Sims a lot as a preteen. It was the only computer game I ever liked that didn’t involve horses, and it lived at my dad’s house, where screen time was not limited. My friend Diana had it, too, and she and I played together sometimes, in the small office connected to her parents’ bedroom. Diana liked the design element of the game, and would use cheat codes to make her Sims very rich, then build them big houses. She chose balconies with glass railings, and reupholstered her Sims’ furniture.
That part was not interesting to me. My Sims were not allowed to use cheat codes. Instead, they had to succeed within the terms of my own life, or what I imagined it would be as an adult: they had to get jobs, learn skills, and build relationships. They spent time learning to cook, mostly by reading the cookbooks on their bookshelves. They paid bills that arrived in the mailbox, and redid their kitchen floors only if they made the money on their own. Everyone got a smoke detector, and I worked hard to help them keep their Need meters—Hunger, Bladder, Social, Fun, Energy, Hygiene, Comfort, Environment—in the green.”
The Politics of Punctuation
“Distinctly more awkward are uncomfortable word neighbours like www.therapistlocator.com (a directory for therapists near you), or www.penisland.com (all that a fountain pen lover ever dreamt of), or www.analemma.com (not a gentlemen’s special interest website but one for the equally particular astrological pastime of documenting the position of the sun in relation to the earth).”
The Happiest Man in the World
“In the past decade, the Hearing Voices Movement, a federation of people who experience auditory hallucinations, has pushed the medical community to acknowledge that their symptoms can be a meaningful adaptation to trauma. Ritunnano belongs to a compatible movement among caregivers—when she met Harry a few years ago, she had just started her Ph.D. in a field known as phenomenological psychopathology, which puts the doctor’s sense of reality on an equal footing with the patient’s.”