All designers have an origin story, and mine is rooted in a childhood obsession with fictional and futuristic interfaces. I watched science fiction not for the story or characters, but for a glimpse at what a computer could be.

One of my favorites was Star Trek and the LCARS (Library Computer Access/Retrieval System) interface for the ship’s computers. Here is an interface that breaks free from the rectangle! It uses lots of colors and sounds! It’s fantastic.

So I was delighted to see that Jim Robertus has brought LCARS to the web as a free to use, responsive HTML and CSS template. It even comes with sound effects.

I can’t wait to find a reason to build something with this.

Someone found the real Spotify accounts of famous politicians, journalists, and media/tech figures and scraped their listening data for more than a year. They’ve published some of the data online as the Panama Playlists.

The Panama Papers revealed hidden bank accounts. This reveals hidden tastes.

Scroll in wonder and/or horror!

File this one away as another excellent example of culture surveillance, which I’d argue would make for an excellent entry in an updated addition of the New Liberal Arts.

Here’s something that checks all kinds of boxes for me: Lori Emerson has a gorgeous new book coming soon (April) called Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, which you can preorder now from publisher Mexican Summer.

Other Networks is writer and researcher Lori Emerson’s speculative index of communications networks that existed before or outside of the internet: digital as well as analog, IRL as well as imagined, state-sponsored systems of control as well as homebrew communities in the footnotes of hacker culture.

You would be hard pressed to purposely conceive of a book more squarely aimed at my niche interests. And the book itself is a beautiful hardcover tome, rife with archival imagery as well as original artwork. Instant preorder material right here.

By the way, I discovered Mexican Summer and Lori’s book by way of Claire Evans on Bluesky, a site I am spending more time on as of late. Join me, won’t you?

One of my favorite albums from last year was Mk.gee’s Two Star and the Dream Police, so I was delighted to recently discover this collaboration between Mk.gee and another artist I like called Dijon. If the electricity of their creative partnership in this video doesn’t get you excited, I don’t know what will.