A fascinating little augmented reality (AR) copy & paste tool that lets you take photos of real-life objects on your mobile phone and then paste them on your desktop by just point the camera at your computer screen. (Check the little preview video on the website.) It feels like a novelty feature, but ClipDrop also works as a desktop tool that quickly crops elements or even text out of existing photos.

This Firefox or Chrome extension provides a more traditional Google search results page. Google’s own products and info panels take up a lot of screen real estate. With Simple Search enabled, an overlay gives you a less cluttered view of just the organic search results.

Climatebase is a directory that accumulates current job opportunities related to climate action and lists organisations and events doing important work in that space.

Connect with friends remotely through simple, playful, creative tasks: create a group on YDays and invite your friends. Every morning, a drawing prompt will challenge your group’s creativity. You have the day to complete it. Then watch what your fellow challengers came up with, vote and cheer them on.

Subprime Attention Crisis →

The precarity of online advertising

Really interesting new book on the mosh pit that is digital advertising: “From the unreliability of advertising numbers and the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars, to the simple fact that online ads mostly fail to work, Hwang demonstrates that while consumers’ attention has never been more prized, the true value of that attention itself – much like subprime mortgages – is wildly misrepresented. And if online advertising goes belly-up, the internet – and its free services – will suddenly be accessible only to those who can afford it.”

Playing Arts →

Artistic playing cards

What a lovely creative project: Playing Arts is an arts collective that releases limited-edition sets of illustrated playing cards. Each deck is the result of a creative competition with often hundreds of artists, contributing their personal styles and techniques.

I’ve read several good critiques of the documentary The Social Dilemma. Paris Marx makes some good points here – though if you dig deep enough, you inevitably end up with ‘It’s capitalism!’ when trying to solve the systemic problems of Western society. “Are we to believe that the breakdown in community and personal relationships is the result of clever algorithms, and not the fact that capitalism has commercialized most aspects of our lives, decimated public spaces, and ensured our communities are built in a way that separates most people into auto-oriented suburbs?”

What a wild ride! Aaron Z. Lewis dives deep into everything that’s weird, fake, and bizarre on the internet and how this new un-reality shapes our understanding of the world, our future and our history: “The fragmentation of reality means that our current method of understanding history (i.e. a single narrative sweep from the ‘beginning’ to the present) is no longer adequate. Consensus history as we knew it in the 20th century will likely be difficult, if not impossible, to recreate. How could we possibly compress all of these contradictory reality bubbles into a single history textbook? The cat’s out of the bag – school kids have access to a dizzying array of alt histories at their YouTube-loving fingertips.”

Sarah writes a great newsletter on climate-related things. In a recent issue, she spoke about how fighting for climate action is a ‘forever fight’. None of us will get to a point where we can claim ‘victory’ and move on to other issues. “A few weeks ago, a younger colleague mentioned that many of her peers had already resolved themselves to the fact that the climate crisis will be their entire life effort. When I was her age, my biggest concern was whether I could go dancing all night and still make it to class in the morning. To reconcile yourself to the idea of the Forever Emergency at 22 is almost unfathomably brave. It’s also prescient.”